The Campaign Is Getting Mundane

23 Aug 2016

Vincent J. Curtis

The usual allotment of campaign news came out yesterday concerning the usual suspects.  And it was boring; it was routine.  The campaign has either hit a flat spot, or the plot is already firm and now it is just a matter of letting the water-slide take you where it will.

Yesterday, the FBI dumped 15,000 more documents into the public record that Hillary swore upon oath that she didn’t have.  Same stuff, different day.  The closest thing that Hillary has to a body-woman, Huma Abedin, was found to have been on the board of a radical Islamic newspaper run by the other members of her family, a newspaper that favors sharia law - and nobody cares.  We suspected it all along, and now that the truth is finally in the public domain, and nobody cares.  It’s just Huma, after all.

Donald Trump was accused of changing his immigration policy, potentially flip-flopping on his central issue: the mass deportation of illegals in order to restore the rule of law and not to reward law-breaking.  While the deportation part of his plan was always controversial and deemed cruel and impractical besides, his turning to address the question of practicality was raised as a cudgel against his faithfulness to his true believers.  Was he turning all Washington already?  Said and implied without knowing any details at all by our faithless news outlets.

Trump’s response was to formulate his deportation plan as, “What Obama has been doing and Bush did, but with a lot more energy.”  A great riposte to the malicious rumour-mongers.  Still, the day of stories of Trump’s changing his tune about the illegal immigration chilled the soul.  Any turn by Trump to gain acceptance by going all Washington would destroy his campaign.  He has to be against Washington.  He has to be the mould breaker.  Any charge of saying that something is impossible should be met with, “Just watch me.”  Anyhow, a day’s glimpse of the apocalypse was disturbing.

Hillary’s scandals are all running together and are so similar that the public may be starting to tune them out.  Another document dump.  Another batch of emails, proving that Hillary lied about keeping her distance from the Clinton Foundation.  Okay, so she used Huma and Cheryl Mills as her go-betweens, and that makes everything legal – so we are expected to believe and told to believe by relentless spokesliars.  Hillary granted favors to Russian oligarchs? Well, go ask Trump about his Russian connections; he admires Vlad and Trump might just be a Russian plant.  Hillary required that $32 million be donated to the Clinton Foundation in order for her to meet with the Crown Prince of Bahrain?  No comment.  The campaign did not respond to a request for a comment before air time.

Hillary is under investigation again?  Is this something new?  Didn’t the FBI clear her on the emails already?  A DNC email dump showing scandal, a DNCC email dump showing how easy it is for Russians to hack into servers – but not Hillary’s because there is no direct evidence of that.  Hillary is being investigated for perjury before Congress, now, finally, or is this old news?  Why didn’t the FBI bring up her perjuries before Congress when they asked her about her email server as part of the criminal investigation?

Colin Powell may finally have had enough and said that the Hillary campaign was trying to blame her emails woes on him.  He advised her to do it, apparently.  That’s what Hillary told the FBI.  Her story was the he advised her to use private mail at a function held by Madelaine Albright.  He says he has no recollection of the exchange.  We are getting lost in the he says- she says, as is the usual Clinton technique for burying a scandal.  Still, Powell waited a long time to rebuke Hillary for implicating him.

The campaign is turning into an endless run of like-sounding scandals from the Hillary campaign, and one outrageous impracticality after another said to be coming from the Trump campaign.

This is a rut Trump can’t afford to remain in.  Yes, there will be the debates to shake things up, but his campaign needs to do something before then to stop the campaign from getting set in concrete and becoming sterile, predictable, and boring.

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