There are few things more annoying that the permanent effort to litigate
Hillary Clinton's campaign. Worse, as the only sense in which it arises
is, "Hillary did it, too!" and "Why aren't you mad at her, you
hypocrite?" Lots of things are characterized as the last refuge of
scoundrels but this has to be the worst. It suggests the comparison of a
person who is probably the best human ever to run for president to an
uneducated tyrant who disgusts every decent human being in the country.
It is truly grotesque.
It also demands a comparison between the
two campaigns. One that was carefully and successfully executed in a way
that should make any American proud. If you read the extensively
prepared positions, look at the immense and carefully organized
operational structure or listened to her speeches, you will see a sound
candidate running an amazing and effective campaign. Look at Trump's
campaign and you find a disorganized nightmare of ad hoc racism, hatred and appeal to the worst instincts of our fellow citizens. Also, grotesque.
But
the suggestion that we compare the horrific collusion with Russia shown
by Junior's emails with the gathering of evidence about Manafort's
connections to Ukraine is the worst yet, only understandable as the last
refuge of Clinton haters and Trump apologists. It is unfair, silly and ultimately, dangerous.
The
biggest reason is that the Clinton campaign is no longer relevant. Turn
it around. When the Republicans started their jihad about email
servers, nobody cared, not one tiny whit, that they were completely
uninterested in the exact same behavior by people on their side. There
was the real, legitimate fact of the precedent but everyone, news
organization and Congressional committees alike, treated Hillary's
servers as de novo, asserting that it was important because she
was an important person who was expected to wield national power some
day. Trump's collusion with Russia is important because he is president.
He wields national power this day.
Had Hillary sent
Chelsea to meet with the government of Ukraine to encourage them to
bring the power of their government to bear on defeating her opponent as
quid pro quo on relieving sanctions, it would still be
completely irrelevant. She lost. There is no possibility that she will
put Ukranian interests above America's. There is no possibility that the
Ukrainians will have leverage over the government to force foreign
policy decisions that help them achieve their goals over ours because
she is not president.
Of course, the Clinton campaign did nothing
like that. What actually happened is that someone heard that
Manafort had improper ties to the Ukrainian government and, before
accusing him publicly, went to ask the Ukrainians if it was true. The
people with whom she met did not subsequently release a ton of stolen
emails in a careful pattern to damage the opposition or hack into the
computers of dozens of strategically chosen voting authorities around
the country. The Ukrainians at the meetings, as far as anyone can tell,
were not lawyers with a brief to work on sanctions or anything else that
would represent a potential corrupt 'ask'.
Even more, nobody
from the campaign management was involved in any way. Only one person was involved and there is no evidence that she was acting at the behest of Hillary Clinton. Don
Trump Jr is can't say the same about his dad. Nor Manafort, Sessions or the
rest.
The demand for equal consideration of these things is the
epitome of false equivalence, fabricated, fictitious and dangerous to
the republic. That Trump is a bad person and dangerous is obvious to
anyone that is not a dumb partisan. That he very well may be a Mancurian
Candidate, secretly working in favor of foreign powers from within the
White House is a real possibility. Even setting aside that he
explicitly called for them, it is now all but certain that he and his
campaign encouraged illegal acts by the Russians to interfere with the
election in his favor and probably in return for acting on his subsequent repeated interest
in lessening sanctions. That the Trump people uniformly "forgot" to
mention the meetings until they were found out by the media confirms the
stench of corruption.
The Clinton family has been harassed for twenty five years, charged with
fake crimes and abused with the misuse of government resources from
Whitewater to Vince Foster to Benghazi to Email Servers and a thousand
steps in between. Hillary, far from being corrupt, is probably the
cleanest, least corrupt politician in history as demonstrated by the
horrific abuse and endless investigation that has failed for decades to turn up
any important dirt. Comparing her to the thug in the White House with
his practice of ripping off vendors, blatant lies, and obvious, proven
corruptions of character too numerous and disgusting to list, is
egregious.
Demanding equal time for a minor conversation by a
peripheral
Hillary staffer as we do for the proven truth that the Trump management
team met with Russians and concealed the meetings is a ridiculous
obfuscation. It is one thing to spend all these years abusing Hillary
for sheer political gain. It is quite another to keep talking about her
in a way that obscures discussion of the real corruption and real
national danger represented by this corrupt president.