And lo, it came to pass: As of last night, Hillary Clinton is officially the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee for President of the United States. Setting aside her party's elite "super delegate" insurance policy, Clinton has now secured a majority of pledged delegates, which reflect the will of primary voters. And despite falling to Bernie Sanders in a startling 23 nominating contests, the former Secretary of State has attracted roughly 3.7 million more votes than the Vermont Senator nationwide. Having lost the election by every metric, the disheveled Soviet Union honeymooner says he'll fight on to the party's Philadelphia convention anyway, marking just the latest instance of a Socialist ignoring simple math that complicates his untenable fantasies.
The fact that Clinton failed to clear this hurdle until the very last day of balloting underscores her profound weakness as a candidate. She enters the general election stage of the campaign as one of the most disliked and distrusted political figures in America, and one of the least popular presidential nominees of all time. Despite his even uglier public image and endless parade of divisiveness and insults, the Republican nominee-in-waiting only trails her by an average of two percentage points at this stage of the race, inside the margin of error. Several weeks ago, a Democratic operative basked in the afterglow of Donald Trump's effective nomination victory, crowing on Fox News that the GOP had selected "exactly the candidate they deserve." Ironically, both Trump's strong backers and detractors on the right would likely agree with this statement, albeit for different reasons. This week, the same formulation applies to the Democrats. They've chosen the corrupt, opaque, power hungry, self-serving, aloof, greedy, politically soulless, congenital liar they so richly deserve.
In case it wasn't sufficiently beaten into your psyche with a rhetorical two-by-four last night, Hillary Clinton has made history. Indeed. She has become the first presidential candidate of either gender to clinch a major party's nomination while under active FBI investigation. That criminal probe -- not a "security review" as she and her campaign have wrongly claimed -- continues to produce serious new developments. Based on her deliberate, national security-endangering conduct, as well as a string of clues and actions by federal investigators, it is entirely possible that a recommendation for criminal prosecution will be handed down in the coming weeks. As America's top diplomat, Mrs. Clinton ordered the implementation of an improper email scheme that predictably culminated in the compromising of thousands of classified documents, including top secret and 'beyond top secret' material. She ignored specific, personal warnings from State Department security officials about her reckless arrangement in 2009 and 2011, using her shockingly unsecure system throughout her four-year tenure as a means of thwarting public records requests and wielding total control over her correspondence. When the existence of her private server was revealed, Clinton and her attorneys unilaterally deleted tens of thousands of messages, falsely stating that none of them were work-related. She has verifiably and flagrantly lied about virtually every aspect of this scandal from the very beginning.
In her victory speech before cheering supporters Tuesday night, Clinton also promised voters that as president, "I will always have your back." One wonders how those words struck the family members of four Americans murdered in Benghazi by Islamist terrorists on September 11, 2012. Under Clinton's watch, the State Department disregarded and rejected repeated requests for increased security measures at the compound that was ultimately overrun and sacked. The facility was operating below the US government's minimum security standards for diplomatic posts anywhere in the world -- let alone a city known to be crawling with jihadists, from which other Western nations had already withdrawn over acute safety concerns. Despite two previous attempted bombings, the makeshift consulate remained woefully under-protected on that fateful night, which rested on an obviously symbolic date. After the carnage was over, Mrs. Clinton provably and intentionally lied to the American people about the nature of the attacks. She repeated her falsehoods to the faces of the victims' grieving families several days later, knowing full well that she wasn't telling them the truth. And when four separate relatives from three of the families independently confirmed that she'd lied to them, she suggested they were the liars, in spite of contemporaneous evidence backing their account. The important lesson in all of this, she's said over and over again, is to ensure that nothing like the Benghazi massacre ever happens again. Several months after her departure from the State Department, a blistering internal report revealed that 15 US diplomatic missions in "high risk" locations still failed to meet security standards. This past March, Clinton told a televised audience that the United States "didn't lose a single person in Libya."
Mrs. Clinton also used her triumphal remarks in Brooklyn to inveigh against the influence of money and "power brokers" in America's political system. In light of her history, these comments should have been accompanied by a laugh track. The words "shameless" and "hypocritical" don't quite cut it here. Clinton's family foundation -- deemed a "slush fund" by a charity watchdog and described as "all bankable" by a former employee -- has been awash in tens of millions of dollars in undisclosed foreign donations. The foundation has accepted gifts from individuals and entities seeking to curry favor with the Clintons, including many groups with active business before Hillary's State Department. This gravy train resulted in dodgy transactions with real national security implications, as well as the re-filing of five years' worth of tax returns, the original versions of which failed to list eight-figures in income from foreign governments -- including regimes that systemically repress women. Clinton's clear-cut pledges on transparency in order to avoid conflicts of interest were routinely violated.
She and her husband have also pocketed well over $100,000,000.00 in speaking fees since leaving the White House in 2001. The former president raked in record levels of honoraria while his wife was running the country's foreign policy, and his wife later made a killing from groups that opened their wallets wide to bankroll her addresses as they coincidentally sought to secure government contracts and grants. Meanwhile, she obstinately refuses to release the transcripts of her high-dollar speeches to Wall Street firms, which she implausibly claims were forums to speak truth to power. And as she panders to Sanders supporters on the scourge of income inequality, she's delivered remarks in $12,000 jackets and issued demands about the size of the luxury private jets in which she'd deign to travel. Hillary Clinton is the very definition of an DC insider and power broker. She operates at the lucrative and ethically dubious intersection of big money and vast power, and has for decades.
Pivoting to the fall competition, Clinton drew roars from last evening's crowd by asserting that Donald Trump is "temperamentally unfit to be President and Commander in Chief." Whether one agrees with that indictment or not -- and regardless of how one feels about her myopic cravenness on gay rights, her callousness in the face of governmental abuse of veterans, her pitiful demagoguery on religious liberties, or her radicalism on abortion, immigration, and gun rights -- Hillary Rodham Clinton has serially revealed herself to be ethically unfit to be President and Commander-in-Chief.