Reporter: E-Mail Fingers Point Right at Obama
President Obama “deserves a lot more mention than he’s been getting” in the current e-mail scandal, says Claudia Rosett at PJ Media, even though it was Hillary Clinton who used a private server and has since engaged in a “contortionist performance of denials, deletions, evasions and professed ignorance.” That’s because Obama “presides over the administration whence came this mudslide of wayward emails, classified information, pay-for-play opportunities and a Justice Department that has itself become part of the scandal.” After all, this was a president who took office promising the “most transparent administration ever” and instead created an “unprecedented climate of secrecy.”
Liberal take: Nix the Left-Wing Blacklists
The Democrats’ hard-left wing — led by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — is already preparing its “demands for a second Clinton administration,” note the editors of The Washington Post. They include “lists of acceptable candidates for senior administration jobs — and a blacklist of unacceptable ones.” That would make the two senators “de facto usurpers of presidential power.” If Warren “wanted to ensure her choices got picked, she could have run for president herself, as many urged her to do,” says The Post. As for Sanders, he “did run,” but lost — “so his entitlement to determine administration staffing is a bit debatable as well.”
Culture critic: Don’t Ignore the Ivanka Voter
Anne Helen Petersen at BuzzFeed says there’s a Trump voter “you rarely see at rallies, but whose existence has been affirmed, again and again, through polling.” She calls them “Ivanka voters” — suburban women who think of themselves as socially moderate and disagree with some of Trump’s message. They like Ivanka, “because she’s classy and sophisticated, polished and well-spoken, all the things her father is not.” But the Ivanka voter keeps quiet and “doesn’t have a Trump sign in her yard, either because it would get egged or she doesn’t want to fight with the neighbors.” In this election year, “you can dislike a candidate and still vote for them — and many women have figured out a way to get past, or at least ignore, their distaste for Trump.” Namely, “enter the privacy of the polling booth, where no one’s judging them, close their eyes and think of Ivanka.”
Libertarian: Don’t Trust Hillary To Avoid Stupid Wars
Hillary Clinton is sounding an awful lot like Lyndon Johnson did in 1964, when he suggested Barry Goldwater was a “crazy guy who’d get us into a stupid war,” says Glenn Harlan Reynolds in USA Today. She’s even enlisted the young girl who starred in the notorious “daisy petal” ad, “now all grown up,” to make a similar point about Donald Trump. But as Reynolds reminds us, it was LBJ, “crazy or not,” who “got us into a stupid war, escalating to the point where, at its peak, we had 538,000 soldiers in Vietnam.” And “the world today, which Clinton as Obama’s secretary of state had a big hand in making, doesn’t look very peaceful.” If she “could do that much damage as secretary of state,” he asks, “how much might she do as president?”
Security expert: Dems Are the New McCarthyites
The same people who jeered in 2012 at Mitt Romney’s description of Russia as our “No. 1 geopolitical foe” are now “hard at work detecting Kremlin plots everywhere trying to steal the presidential election from Hillary Clinton,” writes John R. Schindler in the New York Observer. Somehow, he says, Vladimir Putin “has mysteriously transformed from being a guy we can deal with, no sort of threat, to the devilish figure secretly tearing America apart.” And while there’s something to the claim, “none of that justifies the degree of hysteria that’s currently emanating from Democratic circles.” It recalls the era when Sen. Joe McCarthy “made political hay out of allegations of Communist spies lurking behind every corner in Washington.”