Most of what we read about the election of 2016 was untrue. Here are the most glaring of the election fables.
Hillary would have been better off politically to come clean long ago
We hear a few on the left lament Hillary’s two-year stubbornness in stonewalling, lying, and distorting the facts surrounding her unlawful use of a private e-mail server — as if her problems were largely a result of not being candid soon enough.
Nothing could be further from the truth if we define “better” as “more politically viable.” Had Clinton in spring 2015, from the outset, confessed that she had violated federal law in her transmissions of classified material, or admitted that she had deleted some e-mails under subpoena that contained government business, or had she apologized for allotting, as secretary of state, time to Clinton Foundation patrons of her husband, on the basis of their donations and honoraria, she would have lost the primaries to Bernie Sanders and landed in jail.
Had the president and the Democratic National Committee not intervened to massage the political climate and help to warp the primaries, or had Donna Brazile not continued to sabotage the sanctity of the debates, Hillary might well not have found herself on the eve of the election tied or ahead in the polls for the presidency. Had Bill Clinton not met Loretta Lynch on the tarmac, James Comey might well have acted earlier and with greater effect — and avoided his flip-flopping.
In other words, in all these cases of malfeasance, Clinton calculated quite correctly that Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the entire Obama administration, as well as the media and the liberal establishment, would rally to her side, even when it was evident that her denials were empty and her conduct ethically bankrupt and clearly illegal.
Lying paid off. It got Hillary this far; it could win her the presidency, and there is little likelihood in this world that she will pay a price — and some likelihood she will continue to benefit from smooth prevarication. Cosmic justice will come, as it always does, but probably in her dotage — or somewhere else.
The truth is that for all her campaign weaknesses (voice, demeanor, stamina, etc.), she remains an effective liar and cynically and correctly believes that she is largely immune from accountability — a fact borne out by the 2016 election.
‘They go high, we go low’
Clinton enjoys quoting the supposed hip ethical platitudes of Michelle Obama and, by association, her husband (of campaigning ever more nobly while Trump campaigns still more ignobly).
In fact, the Clinton campaign has matched all mud thrown by Trump, toss for toss — perhaps even more so, given its far greater cash reserves. This final week, she and the president of the United States were falsely alleging that Trump welcomed the official endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan — as if Trump had sat on a bench at a rally of the KKK the same way that Obama once had described himself as being mentored by the racist, anti-American, and anti-Semite Reverend “Audacity of Hope” Jeremiah Wright.
