Thursday, July 07, 2016

comme prévu

The news is a few days old, but as you all know by now, the FBI has, through its director James Comey, issued a bizarrely damning and exonerating statement about Hillary Clinton and her jury-rigged email server: she was negligent, but no "reasonable prosecutor" would pursue action against her. If you want to read commentary about the politics and the potential ramifications of this momentous announcement, there are plenty of blogs and websites that will serve you (Malcolm recently wrote a post that sums up the issues from a right-leaning point of view; the leftie viewpoint can be found in the appended comment thread).

My take: none of this is surprising. I've written repeatedly about the Teflon nature of the Clinton dynasty; these people are above the law, and Comey's announcement serves only to reaffirm this well-known fact. This outcome was utterly predictable, and at this point, I'm so cynical that I can't even muster any outrage. Comey basically laid out the case for Hillary's criminal negligence, then turned around and said, "We're not going to do anything about it." It was brazen; it was galling; it was also par for the course.

So I turn my hopes to October, the month of ugly surprises during an election year. October is when all the nastiest dirt about the candidates comes out. We're going to hear evidence of Trump's racist hiring policies and hypocritical flip-flopping; he may have a sex scandal or two in the closet. Someone might even try to connect a person's death to him, directly or indirectly, just to prove how dirty his hands are.

And the same will happen for Hillary. My own hope is that Vladimir Putin or Xi Xinping will end up waving thick sheaves of paper at the cameras: Hillary's emails, which will be proof that her home-brew server was easily hackable. Not only will this establish just what a criminal Hillary has been and still is, but it will cast a spotlight on James Comey once again: the man who had Hillary in his grasp, and who very consciously let her slip away.

Of course, there are negatives that come with getting my wish. Trump would benefit, of course, and I'm as loath to see him in the White House as I am to see Hillary in it. There's also nothing to cheer about if Putin or Xi should demonstrate how permeable our firewalls are. "Yay! We've been hacked!" is a weird and unseemly cheer.

That said, I would experience orgasmic levels of Schadenfreude if Hillary's presidential aspirations were frustrated by her own malfeasance. I consider both Trump and Hillary to be national-security risks, albeit for different reasons, but Hillary has been aiming for the Oval Office since forever, and oh, what a pleasure it would be to see her fail spectacularly in attaining it. Such a fate couldn't happen to a nicer woman.


_

9 comments:

TheBigHenry said...

I kinda expected it, too, albeit hoping against hope, so to speak. What really galls me, however, is how brazen their disclosure was. It's like the culprits were rubbing America's nose in the administration's slime and telling us, "That's right -- the fix was in from the get-go. What are you going to do about it?"

I am not very hopeful that the majority of the electorate is interested in doing anything about it.

Kevin Kim said...

I'm not that hopeful, either. At this point, if I were a betting man, I'd still bet that Hillary wins the election.

King Baeksu said...

Obama was "all fired up" in North Carolina on Tuesday and ready to "do some work" on the campaign trail because he knew that he would have gone down with Shillery if she'd been indicted. After all, they definitely exchanged emails when she was Secretary of State (this can be confirmed on Wikileaks), so he definitely knew that she was using a private, unsecured server, and consequently putting the nation at risk on a daily basis over the course of years (her email address was hdr22@clintonmail.com, so it was pretty damn obvious). In other words, as her boss he was complicit in and ultimately responsible for her gross negligence or, as FBI Director James Comey put it, "extreme carelessness" (which is effectively the same thing and a punishable offense).

I also wonder if Bill Clinton intentionally, rather than accidentally, met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch in Arizona last week, so that she could have an excuse to "accept the recommendation of the FBI" over whether or not to indict his wife (because of the "bad optics" or "scandal" of their private rendezvous, about which some unknown individual rather fortuitously tipped off to a local reporter). That way, all the heat falls on Comey, and Lynch avoids any flack for giving Hill the Shill a "get-out-of-jail-free card." The plan, in other words, was for Comey, a Republican, to be the fall guy for Lynch, whose reputation would be preserved and therefore "fit" to stay on as Attorney General under a Clinton Administration. If so, that's some pretty 3D-level-chess shit. He ain't called "Slick Willie" for nothin'!

In any case, if you happen to be American, hope you like bananas, because the U.S. is now officially a banana republic!

Kevin Kim said...

Scott,

re: banana republic

I've heard others saying the same thing. Alas.

King Baeksu said...

I was going to say "U.S.S.A." but didn't want to mix metaphors, lol.

Trump is going to win in a landslide. The law is one thing, but in the court of public opinion Shillery's reputation took a serious hammering with the decision not to indict, especially considering how fully Comey exposed her many lies in his damning press conference. Not only is the women corrupt as hell and totally dishonest, but she is dangerously incompetent as well (and even the FBI agrees). Only a complete banana-loving fool or cynical party hack would want her to be the next President of our nation.

Trump may be a blowhard, but he's pissing off all the right establishment figures and that's nothin a good thing as far as I'm concerned. Our house is a mess and needs a good cleaning!

Kevin Kim said...

"Trump is going to win in a landslide."

I'm gonna hold you to that. I'll define "landslide" as "by more than 150 electoral votes." Anything less, and you owe me fifty bucks. PayPal is acceptable.

My own feeling is that, if Trump wins, it'll be by a narrow margin, mainly because liberals are excellent at mobilizing their voter base, and they've been amassing a huge demographic advantage, what with illegal immigration, dead people on the voter rosters, and double- or triple-counted votes.

True: conservatives were hugely mobilized during the primaries this year, and they may come out in force in November, but they're generally not as "activist" as the left is, being susceptible to fatalism and thus passivity. I also have no idea how large the "Never Trump" crowd is, but if it's large enough to constitute some sort of critical mass, the NeverTrumpistas could tilt things for Hillary.

I agree that you'd have to be an idiot to vote for Hillary, but I don't have a clear read on how many people actually agree with that sentiment. Your thoughts?

TheBigHenry said...

I'm an American and I like bananas. But I gave up bananas (too sweet) when I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes, and I no longer recognize the country I love. Sigh.

My IQ is higher than that of an idiot, so, of course, I can not vote for HRC. Therefore, I choose to vote against her, instead.

King Baeksu said...

The only people that really count are the independents and what they've seen this week should tilt many of them Trump's way. I also predict that Trump will absolutely destroy Shillery in the debates, just as he did with all his so-called "big-foot" rivals in the primaries. Sanders was a lame, ineffectual beta during his debates with her (remember when he played the spineless white knight by claiming that no one cared about her "damn emails," as if that was supposed to reassure us all about his "sound judgement" as a leader?), but Trump is going to be another story entirely. He may present himself to some as a buffoon, but he's a master of marketing and branding and knows exactly what he's doing. They're going to have to carry that wicked witch off the stage on a stretcher by the time he's done with her. Hell, she may just melt and disappear in a cloud of smoke before our eyes, leaving nothing but her hideous pantsuit in a crumpled heap on the floor.

The other thing to consider is that Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party) and Jill Stein (Green Party) are likely to siphon off votes from the Democratic side, because pot-smoking hippies and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs will flock to Johnson, and no genuine progressive would actually vote for Shillery, who is essentially to the right of Nixon at this point, and therefore they are likely to vote for Stein in droves. This is nothing but a win-win for the Trumpster.

Finally, nationalism is on the rise around the world, and "globalism" is on the retreat. With his "America First!" message, Trump has energized and mobilized millions of Americans who don't normally vote. (Meanwhile, the only voters that Hitlery has managed to energize are all the people who hate her.) Given that Trump is a proven showman if nothing else, the Republican Convention in Cleveland is likely to be the television event of the summer. And if clueless, shortsighted anti-Trump demonstrators pull the same kind of stupid shit they did in Chicago and San Jose, and you can count on it because he's gotten so deep into their heads that they've lost all reason, that's guaranteed to send many more independents Trump's way as well.

Like I said, Trump's already got his ducks all lined up in a row. It's going to be great fun to watch, if nothing else.

TheBigHenry said...

Your optimism, King B., gives me a bit more hope than I had before. I hope god is listening.