By Daniel Greenfield September 24, 2023
@ Sultan Knish Blog
The Clintons are back in Manhattan, baby.
Once
again random celebrities, Orlando Bloom, Matt Damon, Patrick Dempsey,
Karlie Kloss, will rub shoulders with random foreign leaders like Mia
Mottlev, the Prime Minister of Barbados,
Irfaan Ali, the
President of Guyana, Biden administration officials, the heads of
nonprofits with made up titles like “intersectional environmentalist”,
heads of UN agencies, New York Times reporters, professional
humanitarians and shady foreign oligarchs. (Mostly the latter.)
Getting
to the Midtown Manhattan Hilton may not be easy due to its proximity to
the masses of illegal aliens clustering around hotels that have been
turned into homeless shelters, but once there delegates to the Clinton
Global Initiative 2023 will have the chance to be in the same room as
Atiqul Islam, the Mayor of Dhaka, and Qween Jean, the founder of Black
Trans Liberation, not to mention Ashley Judd, who hopefully will not
beat each other to death with swag bags.
Six years ago, when CGI
appeared to be deader than everyone who had witnessed the Clintons
commit federal offenses, a comeback appeared to be impossible, but
thanks to the boundless generosity of Google, Pfizer, the UAE’s DP
World, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Waltons, and Alfonso Fanjul, the
glorious triumphant resurrection of Bill, Hillary and Chelsea is upon
us.
Wait, are you wondering who Alfonso Fanjul is? The Clintons
have a lot of friends. Especially wealthy friends with foreign last
names. The Fanjul family controls Domino Sugar, which benefits from
government subsidies, and Alfonso was a co-chair of Bill’s 1992
campaign.
But let’s not dwell on Alfonso, when another CGI sponsor is the MEBO Group.
Originally
known as the “Beijing Guangming Traditional Chinese Medicine
Institute”, MEBO boasts that it is a “significant partner of the Clinton
Foundation” and will launch “a new action commitment” to “take action
to deal with global warming and climate crises.”
MEBO, according
to its head, Kevin Xu, claims to be working on “techniques that would
allow humans to endogenously regenerate their own organs in the similar
way that invertebrate animals do” and notes that “some government
officials are appointed for life, such as federal judges in the United
States. These individuals could have a powerful influence on society if
they were able to hold office for centuries, which might be possible
with in situ organ regeneration.”
With organ regeneration,
Hillary Clinton could spend an eternity in a living hell watching people
who are not her be elected president every 4 years, but Bill Clinton
might be more open to it.
But enough about shady foreign oligarchs.
The
Clinton Global Initiative is back under its exciting new motto, ‘Keep
Going’, and has managed to bring together Padma Lakshmi, Cindy McCain,
Chelsea Clinton and Jen Psaki to save the planet. Also possibly Ukraine.
(Although the planet may be easier to save.)
It would be a pity
to ruin all that goodwill by asking about Domuschiev Impact which is
listed as only one of two presenting groups. Wouldn’t it be better to
report on Matt Damon’s thoughts on water (he’s for it) or the Pope’s
thoughts on war (he’s against it) than to go asking inconvenient
questions about the foreigners that the Clintons befriend and then drag
along behind them.
Domuschiev appears to refer to Kiril
Domuschiev, a Bulgarian tycoon, CGI board member and new best friend.
Earlier this year, Bill Clinton stopped by Bulgaria (hasn’t everybody)
in a big shindig where the U.S. ambassador got a copy of Clinton’s book,
‘My Life’ translated into the melodious Bulgarian, ‘Otkradnete
Vsichko’, with Kiril Domuschiev in attendance.
Clinton told the
audience that he will “always be proud to be the first American
president to come here”. But why was Bill in Bulgaria? He was there by
the invitation of the chairman of the Confederation of Industrialists
and Employers: Kiril Domuschiev. The Domuschievs own media companies,
ship building enterprises, a soccer club and possibly a badly aged
former president. They also own Huvepharma, a livestock health company
that is expanding in Nebraska.
But the Clinton Global Initiative
isn’t about Chinese, Indian or Bulgarian oligarchs who just happen to be
giving the Clintons a lot of money, it’s about listening to former
model Christy Turlington talk about whatever she’s there to talk about
and see how surprisingly well preserved Tony Blair looks and how Hillary
Clinton still hasn’t bitten anyone an hour into the proceedings even
though she keeps clenching her teeth and balefully glaring at Nicholas
Kristof.
The Clintons had mastered turning nonprofits into the
Emmys or at least the Golden Globe awards. The beautiful people are here
and so are the strategically ugly people. There are women in hijabs and
men in ten thousand dollar suits. Gov. Gavin Newsom is somewhere in the
area if he wasn’t abducted and eaten by some of the hungry migrants
outside. So is Gov. Whitmer who reportedly ate a few of the migrants
when her lunch order was running late.
Why must we dwell on the
fact that the supporting sponsors for CGI 2023 includes the Fondation
Botnar? You don’t want to hear about the Botnar Foundation, do you? Why
must we drag the noble name of a former president through the dust
simply because he has the same class and standards when it comes to
foreign money as Hunter Biden with an armful of crack pipes?
Alright,
Octav Botnar was a wanted fugitive who fled the UK for Switzerland. He
died in 1998, but not before taking center stage in helping Democrats
and Israeli leftists finance a campaign against Prime Minister
Netanyahu.
What is it with the Clintons and foreign criminals anyway?
Other
people collect paintings of old ships or bearskin rugs, but Bill,
Hillary and Chelsea keep distracting from their noble work of helping
Matt Damon fight against water by hooking up with any foreign
billionaire with a gleam in his eye and a loose checkbook.
The Clintons haven’t changed, but who thought they really would?
Behind
the hype about the return of Tony Blair, the arrival of two Biden
cabinet members, a former model, a former NBA player and a former
president, the Clinton Global Initiative remains a shoddy foreign
influence peddling operation for corporations and foundations that don’t
have the class to just go to prison for sponsoring an all-ages drag
show.
When you end up at the Clinton Global Initiative, it’s
either because you’re a tacky foreign arriviste, a celebrity trying to
seem serious before you’re too old to act, or a foreign leader who will
show up to absolutely anything as long as there’s a camera… like
Ukraine’s Zelensky.
In good news for Swiss and Bahama bankers,
Hillary Clinton and Olena Zelenska, America’s most loathed lady and
Ukraine’s first lady, have teamed up on the CGI Ukraine Action Network
which sounds like a failed martial arts TV import from the 1990s, but is
actually supposed to help the otherwise overlooked Ukrainian people who
weren’t helped by anybody until now.
The Clintons are years late
to the party. But they always are. Much like Nigerian scammers whose
illiterate solicitation emails self-select the easiest marks, Clinton
scams are so obvious that the only people who fall for them think that
they’re the ones doing the scamming.
And maybe they are. In a
ravenous ecosystem where the predators wear Prada, it’s hard to know
who’s really ripping off whom. Only that the Clintons are probably the
best at it.
At the Midtown Manhattan Hilton where hip-hop equity
activists with funky hair rub shoulders with the leaders of Asians
poverty NGOs that may not even exist, local politicians try to attract
some favorable attention and foreign oligarchs claim that they can
regenerate organs, truth is as nebulous as it was when Bill was being
asked about having relations with that woman.
Teach girls in
Afghanistan to code with satellites? Sure, why not. What about training
formerly abused Somali women to grow sustainable marijuana? Sounds good.
Or retraining former coal miners to fight climate change by blocking
traffic in London? Let’s do it. It’s all made up, by me, but so is the
program agenda at the Clinton Global Initiative and less creatively at
that.
The Clinton Global Initiative is a magical fantasy propped
up by Iranian, Indian and Bulgarian oligarchs, by the tawdry lure of the
Clinton name, and by the fact that the masses of migrants flooding
Manhattan still haven’t managed to overrun the steel and glass 54th
Street Hilton.
Bill’s there, looking red and befuddled, Hillary’s
there, gritting her teeth into a diamond hard smile, and Chelsea’s
there, waiting for someone to be nice to her, knowing that this is all
there is or will ever be. Like a 737 carrying a Commerce Secretary
trying to land in Croatia, it’s all down from here. Getting the largest
Medicaid managed care organization in the country or an Iranian video
game tycoon to pony up is a very temporary balm for a future that
already slipped away.
Once upon a time, Bill was going to be the
new JFK, Hillary was going to be the first female president, and Chelsea
was, well, going to be recognized unprompted by strangers on the
street.
Now that’s all gone.
The party has moved on and
all that’s left is a tawdry scam at a hotel so boring that not even
Salvadorans want to invade and urinate over all its floors. The motto of
CGI 2023 is ‘Keep Going’. That’s also the Clinton motto. After having
failed out of the political system, they’re still going. Why? Revenge,
high blood alcohol content, fear of irrelevance or desperate greed?
Like the celebrities who crowd CGI’s events, the Clintons can’t stop or people will forget them.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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