Hillary's "Trump-like Consiglieri" and Her Leftist Creds

"The Democratic front-runner is still intimately involved with conspiracy-theorist leftists":

"...her apparent weakness for the counsel of unrepentant veterans of the 1960s New Left gives cause for wonder about the voices she would listen to and the direction she would steer once she reached the White House.

"When the president of Wellesley College yielded to the demand of protesting students that one of their number be added to the graduation program in 1969 to counterbalance the establishmentarian commencement speaker, Senator Edward Brooke, Hillary Rodham was their choice. She delivered an address in which the core idea was this: 'Our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.'

"She was chosen because she had already made a name as an activist, a trajectory that continued beyond Wellesley. Its highlights were recalled in 2008 by none other than Tom Hayden, who as one of the organizers of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Michigan was perhaps the preeminent founder of the New Left. Hayden, whose purpose was to retaliate against the Clinton campaign for circulating accounts of Barack Obama’s far-left associations, wrote:

She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations [at the Democratic National Convention]...She was involved in the New Haven defense of [Black Panther] Bobby Seal during his murder trial [for the torture and murder of one of their own (whom they suspected of being an informer) in 1970] ….[A]fter Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm’s partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others 'tolerated communists.'

...
"Of course, everything in Hayden’s Hillary history happened long ago, and her views, like those of most of us who were 1960s radicals of one stripe or another, have doubtless evolved. Yet in thousands of pages of writings and in countless spoken words since, she has failed to explain in what way they have changed. Instead, she has deliberately blurred the picture. ...
[The] scandal of Bill [Clinton’s] various extramarital moments, which became the focus of an impeachment process...cement[ed] the role of Sidney Blumenthal as a key adviser to the Clintons, now especially to Hillary.

"Blumenthal had been a member of the SDS. He began a career in journalism writing for “alternative” newspapers like the Real Paper and the Boston Phoenix and radical magazines like the Nation and In These Times. He published an anthology that carried an introduction by Philip Agee, the CIA turncoat who declared himself a 'communist' and turned his knowledge of America’s secrets over to Cuban intelligence. In the 1980s, Blumenthal began to contribute to mainstream publications and landed a position with the Washington Post, which then leaned more sharply leftward than it does today. Blumenthal’s beat was exposing the wrongdoing—real or invented—of conservatives. His contributions often appeared in its Style section, which suited his method—to besmirch his subject’s reputations rather than critiquing their ideas.

"His schoolyard style was vividly displayed in a book he published at the time, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment. I captured his Trump-like approach in a review in these pages: [my emphases]

He reports that Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, read two conservative classics in his freshman year in college, after which 'his mind was set in a pattern that would never waver.'...The neoconservatives as a group embraced President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative as 'a way to compensate' for their failure to 'broker the Jewish vote for Reagan' in 1984. Further, 'a desire for vengeance' against the culture of the 1960’s 'led some neoconservatives to feel a measure of vindication when John Lennon was killed' (though Blumenthal offers neither names nor specifics). William F. Buckley Jr. was inspired to launch National Review by an obsessional anti-Semite. Arthur Laffer is fat.

...
"His longtime friend and former fellow-leftist Christopher Hitchens wrote of their reunion in 1998 after an interregnum:

Where was my witty if sometimes cynical, clever if sometimes dogmatic, friend? In his place seemed to be someone who had gone to work for John Gotti. He talked coldly and intently of a lethal right-wing conspiracy that was slowly engulfing the capital. And he spoke, as if out of the side of a tough-guy mouth, about the women who were tools of the plot. Kathleen Willey, who had been interviewed on television the preceding weekend, was showing well in the polls, but that would soon be fixed….As for Monica Lewinsky, he painted her as a predatory and unstable stalker.[my emphases]

...
"When President Obama named Hillary Clinton secretary of state, she wanted Blumenthal on her staff, but presidential aides vetoed the idea because of Blumenthal’s part in spreading derogatory information about Obama during the primaries. Blumenthal continued nonetheless to function as a confidant and adviser. In lieu of a government salary, he became a consultant to the Clinton Foundation and also to Media Matters, a 'progressive media watchdog' Hillary Clinton helped found, and to its closely linked PAC, American Bridge. [my emphasis]

"Mrs. Clinton’s recently released emails include hundreds from Blumenthal. As Politico’s Nahal Toosi put it, 'Clinton received advice from many…but the quantity and audacity of the missives from Blumenthal…stand out.' Her address on this private server was reserved for top aides, close friends, high government officials, and former secretaries of state, denied even to most diplomatic and administration officials. When Blumenthal’s outsized presence in her inbox prompted questions from reporters, Clinton dismissed it, saying his were 'unsolicited' messages, some of which she had 'passed on.'

"In truth she often replied to them with appreciation, occasionally asked Blumenthal for more on a subject, and at least once wrote that she was waiting for something he had promised. As the New York Times reported: 'Mrs. Clinton…took Mr. Blumenthal’s advice seriously, often forwarding his memos to senior diplomatic officials…and at times asking them to respond. Mrs. Clinton continued to pass around his memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that Mr. Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable.' ...
"In making a highly successful career near power, Blumenthal has never, to my knowledge, confronted his youthful radicalism to explain which, if any, of the ideas held then seem mistaken today and why. Far more consequentially, the same is true of Hillary Clinton, which is disquieting now that the presidency seems so readily within her grasp. The danger is not that she will reveal herself to be some kind of Manchurian Candidate once in office. Rather it is that, having forsaken radicalism merely out of concern for electability, she will continue to be credulous toward the counsel of the Michael Lerners and Sidney Blumenthals of the world." [my emphases]

from Commentary's article, "Hillary Clinton’s Bad Old Days," by Joshua Muravchik, Mar. 17, 2016

Vet her on this (because no one has yet), before it's too late.