“Hillary Clinton’s fragile presidential bid enters the start of the Labor Day-triggered fall sprint staggered by two enormous blows to her already reeling campaign.
The FBI’s report of its investigation of Hillary’s illegal server is so full of damning details that it will take a village to recount them. My personal favorite is that 13 Blackberrys and 3 iPads she used as secretary of state are missing. Play “16 Candles” and think of the fact that the FBI’s best agent on all things al Qaeda, John O’Neill, left the bureau in 2000 in part because he lost a briefcase with sensitive information in it.
O’Neill died in the World Trade Center attack, and so apparently did bureau concern with losing the containers of information useful to our enemies. (The O’Neill saga, including the briefcase, is told in detail in Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower.)
The bureau let the devastating report out on a Friday of a long weekend hoping perhaps that the holiday would blunt its impact on the bureau’s reputation. (Why was Cheryl Mills, at least a witness to Clinton’s wrongdoings and possibly a defendant, allowed to sit in on the Clinton interview? Why wasn’t the interview recorded? Why did Director Comey break all precedent and himself announce a recommendation of non-prosecution and a conclusion of law and not of fact regarding Clinton’s culpability?)
The three-day pause in the news cycle didn’t dampen the story but has given even Clinton-infatuated MSMers nothing to do but chew on the damning summary.
Then close on its heels arrives Sunday’s New York Times story on the at-least-decadent-if-not-
But only if they are under 16. Couldn’t risk a smart advanced placement student asking about Syria or Libya, now.
Read it all. I will, over the air, because this isn’t your mother’s or father’s Democratic Party. This is the low brow re-enactment of Charles II’s Restoration and the big party it started in Great Britain. (The plague did crash the triumphant return of “The Merry Monarch” five years in to his rule, as did the Great Fire of London a year later, but the nobles barely noticed.)
Donald Trump is a lot of things, but the money he inherited and grew was his own. Whatever his failings — and be assured everyone on the island can recite them by heart, even as they are ignorant of Clinton’s four-year run of disasters as secretary of state — Trump is resonating with the people for whom there aren’t ever any vacations and those for whom a week at the shore or the lake is an exhausted respite from a grind that eight years of President Obama has only made saving for more arduous by a lot. (That Obamacare’s promises are melting away like paper mache in the rain is another massive knock on Clinton, but that’s another column.)
Trump campaigned this past weekend at a black church in Detroit. Mike Pence was at the Horseshoe in Columbus, Ohio, where the Buckeyes rolled out the best ground game in the country. Tim Kaine was struggling to explain why Clinton won’t hold a press conference (it’s been 270 days since she did). And Clinton? Somewhere where the little people wouldn’t bother her.”