Enough with Benghazi already

Like it or not, the Clintons have demonstrated throughout the years that they are, essentially, scandal-proof. America gets it: the Clintons are crooked. They surround themselves with crooks and hacks. They are not especially good at anything other than making the Clintons richer and more powerful. For a lot of people, that’s a political death knell. For the Clintons, it seems to mostly engender grudging admiration from swing voters at how they keep getting away with being crooks. In particular Clintons have been having scandal accusations thrown at them by Republicans for so long that each new successive scandal accusation just becomes additional proof that Republicans have Clinton Derangement Syndrome. Fair or not, this is the way it is and it’s time to come around to that fact: scandals are not the way to defeat a Clinton, and no amount of #BENGHAZI hashtags is going to change that.

Which is why I read with dismay that Republicans are seizing on this latest scandal about Hillary’s emails (already something that frankly won’t serve to dent Hillary’s image) and tying it back to Benghazi which has already become a buzzword with which the general public has lost interest.

Look, as it happens, I think Hillary will be relatively easy to beat, as a general election candidate. She’s nothing like her husband as a politician. She’s uncharismatic, shrill, aloof, and gives the clear impression that she is indifferent to regular people. The only thing at all that she has going for her is that her last name is “Clinton” and the historical appeal of being the first female President. I don’t think that will be enough to get her across the line, in the final analysis. But the fact that she’s a crook/not especially competent is already baked in to the public’s perception of her and pressing the issue is frankly likely to galvanize support behind her as yet another Clinton who is the victim of relentless Republican scandalmongering.