OPINION:
The Democrats, like a pig stuck in a barbed wire fence, have a lot to cry about. Their nominee got the telephone call from the governor (or in this case the FBI) with the hoped-for stay of execution, their national convention just barely escaped implosion, but the landslide victory they expected only a month ago doesn’t look like that any longer.
Worse, the cries of “Lock her up!” by Republican “bigots, fear-mongers and addicts of the smear” in Cleveland have been taken up by Democrats in Philadelphia by the fans of Bernie Sanders whom she must persuade to take the trouble to vote for her. Some of these Democrats in Philadelphia, like the Republicans in Cleveland, think she’s a serial liar who has broken both her word and the law.
Those were Bernie Sanders Democrats marching through the streets of Philadelphia on a blazing Sunday morning, attired in T-shirts and waving signs and banners emblazoned with slogans demanding “Hillary for Prison,” “Hillary 4 Prison 2016.” Sen. Tim Kaine, her about-to-be running mate, called the rude slogans “inappropriate,” too, but neither he nor Hillary can afford to say so. They need a lot of inappropriate Democrats, so they just turn up the decibels against the Republicans.
This is the season for partisan exuberance, and the cries of “Lock her up” are no more “inappropriate” than the raucous jeers aimed at a batter facing a 3-2 pitch with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 9th. The jeers are part of the high-stakes game, and if they rattle the lady she shouldn’t let on. Besides, the flaunting of rules, regulations, policies and the law were Hillary’s own work. She escaped an accounting by the skin of her teeth and she and the Democrats should be grateful.
Hillary herself, being the model of ethics and appropriate behavior, was “saddened” that Republicans had stooped to such a “ridiculous” chant, given that the FBI had concluded that despite her reckless care of the nation’s security secrets she would get a pass.
Her defenders in the melancholy media and partisans on the left say the Republicans have only demonstrated that they are not fit for decent company. The correspondents and pundits, of all people, were scandalized. The chant reminded them of a “mob” and cautioned that such spirited truth-telling must be squelched lest voters begin to believe that she has done something wrong.
Chants from the “Black Lives Matter” mob, crying out to “kill the cops!” were only good clean fun, of course, and would never inspire someone to actually kill a cop, and certainly not in Dallas or Baton Rouge. At press time Hillary, armed and dangerous, was still at large.
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