RUTHFULLY YOURS

A group of state legislators in Missouri has, after a great deal of nagging by your favorite roving correspondent and many others, come around and made a public statement that Professor Melissa Click of the University of Missouri should be fired.

Professor Click, you’ll recall, is the petty commissar who assaulted a student journalist (who has since filed a police complaint) who was covering one of the daft, diaper-filling protests on the Mizzou campus. The protest was happening on a corner of the campus that not only is a public space but a public space recognized as such in Missouri state law, with access to it guaranteed. Professor Click attempts to intimidate the student, physically blocks him, and then swats at his face before calling for “some muscle” to forcibly remove him. So far, neither the university nor the campus police department, which are manifestly run by miscreants and moral cowards, has seen fit to do anything about the case.

When Rolling Stone published its breathless account of what turned out to be an entirely fictitious rape on the campus of the University of Virginia, some critics (ahem) were denounced as monsters for asking such straightforward questions as “Why wasn’t a violent gang rape, purportedly committed on a bed of broken glass, followed up by a police report, which surely, given the details, would have produced physical evidence supporting prosecution and conviction?” In the Missouri case, there was not only a police report but video of the incident, shot by the victim of the crime himself. One can only imagine what would have happened if there were a similar video of, say, a white, portly Mizzou football coach physically laying hands on a young black woman going about her legally protected and legitimate business on the campus.

But, so far, not one thing of any consequence has happened to Professor Click.

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It is worth keeping her in mind as one considers the curious case of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s ongoing e-mail problem. It has been amusing to watch the evolution of her lies on the issue: She was going to turn over all the evidence, until she unilaterally destroyed (crime) and withheld (probably a crime) a great deal of it. She insisted that the communication that passed through her off-site toilet (her secret e-mail server was located in the bathroom of a loft apartment in Denver, because that does not seem sketchy at all) was not classified, until it was shown that some of it was; she then said that what she personally sent or received was not secret or sensitive, until it was shown that it was; she then said that none of it was marked as such, until . . .

Strike three.

If you are a Democrat, the safest place in the world to be is under the authority of other Democrats. Lois Lerner, the criminal who used the Internal Revenue Service as a political weapon on behalf of the Democratic party, was never going to be charged, or even disciplined, by her overseers in the IRS or at the Department of Justice. After pulling one of the worst Gestapo stunts in modern American history, she’s receiving a nice, comfortable pension, and those who enabled her crimes were given fat bonuses. There was no way that Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch was going to charge Lerner — what do you imagine the odds are that they’ll discover their integrity in the matter of Hillary Rodham Clinton, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee? Unless President Barack Obama should decide to take this opportunity to rid his party of the Clintons forever (a slim but non-zero possibility), nothing is going to happen.

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The Obama administration can traffic guns to Mexican drug cartels, poison rivers, assassinate American citizens, more or less make up health-care law as it goes, lie about critical foreign-policy questions, and criminally mishandle sensitive information, and all of that amounts to – nothing. For it to amount to anything, you’d need a Justice Department, an FBI, and federal judges with self-respect sufficient to outweigh their institutional political cowardice. And that we do not have.

A couple of militia nuts squat in a vacant visitor center at an obscure park in Oregon and the Left, with one voice, bays for blood. Black Lives Matter rioters torch Baltimore and Ferguson, assault police and innocent bystanders, and attempt to burn human beings alive with Molotov cocktails, and — nothing.

This is a recurring motif in U.S. history. Thousands of Americans over the course of a generation participated in a criminal conspiracy that resulted in, among other things, the murder of some 100 million people, and the bad guy in that story is . . . Senator Joe McCarthy, who tried to stop them. In the 1930s, as the Soviets were intentionally starving millions of people to death, our so-called progressives were busy denying that any such thing was taking place. In the 1960s, our so-called progressives were posing with murderous tyrants in Vietnam and making excuses for Pol Pot’s genocide. The same people still celebrate Che Guevara, a murdering racist and Jew-hater. When the Sandinistas brought the Soviet murder campaign to the Americans, Bill de Blasio and his ilk cheered the Sandinistas. When Hugo Chávez installed himself as an autocrat in Venezuela, all the usual progressives cheered him, too, not just Hollywood jackasses like Sean Penn but elected Democrats such as Chaka Fattah. There never has been, and probably never will be, a reckoning for the American Left’s role in the Communist massacres and repression of the 20th century.

Against all that, what’s a few thousand sensitive e-mails from a Democratic presidential candidate who has accepted millions of dollars in “charitable” donations and speaking fees from Beijing and Moscow? What’s one piddly assault on one piddly student journalist?

— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.