Here’s his lesson for young minds: If you’re rich and boorish enough, you can get away with anything. Get away with sexual assault. Get away with not paying taxes. Get away with never telling the truth. Get away flirting with treason. Get away with stiffing people who work for you, while you take yours. Get away with mocking the disabled, veterans and families of war heroes.
.. Trump has made compassion suspect. Don’t reach out to starving refugees — they’re killers in disguise. Don’t give to a charity that won’t reward you in some way. Don’t pay taxes that build roads and offer relief to those washed away in a hurricane. That’s a sucker’s game. We’re not all in this together. Taxes are for stupid people.
The Big News About What We Already Knew
The longest-running investigation was conducted by John Chilcot, a retired British civil servant, who took 2.6 million words to report that Prime Minister Tony Blair helped President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney mislead their countries into a war with Iraq in 2003 that was one of the most damaging blunders in history.
Chilcot said the intelligence on Iraq was wrong, that diplomatic and military preparations were bungled, that dissenting voices were stifled, and that Blair blindly followed Bush’s lead.
On July 28, 2002, Blair sent Bush a note that read, “I will be with you, whatever.” He actually thought giving Bush a blank check was a good idea?
.. Here is what it showed us about Clinton: She has an elevated sense of entitlement, even for a politician, that would be the envy of any hipster millennial. She is self-protective to the point of paranoia. And she is tone-deaf about her public image.
If there are Americans who didn’t know these things already, they had to have been vacationing in Antarctica for the last 25 years.
.. The vast majority of the sensitive information in the Clinton emails was not marked as classified. And it has been widely reported that a lot of it was about Obama’s killing-by-drone operation, which Obama should never have kept secret for so long.
.. The lack of security notations on those emails was no excuse, as Comey rightly pointed out. And it makes Clinton’s insistence that she didn’t use the servers for classified information seem too cute by half.
But too cute by half is a Clinton trademark. You have to wonder if anyone on her team has the authority, or courage, to tell her when she is doing something that she will later regret.
.. Clinton has never adequately explained her decision to use a private email server, but we can guess that it had to do with her insecurity, her belief that Republicans are out to get her (they are) and her lack of skill at managing her public relations.
.. That lack of judgment about herself, about how people perceive her, is perhaps her greatest weakness as a candidate.