Short Takes: Hillary’s Emails, GOP Letter to Iran, Ferguson

HILLARY – the putative 20016 Democratic Party nominee is in hot water over her use of a private email account to conduct government business while she served as Secretary of State.  Even usually reliable media support has been absent as her recent press conference was generally panned as self-righteous obfuscation.

However, stalwart loyalists, such as James Carville, insist that concerns with email privacy and security are inside-the-beltway worries that do not resonate with the general public.

That’s probably true, but a waning of enthusiasm among the liberal media will translate into fewer fawning – and more critical – pieces on Hillary Clinton.  That will result, inevitably, in a decline in her poll numbers.

GOP LETTER – Forty-seven Republican Senators recently signed a letter to Iran warning that a bad nuclear deal endorsed by the President would not bind the U.S. beyond the term of the Obama Administration.

The response of the left was not surprising:  the Senators were being disrespectful to the President.  Even some moderate voices – such as former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson – were disapproving, viewing the letter as a counter-productive foray into U.S. policy.

Befuddlement, however, was the general media reaction.  It was as if the form of the objection to Obama’s anticipated agreement was all that mattered.

Dana Bash, a conventional liberal CNN anchor, reflected that perspective when she interviewed GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.  She challenged him – he was among the forty seven signers – on the propriety of interfering in US foreign affairs.  The Kentucky Senator properly retorted that the focus should be on the substance of the proposed deal, not the manner in which the issue was brought to the fore.

FERGUSON – The Obama Department of Justice, under the guise of investigating possible civil rights violations by the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, has issued a report accusing the city’s police department of rampant racism (based on the questionable claim that disparate arrest rates are sufficient proof).

Receiving less attention, however, was the conclusion that the widely- disseminated claim that Brown was shot while surrendering (“hands up-don’t shoot”) was an apparent fiction unsupported by evidence.

  

Did those who had promulgated the false narrative – and thereby fed the police bias in the community – apologize and express regret for jumping to conclusions?

Dream on.  No, the typical response was to insist that it really didn’t matter to the sometime violent protesters whether or not Brown had been justifiably shot.  In a laughable re-write of what had actually happened, leftists are now insisting, in effect, the chants of “no justice, no peace” were aimed at uneven arrest rates.