None of my liberal friends like to talk politics anymore. They have nothing to say and it’s obvious why. Liberalism… or progressivism — people who wish to make the distinction can go ahead, but I find it trivial — they’re just different degrees of a self-serving lie…. liberalism, in the immortal words of Preston Sturges, “is not only dead, it’s decomposed.” (Sturges was referring to chivalry.) Not only is there no there there (as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland), there’s no there there there there to the tenth power. I asked a liberal the other day what liberalism was, what exactly it was he supported, and he was stunned that I asked, and then he was just stunned. He didn’t know how to answer because he didn’t have one. It was just a habit. (Oh, I forgot. He said he didn’t like Republicans, which of course is no defense of liberalism, just contempt… with a soupçon of habit.)

And speaking of habits, that’s what Hillary Clinton is. No one, including Hillary, knows why she is running for president. Oh, yes, I think she mumbled something about making things better for the middle class from her tony Chappaqua redoubt, tennis court and bathrooms en suite. (Hey, give the lady a break — she flew coach at least once in the last twenty years.) It reminds me of a famous line from Daniel Cohn-Bendit of the Six de Nanterre that inspired the French student revolt of ’68 — “I want a revolution where everyone can drink cappuccino at the Café Royal.” Hillary could revise it. “I want a revolution where everyone can eat a burrito bowl at Chipotle and not tip!” Tips are so bourgeois.

And now things are about to get even worse with a new book coming out May 5 — Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, by Peter Schweizer. The New York Times, which itself seems to be getting a bit nervous (will they drop her?), describes the book as “a 186-page investigation of donations made to the Clinton Foundation by foreign entities.” They add:

From 2001 to 2012, the Clintons’ income was at least $136.5 million, Mr. Schweizer writes, using a figure previously reported in The Post. “During Hillary’s years of public service, the Clintons have conducted or facilitated hundreds of large transactions” with foreign governments and individuals, he writes. “Some of these transactions have put millions in their own pockets.”

$136.5 million? That’s a whole lot of Chipotle. Maybe they should just bite the bullet and buy the chain.

So the Democratic Party is putting forth a candidate who is a galaxy-sized hypocrite, lies about just about everything — now including her grandparents’ citizenship, pretending they were immigrants — and erased more emails than even the IRS from her personal server, which she used illegally while secretary of state, before trashing the whole shebang who knows where. Also her foundation was taking money from Saudi Arabia where women aren’t allowed to drive and, in one notorious case, dozens of teenage school girls were burned to death by the religious police. And then there’s the little matter of Benghazi. (Hey, what difference does it make? Just a few people got killed. And so what if some of them were Navy SEALs. Didn’t they sign up for that?) And we can give her a pass for refusing to name Boko Haram a terror group. (Okay, more than a few people got killed and raped in that one and continue to be, but give her another break. She was a diplomat after all. Go too far and Suha Arafat will never kiss you again. And all those people currently dying off the Libyan coast or being decapitated in that country by ISIS. Okay, that’s a problem. But would you want to see Gaddafi still around chasing everything in a skirt?)

And now this woman is actually running for president of the United States and people are actually taking her seriously? Have we all gone crazy? How do we look our liberal friends in the eye? How do they look themselves in the eye?

Now, okay, I admit it. I am pro-gay marriage, so I should have a soft spot for Hillary even though, like Obama, she’s kind of a Johnny-come-lately on the issue, way behind, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger or even Dick Cheney. Funny it took her so long, considering all the rumors that have been swirling around her all these years. And now those gossip mongers at the National Enquirer are claiming she wiped those thirty thousand emails because they contained the identities of four of her girlfriends (I guess they hadn’t read the Schweizer book yet), including “a beauty in her early 30s who has often traveled with Hillary; a popular TV and movie star; the daughter of a top government official; and a stunning model who got a career boost after allegedly sleeping with Hillary.“ The beauty in her thirties is of course Huma Abedin, dutiful daughter of the crazed jihadist Muslim Brotherhood and devoted spouse of the Twitteriffic former congressman from New York, Anthony Weiner. (The rumor that they met when Weiner jumped out from behind a statue in Central Park’s Shakespeare Garden is unsubstantiated.)

Now of course we know none of this can be true because we all know the Enquirer has no standards and likes nothing more than to smear politicians without evidence, just like they did to poor John Edwards (Oh, wait).

Still, count me as one of those who doesn’t give a hoot in Hell whether Hillary is a lesbian. In fact, I’d probably be one too if I were married to Bill. But what I do despise is all the lying and thievery. (That’s what the foundation is, really, a confidence racket.) Hillary’s behavior, as I have said before, makes Richard Nixon seem like Diogenes. Destruction of those emails should not only disqualify you from being president, it should put you in jail . That anyone can believe a word she says about anything boggles the mind. This woman makes the word inauthentic inauthentic. In an earlier post, I compared her to Lucrezia Borgia. It was pointed out to me that Lucrezia has been unfairly maligned. I apologize and retract my statement. Hillary’s worse.

Roger L. Simon — co-founder of PJ Media — is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and a multi-award winning novelist. He will soon be launching a new column on PJM, “Diary of Mad Voter,” concerning the 2016 presidential election. He is also working on a book on moral narcissism for Encounter Books.

(Artwork created using multiple Shutterstock.com images.)