A win for Clinton will be hollow
But it’s starting to look like it’s a sure thing
Jeepers. Hillary Clinton still looks as if she will stagger across the finish line on Nov. 8 and become the 45th president of the United States.
But with some Republicans promising to loose mob justice on her with pitchforks and torches, it is increasingly evident the next Clinton presidency will be seriously hobbled from the outset, if not crippled.
For their own very different reasons, Democrats and Republicans, including Clinton herself and her Republican rival Donald Trump, spent the weekend loudly demanding the FBI reveal what is in the latest batch of correspondence flagged to congressional l eaders on Friday by FBI director James Comey and how it may be pertinent to the bureau’s still apparently closed investigation into whether Clinton violated U. S. secrecy laws in her cavalier treatment of classified emails.
Amid media reports Sunday that Comey had known for weeks about the new emails, senior Democrats likened the FBI director’s 11 th- hour intervention to getting hit by an 18- wheeler. Talk radio, which has a much larger and more passionate following in the U.S. than in Canada, and more legal freedom to accuse candidates of being crooks and criminals, is agog at this unexpected gift and spoke shrilly of nothing else for three days.
For all the fury and uninformed speculation, Comey might have remained silent this weekend for the most prosaic of reasons.
According to CBS and other media, a judge has not yet issued a search warrant that would allow the bureau to begin reading an unknown number of emails that have been found on computers belonging to Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, or her estranged husband, former congressman Anthony Weiner, being investigated separately over whether he did anything illegal when he had lewd chats over social media with a 15-year-old girl.
This is a disgraceful yet fitting end to a sleazy, deeply polarizing campaign during which the sexual predilections, self- deceptions and lunacies of Trump and two other men who are not candidates have attracted opprobrium and ridicule and could decide the fate of the presidency.
The tomcatting of Hillary Clinton’s husband Bill, and the husband of an aide that Clinton has described as a “surrogate daughter,” have been righteously mined by the Republicans to besmirch her reputation.
And the Democrats have sanctimoniously harpooned Trump for his many outrageously vulgar comments about women and over multiple allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault by women over the past few decades.
The first woman to reach the Oval Office may start her term under criminal investigation by the FBI. Either way, Republicans will be braying for her impeachment the moment Congress convenes early next year.
Although they are wisely keeping their powder dry, the Chinese and the Russians must be high- fiving each other over how the United States today looks l i ke some kind of t hird world Ruritania, minus the romance and rife with provincialism and political intrigue of the lowest order.
Camille Paglia, the acerbic feminist, has launched a ferocious attack on Hillary Clinton. In an interview in the British weekly magazine The Spectator, the author and professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia denounced Clinton as “a woman without accomplishment” and “a disaster” when she was the secretary of state, citing her destabilization of North Africa, which Paglia said had triggered a flood of refugees into Europe.
While not predicting who will win, Paglia argued that Americans “want change and they’re sick of the establishment — so you get this great popular surge…
“This i dea that Trump represents such a threat to western civilization — it’s often predicted about presi dents and nothing ever happens — yet i f Trump wins it will be an amazing moment of change because it would destroy the power structure of the Republican party, the power structure of the Democratic party and destroy the power of the media,” she said.
Clinton actually got some good news this weekend, although it attracted almost no attention. The Democratic candidate maintains a small lead over Trump in three of the most closely contested s t ates: North Carolina, Colorado and Pennsylvania. Although the popular vote remains fairly close, Clinton is so far ahead in the electoral college that the New York Times still reckons she has a 91 per cent chance of winning the election.
It should be noted, however, that these conclusions are based upon surveys conducted before James Comey drew more attention to himself than any FBI director since the glorious and inglorious reign of J. Edgar Hoover by suggesting he might reopen a criminal investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified information.
What Clinton must count on now is that a majority of voters are so tired of hearing about those emails and so repelled by Trump’s erratic behaviour and bizarre taunts that she will squeak through. Winning in such a fashion is hardly the most dignified way to elect the first woman president of the United States.