I have compared Hillary Clinton's penchant for lying, obfuscation, and evasion to that of Richard Nixon, but that comparison ends today. We now know that Hillary did what even Nixon could not bring himself to do: She burned the tapes. At the height of Watergate, some Nixon advisers and confidantes urged him to do just that -- burn the secret White House tape recordings that incriminated him and exposed him as a liar. But for whatever reason, whether because as a lawyer he understood that to do so would be a crime, the crime of destruction of evidence, or because in some perverse way he wanted the tapes to become public, even Nixon refrained from doing so.
Yesterday we learned that the Hills did what Nixon could have done but did not -- she has destroyed evidence that was being sought by both the State Department and by the Congress. We discover this fact very late in the game. She apparently "wiped clean" the private server on which she conducted official business as Secretary of State, in October, after the State Department asked for all of her correspondence. Now, unless some technological wizardry can retrieve those deleted documents, we may never know what it was that she, and she alone, chose to withhold from the American people and from history.
Failing that, we are forced to take her word for the assertion that she turned over every email relating to her official duties, an act of faith which her previous record makes impossible. There are, as the chairman of the congressional investigating committee has pointed out, large gaps in the flow of her government emails -- far larger than Nixon's eighteen-minute gap -- and gaps that occur at the very time she was dealing with the crisis in Benghazi. It is simply not possible to believe that she was fully candid in her response to the State Department's request for all of her official correspondence. And now, unless someone from her inner circle comes forward to enlighten us, we, the public, whose records they were, will be exactly where the Clintons have always wanted us to be -- in the dark.
Will any of this matter to the Hills' presidential plans? Probably not. This morning, over breakfast, I searched the LA Times for information on this latest twist in the email scandal, and what did I find? Nothing. There was not a mention of it in the front section of the newspaper. There was a front page story of Harry Reid's decision not to run for the senate again (which was welcome news), but no word on the two stories which I thought would have dominated: Hillary's clean sweep, and the Bergdahl desertion charges. Neither story did the Times feel it necessary to report, yet both are important news. The Hills' emails because she is running for president, and Bergdahl because the president saw fit to afford his parents a Rose Garden celebration after he had been exchanged for five leading Taliban killers.
The explanation for these oversights need not be detailed: the Times, and other left-leaning news outlets, are doing everything they can to protect Hillary's campaign and Obama's legacy. Truth be damned; the mainstream media wants Hillary as president and Obama as legend, and will sacrifice anything, including professional integrity, to achieve those ends. Yet the fact remains that Hillary continues to practice the same sort of scheming, scurrilous political and personal behavior for which she has established a lengthy track record. And Obama, and his staff, have been made to look like fools -- dangerous fools -- now that the Army has decided that Bergdahl was what every member of his platoon always insisted he was, a deserter, who gave aid and comfort to the enemy.
Remember, of course, that when those fellow soldiers of Bergdahl's came forward and told the truth about what he did, they were summarily pilloried by the mainstream press; called liars, losers, poor soldiers, unreliable witnesses. Their integrity, not Bergdahl's, was called into question, and for what reason? To protect a president who was either so ill-informed or so arrogant, that he reversed the truth of history for his own political purposes. Now Bergdahl will, probably, be court-martialed, and what does the Obama Administration do? Admit they made a mistake? Never! They insist that the prisoner exchange was a worthy deed, fully justified in retrospect. Despite the facts that six soldiers were killed trying to find Bergdahl, and three of the Taliban killers are already planning to rejoin the jihad.
This is nonsense. And if you won't take my word for that, just consider what the White House press secretary said when asked about the Administration's declaration that Bergdahl had served "with honor and distinction." With a perfectly straight face and waxen hair, the presidential press secretary replied that to serve the country is an honor, and wearing the uniform makes one distinct. This is the kind of self-serving pablum that gives sophistry a bad name. Why this silly man was not laughed out of the press room is a mystery to me. Even the Soviet press corps, after the KGB coup against Gorbachev, laughed in derision when the coup's spokesman declared that Gorby had not been overthrown, but was being held in protective custody at his own request. Those lifelong toadies in the Russian press managed to do what the White House press corps did not: laugh in the face of patent nonsense.
So, we have a presidential candidate who does what even poor, disgraced Dick Nixon could not do, and a press corps that will sit in silence as idiotic lies are told to them. And what does this mean for the nation? President Hillary Clinton.
