There’s a lot to cover on the political front since last week’s blog. So much so that I’m not even sure where to start. Well, yes I do. We learned over the weekend that Hillary’s willing accomplices destroyed a number of her blackberries that contained sought-after emails – with a hammer. WITH A HAMMER. If this stuff was fiction, it would be rejected by a competent editor as too far-fetched to be believable. But it happened.
And Hillary had told us she had only one blackberry – when she actually had 13 of them. Where are they now? No one knows. Or at least no one’s talking. Even though they were being sought by the FBI and Congressional committees.
How did we finally find all this out? The Obama Administration’s FBI just dumped all this information last Friday. The Friday before a holiday weekend (Labor Day.) This is how and when administrations traditionally dump information that they want to get the least possible coverage by the press.
As far as I’m concerned, the FBI and its Director, James Comey, look more and more in-the-tank for Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration as this sorry saga unfolds. Dumping this bad-for-Clinton info, at a time most likely to get the least coverage possible, isn’t the first time the Obama FBI has done this. They did the same thing when they finally questioned Hillary about the email scandal last summer. They did it on a Saturday – before the Fourth of July holiday. And not only that, but they allowed potential witnesses like Hillary’s aide Cheryl Mills, to be present at the interview, even though she was up to her neck in the Hillary Clinton email cover-up herself. This is just unheard of, if you’re doing a serious investigation, which the FBI apparently was not. It just reinforces what many Americans believe, and that’s that there was a double standard in how Hillary Clinton was treated in her email scandal, and how any other American would have been treated.
Okay, let’s switch gears. Even though most of the polling shows Hillary still up by a few points, CNN’s poll shows Trump up by 2 points over Hillary. Rasmussen also has Trump up by a point, and the LA Times poll has the race a tie. So it’s a lot closer than it looked just after Hillary’s post-convention bounce. All the more reason for Republicans who just can’t see themselves voting for Trump, to reconsider. Don’t aid and abet putting another Clinton in the White House, where Hillary would be able to shift the Supreme Court to the left for a generation.
Okay, shifting again. President Obama’s hometown, Chicago, is seeing criminal violence on an almost unprecedented scale. Murders there are more common than in Afghanistan. There were 11 people murdered last weekend alone. The homicide rate in Chicago this year has soared by 76% over last year, and last year was bad. (By the way, they have some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation.) And what’s Obama got to say? Not much.
But he’s happy to weigh in with his support for an NFL quarterback who won’t stand for the National Anthem. That’s just fine according to Obama: “I don’t doubt his sincerity. I think he cares about some real, legitimate issues that have to be talked about.” Give me a break, Mr. President. I noticed that you failed to comment on this highly-paid punk’s socks which portrayed cops as pigs. Not very respectful towards a group of people who put their lives on the line for us when they put on that uniform every day. Mr. President, you can have Kaepernick – I’ll take the cops any day.
And talking about respect, or lack thereof, the Obama Administration’s performance on the world’s stage has been so lackluster, that the leader of the free world can now be freely dissed wherever he goes. The Russians, the Iranians, and the North Koreans have been making this President look like a chump for years now (the North Koreans for example just welcomed the Obama-attended G20 Conference by shooting off three ballistic missiles.) Even our once-close allies like the Philippines are publicly insulting our President. Now this is a family blog, so if you’re sharing this with your little tykes, you may want to cover their sensitive ears, because the newly-elected President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, called President Obama the “son of a whore.” (He later sort of apologized.)
And when President Obama landed in China, rather than roll out the red carpet stairway (as they did for virtually all the other heads of state) they rolled out some little staircase so Obama’d have to slink off from the belly of the plane. Trump said he’d have said “you know what folks… let’s close the doors… and get out of here.” Good for Trump. He’s sounding more and more like Ronald Reagan lately. Okay, maybe wishful thinking on my part. But maybe not.
Anyway, that’s enough for this week. If things seem to be getting crazier and crazier all the time, maybe it’s because they are. Or maybe it’s because we’re now just 62 days away from what could be one of the most consequential elections in a generation. And a lot of Americans still aren’t comfortable with the candidates they have to choose from.
