Thursday, March 06, 2008

Hillary's Tax Return Hypocrisy

I am beginning to wonder what Hillary and Bill Clinton have to hide in their tax returns since somehow Hillary just keeps on postponing their release. I have always believed that if one has nothing to hide, then one does not act like they do. As I have previously mentioned, I would very much like to know how Billary increased their 2003 net worth of slightly over $2,000,000 to roughly $34,900,000 by 2006. Moreover, her behavior is more than a little hypocritical sine in 2000 when running for the U.S. Senate in New York, she made a huge deal out of her opponent’s delays in releasing his returns. The longer she withholds releasing the tax returns, the more I and I suspect many others will by default have to believe that the returns must show something she does not want primary voters to know. As Newsday as stated (http://weblogs.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/politics/blog/2008/03/flashback_hrc_once_thought_tax.html):
Eight years ago, when Hillary parachuted into NY to become our Senator, she and Howard Wolfson became completely obsessed with opponent Rick Lazio's tax returns, which he did not release until the end of August.
They talked about them at every opportunity. In early July, Hillary called it "frankly disturbing." A guy in an Uncle Sam outfit was dispatched to be a nuisance at various Lazio events in August. Howard himself showed up once to try to rattle Lazio by offering him a copy of some Chappaqua property tax receipt after Lazio said he'd release his state returns as soon as Hillary released hers (which didn't exist, because she had just moved up here).


Pressed again today by the Obama campaign, Wolfson said: "Their tax returns since they left the White House will be made available on or around April 15." Maybe a reporter could, like, actually risk getting Wolfson mad by trying to pin him down on whether "on or around April 15" will definitely be before the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, and why a 2001 return from a sitting NY senator can't be copied by, say, March 15?

Without being too cute here, the question is why Clinton and Wolfson were so obsessed by Lazio's returns that they were disrupting his events, but they now treat it as an irrelevancy when Hillary's returns are requested.

So the reasoning is apparently this: "We acted like Lazio's tax returns were a big deal in 2000 because it was in our self-interest to do so, and this year we'll act like our returns aren't a big deal because it's in our self interest to do so. We don't act on principle, and we don't care about being consistent, and we don't care about being hypocritical."

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