Losing MSNBC

You know Hillary is in trouble when see loses MSNBC, and it appears, based on a quick scan of the commentators and "journalists" on the left-wing network, that she has lost them. At least for now. In general, commentary from MSNBC personalities is so vapid that it is unworthy of quotation, so let me call on Peggy Noonan to summarize the current situation:

Doesn’t the latest Hillary Clinton scandal make you want to throw up your hands and say: Do we really have to do this again? Do we have to go back there? People assume she is our next president. We are defining political deviancy down.

The scandal this week is that we have belatedly found out, more than two years after she left the office of secretary of state, that throughout Mrs. Clinton’s four-year tenure she did not conduct official business through the State Department email system. She had her own private email addresses and her own private Internet domain, on her own private server at one of her own private homes, in Chappaqua, N.Y. Which means she had, and has, complete control of the emails. If a journalist filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking to see emails of the secretary of state, the State Department had nothing to show. If Congress asked to see them, State could say there was nothing to see. (Two months ago, on the request of State, Mrs. Clinton turned over a reported 55,000 pages of her emails. She and her private aides apparently got to pick which ones.)

Is it too much to imagine that Mrs. Clinton wanted to conceal the record of her communications as America’s top diplomat because she might have been doing a great deal of interesting work in those emails, not only with respect to immediate and unfolding international events but with respect to those who would like to make a positive impression on the American secretary of state by making contributions to the Clinton Foundation, which not only funds many noble causes but is the seat of operations of Clinton Inc. and its numerous offices, operatives, hangers-on and campaign-in-waiting?

Hillary's actions are emblematic of those who champion big, intrusive government (B.I.G.). The longer they stay in B.I.G., the more arrogant they become. After all, rules are for the little people. But it's not just breaking the rules, it the overwhelming level of dishonesty—blatant, continuous, and corrosive. Dishonesty that is in your face.

Those who have risen to levels of prominence in B.I.G. will lie repeatedly while looking the public in the eye and claiming that the scandals, the corruption, the violations of the public trust just aren't real. "Trust me," they say, "because I'm from B.I.G. and I have your best interests at heart."

Any claim to the contrary is denigrated as politically motivated.

If the citizens of the United States continue to believe those claims, coming from this president, his attorney general, his Secretary of State (past and present), his director of the IRS (past and present), his director of the EPA, the FCC, among many others, they will get the government they deserve. A government that crushes the little guy but tells the little guy that they care—really, really care. A government that is voracious, dishonest, and intimidating. A government that is, well, just an malevolent extension of what we have right now. If we elect another champion of B.I.G. in 2016, the United States will begin a slow, inexorable decline. That's sad.