We all know that there is only one thing that can prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. Of course, that one thing isn’t the surge of support for Bernie Sanders among young Democrats. Given the crooked way the Democrats choose their presidential candidate with superdelegates holding the balance of power, Clinton has an edge that will stand up to Sanders’s ability to win key primaries like the one he took this week in Michigan. No, the only thing that stands between Hillary and an acceptance speech in Philadelphia this summer is the FBI investigation into her mishandling of classified material while she was secretary of state. But given that President Obama is not likely to let the Justice Department indict her, Clinton probably has nothing to worry about heading into the general election other than the stain of scandal should disappointed FBI agents ever leak the contents of their probe.
But Clinton has another big problem that could hurt her in November and that has nothing to do with a homebrew server. It’s a woman named Patricia Smithand her unwillingness to let the former First Lady get away with a lie.
Smith is the mother of Sean Smith, one of the four Americans killed in the Benghazi terror attack on September 11, 2012. The mere mention of Benghazi causes Democratic eyes to roll since they associate it with what they consider to be pointless investigations by Republicans intended to hurt Clinton’s reputation. But while they are right that GOP members of Congress failed to do anything more than annoy Clinton during their course of their probes, Patricia Smith may be a lot harder to dismiss as her claims get prominent mention in the months leading up to November.
Democrats may have agreed with Clinton in 2013 when she responded in exasperation to a question about the reasons she gave for the Benghazi attack from Senator Ron Johnson. Clinton’s “what difference at this point does it make” made for a bad sound byte but she escaped that hearing and a later one held by the House more or less unscathed. But as much as the left poured scorn on the House special committee on Benghazi for wasting everyone’s time, there was one particularly interesting piece of information that they uncovered from the trove of Clinton emails that were not deleted that sheds light on Mrs. Smith’s assertions. It revealed that Clinton had written her daughter to say that Benghazi was a terrorist attack on the day after the atrocity. But at the ceremony when the bodies of the fallen were returned to the U.S., Clinton told Smith and the other parents that a YouTube video was the reason for the attack. That was a false argument the administration promoted in the days after the event in order to dispel the notion that there was a revival of Islamist terror since that undermined the Obama re-election campaign’s emphasis on the death of Osama bin Laden. That Clinton would recycle that lie even when speaking to grieving parents was particularly vile. The fact that we know for sure that she already knew it was false makes it even worse.
Smith has been particularly vocal about her bitterness about Clinton lying to her about the cause for her son’s death but rather than apologize for a politically inspired falsehood, Clinton has doubled-down on the lie.
She did so again last night in the CNN presidential debate when she asserted that Mrs. Smith was “absolutely wrong” about what she was told on the day her son’s coffin came home. But ever the clever lawyer, Clinton not only denies that she lied to Smith but also talked about “the fog of war” and of opinions changing about the source of the attack. But the email to her daughter gives the lie to this argument.
Does it matter? Perhaps not in the grand scheme of things especially when you consider that Clinton’s mendacity about the emails and the conflicts of interest created by the donations solicited by her family foundation. But the difference here is that in a general election campaign, Mrs. Smith’s accusations will continue to be aired.
It’s one thing to deny lying about classified emails or to stonewall the Clinton cash scandals by claiming it’s just another plot by the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that is still out to get Bill and Hillary. But it is quite another to basically accuse a gold star mother of an American hero of lying, as Hillary did of Mrs. Smith last night. If she thinks that will sit well with voters who already doubt her honesty, then she has badly miscalculated. As bad as her Bernie Sanders and FBI worries may be, her Benghazi mom problem may prove even more harmful.
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Hillary Has a Benghazi Mom Problem
Acts of War by Any Other Name
Today, Adel al-Jubeir is Saudi Arabia’s minister of foreign affairs. If Iran had its way, he would be dead. Moreover, Jubeir’s assassination, having occurred on American soil and which would likely have been accompanied by American collateral causalities, could have sparked a war.
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Why We Won’t Know Iran Cheats
This week, the world was sent another message by Iran about its aggressive intentions even after the nuclear deal was supposed to herald a new era in which, as President Obama said, it could “get right with the world.” Defying the United Nations again, the regime fired off more ballistic missile tests. Rather than doing so in private, Tehran openly boasted about the launches. And if anyone didn’t already get the message about the likely target of any future missiles that have a range of 850 miles (enough to reach the Jewish state), the official FARS news agency noted that the projectiles had the following written on them in Hebrew: “Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth.”
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The Aggressive Ignorance of Trump
Donald Trump is the zig-zag man. He takes positions seemingly at random, often retreats from them under fire, and then comes back to his original positions. Trying to attack him in a debate is, as Jonathan has noted, a largely futile undertaking because you never know which Trump you are about to get.
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Trump Violence Not a Minor Issue
Despite being continually bested on the issues by his opponents, Donald Trump escaped from last night’s Republican presidential debate largely unscathed. No mentions were made of his fraudulent business activities and character issues that ought to render him unfit for the presidency. Perhaps that was understandable given the difficulty of getting down in the mud with a bully like Trump. But it was still regrettable that his authoritarian impulses got a pass in what was, if Trump’s statements on Friday morning are to be believed, the last GOP debate.
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Making Communism Great Again
Writing in COMMENTARY, the columnist Ben Domenech recently identified a curious phenomenon. American political actors on the left, he observed, are engaged in a morally hazardous effort to rehabilitate socialism. “The return of socialism has been significantly aided by the academy, where groups of elite-left teachers and bureaucrats of [Senator Bernie] Sanders’s generation who never soured on the ideology have raised up a Millennial generation with no knowledge of the horrors perpetrated by the real-world workings of the ideology,” He wrote. Surely, all the opprobrium in the universe should come down around the shoulders of a generation too self-absorbed to educate themselves about the unspeakable crimes statism has inflicted upon the world over the decades. Socialism-friendly young adults are, however, but passive accomplices in the ethically dubious campaign to raise Karl Marx from an ignominious grave. Domenech correctly ascribed true guilt to their elders. Disturbingly, the task of normalizing tyrannical socialism is a project that has migrated from the faculty lounge to the presidential debate stage. Within the span of 24 hours, in equally reprehensible violations of every classically liberal norm for which America stands, two prominent “outsider” presidential candidates took to national television to rehabilitate and legitimize thuggish and authoritarian communist regimes.
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BDS South Africa’s Terrible Week
I have written here beforeabout the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement in South Africa. This week was supposed to be a good week for its supporters. Israeli Apartheid Week ran from March 1st through the 10th (because in South Africa just one week isn’t enough to unburden oneself of one’s loathing of Israel). The ruling African National Congress had, as it has in prior years, heartilyendorsed Israeli Apartheid Week and made members of its executive committee available for various events associated with it. Things were looking up.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the celebration of anti-Israel bias. BDS-South Africa proved that it does not know how to play a winning hand.
The Daily Vox, a South African paper written by and for young people, has been running a series called Apartheid 2.0. The Vox, though it is affiliated with no political party, is no lover of Israel. Indeed, Apartheid 2.0 is about “Palestine, Israel’s settler-colonial project, and apartheid policies over the Palestinian people.” But the editors made the error of running two pieces critical of the BDS movement.
Neither piece was pro-Israel. One ended “Israel must fall.” The other complained that “Zionist influence has strengthened” as a result of the incompetence of the BDS movement.
As if to prove the latter point, BDS-South Africa responded by attacking the paper. When the editors offered Muhammad Desai, a BDS leader (and himself a nasty piece of work) a chance to respond, he consulted his board. Farid Esack, a professor at the University of Johannesburg wrote back to Desai, but copying the Vox: “This is fuckin malicious! Couldn’t these guys have waited a week or two until after IAW to run these piece. Where the hell do they expect us to get the time to do replies in the middle of this week. Just what is their agenda?” BDS-South Africa promptly canceled a previously scheduled online discussion hosted by the Daily Vox.
BDS is known, of course, for not wanting to talk to Zionists, but it turns out, as Azad Essa, executive editor of the Vox, notes, that BDS-South Africa “is not interested in anything that challenges their methods, or logic.”
I wonder then, how they will respond to Israeli Foreign Ministry Director General Dore Gold’s visit to South Africa. Gold met Thursday with his South African counterpart, Jerry Matthews Matijila. According to the Times of Israel, they agreed“to improve cooperation on such issues as water, agriculture, trade, and science and technology.” Was it only last month that BDS-South Africa was celebratingthe cancellation of a conference on water issues to which Israeli ambassador Arthur Lenk had been invited?
And to think, the week started out with so much promise.
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