The further to the left or the right you move, the more your lens on life distorts.

Monday, October 31, 2016

Apoplectic

Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are really, really good at just one thing—when faced with charges of dishonesty, corruption or malpractice, they can quickly create a narrative to first deflects blame, then obfuscates, and finally re-directs blame away from their candidate toward those who are trying to uncover the truth. In addition, the Democrats, unlike the GOP, maintain party discipline. There have been no prominent Democrats, not one, who have questioned Clinton's honesty or lack of ethics during the latest reprise of the Clinton email scandal.

The current narrative goes like this:
  • Comey sent his letter only to GOP senators (caught in this outright lie, the Dems and Hillary have walked this back)
  • James Comey and the FBI are now "partisan arm" of the GOP (although that didn't seem to be the case in July)
  • The FBI's actions are "unprecedented" (ahh, unprecedented ... and what about Hillary Clinton's unprecedented and criminal use of a private email server when she was Secretary of State?)
  • Comey has "appeased" the GOP (by keeping his word to re-open the investigation should new email be found)
  • Comey made a "mistake" by informing Congress that new emails were found (okay, I suppose it would have been better to hide the information so the public be kept in the dark)
  • Comey may have "broken the law" by announcing the reopening of the case (that's particularly hypocritical, given Hillary's less than savory activities)
  • Comey's action is "threatening Democracy" (dishonesty and corruption by the future President of the United States is the real threat to democracy)
It's the last bullet point that is comical. Andrew McCarthy comments:
How rich of Hillary Clinton to complain now that FBI director James Comey is threatening the democratic process by commenting publicly about a criminal investigation on the eve of an election.

Put aside that Comey did not say a single thing last week that implicates Clinton in a crime. The biggest coup for Clinton in the waning months of the campaign has been Comey’s decision not to prosecute her — a decision outside the responsibilities of the FBI director and publicly announced in a manner that contradicts law-enforcement protocols. There has been nothing more irregular, nothing that put law enforcement more in the service of politics, than that announcement. Yet, far from condemning it, Mrs. Clinton has worn it like a badge of honor since July. Indeed, she has contorted it into a wholesale exoneration, which it most certainly was not.

Just to remind those whose memories seem so conveniently to fail, Comey is the FBI director, not a Justice Department prosecutor, much less the attorney general. The FBI is not supposed to exercise prosecutorial discretion. The FBI is not supposed to decide whether the subject of a criminal investigation gets indicted. The FBI, moreover, is not obligated to make recommendations about prosecution at all; its recommendations, if it chooses to make them, are not binding on the Justice Department; and when it does make recommendations, it does so behind closed doors, not on the public record.

Yet, in the Clinton e-mails investigation, it was Comey who made the decision not to indict Clinton. Comey, furthermore, made the decision in the form of a public recommendation. In effect, it became The Decision because Attorney General Loretta Lynch had disgraced herself by furtively meeting with Mrs. Clinton’s husband a few days before Comey announced his recommendation. Comey, therefore, gave Mrs. Clinton a twofer: an unheard-of public proclamation that she should not be indicted by the head of the investigative agency; and a means of taking Lynch off the hook, which allowed the decision against prosecution to be portrayed as a careful weighing of evidence rather than a corrupt deal cooked up in the back of a plane parked on a remote tarmac.

Now, suddenly, Mrs. Clinton is worried about law-enforcement interference in politics. And her voice is joined by such allies as Jamie Gorelick (President Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general) and Larry Thompson (Comey’s predecessor as President George W. Bush’s deputy attorney general and an outspoken opponent of Donald Trump). Like Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Gorelick and Mr. Thompson were delighted by Director Comey as long as his departures from orthodoxy were helping Clinton’s candidacy.
With the help of their trained hamsters in the media, the Clinton campaign had brilliantly redirected attention away from their dishonest, corrupt and incompetent candidate and focused it on Donald Trump's travails. The reason the Dems and Clinton are apoplectic is because this recent incident reminded the voting public of all the reasons why they shouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton.

UPDATE:
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There's also this historical irony discussed by Roger Kimball:
It was Hillary Clinton in 1992 denouncing President George H.W. Bush after special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh issued an indictment the weekend before the election [emphasis mine] against former Defense secretary Caspar Weinberger in the Iran-Contra case.

As Paul Mirengoff notes at the Powerline blog, "The Clintons seized on the new indictment, howling about a 'culture of corruption' that supposedly pervaded the administration." We all know what happened then: "Bush’s poll numbers declined and Bill Clinton won the election." Mirengoff is right: we should "keep this history in mind during the coming days when you hear Democratic hacks talking about how awful it is for law enforcement officials and/or prosecutors to 'interfere' in the presidential election process."
So ... from Hillary's pont of view, it's okay when an arm of the federal government acts against the interests in a GOP presidential candidate late in the game, but it's not okay when the same thing happens to her. Riiight.