RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/441636/print

Before Democrats burn James Comey in effigy, they should think about how the FBI director came to have an outsized influence in the election in the first place.

It’s not something Comey sought or welcomed. A law-enforcement official who prizes his reputation, he didn’t relish becoming an object of hate for half the country or more. No, the only reason that Comey figures in the election at all is that Democrats knowingly nominated someone under FBI investigation.

Once upon a time — namely any presidential election prior to this one — this enormous political and legal vulnerability would have disqualified a candidate. Not this year, and not in the case of Hillary Clinton.

The country has clearly lowered its standards in this election, and Donald Trump’s madcap candidacy provides evidence of that almost every day. But Hillary’s nomination was itself an offense against American political norms and an incredibly reckless act. And the Democrats were supposed to be the party acting rationally.

Clinton effectively locked up the nomination in June and wasn’t cleared of criminal wrongdoing by the FBI until July. What if she had been indicted? Would Democrats have run her anyway? Would they have substituted in a 74-year-old socialist who had lost the nomination battle, or someone else who hadn’t even run? Any of these circumstances would have been unprecedented, but Democrats risked it.

They did it, in part, because they could never bring themselves to fully acknowledge the seriousness of the e-mail scandal and, relatedly, the ethical miasma around the Clinton Foundation. They considered it all another desperate trick of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.

Clinton henchman David Brock demanded that the New York Times retract its initial report of Clinton’s exclusive use of a private e-mail account in March 2015. A parade of Democratic operatives pooh-poohed the whole thing, from Clinton spokesman Karen Finney (“a politically motivated series of attacks”), to James Carville (“not going to amount to a hill of beans”), to Howard Dean (“hooey”).

When they first got together on a debate stage last October, Bernie Sanders, the only man who had a chance to stop Clinton, pleased the crowd with a ringing denunciation of interest in her e-mails.

Democrats bought the just-so stories offered up by the Clinton campaign. The FBI investigation was just a “security review.” The FBI wasn’t investigating Hillary, but only her server. Anything to deflect from the seriousness of the matter.

While Democrats willfully looked the other way, they put James Comey in an impossible position. An indictment would change the course of American history. That was all on him. He ultimately blinked. But he also put on the record the recklessness of Clinton’s practices as secretary of state in an attempt to create public accountability.

Comey’s conduct is open to criticism, but there is no way to please everyone when handling an investigation with such high political stakes. His notification to Congress last weekend is another case in point. All that can be said is that if Democrats didn’t want the FBI to have any part in the election, they could have considered that before handing Hillary Clinton their nomination.

Trump may be a deeply flawed candidate, but he caught a wave of popular fervor; Hillary, with her astonishing vulnerabilities, is a production of the Democratic elites who did everything to get her over the finish line.

Just how vulnerable is she? If it weren’t for the new trove of Huma Abedin e-mails, the blockbuster news this week would come via a Wall Street Journal report that the FBI is investigating the Clinton Foundation — although Fox News reported the same thing at the beginning of the year, and Hillary, of course, dismissed it as an “unsourced and irresponsible claim that has no basis.”

The e-mail scandal and Clinton Foundation will dog Hillary until Election Day and, should she win, into her presidency. For this, she has no one to blame but herself — and her irresponsible enablers.

— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2016 King Features Syndicate

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/441688/print

Will there be an eleventh-hour Never/Against/No Trump Reconsideration?

The question gains new relevance as a Hillary Clinton landslide, widely predicted until recently, now seems unlikely.

We are back to the razor’s edge, a likelihood of a close one- to three-point victory either way, and an even closer vote in the Electoral College. Once again, eyes focus on the Never Trump camp. It is at a crux, no doubt feeling schadenfreude that in extremis Donald Trump would beckon to them, of all people, with his “come home” campaign, while they are uneasy that his home-stretch themes, despite all the scary talk of a new exclusionary nationalism, nonetheless reflect most of the positions of their own mainstream conservatism.

The more inept Clinton, Inc. — shrill, ad hominem, and conspiratorial — becomes on the stump, oddly, the calmer Trump finally campaigns — again, prompting the question of whether enough Never or Against Trumpers will have second thoughts that might help Trump win close swing states such as North Carolina, Colorado, or Nevada. In other words, will watching the spiraling Clinton criminality and shamelessness finally drive some anti-Trump conservatives to hold their nose and vote Trump? Will enough conclude that a conservative in a swing state sitting out or voting for a symbolic candidate is a de facto sanction of an agenda that they have spent most of their lives opposing?

RELATED: The Case for Trump

Trump and Pence both have recently given impressive issues-orientated speeches. In contrast, an exasperated Hillary Clinton keeps resorting to Jimmy Carter’s 1980 tactic of demonizing the Republican nominee as dangerous, ill-tempered, and existentially reckless — without much interest in reminding supporters of the supposed benefits of her own progressive agenda. Her campaign is being reduced to unimaginative but familiar Clinton boilerplate: Trump is a bad guy, and the formerly sterling FBI director, James Comey, is now a corrupt Trump partisan. At the end, who thought that Trump would be subdued and campaigning on the issues, and the supposedly cool professional politico Clinton reduced to frenetic smears and conspiracies? Otherwise, Clinton apparently believes that, after her motor blew up this past weekend, the Democratic campaign boat can still coast to shore just ahead of a rapidly closing Trump. She could be right.

For all the talk of buffoonery versus criminality, the divide, at least in November 2016, is over issues and ostensibly could not be clearer for both conservatives and liberals.

On the Supreme Court, Obamacare, the debt, rebuilding the military, the Second Amendment, school choice, abortion, reforming the tax code, reexamining regulation, energy exploration and production, illegal immigration, sanctuary cities, and a host of other issues, the Republican ticket is the antithesis of Clinton/Kaine — and is recognized as such by nearly all progressives. Unlike the Democratic prospect, the conservative message oddly still has the chance of being empowered by both Houses of Congress and eventually a Supreme Court.

WikiLeaks, the DNC revelations, the FBI investigations, the Podesta trove, etc., all remind voters in this lowball campaign that Clinton is not a more moral and ethical candidate than Trump, whatever his flaws and shortcomings. And the world we glimpse in John Podesta e-mails is an accurate reflection of the values and interests that created and enriched the Clintons and that would continue their insidious influence in a second Clinton presidency. Remember that the Clinton remorse, such as it is, is not over graft and sabotage of the law and high office but merely over having their habitual corruption exposed. The weird case of Anthony Weiner’s e-mails completed the Clinton circle from immorality to farce, as hubris earned Nemesis — who, remember, always arrives late and in strange incarnations.

It is said that the election poses risks. In fact, in the sense of uncertainty, it does not, at least in the case of Hillary Clinton: There is no mystery at all. Her long record, campaign, published platform, and solidarity with Barack Obama would ensure a twelve-year era of continuing left-wing court appointees, as well as a likely single-payer rescue for the failed Obamacare, more debt incurred for entitlements, a shrinking and more politicized military, more efforts to prune the Second Amendment, no to school choice, expansion of abortion opportunities, more hidden higher taxes on the middle classes and more overt higher taxes on the upper-middle classes, more regulations on small business, more tribal divisiveness, open borders, sanctuary cities and amnesties, crony-green capitalism, and a continued war on fossil fuels. And, of course, there will be endless investigations, more ruined lives of obsequious subordinates, more attacks on prosecutors and the FBI, plea bargains, and scandals as leaks just keep leaking — and always more white lies like her recent false assertion that James Comey wrote his reinvestigation letter only to Republicans.

Clinton’s only remaining advantage is Democratic unity in comparison with the minority party’s fragmentation. Strangely, the supposedly idealist Bernie Sanders, who is the victim of deliberate Clinton-inspired sabotage and subterfuge, in a way that was not paralleled during the Republican primaries, has no compunction about rallying his base to support Hillary. In contrast, Trump’s uncouthness has turned off his rivals and their supporters, who still in large part insist that they will not support him despite the transparency of the primaries and the long-ago oath of fealty of the Republican candidates to the eventual nominee.

The election could depend on how many center-right Republican moderates and independents decide that Hillary’s left-wing visions of a 21st-century America and her innate criminality finally become too much to endure, and how many at last demand her retirement from politics.

If 300,000 to 400,00 apostates in three or four swing states feel that way over the weekend, and come home, she would be finished.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.