They do have one thing in common: a pathological passion for secrecy. Arianna explains:
It’s not just that she’s a private person. There are plenty of public servants who are zealous about guarding their personal lives and equally zealous about keeping their public lives – and public policies – transparent. But, like Bush and Cheney, Clinton seems devoted to secrecy for its own sake.
As Bernstein shows, what was most shocking about her handling of the health care fiasco during her husband’s administration wasn’t that she kept the plan secret from its critics, but that she kept it secret even from those who would have been champions of the plan had they known anything about it.
This passion for concealment is a pattern that, as Bernstein demonstrates, has been repeated throughout Clinton’s life. It was there in the head-scratching decision to hide her college thesis from public view because it was about radical organizer Saul Alinsky. It was there in her refusal for 30 years to admit that she had failed the bar exam the first time she took it. It was there in the way she glossed over in her memoir her summer internship at the law firm of Treuhaft, Walker, and Burnstein — one of the most renowned left-wing law firms in the nation. It was there in the way she handled the Whitewater and Travelgate investigations, which, as Bernstein told me, "ended up unnecessarily prolonging them."
Bernstein quotes Clinton lawyer Mark Fabiani as saying of Hillary and Whitewater: "She would do anything to get out of the situation. And if that involved not being forthcoming [in releasing documents and other materials] she herself would say, ‘I have a reason for not being forthcoming.’" And he reports that then-White House advisor George Stephanopoulos described Hillary’s responses to the various scandals of the Clinton presidency as "Jesuitical lying."
One way to continue and compound the secrecy and paranoia of the Bush-Cheney years is to put Clinton back in the White House.
The Dish 