What irritates me is to see the Clintons slip and slide into a scandal that could have been avoided and can’t honestly be blamed on anyone other than themselves.
The latest example is tarmac-gate, so named because it occurred on one of former president Bill Clinton’s favorite places to schmooze with VIPs: an airport tarmac amid the VIPs’ private planes.
Clinton was preparing to fly out of Phoenix during a fund-raising swing for his wife’s campaign when he learned Attorney General Loretta Lynch was in another nearby plane. He decided to say hi.
The chat lasted 20 minutes and also included Lynch’s husband, Secret Service agents and several staff members.
Fine. But Lynch is still the nation’s top cop. She oversees the FBI, which has been investigating whether Clinton’s wife or any of her associates broke laws in using an unauthorized private email server for her when she was secretary of state.
Now that the FBI has decided against filing criminal charges against Hillary Clinton, her husband’s visit with Lynch taints that decision with a cloud of suspicion. Republicans howl about the appearance of impropriety. Populists charge that the system is rigged. Democrats ask how the former president and current attorney general could have been so stupid.
Watch out, Madam Attorney General. You can be pulled into the Clinton web of high-risk shenanigans before you know it. The Clintons are drama junkies.
That’s what in today’s psycho-babble you call people who cause problems, actively or passively, because they find it easier than avoiding problems.
For example, a normal non-drama junkie might ask, why did Hillary Clinton need to have an unauthorized private email server anyway?
In her case, she has claimed, it was merely a matter of convenience. She didn’t want to have to carry two Blackberries or switch between two accounts — one personal, the other government-issued and therefore more secure against hackers.
But wasn’t convenience a small prize for the huge toll that now has been taken on her credibility? You might think that, if you were not a drama junkie.
She and her husband are both smart, Yale-educated lawyers. But they also seem to share the lawyerly belief that they can argue their way out of anything, tough or teeny.
And sometimes they seem so battle-hardened from surviving their conservative critics’ relentless assaults that they no longer worry very much about the appearance of impropriety. There always seem to be bigger crises to face. So the prospect of yet another scandal seems to bring little more than a yawn from the Clinton camp, as long as their polling numbers are up.
I’m hardly the first to notice. “Scandals don’t weaken Hillary Clinton,” said comedian Bill Maher on his HBO show “Real Time” back in 2013. “They only make her stronger.”
Whether that’s true or not, they have been helped enormously by the shortcomings of their Republican rivals. Donald Trump could hardly do a better job of alienating people if he was on the Clinton’s payroll.
That leaves us to choose between two of the most disliked presidential candidates in the history of polling — two drama junkies running against each other.
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