Hillary, Doug Schoen, and the FBI investigation(s)

photo credit: RT.com

Over the weekend, Democrat pundit Doug Schoen stunned TV viewers when he went wobbly on his support of Hillary Clinton. He's concerned about the fallout from the FBI investigation. From his follow-up column at The Hill:

However, in good conscience, and as a Democrat, I am actively doubting whether I can vote for the Secretary of State. I also want to make clear that I cannot vote for Donald Trump as his world view and mine are very different.

So, it would seem that Mr. Schoen will either vote third party or not vote for any presidential candidate. Either way, that’s more bad news for Mrs. Clinton.

On a related subject, Andrew McCarthy raised some interesting points concerning the FBI Director’s decision to re-open the email investigation. From PJ Media:

I have never been a fan of the notion – at the Justice Department, it is the received wisdom – that the election calendar should factor into criminal investigations.

Law-enforcement people will tell you that taking action too close to Election Day can affect the outcome of the vote; therefore, it should not be done because law enforcement is supposed to be apolitical. But of course, not taking action one would take but for the political timing is as political as it gets. To my mind, it is more political because the negatively affected candidate is denied any opportunity to rebut the law-enforcement action publicly.

The unavoidable fact of the matter is that, through no fault of law enforcement, investigations of political corruption are inherently political. Thus, I’ve always thought the best thing to do is bring the case when it’s ready, don’t bring it if it’s not ready, and don’t worry about the calendar any more than is required by the principle of avoiding the appearance of impropriety.

A problem arises, however, when you start bending other rules. FBI Director James Comey bent a few of them when he decided to (a) make a public recommendation against prosecution, (b) nevertheless make a public disclosure of the evidence amassed by the FBI, and (c) include a public announcement that the investigation was closed.

McCarthy had more to say about Director Comey’s decisions and his bending of the rules at NRO here.

It is fair enough to say that Director Comey should not have started down the wayward road of making public comments about pending investigations in which no charges have been filed. Such comments inexorably lead to the need to make more comments when new information arises. Not that the director needs advice from me, but at this point, he ought to announce that — just as in any other investigation — there will be no further public statements about the Clinton investigation unless and until charges are filed, which may never happen.

As for the election, Mrs. Clinton is under the cloud of suspicion not because of Comey but because of her own egregious misconduct. She had no right to know back in July whether the investigation was closed. She has no right to know it now. Like any other criminal suspect, she simply has to wait . . . and wonder . . . and worry.

There were other worthy Democrats, but the party chose to nominate the subject of a criminal investigation. That is the Democrats’ own recklessness; Jim Comey is not to blame. And if the American people are foolish enough to elect an arrantly corrupt and compromised subject of a criminal investigation as our president, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

Read the rest here.

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See No Jihad

art credit: 123rf.com

IMHO, Andrew McCarthy is one of the go-to columnists on matters jihad. Back in January, when McCarthy wrote his short piece for the Conservatives Against Trump issue of National Review online, I shook my head in disappointment. Here’s a short quote:

A president may not have to be good with names to oppose [the jihad agenda] effectively, but he has to grasp the animating ideology, the power relations, and the goals of the players — and how weakening one by strengthening another can degrade rather than promote our security.

Donald Trump does not have a clue about any of this,  careening wildly from vows to stay out of the fray (leaving it in Vladimir Putin’s nefarious hands) to promises that the earth will be indiscriminately scorched. The threat against us has metastasized in our eighth year under a president who quite consciously appeases the enemy. But the remedy is not a president oblivious of the enemy.

I wonder if Mr. McCarthy has reconsidered his opinion. I’d like to think that back in January, he was towing the NR anti-Trump line half-heartedly, but maybe he still thinks Trump has no clue. 

However, in view of McCarthy’s analysis today of the jihad attacks in New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota, it would be difficult to square his Never Trump position with the presidential race. Today, Trump is the candidate speaking in plain English about the threat of jihad to Americans and about screening those who would enter the United States from overseas. Here’s McCarthy on the latest spate of jihad attacks on US soil:

In the all too familiar pattern, things are going boom, Americans are under attack, and the American political class is already busy playing the “See No Jihad” minuet.

In a rational world, where our highest imperative would be to understand the threat that confronts us rather than to find the least offensive way of describing it, it would be patently, undeniably obvious that we are targets of international terrorism fueled by Islamic supremacist ideology. Nevertheless, the political class can only bring itself to say this kicking and screaming, and only if there is no other plausible alternative — which basically means a terrorist caught in the act while wearing an ISIS T-shirt.

. . .

Here is reality: The enemy that unifies the terrorist siege against the U.S., Israel, and the West is Islamic supremacist ideology, which aims to bring the world under sharia dominion. This ideology is far more important than ISIS and al-Qaeda because it is what created ISIS and al-Qaeda. It was the catalyst before those jihadist organizations existed, and it will be around when they are gone — for as long as we fail to take it on without apology and discredit it in the light of day.

The attacks spurred by this ideology, like those carried out this weekend, are international terrorist attacks, regardless of whether the operatives who execute them are affiliated with or inspired by a designated international terrorist organization. There are no “homegrown” attacks because the ideology is alien. There are no “lone wolves” because the wolves are part of a huge pack — a fundamentalist Islamic anti-Western movement that has millions of adherents, some percentage of which will always be willing to take up arms and kill for the cause.

Pro-American Muslims need us to help them discredit the fundamentalists. We cannot do this without openly acknowledging — as, for example, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has courageously done — that the roots of jihadist aggression are Muslim scriptures. This must not be obscured by political correctness. The scriptures in question must be acknowledged and reinterpreted in a manner that confines them to their historic context and nullifies a literal interpretation of them in modern life.

If we don’t confront the animating ideology and its stealth supporters with every bit as much energy as our police pursue the murderous jihadists, we lose. Winning begins with cashiering political correctness, with speaking openly about, and understanding, what we are up against.

Read the rest here. (And Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is meeting with both presidential candidates during his visit to New York and the United Nations this week.)

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