Congratulations, America. Your 2016 presidential election has reached banana republic status and then some.
Just like heroin addiction now in the white suburbs, the FBI’s wicked COINTELPRO disruption of the black civil rights movement of the 1960s has oozed into the white political mainstream like chickens coming home to roost.
This is the nastiest election, the filthiest election, the most nauseating election I’ve ever observed, going back to the bad old days when Arizona Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater supporters issued campaign buttons with a peace symbol morphed into the shape of a B-52 bomber, with the words “Nuke ’em.”
This cycle’s GOP nominee is a potty-mouthed, confessed sexual predator and narcissistic bully who has not released his tax returns, probably because they reveal he does not pay his fair share (or any share for that matter) of federal taxes.
Just days after the election, the con man and hustler and Republican nominee Donald J. Trump will have to appear in court on fraud and racketeering charges related to what was laughably called “Trump University.” Then in December, he will have to appear in court again on charges he and one of his drinking buddies raped a then-13-year-old girl. Yuck!
But Trump’s real, felonious charges are not the subject of most of the headlines just hours before the election. No. The headline which might decide the outcome of this election has two words which the GOP mischief-makers in Congress have managed to define as evil incarnate: “Hillary” and “emails.
As Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a Democratic presidential debate in October 2015, “I’m sick and tired of hearing about your damned emails.”
You see, the email business — not unlike what Republican Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell did when they were in office — is a sideshow. Republicans in Congress set out to intentionally tarnish Clinton’s record even before the presidential campaign began. They set out to “investigate” her handling of a tragic incident at a U.S. consulate in Benghazi Libya because sadly, something went wrong. Four U.S. embassy personnel were killed in a riot by Libyans protesting U.S. policy.
Imagine if President John F. Kennedy had been measured by this same yardstick after the horrendous, failed U.S.-launched attack at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Hundreds of invaders were captured, the U.S. was humiliated.
Or what if President Ronald Reagan was judged by the Hillary standard? There were 10 embassy attacks, 318 U.S. personnel killed, as well as 254 Marines dead. There was one investigation. During the George W. (W. for “worst in history”) Bush administration there were 13 embassy attacks resulting in the deaths of 66 people, including three U.S. diplomats, yet there were no investigations of his conduct of foreign policy.
So, what happened to the Benghazi investigation? It rolled over by accident into the investigation of Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server in her home, and her possible violation of State Department rules requiring the use of government servers.
OK. Rules are rules. She should have followed the policy. Slap her on the wrist and let’s move on because of all the millions and millions of emails, or missing emails, or suspicious emails that Trump is braying about constantly on the campaign trail what has been the damage done to U.S. vital interests by those infernal emails? I’ll tell you. There has been zero damage!
That’s right. The repercussion from the weight of all that was revealed has been some embarrassment, but there were no damaging secrets revealed by Hillary.
But the visceral hatred that has rendered Clinton damaged goods who may be unable to even govern for her first year or two in office — what with Trump claiming he may not accept the results if he loses, and some of his supporters threatening a violent uprising if Clinton, who’s been the favorite from day one wins. They wear T-shirts reading “Hillary for Prison” to Trump rallies. This is unprecedented.
Trump’s most reliable campaign surrogate has been WikiLeaks, which with Russian help broke into and stole millions of confidential Democratic Party emails. So in addition to the FBI director who dropped a bombshell on the Clinton campaign about some new emails — which weren’t even sent by Clinton, for crying out loud — every day there is a new WikiLeaks dump with, for example “shocking” revelations into Clinton’s vice presidential candidate ranking. That’s all?
There is no “there” there! The emails are the equivalent of navel lint. They amount to political zilch! Nada. Nothing. The emails may feed the curiosity of the voyeuristic news media, but they really mean nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Clinton and the entire U.S. establishment going back 240 years should answer for this country’s evil, imperialistic foreign and domestic policies, crimes against humanity, enslaving millions of Africans and genocide against millions of Indians, but we’re not talking about that, the public is consumed with those damned emails.
Great job, FBI and other federal mischief-makers. COINTELPRO is still effect