Spare this nation President Hillary Clinton. But how?
If you think Hillary Clinton is going to be indicted for her illegal misuse of classified documents, you haven’t been paying attention. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, appointed by President Obama, has discretion not to indict. She’ll use it.
Want to argue that the Obama Department of Justice will put enforcing the law ahead of politics? Go right ahead.
The bigger issue, really, is whether Mrs. Clinton will be held accountable by voters. She put the people of this country at risk, and did so, quite obviously, in pursuit of her own selfish personal and political advantage. As Secretary of State, Hillary did our public business privately to keep her email from prying eyes at the State Department and elsewhere in that same federal government she wants to otherwise use to regulate everyone else.
Yet, very dangerously, her Westchester, N.Y., server and the information it stored were extremely vulnerable to capture by Chinese and Russian intelligence. And others.
It’s now clear that numerous classified documents passed through her personal, private, “home” email server — Fox News reports “several dozen.” Earlier this month, the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Inspector General informed Congress that extremely sensitive and classified material, allegedly involving human intelligence, had been discovered on Hillary’s private server. That disclosure led one former Special Operations planner to declare, “There are people’s lives at stake.”
Meanwhile, just last week the State Department announced it would not be able to comply with the court-mandated date to turn over the final 9,400 pages of then-Secretary of State Clinton’s emails, asking the judge for a one-month extension — past the first presidential caucuses and primaries.
More Equal Than Others
Polls have consistently shown Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders besting Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire and a recent CNN poll placed Sanders ahead in Iowa as well. Clinton, however, has consistently led in national polls.
Unlike the GOP race for president, the Sanders-Clinton tussle features a one-on-one David vs. Goliath contest. Yet, in an illuminating way, it does mirror the casting of the Republican presidential contest as “outsiders” — businessman Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz and neurosurgeon Ben Carson — against “establishment” (insider) Republicans, namely, Florida Sen. Florida Man, former Florida Gov. Florida Man, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
On the one hand, Sen. Bernie Sanders is the ultimate “outsider.” He’s not even really a Democrat, at least not until 2015, when he officially joined the party to run for the party’s presidential nomination. Granted, the Senator had caucused with Democrats, but has continued to call himself a “democratic socialist.” Moreover, he ran and won his Vermont U.S. Senate seat as an independent. When he switched from independent to Democrat, Sanders had been the longest serving independent in the history of the U.S. Congress.
On the other hand, how can Sanders be considered an outsider when he’s been on the inside of Congress legislating this awful mess for the last quarter century? Note that Republican U.S. Senators still running for president — Cruz, Rubio, and Paul — are only in their first term, bearing a tad less responsibility for the status quo. The more outside outsiders Trump, Carson and Carly Fiorina are completely guilt-free, having never served in any public office.
Still, compared to the Hillary Clinton of Democratic royal family fame, Sanders is decidedly the outsider. That’s why Clinton’s confidant, Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz ensured the presidential debates would only be held on weekend evenings against major sporting events, the better to avoid an audience for the challenger to score points against the party favorite.
For the record, Clinton and Wasserman Schultz also share an uncanny inability to explain the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist. But I digress.
My point is that despite the fact that a majority of Americans don’t trust Hillary, and even 40 percent of Democrats say “honest” isn’t a good word to describe her, Mrs. Clinton will nonetheless win the Democratic Party nomination for president.
And that’s whether a majority of the people who cast ballots in Democratic primaries and caucuses vote for her . . . or not.
A Done Deal
One might surmise that the Democratic Party would embrace democratic practices and principles, and, therefore, that the candidate garnering the most votes in these exciting caucus and primary contests we hear so much about would win the party’s nomination. One would surmise incorrectly.
Let me explain: Democrats have a lot of “superdelegates.”
These are party leaders, elected officials and former elected officials. In short, muckety-mucks. They’re appointed to be delegates and get to vote representing the party establishment, just like the delegates actually chosen through democratic elections get to vote. Thankfully, there are only 712 superdelegates among a total of 4,764 delegates.
Still, that’s 15 percent of the total vote. And why should there be even one unelected delegate voting to cancel out an elected delegate’s vote?
By the way, did I mention that Hillary Clinton leads Sanders in committed superdelegates by 380 to eleven? She’s winning the insider vote by an incredible 97 to 3 percent over the Bern.
What does this mean? It means that Bernie Sanders could win the actually voting in all the primaries and caucuses by a whopping 58 to 42 percent over Clinton and still lose the presidential nomination to Hillary among delegates as a whole.
That’s not democracy. It’s a fixed insider game . . . played to near perfection by the consummate insider politician.
Hillary Clinton will not be indicted. The DOJ won’t stop her. Bernie Sanders won’t stop her, either, even with an underwhelmed Democrat base flocking to the democratic socialist.