James Comey, Director of the FBI went on the tube this morning, July5,2016 and after reading a seemingly inexhaustible list of the processes that his agency had gone through in the Clinton email investigation, announced that they would recommend to the Attorney General that no criminal charges be filed against anyone in the whole process. This is going t make a lot of GOP nuts spin off their wheels. Republican politicians are running around all over Washington with their hair on fire.
Clinton thinking that this will end the noise may have breathed a huge sigh of relief but anyone who has followed politics for the last half-century, especially Clinton politics, knows that the Right isn’t even close to letting this one die.
Shouts of Obama cover-up were echoing through he halls of congress even before Comey finished his first sentence. Those who have kept alive the faded remnants of Whitewater are already tucking the details of email-gate into their portfolios and figuring out how to best use them for renewed attacks on Hillary. This is just the Republican way. It’s been decades since they had anything like a viable or saleable platform; this leaves them a single fall back position; personal character assassination usually fed by false information and outright lies.
Like Benghazi, if the process had involved anyone other than the Secretary, it would now be dead. We have, however, over the decades, discovered that attacks on Hillary or Bill never die, regardless of veracity. They just retire to the closet to await regeneration.
It was very interesting to watch an installment of Morning Joe that was aired just before Comey’s announcement, They gave airtime to Trump, on which he declared that no charges would be brought against Clinton and whining that the system was rigged. The sycophants on Morning Joe all thought Hillary was in trouble and almost certain to be indicted. So much for the insight of pundits.
The problem for the Right is, the agency doing the investigation has historically been considered very far Right and not susceptible to any pressure from Left leaning administrations. Director Comey himself has been a life long registered Republican. If it had been the CIA, Right wing charges against it would bear slightly more weight but THE FBI? We’re talking about an agency a little to the Right of Ronald Reagan.
The Right can whine and bitch all they want. They can make accusations and complain about power politics, but the bottom line for the email discussion is that for any intelligent, fair-minded person, the FBI’s conclusions are solid. That does not mean the story is over but it does mean that the discussion of it has been relegated to whining and grumbling with no serious threat on the horizon
The Right won’t believe or accept this and there have always been people who will never change their minds about Hillary. This does not make them right or Hillary wrong but it does remove all the legal hurdles from Hillary’s campaign and set up a situation where only one of the national candidates is liable for criminal prosecution.
Watching the tube on the morning after, confirms that, like Benghazi, this will never be over for the pundits on the Right, but also like Benghazi it no longer has anywhere to go that will satisfy them. The problem if you are a Republican is very simple. You have attacked the Clinton’s multiple times over the years yet you have not been able to make anything stick. Maybe because you have never picked the right fight or maybe because you have been so incompetent in your prosecution of your goals. Either way you look like fools to any functional member of the public.
The first big scandal was Whitewater and it set the tone for all the rest. The Clintons were supposed to have been involved in a land deal from which they profited immensely but when it all unfolded, it turned out that they actually lost about $300,000. Not really a great basis for a scandal. Trooper-gate, travel-gate, and eventually the Vince Foster mess in which they were accused, by GOP toadies of being involved in Foster’s suicide, followed Whitewater. Of course the problem with all these accusations was that they had no basis in reality and no proof of anything actually happening anywhere but in GOP imaginations. This process has never died. The GOP keeps waiting, accusing and hoping. Kind of like a dog waiting for a bone at the back door of a restaurant that has log ago closed.
One hates to give the Republicans an intelligent path to salvation because one knows they will reject it out of hand, but maybe, instead of continually attacking the Clintons, just as they have spent the last eight years continually attacking Obamacare and always failing on both counts, maybe, just maybe, it would be fruitful to forget the Clintons and try to woo voters by putting forth an attractive candidate and encouraging him to pursue an intelligent platform that would curry the interest of voters and maybe make them think that the GOP was interested in something besides the goals of their corporate benefactors.
Of course right now they are faced with two obstacles to this approach. They have a platform that is the exact opposite of what their voters want to see and they have a candidate that in any but a GOP world is so totally unacceptable as to be a sick joke. So they fall back on the established GOP format and proceed as the whiney little bitches that they are.