Again, Clinton Lies To The Public
What has it been now, nearly 10 days? And we’re still wrangling over the Big Lie Hillary Clinton peddled in her interview with Chris Wallace?
Well, of course we are. Because, for openers, what Herself said about FBI Director James Comey giving her version of events a clean bill of health was, as noted above, a Big Lie.
No, Comey did not exonerate her. Instead, what he did was lay out a bill of particulars that, if it were any other year and HRC were anybody else, at least would have wound up being weighed by a grand jury.
But we lately have put men in high places — Chief Justice John Roberts is another — who seem not up to the demands of their jobs, men who, when the moment to make history raps on the door, flinch.
Just as Roberts assumed the role of Supreme Unelected Legislator to rewrite key portions of Obamacare, thus ducking responsibility for undoing a president’s key domestic achievement, so Comey declined to recommend charges, very likely because he didn’t want to be remembered as man who upset a presidential race.
In these, Roberts and Comey are much like the quiescent Pennsylvania judge, James Wilson, in the musical “1776,” who, at the pivotal moment, votes reluctantly for independence, siding with Benjamin Franklin to break his delegation’s tie and adopt Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration. Why? Because going with the majority gave him cover.
“I’m different from most of the men here,” Wilson tells the wealthy merchant John Dickinson. “I don’t want to be remembered.”
Like the shrinking Wilson, Comey has made certain whatever his place in the history books, it will not be for upending the 2016 presidential race, or thwarting the Clinton dynasty.
No, that task will be left to HRC herself. But her Republican opponent is so persistently ridiculous, Clinton can get away with putting claims on the truth that simply do not exist. Even left-leaning fact checkers couldn’t bear this latest, awarding her a quartet of Pinocchios on fire, or something.
An entire week later, she was still in self-denial, but with a fresh explanation. She’d skipped the details, she said. She’d “short-circuited” her explanation. (This is also known as “assuming facts not in evidence.”) Here goes.
The FBI did not find fault in what she told investigators, Hill says. And, she says, what she told investigators is what she told the American people. Ergo, by applying the commutative property of explanations, the FBI says she told the truth.
Not for the first — or, in all likelihood, last — time, we say: You can believe that if you want to.
In fact, from the moment the private server scandal broke (as part of the House of Representatives’ investigation into the Benghazi massacre), Clinton’s version of events has been shiftier than Groucho Marx’s eyebrows. You know the details, and if you don’t, there’s the video of Rep. Trey Gowdy using Comey to eviscerate HRC’s claims of consistency and truthfulness.
You know how we’d know Clinton told the FBI the same things she’s been telling us the last 18 months? If there were a video recording, and that recording showed her being put under oath. But there isn’t, and she wasn’t.
How the heck does that happen?
What Clinton wants us to do — no, what she needs us to do — is take her word for it when she says she told the FBI what she told us. Right. We should take the word of the woman who has for 25 years never missed an opportunity to dissemble, even when the truth was harmless, and to cover her tracks this time around destroyed evidence.
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Scarborough says she could put this whole email and server thing behind her if she’d simply stop dodging the truth, own the mistake, apologize and move to policy questions.
That’s absurd. Clinton has, to the degree she is capable, conceded her error and more-or-less apologized. And in Hillary World, she thinks her tepid nod to the 70 percent of Americans who consider her untrustworthy is enough. She’s with Scarborough; she’s more than ready to move on.
But an apology without contrition is not really an apology at all. It’s just words. A meaningful apology — a real confession of having messed up, big time — would be accompanied by the heretofore missing 33,000 emails she had scrubbed from her assorted servers. Surely they exist someplace known to HRC’s IT people.
And we want them. Yes, every last one of them. And we would see for ourselves the evidence of all that yoga and wedding plans and funeral arrangements and whatever else — Clinton Foundation quid-pro-quo work, perhaps? — her busy fingers were tapping away at.
This isn’t because we’re voyeuristic or we want to probe her personal life. It’s because she wasn’t straight with us from the start. It’s because she withheld, by Comey’s count, “thousands” of work-related emails. And those were just the ones they were able to recover. Who knows what else was obliterated?
And it’s because she thinks we should trust her to put her knees under the Resolute Desk. Well. That trust has a price, and it begins with her — not Julian Assange, the Russians or some other foreign agents — accompanying her apology with the only thing that will make it worth the breath it traveled on.
