https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2015/09/04/hillary-clinton-has-not-hit-bottom-yet/By Jennifer Rubin September 4
Gallup reports, “Dogged by continued scrutiny of her email practices as secretary of state, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s favorability with the American public has sunk to one of its lowest levels in Gallup’s 23-year trend. Currently, 41% of U.S. adults say they have a favorable opinion of the Democratic front-runner, while 51% hold an unfavorable view.” It is even worse than that: “Clinton’s sub-40% favorable ratings in 1992 were mostly a product of the public’s lack of familiarity with her, rather than any kind of broad unpopularity. By contrast, her current 41% favorable rating is arguably her worst, given her nearly universal name recognition.”
One wonders when she will hit bottom. Certainly things may get worse after her latest interview with MSNBC. Her stubborn refusal to admit she was wrong to put U.S. national security at risk is not sitting well with voters. Like a crook who isn’t sorry she stole the money, only that she got caught, Clinton offered, “I certainly wish that I had made a different choice.” I bet. It is remarkable based upon what we already know that she could still say, “I’m so careful about classified information. I take classified material very, very seriously.” I suppose that depends on what the meaning of “seriously” is.
When she says that she is “very confident that by the time this campaign has run its course, people will know that what I have been saying is accurate.” But of course we already know that what she said — there were no classified e-mails, her correspondence with Sid Blumenthal was just catching up with an old friend, and she turned over all the e-mails — is not accurate. In fact, it is hard to see how her statements all along have been anything but misdirection and misinformation, deliberately calculated to shift blame and avoid scrutiny.
When confronted with an excuse that is untrue she barely blinks:
MITCHELL: You have said that Colin Powell did the same thing. He actually had a personal e-mail and a State.gov official e-mail system. He didn’t just rely on a personal system. I don’t think there’s any precedent anyone just relying on a personal e-mail system at your level of government.
CLINTON: Well, I can’t speak for him. That certainly has been portrayed differently depending upon how it’s considered.
Hold it. What does this mean: “depending upon how it’s considered“? Her team was the one that came up with the flim-flam to begin with. But you see the truth leak through the wall of lies when she says “the vast majority” of e-mails were captured by the State Department system. (How many were not captured? Didn’t she once say all of them were captured? What about the ones she sent to private accounts and then destroyed?)
Former senator Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.) famously said about Bill Clinton: “Clinton’s an unusually good liar.” Lacking her husband’s political skills, Hillary Clinton is a mediocre one, but just as shameless. Looking straight into the camera time and time again, she decides to misrepresent the facts and shade if not obliterate the truth. At this point, nothing but contempt for the voters and certainty in their willingness to be deceived can explain her refusal to come clean. Then again, maybe there are things so obviously classified and/or so damaging to her career and legal position that lying is the logical option.
Her defenders (with friends like these . . .) would say, “Aw, she’s deceitful, but all politicians are.” First, not all of them run for president. Second, what secretary of state has behaved in this fashion, and then continued to deny what she did? (According to Mitchell, the answer is none of the others.) And third, we should take our chances on a possibly honest candidate rather than someone we know to be disingenuous. With the possible exception of Donald Trump, I would venture a guess that if we threw blindfolded at a dart board with pictures of all the contenders (on both sides), we’d get someone more honest than she. Maybe we should.
