At a most troubled moment in history, both major
political parties appear set to nominate time-bomb candidates for president
with a fair percentage chance of blowing up their own campaigns and the
parties themselves.
We’ve been living in the era of anything goes and nothing
matters — that is, the era of no consequences — but at some point between now
and November 8 someone surely will press FBI chief James Comey as to why his
agency issued neither a criminal referral nor an explanatory memorandum in
the matter of Hillary Clinton’s private email server and its role in the
money-gathering activities of the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary
of State.
Hapless Bernie Sanders blew his chance to call her on
that months ago — “The American people are sick and tired of hearing
about your damn emails!” — but it’s absolutely certain that Trump will
jump up and down and shout woo-woo-woo about it during the general election
campaign, if he manages to not get dumped at the GOP convention. Or his
as-yet-hypothetical replacement will.
The email issue won’t go away because it entails serious
issues of racketeering in public office, not just niceties of security
procedure. One of the Secretary of State’s duties is to approve weapons sales
to foreign countries. During her three years at State, Hillary signed off on
$165 billion worth of sales by private commercial arms contractors to Clinton
Foundation foreign donors. On top of that was an additional $151 billion of
separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries that gave to the
Clinton Foundation. It also happened that the weapons contractors themselves
and companies connected financially to them made substantial donations to the
Clinton foundation — and paid whopping speaking fees to Hillary’s husband
ex-president Bill, during her years at State.
Salon Magazine has also
reported that in contradiction of a 1995 directive signed by then-president
Bill against arms sales to nations violating human rights, Hillary approved
such weapons sales. Salon’s David Sirota writes:
As just one of many examples, in its 2011 Human Rights
Report, Clinton’s State Department slammed Algeria’s government for imposing
“restrictions on freedom of assembly and association,” tolerating “arbitrary killing,”
“widespread corruption” and a “lack of judicial independence.
That year, the Algerian government donated $500,000 to
the Clinton Foundation and the next year Clinton’s State Department approved
a one-year 70 percent increase in military export authorizations to the
country. The jump included authorizations for almost 50,000 items classified
as “toxicological agents, including chemical agents, biological agents and
associated equipment.” The State Department had not authorized the export of
any of such items to Algeria the year before.
There’s no way that the shady doings of the Clinton
Foundation will not become a campaign issue whether Trump emerges as the
eventual GOP nominee or not, and of course the other noisome matter of
exactly what Hillary told Too-Big-To-Fail banks in exchange for many
quarter-million dollar “speaking fees” still lurks behind all that. Hillary’s
partisans at the The New York Times and The WashPo have
ignored these stories for months, but the telltale stench remains, like a dead
body under the floorboards.. In contrast to her beaming victory lap after the
California primary, all this stuff promises some serious frowny-face for Mz.
It’s-My-Turn in the months ahead.
As for Trump, the hand-wringing and Maalox-gulping among
GOP nabobs got a lot more intense since the Orlando Club massacre, and the
(as usual) disjointed utterances by the presumptive Republican Party nominee.
This guy is not just a loose artillery shell rolling around on the deck —
he’s a dirty bomb wrapped in a smallpox blanket threatening to turn the Grand
Old Party into a political Flying Dutchman. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan
underscored his extremely conditional endorsement of Trump on the
Sunday TV chat forums, hinting that even if Trump got where he is playing by
the rules, the rules can be changed at the convention.
That would set the stage for a melee both inside and
outside the GOP convention in Cleveland a month from now. The tragedy of a
legitimately irate populace vested in such an obviously inept champion will
lead to a political explosion when the party poobahs try to maneuver him
off-stage. The only worse alternative is if they actually go ahead and
nominate the ham-headed sonofabitch. Either way, the Republican Party comes
out as burnt toast.
Remember, too, the Black Lives Matter movement and its
affiliates promised months ago to bring a disruptive presence to both
conventions. Imagine how they will get on with thousands of outraged
Trumpsters moiling in the streets. Add a dash of Mexican hot sauce to this
farrago and you’ve got a perfect recipe for mayhem.
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