You Just Keep Being You, Donald. Please.

Opinion | thepilot.com

Dear Mr. Trump:

I know there are people around who are telling you that you’re blowing this election, that the tactics you’re using are ill-conceived and self-defeating. I know they’re urging you to stay off Twitter and to let the political professionals handle your message.

I can tell you that I only have your best interests and, even more important, the best interests of America, in mind when I say this: Don’t you believe them, Mr. Trump. You keep right on doing what you’re doing. In fact, I think you need to ramp it up. A lot.

Take Paul Ryan, for example. How dare he withdraw his support and tell down-ballot candidates to do whatever it takes to save their own political careers? That was a betrayal of you personally. Worse than that, it was disrespectful, and we all know you’re a man who doesn’t tolerate or forgive disrespect. It’s why your base loves you.

So you should totally keep going after the Republican speaker of the House, calling him “very weak” and “ineffective” on Twitter. You’re not going to need him when you take power.

In fact, you know what? You should do the same to each and every one of the 33 House members and 17 senators from your party who have shown you that same appalling level of disrespect.

You should do a nasty Tweet about each and every one of them individually. Space the tweets out over days. Take your time. Tell them they’re losers. Keep telling them their “poll numbers — and elections — are going down” in November. After all, you tweeted it yourself: “Disloyal R’s are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary.” Show America you know who the real enemy is.

Hey, I’ve got an even better idea! Tell them that when you win, they’re going to jail! That’ll show them you’re not a candidate to be trifled with. It’ll purge the weaklings and cow the rest into silence. Let the Republicans hate, so long as they fear, right?

And how about those debate moderators? Boy, they sure rigged the thing for Hillary, didn’t they? You should spend lots and lots of time talking about them, and talking in general about how unfair the media is to you.

Tell them how you’re going to single-handedly “open up” the libel laws so you can sue and — dare we even hope? — put anyone in jail who criticizes you in a way you think is unfair. That’ll really show people what kind of leader you’ll be: a strong one. Like Vladimir Putin or Saddam Hussein.

Also, you should totally double down on bringing up the women who’ve accused Bill Clinton of sexually assaulting them. You should bring them to every campaign event, just to remind people that it’s not necessary for anyone to be charged, let alone found guilty, of sexual assault.

The accusation is enough for the guy to be branded a “rapist,” right? Unless of course the person making the accusation is someone like Jill Harth, who’s sued you for allegedly trying to rape her in your own daughter’s bedroom. Or that woman who’s suing you for allegedly tying her to a bed, beating her and raping her at your good buddy and convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein’s house when she was only 13.

Or your ex-wife Ivana, who accused you of raping her while you were married but later, after being pressured by your lawyers, said she was only “violated.” Those gals have, in your words, “real problems,” am I right?

So you keep defending your bragging about sexually assaulting women as “locker room talk.” Keep bringing up Bill Clinton’s accusers and talk about how Hillary “attacked” them. I’m sure no other women from your past will come forward to accuse you of that same behavior.

(Oh, by the way, if you’re tempted to grab a strange woman by her private parts while you’re campaigning in North Carolina, don’t. It’s called “sexual battery” here, and being convicted of it would require you to register as a sex offender.)

In summation, Mr. Trump, I’m glad that, as you recently tweeted, “the shackles are finally off.” Let Trump be Trump. Lead the Republican party to its inevitable, God-ordained destruction — I mean its destiny. Please your base, and everyone else can go pound sand. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Stay the course, Mr. Trump. America depends on it.

There Can Be Only One

Opinion | thepilot.com

It seems like only yesterday that one of the favorite right-wing talking points was “only one candidate is under FBI investigation.” Well, that investigation has come and gone, with no criminal charges recommended or brought. But there’s still one candidate who’s unique in so many ways:

Only one candidate’s skin is so thin that he gets up at 3 in the morning to engage in a Twitter feud with a former Miss Universe and to insist that he was completely justified in cruelly humiliating her in public 20 years ago because she was really, really getting fat.

Only one candidate completely loses his mind, his temper, and all sense of decorum and proportion every time you mention Rosie O’Donnell.

Only one candidate thinks it’s a legitimate campaign tactic to attack his opponents’ spouse, both in the primary and the general elections.

Only one candidate has mocked a disabled person on camera.

Only one candidate’s foundation has received a “cease and desist” letter from the New York attorney general because of raising funds without being legally certified as eligible to do so.

Only one candidate’s foundation has used $258,000 donated allegedly for charitable purposes to settle the candidate’s legal problems and over $30,000 to pay for huge portraits of the candidate.

Only one candidate used money from his charitable foundation to pay big contributions to two attorneys general to get them to lay off a fraud investigation, while bragging that when he gives money to politicians, they do what he wants.

Only one candidate has repeatedly expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Only one candidate says he wants to “run the government like a business” after losing nearly a billion dollars in his own companies and putting them through multiple bankruptcies.

Only one candidate says that people who don’t pay taxes are “a problem” in society but then says that not paying taxes because he lost all that money just shows how “smart” he is. Guess that makes those of us who do pay taxes and don’t lose hundreds of millions “dumb” in his eyes.

Only one candidate says he wants to “run government like a business” after stiffing multiple small business people, daring them to sue, and fighting them tooth and nail in court to avoid paying the money he owed.

Only one candidate has longstanding and well-documented ties to the New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia mobs, including paying double market value to Philly mobster Salvatore Testa for land upon which to build a casino.

Only one candidate paid far over market value for ready-mix concrete to New York Mafiosi Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, the boss of the Genovese crime family, and Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino family. Only one candidate has been proven to have used illegal immigrant Polish workers in a demolition project on one of his New York building projects, mysteriously without any backlash from the unions.

Only one candidate has an upcoming court date in a civil fraud and racketeering case.

On the other hand, only one candidate was secretary of state when four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador, were murdered by terrorists in Benghazi, Libya. And that candidate is the only one who’s undergone scrutiny by a total of 10 government committees, including highly partisan House and Senate select committees, in regard to the tragedy.

Those committees have generated thousands of pages of reports at a cost of millions of dollars, in order to find absolutely no evidence of personal wrongdoing by that candidate.

Only one candidate has been the focus of more prolonged, highly partisan investigations than any other in U.S. history, investigations which have turned up exactly zero criminal activity.

And yet only one candidate gets the benefit of “innocent until proven guilty” in the court of media and public opinion. After all, where there’s that much smoke, there must be some fire somewhere, right? But only for one candidate.

Both candidates supported the Iraq War. And only one voted for it, because only one was in a position at the time to do that. The other one was apparently busy losing millions of dollars in his businesses. But only one candidate is honest enough to admit that support and only one now says it was a mistake.

To paraphrase one of my favorite quotes from the late Hunter S. Thompson: Hillary Clinton may have made some stupid mistakes, but they pale in comparison to what Donald J. Trump does every day, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.

I started this year as a Bernie Sanders supporter, and I’m still not totally thrilled about Hillary Clinton. But when you weigh the pros and cons — the longtime political pro versus the shameless con artist — the choice is clear. There can be only one.

But Yeah, Hillary's the Crooked One

Opinion | thepilot.com

In September of 2013, the attorney general of Florida, Pam Bondi, publicly announced that her office was considering investigating the activities of Hillary Clinton.

A similar probe had already been commenced in New York. Bondi at the time had personally solicited campaign contributions from Clinton.

Six days after the AG’s office announced that they were “reviewing the allegations” against Clinton, the Clinton Family foundation wrote a check for $25,000 to the AG’s campaign, after which Bondi’s office announced that they’d decided not to pursue action against Clinton after all.

Pressed about the matter, Clinton claimed she never even spoke with the AG, a claim which was quickly revealed not to be true by Bondi’s own spokesperson.

The payments came to light only after the IRS levied a paltry $2,500 fine against the foundation because it had violated IRS rules about charities making political donations. It had also, according to a story in The Washington Post, “failed to disclose the large gift to the Internal Revenue Service, instead reporting that the donation was given to an unrelated group with a similar name — effectively obscuring the contribution.”

Just goes to show how corrupt and untrustworthy Hillary Clinton is, doesn’t it? Even though there’s no specific evidence of a quid pro quo, you have to admit it certainly raises questions about her integrity and her fitness for office.

And that ridiculous $2,500 fine? The entitled Hillary Clinton gets away with things the rest of us would go to jail for.

It’s an outrage that this story hasn’t been given front page status in every major newspaper and been the top story on every network. There really should be some Congressional hearings on the shady dealings of Hillary Rodham Clinton. ...

Oh, wait. Did I say Clinton? Sorry, my bad. The family foundation that donated 25 large to the campaign of Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi was actually the Donald J. Trump Foundation.

The probe being conducted in New York that Bondi said she’d been considering imitating was one into the fraudulent Trump University — you know, the scam where Trump, the Russian-backed presidential candidate with well-documented ties to the New York and Jersey mobs, the Russian Mafia, and the Hong Kong Triads, has an upcoming court date on a racketeering claim.

But everyone knows it’s Clinton that’s the crooked one.

Certainly, however, only some kind of liberal bigot would think there was any impropriety in a prosecutor who’s publicly said she’s considering a formal investigation receiving a large check from the potential target of that investigation six days after said announcement, then deciding “Nah, it’s not worth going after the guy.”

We know there’s nothing improper about it because both Bondi and Trump said so.

Oh, and Trump also gave $35,000 to Texas AG Greg Abbott, who’d already dropped a probe of Trump U after they shut down the operation in Texas and got out of town with the loot. Surely that was just a coincidence, too.

But, you know, Hillary’s the crooked one. After all, her foundation took contributions from, and then had meetings with, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was working to aid poor people with so-called “micro-loans” in Bangladesh.

The Hillary group also met with the head of charitable giving for the cosmetics firm Estee Lauder, who was partnering with the State Department and USAID to fight AIDS, gender-based violence in Africa, and sexual slavery in Cambodia

Then there’s Wall Street mogul Stephen Schwarzman, whose Blackstone Group donated millions to “three Clinton Global aid projects ranging from the U.S. to the Mideast” and who got — well, the AP so-called “expose” on the Foundation that I’m quoting in this paragraph isn’t really clear about what he got. It says he was “one of several attendees” at a breakfast meeting with Clinton, that his wife “sat at Clinton’s table” at the Kennedy Center honors and later introduced Schwarzman, and that the State department was “working on a visa issue” for him.

Nothing in the story says what the “issue” was or what, if anything, Schwarzman got.

Those are the top three examples the AP pulled from all the others to suggest some sort of evil-doing on Clinton’s part. Some pretty shady characters, there to be sure, and some deep skullduggery going on, what with fighting AIDS and sexual slavery overseas and introducing people at the Kennedy Center and all.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump pays off a couple of attorneys general to get them to leave his Trump U scam alone after bragging that politicians do what he says because he gives them money.

He knows the system is broken because he helped break it. And you expect him to be less corrupt if he’s elected?

Republicans Are Channeling 1984 (The Book, Not the Year)

Opinion | thepilot.com

Philosopher and novelist George Santayana once observed that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Nowadays, however, it seems that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to be Republican spokespeople.

Take, for instance, the latest jaw-dropping assertion from failed presidential candidate and former “America’s Mayor” Rudolph Giuliani.

Rudy appeared in front of a crowd at a Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio, and said, with a straight face, “Before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attacks in the United States. They all started when Clinton and Obama got into office.”

Yes, that’s right, folks. The man who milked the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, so long and so hard for political gain that Joe Biden once observed that “there’s only three things Rudy mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11,” the man who stood all teary-eyed before a Republican convention and claimed that on that dark day he “grabbed the arm of then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and I said to him, ‘Bernie, thank God George Bush is our president,’” now seems to have forgotten both the day and which president he was thanking God for.

Then you have Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson, the dead-eyed, raven-haired convicted shoplifter and sometime reality show guest star who’s fond of sporting a “Road Warrior”-esque necklace made of bullets during CNN interviews.

When Trump was taking heat over attacking the parents of Capt. Humayan Khan, the American soldier who sacrificed his life to save his comrades, Pierson snarled, “It was under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that changed the rules of engagements that probably cost his life!”

Only problem was, Khan was killed in 2004, when the president, once again, was George W. Bush. She then went on to assert to an obviously flabbergasted Victor Blackwell in a later CNN interview that “Barack Obama went into Afghanistan, creating another problem.”

Blackwell couldn’t resist paying out a little more rope for Pierson to hang herself with: “So you’re saying that Barack Obama took us into Afghanistan, post-2009?” Pierson, with an expression slowly dawning across her face that reminded me of Wile E. Coyote when he realizes he’s walked off the cliff again and is standing on thin air, nevertheless plowed ahead: “That was Obama’s war, yes.”

Nope. Sorry. Much as I hate to be one of those awful liberals who keep blaming George Dubbya Bush for the stuff he actually did, that one was his, too.

It seems as if Giuliani and Pierson were attempting to appeal to the same crowd I wrote about back in 2013, when a survey by Public Policy Polling found that 29 percent of Louisiana Republicans said it was President Obama who was responsible for the botched response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — and another 44 percent said they weren’t sure. By the “same crowd,” of course, I mean “morons.”

It’s all very “1984.” Not the year, the book. As you may remember, in that bleak novel, people who’d fallen from grace or become politically embarrassing to the Party were stricken from the history books, removed from all records, with even photographs in which they’d appeared altered to remove all trace of their existence. They became, in the words of the Party, “unpersons,” and to even mention their names was to invite torture and death.

In addition, the three superpowers (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia) were locked in eternal war, with each power occasionally shifting its alliances. But to admit that things had changed might mean that the Party had been wrong.

So, when Oceania stopped fighting, say, Eurasia and turned its armies loose on Eastasia, everyone blithely said, “We have always been at war with Eastasia.” They even got to the point where the good citizens not only believed it, they could shift without a moment’s hesitation when it changed again and they had “always been at war with Eurasia.”

And so it is in the People’s Republic of Wingnuttia. George W. Bush was an embarrassment, and his family doesn’t support Big Brother With the Little Hands, so he’s never mentioned anymore. It’s as if his entire presidency has been edited out, leaving a seamless jump from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama. To the people who once said, “Thank God he’s our president,” poor Dubbya is now an unperson.

And they have always been at war with Obama.

Careless, But At Least Not Crazy

thepilot.com

On July 5, FBI Director James Comey finally answered the question that’s been hanging out there for months: Will Hillary Clinton be criminally indicted for irregularities having to do with the private email server she used for official business as secretary of state?

In case you missed it, the answer was “no.” The reaction of Clinton’s critics shows another perfect example of the kind of overreaching that explains why they’re always angry and frustrated.

Some of us have been, to say the very least, skeptical of the confident assertions from the Raging Right that Clinton was going to be indicted over what Bernie Sanders called her “damn emails.”

Because let’s face it, we’ve been hearing “Hillary’s going to jail! Real soon now!” since 1992.

Unfortunately for the wingnuts, every investigation — Cattlegate, Travelgate, Whitewater, etc. — all the way up to the latest attempt to politicize the tragic deaths of four Americans in Benghazi — has come up with a big fat zero as far as any criminal charges are concerned. Now it’s happened again.

Even Donald Trump knew it wasn’t going to happen.

On July 2, three days before the press conference, he took to Twitter to inform us that “sources” had announced that “no charges will be brought against Crooked Hillary Clinton. Like I said, the system is totally rigged!”

When the announcement was made confirming this, House Speaker Paul Ryan was equally outraged.

“This announcement defies explanation,” he said.

You know, the Trumpkins remind me of nothing so much as a bunch of spoiled little boys yelling “Cheater! Cheater!” every time they lose a ball game. Except little boys occasionally wait for the game to be over. The problem is, in their obsession with seeing Hillary Clinton in jail, they blow right past some legitimate criticisms in the report.

The director clearly said that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case” because the FBI never found any evidence of intent to violate the law or to hurt the United States and no intent to obstruct justice from the deletion of some emails.

He did say that “Secretary Clinton or her colleagues” were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” Further, he went on to say that the State Department as a whole “was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government.”

That’s actually worrisome, when you think about it.

Faced with a critical-but-not-criminal report, Trump could go one of two ways:

One, he could switch from his tiresome and unsupported “Crooked Hillary” mantra to “Careless Clinton” and use it to question Clinton’s judgment.

Two, he could screw his tinfoil hat on tighter and keep ranting that the FBI is corrupt because she’s not going to jail. As we’ve seen, Trump’s pre-emptively boxed himself into option one. He’s not very flexible when it comes to tactics, so this probably won’t change.

It’s exactly like the Benghazi mess.

There are serious questions that could and should have been asked about what happened there, including but not limited to whether we should have been intervening in Libya in the first place (something which, you may remember, I said was a ‘terrible idea.’ You can look it up).

Beyond that, you could legitimately question whether we should have had rapid response forces closer to Benghazi when we did, and soberly discuss whether that would have made a difference.

But noooooo. After all, how are you going to get eyeballs glued to the Fox News and CNN shoutfests if you talk about wonky policy stuff like that?

What draws the viewers are wild claims like the one that Secretary Clinton or President Obama told rescuers within striking distance to “stand down”; that Clinton personally denied security requests by the ambassador; or even that Clinton “faked a concussion” to avoid talking to one of the seemingly endless witch-hunts (sorry, congressional committees) investigating the murders.

And all of those committees, after spending months and millions of dollars, came up with the following that would lead to Hillary Clinton facing criminal sanctions: another big fat zero.

Come to think of it, though, there’s probably a reason why the Republicans don’t want to get into questions about something as mushy as a candidate’s “judgment.”

They are, after all, about to nominate Donald Trump, a man whose bad judgment in word and deed is truly breathtaking in both its breadth and depth.

So they’ll continue to hope for the criminal indictment that might knock their opponent out, and will once again find themselves fuming and clutching an empty bag while the woman they love to hate stumbles to the White House.

“Clinton 2016: She May Be Careless, But She’s Not Crazy.” Not the most compelling bumper sticker, but it’ll do in a pinch.

THE GOBSHITES SPEAK: Commenter "melocal" had these tidbits of wisdom to impart:

 Hillary is absolutely useless. She needs to go back to doing dishes and keeping an eye on that player she has for a husband.

Hey, good luck with the women's vote there, Trumpkin. 

And of course, you can always count on perennial asshole "Francis" to provide us with a heaping bowl of word salad, with extra bullshit dressing on the side:

I believe Democrats were more surprised than any others, like this columnist/ lawyer/writer, l who is now jumping up and down like a jubilant school girl, clapping like a trained seal, I believe others in the Democratic party thought Hillary would face some type of disciplinary action, after all several had made the comment she was guilty, but they were quick to withdraw from those statements being pressured from within their party, corruption wins again. Hopefully a more qualified will come forward and explain the outcome. The expectations met the reality, so no surprise, just lacks understanding.

Orange Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye (With the Usual Idiotic Poo Flinging by the Right Wing Monkeys)

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

On Friday, Sept. 25, Speaker of the House John Boehner stunned everyone (including, it seems, members of his own staff) when he announced that he was resigning not only his speakership, but also his seat in Congress, effective at the end of October.

Perhaps the most revealing thing about Boehner’s resignation was the way he approached the podium to announce it. The man best known for bursting into tears at the slightest provocation strode jauntily to the podium, nearly skipping, smiling as he literally sang, “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.”

“I used to sing that on my way to work every morning,” he added.

From the way he said it, it’s clear he hadn’t done so in a long time. And who can blame him? I’ve frequently slammed Boehner for being the most ineffective speaker of the House in that body’s long history. But I’m not sure that there is any way to actually lead a caucus that’s contained such egregious looney tunes as Michele Bachmann and that still plays host to paranoid whack jobs like Louie Gohmert and Steve King. Not, at least, without a tranquilizer dart gun and a 55-gallon oil drumfull of antipsychotic medication, both of which I’m pretty sure are against the House rules.

I mean, how do you realistically lead people who sincerely tell themselves and each other that “even though it’s never worked before, if we shut the government down this time, the Senate will go along, Obama will cave in and allow Planned Parenthood to be defunded, and everyone will love us. And after that, we’ll hold yet another vote to repeal Obamacare”? If insanity is defined as doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then this Congress is indeed the country’s best-dressed lunatic asylum.

Then again, maybe I’ve been exactly as hard on Orange John as he deserves. Compare his leadership, for example, with that of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She has had some wild-eyed, die-hard fanatics in her caucus. Dennis Kucinich and Bart Stupak come immediately to mind. And yet, when the crucial vote for the Affordable Care Act came up, Pelosi could get her people lined up and deliver the votes for a bill some of them had previously said they hated and wouldn’t vote for.

Whether you like Pelosi or loathe her, that’s what an effective speaker does. In fact, I strongly believe her effectiveness is exactly why the right-wing howler monkeys start screeching and flinging poo at the mere mention of her name. Boehner, in contrast, can’t get his people to stop grandstanding and posturing long enough to vote for things as simple as keeping the government open and paying the debts the country has already incurred.

So what happens now? Well, as the old song goes, “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” Since Mr. Boehner will soon shake the dust of the place off his feet and put the crazies in his rearview mirror, it looks like he’s going to dare to work with both Democrats and the few sane Republicans in the meantime to pass a “clean” funding bill that keeps the government running for a little while longer. You know, do some actual governing.

After that, however, things might just get ugly. There don’t seem to be any candidates for the speakership, at least as of this writing, who have the gumption to sit their people down and go, “Look, we’re not going to do another show vote to repeal Obamacare, we’re not going to shut down the government again because that just makes us look stupid, and let’s face it, if the longest special committee investigation in congressional history hasn’t hung the Benghazi murders around Hillary Clinton’s neck by now, it’s not going to happen. So can we actually try to get some stuff done, even if it means trying to get some Democratic votes?”

No, I fear that the Republican-“led” House of Representatives is going to sink further into delusion and anarchy. There’ll most likely be another threat of a government shutdown and maybe even default when the next funding bill runs out, just in time for Christmas. They may actually figure out a way to drive Congress’s approval rating into negative numbers.Yeah, that’ll show that rascal Obama.

THE HOWLER MONKEYS SHRIEK AND PROVE MY POINT: The idiot who calls himself "Lenny Bo" once again weighs in to tell an uncaring world how much he hates the column he faithfully reads every week:

Dusty,
I am one of millions that loathes the mindless Nancy Pelosi. If she is your model of a good leader, then we are all in trouble.

As usual, the howler monkeys prove my point with every comment.

Obamacare was cited as an example where she got all the dems in line for a vote. How exactly did she do that? Well, she herself said that the bill had to be passed before they read it! Some leadership skills - keep the sheep in the dark and feed them BS.

And get ready Dusty - when the committee busts the lid off of 'ol Hellery's antics, I expect you to write a similar column on her leadership skills.

You know, the wingnuts have predicted Hillary Clinton's downfall since 1992. She's been investigated and investigated and investigated again, over "Travelgate," Vince Foster, Whitewater, Benghazi etc, etc, and...nothing. But with the conviction of the truly obsessed, they tell us THIS one, by God, will get her.  As I said above, they're "doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting a different result." And that's why I call them wingnuts. 

Frequent fuckwit "fugitiveguy" weighs in: 

DR doesn't seem inclined to write about Hillary. If I remember correctly he supported her over BHO in the early going in 2007.

What utter bullshit. I supported Obama from the beginning, and I've written a lot about Hillary, not a lot of it complimentary. Once again, it seems that "conservatism" is a form of brain damage wherein they lose the ability to remember anything. 

Mad About the "Clinton Cash" Non-Scandal? Well Here's Your Alternative.

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

So, apparently, an upcoming book, the ponderously titled “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” seems poised to set a record for the shortest time between a Clinton “scandal” breaking into national news and its complete collapse into a big ol’ pile of nothing.

Considering the resume of the author, a longtime professional Republican operative named Peter Schweizer, this book is clearly one of those right-wing tomes designed not to put forth any actual agenda or philosophy of governance, but to tear down the Democratic front-runner with an eye toward giving whichever piece of damaged goods is the last Republican standing a shot at the White House.

A pretty dismal strategy, to be sure. But fear not, good friends, I offer you a way out of the gloom. Bear with me for just a bit and I’ll show you.

First, let’s have a look at the allegations. They consist of the usual ginned-up “OK for me but not for thee” scandal-mongering guaranteed to make the hearts of the editors of Clinton-hating mainstream media outlets like The New York Times go pitter-pat.

The former “newspaper of record” breathlessly reported on allegations in the book that donations by officers of a Canadian company to the charitable Clinton Foundation led to the takeover of some American uranium mines by the Russian company that eventually acquired the Canadian company. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton got a big speaking fee of $500,000 from, not the Russian company or the Canadian one, but from “a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.” (I know, it’s convoluted, but most right-wing conspiracy theories are.)

Sounds pretty ominous, right? Sure, until you actually start thinking.

Before the book was even released, Schweizer was forced to admit, on talk show after talk show, that there was absolutely no evidence that there was criminal wrongdoing or any “direct action” by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to influence decisions on behalf of foreign companies that donated to the Clinton Foundation.

Even Fox News’ Chris Wallace had to point out that the decision on the uranium mines was approved by no fewer than nine federal agencies, not just the Clinton State Department. (No, Hillary Clinton did not control all nine of them.)

Pressed to provide evidence, any evidence, of the actual criminality he alleged, Schweizer was forced to fall back on the old right-wing dodge, “Well, I got nothin’. I’m just raising questions.”

Maybe, he suggested hopefully, some good old-fashioned congressional investigations with the customary Blizzard O’Subpoenas will turn something up to discredit Clinton. You know, like they did with Benghazi. Except wait — they didn’t.

Big Money is, without a doubt, a pernicious influence in American politics. But if you can say with a straight face that donations to the Clinton Foundation or big speaking fees paid to the Clintons are worthy of congressional investigation while turning a blind eye to Republican pols pandering to billionaires like Sheldon Adelson or the Koch brothers, then, let me put this as politely as I can: You’re full of it.

But, as promised, I offer you a way out of hypocrisy. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Oh, I know, I’ve pooh-poohed the idea of the junior senator from Vermont going for the Democratic nomination. Largely because he wasn’t, you know, a Democrat. But it seems as though that rumpled, lovable old coot is about to throw his hat into the ring with a “D” on it. And boy, does he hate the big money style of politics.

He’s called for a constitutional amendment “making it clear that the right to vote and the ability to make campaign contributions and expenditures belong only to real people, not corporations.”

And he’s “continuously supported the DISCLOSE Act, which would lower the veil of secrecy over campaign finance and prevent foreign corporations, individuals and governments from interfering in our political system.” In Bernie Sanders’ America, political marriage, so to speak, would be between one American man (or woman) and one candidate. Per election, at least.

So, Republicans and Democrats, wingnuts and manic progressives: If you’re disgusted with the Clintons for associating with big donors and getting big contributions, then won’t you join me in supporting the only candidate who actually has a plan to get that kind of big money out of politics?

I mean, surely, you don’t think big speaking fees or contributions to private foundations are only bad or suspicious when Bill or Hillary Clinton are involved, right? If that kind of perceived influence-peddling makes you mad, then Bernie’s the only logical choice, right?

Right?