Is Hillary Toast? Sure Starting to Look That Way

Let’s see… the emails have been known for two years or so, but this story is just “breaking” now, at the same time Sen. Bob Menendez is being brought up on federal charges and David Petraeus cops a plea deal. Now the stenographers at the Washington Post are beginning to connect the dots between Hillary Clinton’s private emails and her disastrous tenure in Foggy Bottom — Benghazi! You remember Benghazi — nothing to see here Benghazi; who cares where Barry Hussein was the night of Benghazi. Yes, that Benghazi. If this scenario reminds you of the end of The Godfather, you may be a winner:

Clinton’s time at State Department, once an asset, now a liability?

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state was supposed to be a central argument for her forthcoming run for president. Her globe-trotting record as the nation’s chief diplomat, her role championing women’s empowerment and gay rights, and her experience on tough national security issues were all supposed to confer credentials that none of her possible GOP opponents would possess.

But over the past two weeks, with back-to-back revelations that she was working with foreign countries that gave millions to her family’s charitable foundation and that she set up and exclusively used her own private e-mail system, that argument is in peril.

Mightly conveniently timed “revelations,” eh?

Instead of a fresh chapter in which she came into her own, Clinton’s time as the country’s top diplomat now threatens to remind voters of what some people dislike about her — a tendency toward secrecy and defensiveness, along with the whiff of scandal that blotted the record of her husband, former president Bill Clinton.

That side of Hillary Clinton also plays directly into the main Republican argument against her, that she is a candidate of “yesterday” — as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida recently put it — who comes with decades of baggage the country no longer need carry.

“Part of the reason the story is gaining traction is that it reminds people of what the Clinton White House was like,” said American University political science professor Jennifer Lawless. “It reminds people of the scandals, the secrecy and the lack of transparency that were often associated with Bill Clinton’s eight years in Washington.”

As I’ve said before, these are not coincidences — they’re a message being sent to the Clintons that their time at the top is over. The only question is whether they’ll take the hint and retire to their money-collection business, aka, the Clinton Foundation, or whether she’ll go down hard. Already, the young Turks are getting restive:

And while Clinton remains the overwhelming favorite for her party’s nomination, some Democrats last week were more open about their misgivings about her candidacy. On Friday night in New Hampshire, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, who might run against Clinton, for the first time criticized her use of the private e-mail account, saying that “openness and transparency are required of governing in the modern age.”

If Hillary were smart, which she’s not, she’d take the hint. But her greed and arrogance will get the better of her, and she’ll never hear the sound of the accelerating bus until it’s too late.

UPDATE: The headline on the Post story has been changed. It now reads: Will Clinton’s experience be a liability? To which one might reply: what experience? Unless you count logging air miles and getting sozzled at public expense as “experience.”