Madam Shoo-In Avoids Prison & Will Coast To The White House
The last, best hope to keep Hillary Rodham Clinton from the presidency left the FBI building this week, as its director, James Comey, finished a nearly 15-minute harangue rebuking every facet of the former secretary of state’s comportment in the excruciatingly drawn out “email scandal”, stopping just short of the pay-off; indictment. As stated in this space for over a year now, indictment was the only thing that could keep Madam Shoo-in from her destiny, which is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And even that was a pipedream; as it is always possible to juggle court battles while stumping for a Democrat these days.
The “Broom Handle” theory, soon to be an iron-clad axiom, is simply this: You can run a broom handle for president as a Democrat now and garner a minimum of 233 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. The way the opposition party has been going since the mid-1980s has rendered it fairly obsolete and therefore incapable of competing on a national ticket for at least a generation, and with the wild card Donald J. Trump now at the top of its 2016 ticket, it is almost certain to further disappear.
We have already deconstructed the queer beauty of the Trump candidacy, which on a daily basis fills my tainted soul with a measure of joy difficult to express without the use of poetry. This fabulous Summer of Fun will someday fill volumes in the historical record, but that is for another time and place. Today we deal in a “reality check” far more concrete: beyond a completely outlandish and wholly unforeseen calamity, Hillary Rodham Clinton will become the 45th president of the United States.
For his part, Comey, a staunch Republican appointed by George W. Bush to the post of Attorney General in 2003, most famous for tossing Martha Stewart in jail for securities fraud and openly refuting Bush’s federal wire-tapping program, did what any former prosecuting attorney would do when faced with the evidence he was given: tell everyone this is shitty behavior but not a crime. Adding to this, Comey, a D.C. lifer, was not about to alter the will of the people over “the Clintons being the Clintons”. Using as precedent the pardoning of Richard Nixon and the white-wash of Iran-contra that should have not only impeached both presidents but landed them both in jail, Comey did his duty as a public official and let it slide.
After being thwarted as a respected man of law, Comey did his due diligence as a proper Republican and unleashed as many accusations about a person’s character as he could on Clinton in his actual-15-minutes-of-fame, casting aspirations on her motives, judgment and blatant disregard for basic state department procedure. But make no mistake, Comey took with him any shot Trump and the Republicans had at achieving the executive branch of this government and turning it into “who knows?”—which may be sad for some of us, who ponder Who Knows as a preferable, or at least interesting, place for things to go at this juncture.
But alas, there is a very real possibility that Clinton will garner well over 300 electoral tallies and roll into history as the first woman president, which will be lauded as some kind of incredible achievement for a country so proud of its freedoms and democracy, but will place 64th in a list of nations who have since elected/appointed a woman as head of state. Whoo-hoo!
And although this is obviously editorial speculation by a well-worn mental defective, it is nonetheless a pretty sound one when considering all the factors; either in voting demographics, geographical polling, two decades of national statistics, and the fact that mere weeks from the Republican Convention nearly seven of 10 members of Donald Trump’s party are conjuring harsh and inventive ways to avoid, dismiss, explain him away or even dump him altogether in a 19th century styled bloodless coup on its floor. At best Trump needed Clinton to be led away in an orange jump-suit with ankle chains.
Why do you think Republican senators have spent over seven million dollars over nine separate investigations throughout four brutal years trying to pin something-anything on Clinton for the Benghazi tragedy? Even when their own report cleared her of any shenanigans but the normal red-tape shit that lands war zone-placed CIA agents in the crossfire, they kept it up. Why? Because these are learned politicians who have studied the Broom Handle Theory and know it is sound.
Shit, once Bernie Sanders quits his Bastille-storming charade and endorses the woman who bested him in the primaries, and now that Barack Obama, whose approval ratings rest in second-term Reagan-esque 50-percent territory, is on the stump, this presidential campaign will be merely spectator sport.
This is exactly why I have touted Trump’s candidacy so fervently. He provides daily entertainment that sets him apart from the sort of sad-sack, half-assed loser pabulum displayed daily by the likes of John McCain and Mitt Romney. Trump will lose, but he will lose with a pizzazz sorely needed in our political rhetoric. In the short year he has been bounding across the national political scene, Trump has mocked and challenged every corner of our bloated, corrupt and mostly fixed system. For all intents and purposes he has eviscerated Republican politics and shed a light on our most putrid and damaging traits as citizens.
To wit: The day before this column was penned, Trump told an audience in North Carolina that Saddam Hussein, whom this country spent trillions of dollars and spilled American and Iraqi blood to oust, was an exemplary force for anti-terrorism, which is what every president since this nation put him into his dictatorial post believed but did not have the guts to express in public. It is this Trumpian craziness that will put Clinton and the entire system that bore her on trial, which this country needs to see in the worst way.
Of course, as stated, Trump will inevitably go down to ignominious defeat and head back to funding Clinton’s kind soon, but the ride will not be business as usual, and this is a grand thing for our ongoing blessed democratic experiment, no matter what ridiculous thing he spouts or tweets and what outlandish charge some liberal think-tank-defamation-whine-fest chooses to call it.
Whether Clinton fucked up or not is never our concern around here. The horrors of politics are routinely dissected here with the kind of detached acceptance of the numb coupled with an acute and rigorous understanding that for the first 150 years of this republic the sickening level of debased monsters that ascended to the presidency makes either of these candidates—both buried beneath a torrent of record polling negatives—a fine choice for the post.
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James Campion is the Managing Editor of The Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of “Deep Tank Jersey”, “Fear No Art”, “Trailing Jesus”, “Midnight For Cinderella” and “Y”. and his new book, “Shout It Out Loud—The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon”.
