Give James Carville credit for loyalty — and for a willingness to say anything.
The prominent Democratic strategist and long-time Clinton supporter is out on TV saying that humanity demands that the Clinton Foundation be saved. Of course, the Foundation has come under scrutiny over the last year and even more intently recently with the release of e-mails showing that donors got special access to the State Department. Last night on CNN, Carville claimed that the Clintons never received any money from the Foundation, as well as asserted that people will die–yes, die–if the Foundation gets shut down:
First of all, the Clintons never took a nickel out of the foundation. In fact, they gave a million dollars. . . . Not a penny. The second thing is I’m sorry, but the foundation negotiated prices to lower malaria [drugs] to cents. Under CharityWatch, it is a five-star rated charity. You can’t get a higher rating for a charity. So the Clinton Foundation was taking no money for the Clintons, raising money from rich people and giving it to poor people. And all of a sudden, the press has decided that we’re going to go after this and shut it down. And you know what, you are probably going to be successful. There are going to be people that are going to die because of this.
“When George W. Bush was president, his daddy was raising money for the Bush library,” Carville added. “I thought that was fine. I didn’t care. When Bob Dole was Majority Leader, Elizabeth Dole was the president of American Red Cross. I didn’t say anything.”
Carville went on, upping the body count: “Somebody is going to shut this down and people are going to die. All the people who helped shut it down are going to say, ‘A million people had to die, but we had to prove a point.’ Okay, go ahead, you have your point.”
Reprising his over-the-top defense this morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Carville lavished more extravagant praise on the Foundation:
The Clinton Foundation is a five-star rated charity. That treat about 10 to 11 million people that they give the AIDS antiviral drugs to. They’ve taken the cost of malaria drugs down about 90 percent. And I’ll say this, of all the things that I’m of proud Bill Clinton that he did, stopping a genocide, the Human Genome Project, the Clinton Foundation is an awesome organization.
He also asserted that “somebody is going to hell” over the attacks on the group:
What the Clinton Foundation does is it takes money from rich people and gives it to poor people. Most people think that’s a pretty good idea. . . . As a human being [rather than a political adviser] I think that money does an enormous amount of good. . . . Somebody is going to hell over this, because this is saving people’s lives.
The Democratic strategist declined to name who has put their immortal soul at risk by calling for the Foundation to shut down.