Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Has Hillary racked up one too many screw-ups?

Ron Fournier - nobody's idea of a water-carrier for righty-ism - says it's time to seriously consider it:

Maybe she should stay at the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, where the former secretary of State could continue her life's work of building stronger economies, health care systems, and families. Give paid speeches. Write best-selling books. Spend time with Charlotte, her beloved granddaughter.
Two weeks ago, we learned that the Clinton Foundation accepted contributions from foreign countries. Assurances from the Obama administration and Clinton aides that no donations were made during her tenure as secretary of State were proven false.
Now The New York Times is reporting that Clinton used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of State, an apparent violation of federal requirements that her records be retained.
Exposed by a House committee investigating the Benghazi Consulate attack, Clinton brazenly dug in her heels. Advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal email and decided which ones to release: Just 55,000 emails were given to the State Department.
Those are our emails, not hers. What is she hiding?
The Times quoted a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration who said there is only one scenario under which it's proper for Cabinet-level officials to use private rather than government email: "nuclear winter."
Because she doesn't seem ready for 2016. Like a blast of wintry air in July, the worst of 1990s-style politics is intruding on what needs to be a new millennium campaign: Transparent, inspirational, innovative, and beyond ethical reproach.
I called the actions sleazy and stupid. Sleazy because any fair-minded person would suspect the foreign countries of trying to buy Clinton's influence. Stupid because the affair plays into a decades-old knock on the Clintons: They'll cut any corner for campaign cash. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton and his top aides used the White House as a tool to court and reward big donors.
Transparency isn't the only issue. Clinton exposed confidential and potentially dangerous information to a nonsecure, commercial email system. She gave Chinese spies a better shot at reading her emails than U.S. taxpayers.
When taken as being of a piece with "We were broke when we left the White House," "What difference does it make," the reset button, the "vast right-wing conspiracy," the cattle-futures profit, the mysterious reappearance of the Rose Law Firm records, and the intimidation of the women on the receiving end of Billy Jeff the Zipper's predatory advances, we see that Nixonian brew of contempt, paranoia, insecurity, and a troubled relationship with the truth that doesn't exactly look like a promising start to a campaign.

If this is the case, better to find it out now than in, say, the spring of 2017.

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