Much has been written about how horrible Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee for president, is. The criticism of Hillary Clinton, the front-runner in the race for the Democratic nomination, has been far more muted next to the well-deserved firestorm of controversy and outrage over Trump.
That hardly means Clinton is undeserving of criticism. Bad Bad Leroy Brown would look like a fabulous presidential candidate next to Trump's mean-spirited, lying, racist, misogynistic and idiotic comments. His doozy this week, when asked about who he will consult for advice on complex foreign policy issues: "myself, because I have a very good brain and I've said a lot of things."
Unless something changes between now and the Republican convention at the end of July, Americans will choose between this man and Clinton to be the next president of the United States.
By any measure, however, Clinton is a flawed and problematic candidate, in this or any election year. Writing in the Washington Times last week, Wesley Pruden's devastating analysis drew a powerful comparison between Clinton and the reviled Richard Nixon.
Back in her youth, Pruden pointed out, Hillary Rodham was a hard-charging 27-year-old lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee, knocking herself out to impeach Nixon. Four decades later, she is the favoured presidential candidate, somehow still standing despite with the stained political record of indiscretions and missteps piled high.
Her latest example of misjudgment has a B.C. and Prince George connection. Last Friday, charges were laid against a former provincial government bureaucrat in connection with the "triple-deleting" or permanently wiping out of government e-mails. A whistleblower claimed that George Gretes deleted the emails to avoid having to release them as part of a Freedom of Information request regarding the Highway of Tears. Government officials have been using private e-mail addresses and servers for years to avoid this kind of scrutiny and have run afoul of the privacy commissioner for doing so.
Clinton played the same game during her tenure as secretary of state in Barack Obama's first term in office. The matter up for investigation in Clinton's case, however, is whether she was handling classified and other sensitive documents of high national security through her non-governmental e-mail account. Normally, American bureaucrats with the highest security clearances caught mishandling files lose their jobs at the very least and some are sent to jail for putting the country's national interests at risk. The last high-profile American leader caught in this web was David Petraeus, the decorated four-star general who resigned in disgrace in 2012 after just one year as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Sharing confidential files with your biographer, who also happens to be your lover, isn't very bright.
By the time it was all over, Petraeus pled guilty to a single charge of mishandling classified documents, a tawdry conclusion to a commendable public service career.
As secretary of state, Clinton would have been fully aware that private emails for government business were discouraged, meaning she knew she shouldn't do it but there was no law or policy forbidding her from doing so.
Call it Hillary's "it depends on what the meaning of the word is is" moment, the same kind of legal word-twisting her husband excelled at when his indiscretions were challenged.
Sadly, the best the Democrats could throw against Clinton in 2016 was an angry, old socialist from Vermont in Bernie Sanders. Barack Obama's vice-president, Joe Biden, decided not to mount a challenge in the wake of his son's death last May. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is probably still kicking herself that she didn't give it a whirl because she would have been a much more legitimate contender than Sanders, who has been little more than a parking spot for anti-Clinton progressives with the Democratic Party.
In any other presidential election cycle except this one, Democrats would be concerned by Clinton's terrible image and her worrisome numbers in national polls. Significant portions of the electorate simply can't stand her and another large segment only finds her appealing when holding her up to Trump.
There is an ongoing FBI probe into Clinton's private emails, meaning that, as a candidate, she is a disaster waiting to happen. Trump would have a green light to the White House if Clinton were to be indicted on federal charges between now and November.
Now there's a political nightmare to keep Americans and citizen of the world awake at night.
