Trump Couldn’t Thank FBI Director Comey Enough
Let’s face it. The real scandal of today’s announcement from FBI Director Comey today was not the fact that Hillary Clinton escaped indictment. Most everyone expected that.
The real scandal? Is that if anyone else had committed the same sort of gross negligence, they’d be in an orange pantsuit and rotting in a jail cell quicker than you could say General Petraeus.
The net effect on social media has been stunning to say the least. Conservatives who were disgusted with their presumptive nominee have gone from distinctly concerned about Trump to vehemently outraged over Clinton, whose ability to escape even the slightest bit of scrutiny from dead ambassadors to wiped servers remains not just uncanny, but entirely corrupt — and in broad daylight, the American people are asked to swallow this clean?
Case in point? Delegate Scott Lingamfelter came out of the woodwork this morning and made the case that the time for vacillation was over. Lingamfelter thoughts via Facebook offer observations that serve as a direct challenge to the #NeverTrump set — and when the colonel speaks, intelligent observers of Virginia politics sit up and listen:
I’ll tell you this, if Trump is the GOP nominee—and he will be I am sure—and you are an “anybody but Trump” Republican or Independent and think you are being “principled” (are you paying attention Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham and “never-say-die” Cruz supporters?) by throwing your vote away on another candidate such that Clinton is elected—particularly after this email stuff, the Clinton Foundation “pay-to-play” corruption, and leaving soldiers to die on the battlefield in Benghazi—then you are complicit in her election. She is yours.
So spare me your outrage over Trump. At some point you have to wake up and smell the coffee. Our nation hangs in the balance.
That is hot heat from an elder statesman in Virginia, and when the gut reaction is that eloquent (in a General George Patton sort of way)? You can expect others to sit up as well.
Hillary Clinton may have escaped the Department of Justice, but the verdict of an American public that overwhelmingly reacted with what could only be termed as disgust remains to be seen. For the fence sitters? That plays directly into the hands of a Trump campaign desperate for respectability.
Jonah Goldberg over at NRO had some thoughts that help feed this inclination, and they are worth reading in full:
Do we believe that she didn’t intend to put her privacy and political security above national security? She’d been warned about the server and did it anyway. I’m obviously no lawyer but that looks like intentionality and willfulness to me. As for the strength of the evidence . . . what more evidence do you need? There were not one but apparently several unsecured servers set up and paid for by Mrs. Clinton to house and transmit classified information. Comey said she was “extremely careless.” Is that just a tick below “gross negligence”? What am I missing?
The answer? Nothing at all.
Goldberg is a committed Never Trump guy and has been for months. When thinkers and writers like Goldberg push back against the arm rests, lean back and go “woah” — that’s a problem.
Of course, Trump can’t earn votes by pointing at the opposition and claiming they are worse. Politics doesn’t work that way. Yet Comey today may have just welded shut any thought that independents would matriculate to Hillary’s campaign.
Americans are in a mood to punish, after all. While both candidates are unworthy of trust to many, Trump is only guilty in the omission of several sins; Hillary in the multiple commission of same.
