In a parallel universe, there’s a place called Bizarro World. Or maybe that’s the normal planet, and we’re the ones living on the backward, block-shaped world. Admittedly, it’s getting hard to tell these days.
Anyway, on that other planet the Republican presidential candidate doesn’t generate headlines about whether he suggested assassinating Hillary Clinton to keep her from nominating anti-gun liberals to the Supreme Court. There, instead, it’s the Clinton campaign that is circling the drain.
In that world, the Bizarro Republican is sitting back, shutting up and letting the press run with stories that help him — such as Hillary’s continued inability to get her story straight about her private email server while at the State Department.
There was the recent interview on Fox News in which she claimed FBI Director James Comey “said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails.” In fact, and as the Washington Post Fact Checker noted in giving her the maximum “four Pinocchios” for the claim, Comey said much the opposite.
Five days later, she suggested she’d merely “short-circuited” during her response. Then she gave another answer that was substantively the same, insisting Comey vouched for her truthfulness and carrying on with the same demonstrably false notion about retroactive classification.
But the Bizarro Republican need not rely only on questions about Clinton’s mendacity. There is also the apparent mixing of personal and official business that her falsehoods are meant to obscure.
The entire premise for having a private server — according to Clinton, when she isn’t making other excuses — was to keep her private correspondence out of public sight. But among the messages that she and her lawyers deemed not “work-related” were those encouraging favorable treatment at State for donors to her private, family charity.
Not only Bizarro voters may wonder why it isn’t “work-related” for Clinton’s top aides at State to reach out to the U.S. ambassador in Lebanon to arrange a meeting with a Nigerian man of Lebanese descent who had business interests in Lebanon. The fact that he’d donated millions to the Clinton Foundation didn’t magically render the matter “personal.”
Nor should they be the only ones who frown upon a Clinton Foundation official corresponding directly with top State brass about getting someone with ties to the charity — the person’s name and role were redacted from emails released this week by the conservative activists at Judicial Watch — a job at the department.
On Bizarro World, these pieces of a broader tale result in Clinton’s trailing by an ever-larger margin, because the Bizarro Republican doesn’t step all over her bad news with his own antics. There, liberal commentators and thought leaders are the ones wrestling with the fact that voters on their “side” chose such an unpalatable person to be their standard bearer. There, the stagnant economy and brush fires abroad are due for a fresh set of eyes, hands and ideas, not a continuation of the unsatisfactory status quo.
Maybe instead of Mars, NASA should be aiming to take us to that planet, wherever it is.
