Whither Hillary?

I spent almost four seconds over the Thanksgiving day football marathon considering the topic that somehow has evaded the lips of the pundits since the election.  We and they have been grappling over the turmoil that defined America after the immense election upset, to wit:

- How did Trump pull off the election?
- Who will be in his Cabinet?
- Will his Cabinet have the requisite percentages of different sexes, races and religions?
- Will Person X, who didn't endorse Trump, be made Secretary of Something?
- Why are all the rioters always from the left?
- What is that "alt-right" that the media made up?
           - Corollary: is there an "alt-left"?
- How come my 401(k) value didn't plummet like they told me it would?
- When are all those people who promised to leave the USA actually going to leave?

OK, so not only have none of those actually been answered, save for the first one (hint: it's answered quite adequately here), they're not what anyone should be asking, except for the first one and that one about when Whoopi Goldberg is going to move to Namibia and Cher is going to Jupiter (or vice versa).  Given that there were offers of first-class airfare, including to Jupiter, I still want to know when they're going.  Any of them.

But I digress.

The questions we should be asking are actually about the big loser on Election Tuesday, that is to say, Hillary Clinton.  It would surprise no one to know that she planned to be working on assembling her Cabinet today, assuming she hadn't used all that campaign time spent not taking questions from the press, to have already built her list.

Hillary is 69 years old, which pretty much means that her political career is done, unless she carpetbags some new state to try to run for another Senate seat, sort of like the hour and a half she spent in New York before running for the Senate from there in 2000.  Even if she did that, she almost certainly would not be replacing an incumbent Republican, meaning that her presence would not change the landscape at all.

What will she do?

I suppose the correct answer, snarky though it may be, is "who cares?".  She had no issue to run on, running primarily on her possession of a uterus.  Oh, she had positions on issues, well-documented on the website of the campaign.  But they weren't "her" issues.  There was nothing she was really prepared to work on.  It is possible that part of the reason she isn't president-elect is that no one could come up with a good reason why we should even want her to be president.

That said, it becomes very difficult to imagine that Hillary Clinton is going to be anything more than an elder stateswoman of the Democrats in her already-here elder years, perhaps even fading back into being Bill Clinton's wife.  Having lost an immensely winnable election -- remember that Donald Trump in winning received about a million fewer votes than Mitt Romney had in losing in 2012 -- Hillary will have lost a goodly chunk of her constituency, the ones who blame her for what is about to happen to the Supreme Court.

We also, no matter what Donald Trump says, are likely to see some serious legal trouble for her.  While it is more likely than not that the whole email/private-server/sloppy-handling-of-classified-documents thing will eventually fade with a public shaming, the Foundation is a whole 'nother thing.

The Clinton Foundation is clearly a racketeer-influenced and corrupt organization (RICO), set up to funnel money to the Clintons and their cronies in exchange for the sale of influence by a sworn Cabinet officer to, among others, foreign interests.  That much of that was done while Hillary was Secretary of State leaves the FBI unable to walk away, lest there be another one of those "charities" built.

We sort of imagine the actual charitable works of the Foundation, like the AIDS medicines that are pretty much the only example anyone presents of actual charitable work, as being not the "reason for existence", but the "cover."  Sort of like the little groceries set up to hide the casinos in the back, or the way the Corleone family sold olive oil in The Godfather.

The FBI is definitely investigating the Foundation, and it is far from beyond question that Bill and Hillary, and perhaps Chelsea and a few other capos of the regime, are going to spend a lot more time hiding behind lawyers than running for office or making policy speeches.

Ironically, even though the Foundation was built as a RICO enterprise, the Clintons are going to have to keep it active and roaring, precisely so that they can keep up the front.  After all, if somehow its contributions dried up because the Clintons no longer have any influence to sell, it would scream to the world that the Foundation was RICO through and through. Unfortunately for the Clintons, those contributions have tanked, including about a 90% drop from Norway alone, and nearly a 40% drop overall.

If the Clintons try to phase out the Foundation, it will cement the notion that it was an influence-peddling enterprise.  But with a full-out drying up of contributions -- no influence, no pay-for-play -- they're going to have to figure out how to get a pile of money contributed or they can expect to lose the argument that it was on the up and up.

So Hillary's future may indeed be in stripes, although she might be able to have her husband in a neighboring cell, which would be amusing given the level of their relationship and the screaming volume.  The other inmates might have to ask for one of them to be moved so they can get some sleep.  And where would the Secret Service detail Bill still gets go?  Next cell over?  The mind boggles.

Ahhhhh, it's Tuesday.  Just a fun way to let the mind wander.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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