Hillary as Dark Lord?

With good reason in my view, the media is accused of left-liberal bias. However, ideology is often trumped by nihilism or sensationalism or the two in combination.

This week, the world prefers mostly not to contemplate the implications of the Obama Iran policy which, in connect-the-dots fashion, is only two of three steps removed from a regional or even global nuclear war.

The story that is the default setting which the media prefers to hype is Hillary Clinton’s “email scandal” dating to when she used a private server for official State Department business. Did she violate any law? Technically, maybe, though I would love to have a dollar for every reader of this newspaper—liberal or conservative—who has technically committed one or possibly more than one felony.

But for the grace of God, we could all be Senator Bob Menendez facing a peculiarly-timed prosecution for what is essentially political business as usual—and not only in Tony Soprano’s New Jersey.

Indeed, Lee Smith in a unique twist sees the new Hillary scandal being manipulated by the Obama White House in a preemptive strike to disarm her before she joins Menendez’s criticisms of the proposed Iran deal.

Not content with conducting lawfare against Hillary, pundits on the right, but not exclusively on the right, are having a field day. According to George Will, “The Clintons come trailing clouds of entitlement and concealment and legalistic, Jesuitical reasonings—the kind of people who could find a loophole in a stop sign. . . .This is a way of controlling what we will know about the history of our country. And it is deeply sinister.”

If this were not noir enough, Hillary according to Richard Fernandez in PJ Media may be the Dark Lord (in drag) from Lord of the Rings wizarding a “dark network” akin to those guilty of: • Drugs • Alien Smuggling • Money Laundering and counterfeiting • Intellectual Property • Terrorism • Human organs • Stolen Art • Sex Trafficking • Arms Trafficking • Nuclear Proliferation.

In Washington, politics is increasingly less about policy and more about the control of information flow. Perhaps Hillary’s gambit recognized this in one of the more ham-handed, stupid ways imaginable. I’m not a Clintonista, but to call it “sinister” without further evidence crosses the border from hype into hysteria.

If stupid words and actions were a disqualification for being elected president, we would be mercifully free of drawn-out primary races in either party. About 100 years ago, House Speaker Joe Cannon—notorious for warning conservationist President Theodore Roosevelt: “Not one cent for scenery”—also declared that mediocrities have as much right as anybody else to be elected. Perhaps now ineptitude is also a qualification for office.