What Hillary Deserves

As a long-term leader of the Senate Intelligence Committee and one of the staunchest defenders of the often-rogue CIA, Dianne Feinstein of California certainly knows the value of elite secrecy.

And she thinks that her sister in extreme wealth, extreme power politics and extreme secrecy is getting a bum rap over that withering State Department Inspector General's report, which exposed Hillary Clinton's pathological need for secrecy and corresponding pathological need to lie. According to Feinstein, Hillary has already admitted that mistakes were made, and so it's time to move beyond her character traits (Incisive and Determined! Compassionate! Plus, Qualified!) and concentrate on the real campaign "issues" -- first and foremost of which are, from her point of view, Donald Trump's negative character traits.

Feinstein's Shield of Hillary Character Traits

  When ABC's Jonathan Karl suggested on the TV program "This Week" that Clinton had possibly broken the law by not only installing a private email server in her basement, but subsequently stonewalling the investigation (half of her emails were erased and her staff was ordered to keep quiet about it) -- Feinstein blew up.

 "Whoa, wait a second," she protested. "I don't believe she was trying to hide anything. I've known Hillary for a quarter of a century. Let me tell you what I do think, I think this is a woman who wants a little bit of a private life. She wants to be able to communicate with husband, with daughter, with friends, and not have somebody looking over her shoulder into her emails."

Public life is such a bitch. Clinton apparently was forced against her will into her cushy Secretary of State job by a conniving President Obama, who knows how to keep his friends close and his friends like Hillary even closer. He knew, or he should have known, that Hillary was breaking the law by using a private server. He knew or he should have known that her family foundation was profiting big-time through her stint at State. He knew or he should have known, to name just one influence-peddling example, about the big Saudi donation to her private organization in the immediate wake of his administration's multibillion-dollar arms sale to the Saudis. He could have easily staged an early intervention in the privacy of the Oval Office.

But for whatever reason, he preferred not to.

Much has been written about Obama's preference for "the long game." And revenge is always a dish best served cold.

Perhaps he sees himself as operating above the fray by allowing his one-time opponent to clinch the nomination as his successor and then simply sitting back to watch her hang herself by the rope of her own personality traits. Perhaps I'm totally mistaken. Psychoanalysis is always best left to the experts, after all.

But it's a fact that Obama has been carefully obtuse in his "defense" of his former nemesis.

“I’ve got to be careful because, as you know, there have been investigations, there are hearings,” he told a TV interviewer last month before the IG report's release. “Congress is looking at this, and I haven’t been sorting through each and every aspect of this. Here’s what I know: Hillary Clinton was an outstanding secretary of state. She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy.” 

That's pretty damning with faint praise.The subtext is that as idiotic as Hillary's actions might seem, her heart is in the right place. Obama doesn't really think she's a criminal. She's more like that hapless Cincinnati mother who unintentionally let her mischievous little boy slip through a zoo enclosure this past weekend. It was Mom's intention to give her kid a fun day at the park and look what happened. But since the only harm came to a gorilla, and the child himself was not critically injured, it doesn't rise to a felonious level. If the parents are held legally accountable, it will be due to a Twittered outpouring of public demand as well as their social status. Only the little people are regularly held liable for carelessness, bad judgment and ineptitude. It's the American way. So far anyway, Hillary appears unlikely to be held liable for her own breach of duty.

Maybe Obama and Clinton's defenders and apologists would be singing a different tune if her email setup had resulted in the demise of a beloved animal. Americans love to be outraged by the deaths of caged or tame wildlife like Harambe the Gorilla and Cecil the Lion and Marius the Giraffe.

 It is so much harder to wrap our heads around atrocities like 700 refugees -- including many young children -- drowning in the Mediterranean during the same weekend as the gorilla dying at the zoo. This collateral human damage of war and violence was instigated by, among other pathocrats, none other than Hillary Clinton herself. No public outrage = no public accountability. There is definitely no petition with half a million American signatures on it, demanding justice and sanctuary for those fleeing Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia.

But back to Hillary and the email stonewalling saga. It is a fact that she has always clung to an almost paranoid secrecy about even the most mundane aspects of her life, such as White House travel personnel records and land deals gone bad, which in the end signified absolutely nothing much. Her need for secrecy is her Achilles heel. And Obama can certainly relate, presiding as he has over the most secretive administration in history and instigating his own Orwellian directive for government employees to spy on one another's lunchtime reading materials and marital issues.

We must not fault Hillary Clinton for wanting a private life. Does she even, deep down inside, really want the presidency?

Her pal Dianne Feinstein speaks truth to power. Since Hillary Clinton is indeed "a woman who wants a little bit of a private life" without the press and the public constantly looking over her shoulder, we should give her an out. We should allow her to gracefully suspend her presidential campaign while there's still time. 

Let's give Hillary exactly what she, and we, deserve. And to be really incisive and compassionate, let's hold a retirement party for Dianne while we're at it. Both of them seem in dire need of a break.