Wasn’t it the WaPo Who Once Instructed Us That It’s Not the Crime, But the Coverup?

The Washington Post has had just quite enough of this Hillary email stuff, thank you, and has sent out the Official Narrative, :

JUDGING BY the amount of time NBC’s Matt Lauer spent pressing Hillary Clinton on her emails during Wednesday’s national security presidential forum, one would think that her homebrew server was one of the most important issues facing the country this election. It is not. There are a thousand other substantive issues — from China’s aggressive moves in the South China Sea to National Security Agency intelligence-gathering to military spending — that would have revealed more about what the candidates know and how they would govern. Instead, these did not even get mentioned in the first of 5½ precious prime-time hours the two candidates will share before Election Day, while emails took up a third of Ms. Clinton’s time.

. . . .

Ms. Clinton is hardly blameless. She treated the public’s interest in sound record-keeping cavalierly. A small amount of classified material also moved across her private server. [Not so much rat in it!] But it was not obviously marked as such [er, so?, and is she so stupid that she needs a BIG BOLD LETTERS TO TELL HER WHAT IS CLASSIFIED?], and there is still no evidence that national security was harmed. Ms. Clinton has also admitted that using the personal server was a mistake. The story has vastly exceeded the boundaries of the facts.

It is beyond ironic that the Washington Post, of Watergate fame, has forgotten the main lesson of that scandal–a lesson it first drew and has pushed repeatedly over the years: it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup. Watergate was a “two bit burglary” that blew up into a presidency-ending national crisis because of Nixon’s efforts to conceal. That Nixon was capable of such conduct was widely believed even before it was proved precisely because of his longstanding reputation for dishonesty and trickery.

What makes the email controversy so damaging to Hillary is not so much the emails themselves (though I take issue with the WaPo’s attempt to sanitize and minimize their import), but the barrage of lies that she has unleashed in an attempt to explain her conduct. The lies are transparently such to those who have an even passing familiarity with the facts. Further, Hillary is such a bad liar that her deceit is likely obvious to many who don’t.  Adding to this is the fact that Hillary’s shiftiness on the email issue reinforces her longstanding Nixonesque reputation as a power-hungry liar. Hence, the longer the email controversy drags on, the lower Hillary’s trustworthiness ratings (never high to begin with) plunge.

Furthermore, that Hillary feels compelled to lie indicates to many that there must be something to hide. Meaning that the lies give the lie to the WaPo’s claim that there is nothing to see here, and we should all move on.

This is why the WaPo and the NYT and a phalanx of establishment journalists savage Matt Lauer and anyone else who asks her about the emails, and why they are so frantic to rule the issue over, done, irrelevant, and out-of-bounds. Every question about the subject obligates her to tell another lie–or lies, plural–further cementing her pantsuit-on-fire image. So the questions must stop! Now!

This may succeed in getting Matt Lauer’s mind right, and the minds of others who want to remain accepted members of the tribe. But this reveals yet another problem with the WaPo’s editorial: it reads like yet another diktat from the Better Thans to the Lesser Thans, instructing them on what to think. Once upon a time that might have worked. But truth be told (though not by Hillary!) these days the Lesser Thans have a very low opinion of the Better Thans, and are more likely to bridle at such attempted instruction, rather than knuckle under. The Brit Better Thans tried to do the same thing, and were rewarded with a stinging Brexit rebuke.

In other words, in the face of populist unrest, presumptuous patrician instruction is likely to have the opposite of the intended effect.

But what else have they got? They go with what they know. And the pronouncements to “pay no attention to the server behind the curtain” betray more than a little establishment panic. The media and political elites are clearly more than a little unnerved by the fact that Hillary has had no more success shaking off Trump than she has had shaking off that racking cough.

In addition to playing defense (“no more email questions!”) the media and the Democratic establishment are playing offense against Trump. Bizarrely, their main weapon in this attack is Putin. I see no evidence that these increasingly frenzied assaults are having the slightest effect. Part of the reason for that is post-Cold War, the vast majority of Americans don’t give a damn about Russia, and couldn’t care less what Putin does to his own country, or even to countries on his borders. But there is another reason as well: the sudden emergence of Putin as a Democratic bogeyman seems more than a little insincere.

Well, it seems outrageously insincere, actually, to anyone with a memory that stretches back four years, or seven. Go back seven years, and you come across the image of  a buffoonishly grinning Hillary pressing the reset button with Lavrov, and announcing a new age of Russia-US relations. Go back a mere four years, and you see the same people screeching about Putin now ridiculing Romney for suggesting that Russia and Putin are a threat. Go back four years, and you see these people seeing nothing amiss in Obama whispering a Message to Vladimir to Dmitri Medvedev:

President Obama: On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him [Putin!] to give me space.

President Medvedev: Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…

President Obama: This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.

President Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

So, in 2012 the people now claiming Putin is the evil puppet master who will jerk Trump’s strings were totally fine with Obama canoodling with selfsame Putin, and snarked at Romney “the 80s called and want their [Cold War] foreign policy back” when he claimed that Putin was a threat.

So were they clueless in 2012? If so, will they man up and admit it? Or are they opportunistic now? (Personally, I’m going with “both.”)

Hillary is still the likely winner, but it is far too close for comfort for the elite media and the political establishment (primarily on the Dem side, but not exclusively so). So the drones are swarming to defend the queen. But I seriously doubt that their Putin sting is all that venomous, and if I am right Hillary may well be frustrated in her ambition. If that happens, no head in throwing distance of a lamp will be safe.