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So many lawyers in this column, so little law....The Clinton Contamination

The Clinton Contamination

JULY 9, 2016

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President Obama joined Hillary Clinton on Tuesday for the first time during her presidential campaign. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — IT says a lot about our relationship with Hillary Clinton that she seems well on her way to becoming Madam President because she’s not getting indicted.

If she were still at the State Department, she could be getting fired for being, as the F.B.I. director told Congress, “extremely careless” with top-secret information. Instead, she’s on a glide path to a big promotion.

And that’s the corkscrew way things go with the Clintons, who are staying true to their reputation as the Tom and Daisy Buchanan of American politics. Their vast carelessness drags down everyone around them, but they persevere, and even thrive.

In a mere 11 days, arrogant, selfish actions by the Clintons contaminated three of the purest brands in Washington — Barack Obama, James Comey and Loretta Lynch — and jeopardized the futures of Hillary’s most loyal aides.

It’s quaint, looking back at her appointment as secretary of state, how Obama tried to get Hillary without the shadiness. (Which is what we all want, of course.)

The president and his aides attempted to keep a rein on Clinton’s State Department — refusing to let her bring in her hit man, Sidney Blumenthal.

But in the end, Hillary’s goo got on Obama anyhow. On Tuesday, after Comey managed to make both Democrats and Republicans angry by indicting Clinton politically but not legally, Barry and Hillary flew to Charlotte, N.C., for their first joint campaign appearance.

Obama was left in the awkward position of vouching for Hillary’s “steady judgment” to run an angry, violent, jittery nation on the very day that his F.B.I. director lambasted her errant judgment on circumventing the State Department email system, making it clear that she had been lying to the American public for the last 16 months.

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James Comey, the F.B.I. director, testifying before a House committee on Thursday. Credit J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

Comey, who was then yanked up to Capitol Hill for a hearing on Thursday, revealed that instead of no emails with classified information, as Hillary had insisted, there were 110, of those turned over to the State Department. Instead of Clinton’s assurances that the server in the basement in Chappaqua had never been breached, Comey said it was possible that hostile actors had hacked Clinton’s email account. Among the emails not given to State, he said at least three contained classified information.

Hillary had already compromised the president, who feels he needs her to cement his legacy. Obama angered F.B.I. agents when he was interviewed on CBS’s “60 Minutes” last fall and undermined the bureau’s investigation by exonerating Hillary before the F.B.I. was done with its work, saying pre-emptively, “This is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.”

Hillary willfully put herself above the rules — again — and a president, campaign and party are all left twisting themselves into pretzels defending her.

Obama aimed to have no shadows, but the Clintons operate in shadows.

After Bill Clinton crossed the tarmac in Phoenix to have a long chat with Lynch, the attorney general confessed that the ill-advised meeting had “cast a shadow” over her department’s investigation into his wife and that she would feel constrained to follow the recommendation of the F.B.I.

“I certainly wouldn’t do it again,” Lynch said, admitting it hit her “painfully” that she had made a mistake dancing with the Arkansas devil in the pale moonlight.

The meeting seemed even more suspect a week later, when The Times reported that Hillary might let Lynch stay on in a new Clinton administration.

The fallout from the email scandal has clouded the futures of longtime Hillary aides Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan, who were also deemed extremely careless by Comey for their handling of classified information. The Times reported that they could face tough questions as they seek security clearances for diplomatic or national security posts. (Not to mention remiss in not pushing back on Clinton about the private server.)

“You’ve got a situation here where the woman who would be in charge of setting national security policy as president has been deemed by the F.B.I. unsuitable to safeguard and handle classified information,” Bill Savarino, a Washington lawyer specializing in security clearances, told the Times.

So many lawyers in this column, so little law.

President Obama is not upset about being pulled into the Clinton Under Toad, to use an old John Irving expression. He thinks Washington is so broken that the next president will need a specific skill set to function, and he thinks Hillary has that.

But what should disturb Obama, who bypassed his own vice president to lay out the red carpet for Hillary, is that the email transgression is not a one off. It’s part of a long pattern of ethical slipping and sliding, obsessive secrecy and paranoia, and collateral damage.

Comey’s verdict that Hillary was “negligent” was met with sighs rather than shock. We know who Hillary and Bill are now. We’ve been held hostage to their predilections and braided intrigues for a long time. (On the Hill, Comey refused to confirm or deny that he’s investigating the Clinton Foundation, with its unseemly tangle of donors and people doing business with State.)

We’re resigned to the Clintons focusing on their viability and disregarding the consequences of their heedless actions on others. They’re always offering a Faustian deal. This year’s election bargain: Put up with our iniquities or get Trump’s short fingers on the nuclear button.

The Clintons work hard but don’t play by the rules. Imagine them in the White House with the benefit of low expectations.

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Klavan On The Culture

The Obama Contamination

By Andrew Klavan

July 10, 2016

A column by Maureen Dowd entitled The Clinton Contamination is trending on Twitter as I write. Conservatives especially are all — so to speak — a-twitter to have such a reliable leftist voice raised against the left's standard bearer. I've never been a fan of Dowd's but I've always respected her unwillingness to abandon her feminist principles to follow the Clintons down the rabbit hole of abuse and corruption. I wish some conservatives would learn from her example before they ditch their principles to traipse after Donald Trump.

But what struck me about the Dowd column was its view of Barack Obama. Dowd writes that the Clintons are so awful that they've "contaminated three of the purest brands in Washington — Barack Obama, James Comey and Loretta Lynch." This view of Obama as pure is not just Dowd's. It's the official narrative of the fantasy world that is the New York Times op-ed page — or, as I like to call it, Knucklehead Row.

"The Obama administration has been remarkably scandal-free," wrote David Brooks on the Row in February. "To his opponents, this president’s greatest sins are his success and his self," wrote Charles Blow. And Obama is "one of the most successful presidents in American history," says Paul Krugman, who may have heard all about it on the same tinfoil hat through which he receives his economic policies.

All this is simple childishness, the journalistic equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and whistling Dixie so you don't have to hear the bad news. Whether you agree with Obama or not, the fact remains that his administration has been wracked with scandal from the IRS to Fast and Furious to the persecution of journalists to Benghazi to the lies about Bowe Bergdahl to the lies and dirty deals used to pass Obamacare to the lies used to push the Iran nuclear deal and on and on. Just because the New York Times has responded to these scandals with a curious lack of interest in no way means they didn't exist.

As for Obama's success, a fair journalist might at least consider his disastrous mishandling of the Middle East, the economic crumbling of Obamacare, the out-of-control debt, a recovery that never quite takes off because of feverish over-regulation and (did I mention?) Obamacare, and of course the upsurge in racial tension which the president has stoked with his reckless pre-judgements of the police and his false 1970s view of America.

The desperate need of left-wing journalists to see Obama as "pure" and "most successful" — to see him as they've reported him instead of how he is — is in part a result of the racial pathology of the left, its tendency to reduce people to their victim group. The notion that "the first black president" has been a failure would be, according to this way of thinking, a nasty slight against a race rather than, what it is, an indictment of bad ideas and their consequences.

But there is also this: Obama possesses the narcissist's gift of drawing people into his own imagination of himself, that imagination in which he is never to blame. "I said I'd end the war in Iraq and I ended it," he crowed in 2012. Then in 2014, when his decision to withdraw our troops was shaping up to be a disaster: “What I just find interesting is the degree to which this issue keeps on coming up, as if this was my decision." In 2012, trying to show that he was on top of the deteriorating situation in Syria, Obama said, "We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized." In 2013, when it became clear Syria was out of control and that chemical weapons had been used and Obama wasn't going to do anything about it: "I didn't set a red line." Obama has repeatedly rushed to judgement on police incidents involving blacks and he and his minions have abused his political opponents in the most uncivil terms imaginable, including comparing them to the Islamic terrorists he doesn't even admit exist. But when, on his watch, the country becomes so divided that it now simmers with violence, American against American, suddenly America is not "as divided as some have suggested."

Narcissists do this. Their egos are so fragile they can accept no responsibility for their bad actions. But the fact that the Times and the networks and the rest of the elite media have decided to make Obama's personality disorder their own has only contributed to the frustration and anger felt by principled parties on both sides. Any moderately fair observer must look at the situation we're in — the violence in our homeland, the anger of our people, an election that has boiled down to a choice between a blowhard and a crook — and think: Something has gone terribly wrong with our country over the last eight years and surely our leader must have had at least a part to play in that.

That the media can't see this is a kind of blindness, a blindness they seem to have caught, in part, from Obama's weird idea of his own blamelessness.

Call it The Obama Contamination.