The persistence of mendacity (2)

When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, Dick Morris polled possible responses for Bill Clinton. Morris determined that truth was not an option if Clinton wanted to remain in office. “Well, we just have to win then,” Clinton concluded. Thus Clinton’s finger-wagging denial of what proved to be the facts of the case.

When Clinton was finally questioned under oath by one of the lawyers working in the office of the independent counsel operating under Kenneth Starr, Starr’s office had obtained and tested Monica’s blue dress. The lying was over, but Clinton nevertheless prevailed in the court of public opinion.

Clinton’s lying bought him the time he needed to survive. With the time public opinion came around to the new line he had adopted about the whole thing being a private matter. Clinton succeeded in lowering public opinion to meet his gargantuan needs.

The missus was instrumental in helping Clinton buy the time he needed to sway public opinion. In her infamous interview on the Today show after the scandal broke (transcript here), Hillary decried the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that she asserted was the real story of the scandal. That helped, of course, but the key point she asserted twice in the course of the interview was this. The charges against the Big Dog would not be “proven true.”

The missus took a similar tack in her FOX News Special Report interview with Bret Baier last week. Clinton persisted in the falsehoods and evasions have reflected the order of the day in the matter of her private server for official State Department business (video below at about 4:15).

“You’ve said you’ll talk to anybody any time,” Baier observed. Why not the State Department Inspector General, Baier asks. He’s somebody.

Clinton’s response offered no subtlety. It did not depend on the meaning of “is.” The lying was rampant and obvious. It is the verbal equivalent of brute force.

“You said you sent or received nothing that was marked classified,” Baier notes, but she had signed a non-disclosure agreement providing that markings don’t matter. Classification inheres in the information, not the marking.

She purports not to recall that, but “the fact is, nothing that I sent or received was marked classified and nothing has been demonstrated to contradict that.”

Where have we heard that before? Ah, history!

We have seen every assertion of fact Clinton has made about the use of her private server fall by the way. As Catherine Herridge and Pamela Browne now report, this one is no exception. Austin Bay has more here.

Does it make a difference at this point? As always in the scandals of Bill and Hillary, time allows us to accommodate ourselves to their lies. The best defense is the persistence of mendacity.

Today the editors of the New York Post take a look back at the week that was in Clinton emails. They have plenty of developments to review without even getting to the latest report from Herridge and Browne. The editors declare: “Hillary’s final email defense: Mass amnesia.” The Post editors ask whether anyone will hold the lady to account and provide this answer: “We strongly doubt the Obama Justice Department will indict the woman the president just endorsed to be his successor. Any ‘law enforcement’ action is up to the voters.”

I’ll take that as a “no.”

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