Bill Clinton sends fundraising damage control letter

clinton at CGI

Going back to the point I made earlier in the day, I don’t have to make up lies about Democrats. If I can’t develop a migraine by the end of the day just seeing what they are doing in the open I’m just not trying.

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Case in point.

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Petra Nemcova, a Czech model who survived the disaster by clinging to a palm tree, decided to pull out all the stops for the annual fund-raiser of her school-building charity, the Happy Hearts Fund.

She booked Cipriani 42nd Street, which greeted guests with Bellini cocktails on silver trays. She flew in Sheryl Crow with her band and crew for a 20-minute set. She special-ordered heart-shaped floral centerpieces, heart-shaped chocolate parfaits, heart-shaped tiramisù and, because orange is the charity’s color, an orange carpet rather than a red one. She imported a Swiss auctioneer and handed out orange rulers to serve as auction paddles, playfully threatening to use hers to spank the highest bidder for an Ibiza vacation.

The gala cost $363,413. But the real splurge? Bill Clinton.

The former president of the United States agreed to accept a lifetime achievement award at the June 2014 event after Ms. Nemcova offered a $500,000 contribution to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The donation, made late last year after the foundation sent the charity an invoice, amounted to almost a quarter of the evening’s net proceeds — enough to build 10 preschools in Indonesia.

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This is shocking on a couple of levels. The charity spent over one-third of the money it raised on the gala. By the time overhead and personnel costs were raked off the remainder it wouldn’t be suprising if under a third actually made it into the targeted countries. Given that this was the hostess:

petra-nemcova

I would have thought that Bill Clinton would have PAID money to get close to her.

Close on the heels of these revelations comes this delicious bit of chutzpah via The Daily Beast:

Bill Clinton has a message to all those autocrats, petro-billionaires, compromised television journalists, and corporate titans who have been tied to a series of devastating exposes about the Clinton Foundation and its finances: I feel your pain. And we still need your money.

In a letter sent today to Clinton Foundation supporters, the former president writes, “As you all know, it’s the political season in America, so the purpose and impact of the efforts your support makes possible has largely been ignored in recent coverage of the Foundation. But we are and always have been a non-partisan, inclusive foundation with lots of support from and involvement by people across the political spectrum and governments from right to left, all committed to our creative solutions-centered work.”

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The Clinton letter goes on to claim

When I look at what the Foundation has accomplished over the last 14 years, I believe we are helping to move the trend lines in the right direction. 9.9 million people in more than 70 countries now have access to low-cost, life-saving HIV/AIDS medicines through the Clinton Health Access Initiative; 16 million kids in more than 28,000 schools in the U.S. now have healthier food and more physical activity options; and members of the Clinton Global Initiative have made 3,200 commitments that have already improved 430 million lives in more than 180 countries.

As Sean Davis, writing in The Federalist, pointed out, the biggest beneficiary of the Clinton Foundation is are Bill and Hillary Clinton. It is rather doubtful that the Clinton Foundation accomplished more than a small fraction of what it claims to have done.

Clinton-Foundation-2013-Breakdown

That’s right. The Clinton’s are using a fundraising appeal to carry out a damage control strategy. You have to admire the sheer effrontery of it.

 

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