RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Had the meeting in Phoenix never come to light, which was clearly the intention of Lynch and Clinton, the fix with Hillary would have been in. As it stands, Hillary’s fate will depend on whether she escaped the FBI interview in good shape, the integrity of that agency’s director, and the utter indifference of many Americans to her criminal dishonesty. Finally, it will depend on the Obama administration’s tolerance for blatant political intrigues. If the past is any guide, that tolerance is quite high. ”

Sifting through the facts slowly emerging from the tattered veil of secrecy surrounding the tarmac meeting between Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton, it is likely that the popular narrative that the Attorney General was ambushed is false. In all likelihood, General Lynch had an important agenda that needed to be communicated immediately to Team Hillary.

Last week I wrote a piece reasonably speculating that Lynch’s meeting with Clinton meant that the FBI would shortly refer charges to Justice, and that Lynch met Clinton to break the bad news and reassure him that nothing would come of it under her watch. Since that article was published new information has come to light, but none that would undermine its central premise. That Hillary Clinton was finally interviewed by FBI agents on Saturday strongly suggests that not only was Lynch’s meeting with Clinton prearranged, but reinforces the idea that their discussion improperly focused on the FBI’s investigation of Hillary.

Coincidences are often the fodder of conspiracy theorists and for good reason should be evaluated carefully. But that doesn’t mean that stunning coincidences are not good evidence. Circumstantial evidence is essentially another name for coincidence, and properly presented is a good as any other kind of evidence and sufficient to decide a case.

The meeting of Clinton’s and Lynch’s planes in a Phoenix airport at the same time of day, far from their own home bases, with both of them following busy schedules is strangely coincidental in and of itself. That we now know the “chance” meeting occurring five days before Clinton was to be interviewed by the FBI (something that both parties to the Phoenix encounter already knew) is one coincidence too many. To believe this encounter happened purely by chance is either to discount logic, or to take a political side.

The mainstream media predictably are doing their best to avoid logical conclusions that hurt their candidate, and so predictably have spun a narrative to explain it. In this telling, the meeting was not only by chance, but forced upon Lynch by Clinton, who left his plane with his security detail and set upon her plane. This account appears to be backed by leaks that suggest Lynch’s FBI escort was surprised and upset by the encounter — not only because it presents inherent security problems when two groups of heavily armed agents approach each other without a prearranged plan, but because as FBI agents they understood that the encounter at least appeared improper.

The sun blazed down on Norfolk’s old-fashioned fife-and-drum parade on July Fourth of 1822, but the weather deteriorated for the afternoon picnic. The skies of coastal Virginia turned heavy and black; the rain fell in sheets. Some guests ran for cover, while the rest dined on soggy food, sang above the howling wind and drank a toast to…Latin America?

Before the party started, the hosts had carefully hung the flags of Peru, Argentina, Chile and Colombia alongside the Stars and Stripes. The Mexican flag was probably there too, whipping and snapping in the wind.

There was nothing unusual about this interest in our hemispheric neighbors. Newspapers of the era printed long transcripts of holiday toasts every summer in the weeks after Independence Day. A sample of several hundred indicates that well over half of July Fourth gatherings in the decade following the War of 1812 raised their glasses to Latin America.

Why, on their most patriotic of holidays, were so many Americans looking south of the border, speaking not of walls but of brotherhood?

The answer lies in the cosmopolitan vision of the American founding. The audacity of the Revolution lay not simply in the fact that 13 disparate colonies had defied the mighty British Empire but in the conviction of Americans that the rest of the world should care. When Parisians stormed the Bastille in the summer of 1789, Americans exulted, thrilled to think that such a powerful country was following in their footsteps. (The ardor soon cooled as bloodied heads toppled in the streets of Paris and a slave rebellion erupted in Haiti.)
When another wave of rebellion swept across Latin America from 1810 to 1825, Americans erupted with joy once again. By the 50th anniversary of the U.S., most of the western hemisphere was independent, from the U.S. and Mexico to Venezuela and Brazil. It was a “jubilee of nations,” a Kentucky congressman crowed, “the birth-day of a hemisphere redeemed.” U.S. patriots hailed Latin America’s wars of independence as thrilling equatorial reprises of 1776.

The international ardor rang loudest on July Fourth, but it reverberated year-round. Appalachian farmers read poetry about Andean independence. Sailors wore cockades for revolutionary Montevideo. Parents even named their sons Bolivar, after Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan political and military leader sometimes called the “ George Washington of South America.”

‘Does not, then, the Almighty clearly impress an awe of the persons and authority of Kings upon the minds of their subjects, hereby proving Government of Divine origin?” So asked the Reverend J. R. Walsh in a pamphlet printed in 1829. “For, otherwise, by what principle could any one mortal command subjection from so many millions of fellow creatures”?

That was a question very much upon the mind of King George IV, whose coronation provided the inspiration for the Reverend Walsh’s essay: That king’s father, George III, had been treated with a notable lack of awe by his American subjects, who gave him the shoe and set up their own republic, without any king at all. This experiment in awelessness, all the smart people of the late 18th century assured one another, was doomed to failure: Awelessness was next to lawlessness, they believed, and a people without a king to tell them how to behave or a king’s church to tell them why to behave were doomed to anarchy.

Here’s to 240 years of glorious anarchy.

Awe was very much on the minds of those early republicans. George Washington, whose name appears frequently in sentences containing the word “awe,” wrote that one of the purposes of our northern fortifications was to “awe the Indians.” Thomas Paine, who had no great awe of the state, wrote of the constitutional right to keep and bear arms: “Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property.” You’ll find a man’s heart where you find his awe: Walter Bagehot, founder of (that other) National Review and later editor of The Economist, lived to learn: “A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe,” he wrote, “and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.” Edmund Burke believed that even when addressing the defects of the state, we should treat it “with pious awe and trembling solicitude,” hence his hesitancy about the American Revolution and his detestation of the French one. The libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard would later argue the opposite, that failed revolutions are valuable to the extent that they “decrease the awe in which the constituted authority is held by the populace, and in that way will increase the chance of a later revolt against tyranny.”

When the Reverend Walsh connected awe with divinity in government, he had in mind Paul’s letter to the Romans: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.” Burke had in mind a kind of holy terror, too, though one that less closely resembled the apostle’s fear of the Almighty than it did Thomas Hobbes’s fear of bellum omnium contra omnes. But in many ways those come down to the same thing: Without someone to keep them in line — to keep them in awe — what’s to keep the people from running amok?

The American Founders did not contemplate a world without awe of government, but they did intuit that a free, self-governing, democratic republic could get by with a good deal less of it. George Washington famously rejected an offer to make him king and thought that calling the president “Your Excellency” might be a bit much, too. We hear a great deal now about the “dignity of the office” and the need to have “respect for the presidency,” if not for the president himself, but nobody ever really says why. Why should we be awed at the chief bureaucrat of the federal administrative apparatus? Why should we hold in awe our employee? “Only I can fix” is Donald Trump’s illiterate shorthand for the idea that presidents are, like kings, products of divine election. George Washington never said anything like that; he didn’t need to convince anybody that he was the man for the job, and he knew that the job was governing, not ruling.