Bill and Hillary Clinton have for years looked into the nearest camera and said, "It's just politics." Every attack from every direction has been deflected with that. Even now, as more and more information comes out about Hillary Clinton's email server, the standard Clinton talking point has returned: "It's just politics."
Unfortunately for Hillary, she is no Bill. She lacks his charm and aw-shucks manner. She lacks his smile. Right now, she even lacks him. Bill Clinton has gone into hiding, and no one wants to sail down to Jeffrey Epstein's "orgy island," where Bill allegedly likes to hide out. Mrs. Clinton has instead sent out a series of befuddled and befuddling spokesmen who have tried their best to confuse the situation only to get confused themselves.
When that failed, Mrs. Clinton herself tried to defuse the situation and only made it worse by retorting to a reporter that she did not wipe her servers with a cloth and she did not know technically how to wipe a server. But the server was wiped clean.
"It's just politics" does not work when the public realizes it is actually about national security. Chinese hackers have hacked the Office of Personnel Management and obtained the private records of millions of Americans, including those who applied for security clearances. IRS records have been hacked. Current Secretary of State John Kerry claims the Chinese or Russians may be reading his government encrypted emails.
In this environment, Hillary Clinton would have us believe her private server was no big deal. In this environment, Hillary Clinton and her campaign have written and rewritten the story of her server as the story has evolved.
First, Hillary Clinton said she was confident she had never sent any classified information from her email address. News reports declared otherwise, and so Clinton had to retreat. Her next position was that she was confident she had never sent classified information from her email address that was classified at the time she had it. Again, we now know that is not true.
Hillary Clinton now again has retreated, moving the goal posts with her. Now she has declared the legal standards are not as the hicks and rubes who make up America's television experts understand them. Of course, those television experts are also congressmen who helped write the laws and lawyers who have represented people dealing with classified information. Here, too, Hillary Clinton is wrong.
Never fear, Mrs. Clinton has moved on already. She says she is not under investigation and has never been subpoenaed. Again, facts contradict the reality she has chosen to inhabit. The House of Representatives has subpoenaed her, and the FBI is investigating her. Hilariously, Mrs. Clinton's campaign team now says she is not being investigated, just "her conduct" is being investigated. Once she declares it depends on the meaning of "is," we will have come full circle.
Over the past month, Mrs. Clinton's poll numbers have gone into a free-fall along with the number of people who trust her. Vice President Joe Biden is thinking of getting into the race now. Some of President Obama's campaign team is pushing Biden, and the vice president reportedly is actively considering it.
This is not the Clinton campaign Democrats were expecting. The leaders of the party rushed to have a coronation, stocked Mrs. Clinton's coffers with hundreds of millions of dollars and decided to sit back and let the GOP self-destruct. In fact, the GOP keeps looking like it wants to self-destruct in an intra-party slug fest, but every time they pass premature victory to the Clinton team, the Clintons pass it right back with gusto.
At this point, it is apparent to many observers that the Democrats may be stuck with Hillary Clinton. They arranged all the deck chairs exactly as she commanded, oblivious to the iceberg into which she was sailing the Democrats' ship. The problem for Hillary Clinton is that her husband's playbook demands she claim "it's just politics," but that only works for him, and most voters realize it is actually about national security.
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