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.


_