March 31, 2014

Ron Brown's House of Cards

By Jack Cashill

Former congressman Barney Frank does not much like the wickedly cynical series on Netflix, House of Cards. He has particular trouble believing that a charming Southern Democrat and his ice-queen wife could cheat and lie and murder their way to the White House.

“Preposterous” is how Frank describes the series’ lead character, Frank Underwood. “He has no political principles, either substantive or procedural,” whines Frank. “There is no issue about which he cares; no tactic he will not employ, no matter how unfair it is to others; and he is thoroughly dishonest.”

Frank would seem to have forgotten about Bill and Hillary Clinton, their 1995-1996 re-election campaign, and its ultimate victim, Clinton Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who died on a Croatian hillside eighteen years ago this Thursday.

In the way of recap, the Democrats lost both the House and the Senate in the 1994 midterms, the blame for which fell heavily on the Clintons. “I can tell you,” current Virginia governor and then Clinton fundraiser Terry McAuliffe admitted, “the political mood at the time clearly was that [Bill Clinton] had no chance of winning again.”

Like the Russians at Stalingrad, the Clintons had few options but to fight on. In early December 1994, in the White House treaty room, Bill and Hillary Clinton held a secret meeting with the one man who could possibly turn the tide of battle, political consultant Dick Morris.

The rules of the game, which had been only loosely followed to this point, were about to be scrapped altogether. In a more disciplined fashion than they had done anything else since coming to town, the Clintons were preparing to launch what Senator Fred Thompson would call “the most corrupt political campaign in modern history.”

Like the campaign in season two of House of Cards, “Millions of dollars were raised in illegal contributions, much of it from foreign sources.” The Thompson Committee report revealed this and much worse.

Ron Brown played a role in all of this that he would rather not have. Targeted by an independent counsel along with his son Michael and his confidante (and my source) Nolanda Butler Hill on unrelated charges, Brown desperately needed the Clintons’ help to keep himself, Hill, and especially Michael out of prison. In true Underwood fashion, the Clintons exploited Brown’s vulnerability by making him their international bagman.

As Hill tells it, Brown arranged a meeting with Clinton at the White House family quarters. It did not go well. When Clinton said there was nothing he could do for Michael, Brown resorted to his ultimate bargaining chip. If he had to, he told Clinton, he was prepared to reveal the president’s treasonous dealings with China, news of which had yet to break.

Next thing you know, Ron was on his final seat-selling trade mission, this one to Croatia to cut a deal between the neo-fascists who ran the country and the Enron Corporation. Yes, that Enron. He never got there. The Air Force plane that carried Brown, the military version of a Boeing 737, crashed into a hillside outside Dubrovnik. Brown and 34 others were killed.

Read more:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/03/r...e_of_cards.html