A good examination of How the Press is Making the Clinton Foundation into the New Benghazi

Did donors to the Foundation get special access to the secretary and the department as a result of their donations? If they did get special access, did they receive any favors? Did Hillary or her staff do anything illegal, unethical, or contrary to U.S. interests or administration policy?

The good news is that as a result of these investigations we can now answer those questions pretty definitively: no, no, and no. The bad news is that the press doesn’t seem to want to take “no” for an answer, even if the answer is based on the evidence of its own reporting.

I thought e-mail server was the new Benghazi. And Benghazi was the new blow job. Whatever, only the Clintons could be castigated for a fucking charity that is respected worldwide with not a hint of actual mismanagement or malfeasance.

Now here’s the Rant:

It’s incredibly easy to throw shade and smoke at Hillary Clinton with leading questions and misleading headlines when the underlying facts have no context.  HRC took responsibility for her use of a private e-mail server, and there may have been some sloppy treatment of possibly classified materials, but no criminality and no ethics violations occurred. The context question is was any of this unusual? Who knows?  Because other government officials including John Kerry, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice also had private e-mail servers, but nobody cared. No investigations, no questions asked about them. Nobody cared until the person involved was HRC, then it’s a “concern,” an investigation, a “scandal”, maybe even a crime!

This does indeed remind one of Benghazi – not the actual event but the sorry attempt to turn a tragedy into a scandal or a crime. During the 8 years of the Bush administration there were between 13 and 39 attacks on embassies or consulates, depending on criteria examined, with between 60 and 87 people killed. But there were no investigations, no Congressional inquiries, the families of victims were not paraded across a stage at the DNC claiming that George Bush killed their children. It was never politicized, and nobody said boo. Four people died in Benghazi and it’s been the most investigated incident since 9/11. The GOP/Fox News/right wing noise machine has claimed that the President and the Secretary of State were responsible for those deaths and yes, a sad woman claimed that Hillary Clinton murdered her son at the RNC. It was a tragedy, not really a unique one, but certainly not a “scandal” or a crime. And yet the disingenuous effort to turn it into a story that it wasn’t was aided and abetted by a media that, with few exceptions, is unable or unwilling to shut down these kangaroo courts with the necessary context that renders them obviously political hatchet jobs.

On the contrary, when it comes to the Clintons the media is all too willing to let nonsense through the filter under the Trump-like rubric of “people are saying” or “there are trust issues”.

Yeah we know why there are trust issues: billions of nothingburgers served in the 90s as the media regurgitated every conspiracy theory and nutsy cuckoo story that Clinton haters could come up with to create all that shade and smoke that fed the constant character assassination of the Clintons, both of them. Years of investigations turned up a blow job and Bill Clinton was less than candid about extramarital sex (shocking!) and that’s the entire extent of the fire that all that smoke pointed to. Only the Clintons could be persecuted for a land deal that they lost money on, exonerated at every turn, but yeah, you know with all that smoke… bah, blah, blah. JAIL HER!!!

[** Do I have to repeat my personal disagreements on POLICY with the Clintons here? God I hope not. They’re legion actually. But this isn’t about that, it’s about the Clinton derangement syndrome industry that continues booming that I have NO PATIENCE FOR.]