If books can make presidencies — and Barack Obama proved they can– then hold the talk about the inevitability of Hillary Clinton.
The Huffington Post has learned that new survey figures show sales of her foreign policy memoir, Hard Choices, are falling fast.
According to authoritative numbers from Bookscan, which monitors sales at 80 percent of bookstores nationwide, retail sales of Hard Choices plummeted another 50 percent in the third week — down to 26,190 from 48,200 the week before and 85,900 the first week of publication.
Books whose sales drop off by half in successive weeks generally don’t become blockbusters, which could be a problem — a big one — for Clinton’s publisher, Simon & Schuster.
S&S reportedly shipped 1 million copies of the book to stores and is said to have paid Clinton an advance approaching $14 million. At the current rate, it would take many months to sell the million copies — an unlikely prospect according to industry sources.
“It looks like they are going to be pulping a lot of paper,” said a top industry source, who declined to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter in the industry. A Simon & Schuster spokesman declined immediate comment.
Total sales are only 160,000, according to the leftist Washington Post.
I think this probably has to do with her much publicized comments about being “poor”, despite having millions of dollars. The flagging book sales is good news for us who want Hillary to be the nominee for the Democrats in 2016.
When the Global Terrorism Database of the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism compiled its list of terrorist organizations and ranked them by the number of their terror acts in 2012, Afghanistan’s Taliban came in first. Boko Haram was not far behind.
The world’s attention is now focused on the kidnapping of some 300 girls from the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School in Lagos, Nigeria.
“I abducted your girls,” a man claiming to be Abubakar Shekau, the group’s leader, said in a video seen by the Guardian newspaper. “I will sell them in the market, by Allah. I will sell them off and marry them off. There is a market for selling humans.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has joined the campaign to free the girls, expressing her concern in a May 4 tweet with the hashtag “BringBackOurGirls.” On Wednesday, she called the abduction “abominable” and “criminal.”
“It’s an act of terrorism,” she said, “and it really merits the fullest response possible, first and foremost from the government of Nigeria.”
Yet for two years, the State Department refused to acknowledge the growing threat and barbarism of Boko Haram. As Josh Rogin at The Daily Beast reports, the Clinton State Department “refused to place Boko Haram on the list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2011” after the group bombed the United Nations headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria.
“The one thing she could have done, the one tool she had at her disposal, she didn’t use. And nobody can say she wasn’t urged to do it. It’s gross hypocrisy,” wrote Rogin, quoting a former senior U.S. official who was involved in the debate.
It’s been reported that the State Department was urged to act by the CIA, the FBI and yes, even the Justice Department. Not until November 2013 — 10 months after Clinton left State — did the U.S. finally list Boko Haram as a terrorist group after another round of church bombings.
In June 2012, Gen. Carter Ham, chief of U.S. Africa Command and the man who could have directed a Benghazi rescue attempt if so ordered, warned that Boko Haram provided a “safe haven” for al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (northern Africa) and was likely sharing explosives and funds with the group.
Yet Clinton’s State Department, as in the case of Benghazi, was unmoved by warnings of terrorist activity.
Rep. Patrick Meehan, R-Pa., chairman of the Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, was one of many members of Congress who wrote “letter after letter” to the State Department since 2011 demanding action on Boko Haram.
“We lost two years of increased scrutiny,” Meehan says, noting that the response he got from the administration was eerily familiar to statements made about Benghazi. “They were saying al-Qaida was on the run, and our argument was contrary to that. It has metastasized and it is actually in many ways a growing threat, and this is a stark example of that.”
So, you might be thinking what I’m thinking right now… what was Hillary focused on when she was Secretary of State?
In an address earlier this week in Geneva, Hillary announced that the imposition of the gay agenda on foreign governments now forms “a priority of our foreign policy.”
[…]”In our embassies, our diplomats are raising concerns about specific cases and laws, and working with a range of partners to strengthen human rights protections for all,” she said. “In Washington, we have created a task force at the State Department to support and coordinate this work. And in the coming months, we will provide every embassy with a toolkit to help improve their efforts. And we have created a program that offers emergency support to defenders of human rights for LGBT people.”
The American taxpayer will also have to pay for a gay rights propaganda fund Hillary has set up:
“I am also pleased to announce that we are launching a new Global Equality Fund that will support the work of civil society organizations working on these issues around the world. This fund will help them record facts so they can target their advocacy, learn how to use the law as a tool, manage their budgets, train their staffs, and forge partnerships with women’s organizations and other human rights groups. We have committed more than $3 million to start this fund, and we have hope that others will join us in supporting it.”
Thus will the State Department make the world safe for sex-change operations and gay marriage.
What’s more important? Gay rights, or Boko Haram? Hillary had two years to decide, and we know what her answer was.
That’s one case, but are leftists always hypocrites?
Do As I Say Not As I Do
I had a long drive on the way to my parents’ house for Christmas and I decided to listen to the audio book version of Peter Schweizer’s 2004 book “Do As I Say Not As I Do“. In that book, he profiles a number of leftist public figures, and he discovers that leftists don’t practice what they preach, because even they know that leftist ideas don’t actually work. I really recommend the book, so let’s take a closer look at it and you’ll see why you should read it, too.
FrontPage: Give us some of the best examples of the gulf between some liberals’ social criticisms and the ingredients of their private lives. Give us some insights, for instance, into the likes of Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Cornel West, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and Barbra Streisand.
Schweizer: Looking for liberal hypocrisy is, as they say in the military, a target-rich environment. Noam Chomsky, for example, has attacked wealthy Americans who set up trusts to avoid paying inheritance taxes. But this self-professed “radical socialist” has a tax attorney and did the very same thing. (When I asked him about this hypocrisy he said it was okay because he and has family have been working on behalf of suffering people all these years.)
Michael Moore’s hypocrisy is pathological. He has said numerous times that he doesn’t own a single share of stock and that capitalism is not acceptable “on any level.” And yet, I found that, according to tax returns filed with the IRS, he has owned shares in Halliburton, numerous oil companies, defense contractors and other multinationals through a tax shelter. When it comes he race he’s also wildly hypocritical. He says that Americans who happen to live in largely white neighbhorhoods do so because they are “racists.” But he lives in Central Lake, Michigan, which according to the U.S. Census has more than 2,500 residents and not a single black person in the entire town.
Cornel West has numerous times condemned middle class blacks that abandon the “chocolate cities” for the “vanilla suburbs” but guess what, his flavour of choice is vanilla, too.
Ted Kennedy likes to pose as the Robin Hood of the Senate, forcing wealthy Americans to pay their taxes to help the poor. But I discovered that Kennedys record of actually paying taxes is horrible. Tax the inheritance tax. He says that Americans should pay 49% to the IRS when they die in the name of “social justice.” But according to public records, the Kennedys have almost completely avoided contributing to “social justice” by placing their assets in trusts that are located overseas. The Kennedys, over the past thirty years, have paid less than 1% in inheritance taxes on more than $300 million. Ted Kennedy, like Hillary Clinton and George Soros, loves higher taxes. On other people.
And:
FrontPage: Why do you think people are drawn to leftist ideals and what kind of people are they? Self-contempt appears to be a common ingredient, no?
Schweizer: Yes, self-contempt is a big part of it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German pastor who stood up to Hitler, wrote a book about “cheap grace.” Liberals are guilty of cheap grace in the political sense. They feel guilty and their form of penance is embracing the destructive ideas of the progressive faith. But it’s cheap grace because as I show it the book, they don’t actually change the way they live. I think that the religious comparison makes sense because in many respects the modern day left represents a religious movement. They are motivated by a sense of sin, guilt, and the need for salvation and absolution in the political sense. Socialism offers salvation to them. Of course, they don’t actually plan to live like socialists.
I would really recommend taking a look at this book. It’s similar to Paul Johnson’s “Intellectuals” if you’ve ever read that, but it’s better.
WINTERY KNIGHT 