In the 1967 movie “Divorce American Style,” comedian Dick Van Dyke is getting a divorce from wife Debbie Reynolds. (I know, who does he think he is, Eddie Fisher?)
After she ends up with the house, the car and custody of the kids, he finally sees how the courts treat men: “The uranium mine to her – and the shaft to me!”
That phrase came to mind when U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who until this week was head of the Democratic National Committee, got tossed to the wolves after Wikileaks dumped nearly 20,000 DNC emails that showed her staff’s thumbs (actually, their entire bodies) pressed down on the party’s primary scales in favor of Hillary Clinton.
Who, of course, professed absolute ignorance of the entire slimy mess, just as she did of any possible misuse of her State Department emails.
Which once more raises the inevitable conundrum: If she’s lying, she doesn’t deserve to be elected president. And if she truly is that incredibly ignorant of something so important going on right under her nose – she doesn’t deserve to be elected president.
I know which one of those possibilities I think is more likely (the emails link one of Clinton’s own staff attorneys to an anti-Bernie Sanders ploy), but Wasserman Schultz is a minor figure who, like many others, paid a hefty price for dealing down and dirty on the Clintons’ behalf.
Meanwhile, the emails (Wikileaks hacker Julian Assange has said he has more on the way) offered a fascinating insight into a corrupt system.
They revealed a member of the media emailing a complete story to Democrats prior to publication; a staffer speculating about advertising Sanders’ “atheism” to “my Southern Baptist peeps”; and other staffers sending interns to create “spontaneous” anti-Trump rallies, demanding MSNBC “immediately pull” a commentary critical of Clinton, and ordering one anchor there to be told to “cut it out” when she was scornful of the candidate.
The DNC did its best to play down Sanders supporters’ unhappiness (and also played down the American flag, which didn’t show up on stage until Day 2, after its absence was widely noted).
Unfortunately, the deadline for this column was too early for me to be able to compare Clinton’s acceptance speech with Donald Trump’s.
The left-leaning media uniformly called his address “dark” (so unanimously that it almost made you wonder if a DNC email recommended it), but I wonder how much sweetness and light her speech Thursday night contained.
After all, this week’s Real Clear Politics poll average on the country’s overall direction had just 23.1 percent saying the nation was on the “right track.”
The “wrong track” figure was 68.9 percent, a 45.8 percent negative difference. Is that dark enough for you?
All by itself, that gap is terrible news for a candidate who says she’s going to run on President Obama’s record.
Meanwhile, Sanders entered the campaign like a lion, but exited it with a purring tongue-bath for Clinton. (Sorry, Bernie-bros. You trusted a guy who got rolled by the professionals.)
I must say, however, that it was heartwarming to see Sanders’ supporters marching outside the convention hall (and being held at a distance by a 4-mile-long, 8-foot-high chain-link fence – no word as to whether Mexico paid for it) while yelling the same chant as Republicans did last week: “Lock her up!”
Finally, the spin on the left very quickly became the claim that Russian czar Vladimir Putin coordinated the leaks because he wanted to help Trump and hurt Clinton. Maybe he did – but it still doesn’t change their authorship or content.
However, why would he? While Trump has said clueless things about NATO and the Russians, he’s not the one who made our secrets vulnerable.
And the Obama-Clinton axis has done little to stop Putin from annexing the Crimea and continuing to fight Ukraine; threatening the Baltic states; gaining influence with Turkey; threatening our ships and planes with dangerous overflights; and putting bases in Syria to support dictator Bashar al-Assad.
In fact, the Russians just bombed a Syrian base often used by the U.S. and its allies. Did you know that when we protested the attack, they immediately bombed it again?
Putin clearly doesn’t fear either Obama or Clinton. But there may be an even more sinister possibility.
Some are saying that, if Putin was the source, the leaks might represent a shot across the bow for her presidency.
Trump’s call Wednesday for Putin to release anything he has only highlights the fact that her negligence in office meant security for her home-server State Department emails was essentially nonexistent.
The really important question is this: What might Russia – or China or North Korea – possess to use against her if she is elected? Now, there’s a reset button for you.
M.D. Harmon, a retired journalist and military officer, is a freelance writer and speaker. He can be contacted at:
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