Hillary Clinton is responsible for the mess Hillary Clinton is in

Michael Goodwin:

We must forgive Mark Twain for his error when he declared that “history never repeats itself but it often rhymes.” After all, he’d never met the Clintons.

If Twain were alive now, he would be astonished at how the headlines over the e-mail scandal roiling the presidential race are virtual repeats of the family’s 1990s saga in power.

The headlines are also an omen. A restoration of the Clinton presidency would be a restoration of the national and moral chaos they invariably create.

They can’t help themselves. They are corrupt and corrupters, the ­Typhoid Mary of politics.

Whether by nature or nurture, they are programmed to ruin. Friends, allies, institutions — all are stained by their touch.

And always, the Clintons blame somebody else. Now it’s FBI Director James Comey’s turn to embody their all-purpose bogeyman, the vast right-wing conspiracy. Somebody, sometimes everybody, is out to get them, unfairly of course.

The victim card is a Clinton family heirloom, but there are major problems playing it over Comey’s sudden reopening of the e-mail probe.

Clinton created the mess with her incredibly stupid decision to use a private server as secretary of state. Virtually every major issue dogging her, including her reputation for chronic dishonesty, was started or exacerbated by that decision, including the current one.

Even as her top aides remain mystified about why she did it, the result fits the family pattern now that Huma Abedin, her most loyal “body” person, is on the hook. It was, by all accounts, the FBI’s criminal investigation into Abedin’s pervy husband, Anthony Weiner, that led to the new cache of suspect e-mails found on a computer the couple shared.

Still, Clinton is understandably panicked because the timing of Comey’s announcement could cost her the election. Her demand that he release everything immediately is also understandable, even as she knows it is impossible for him to release potential evidence before it is examined.
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It is probably asking too much for Clinton to come clean on what happened, and Abedin has also told people she does not know how the material got on the computer, as preposterous as that sounds.  The fact is that if she had not been an accomplice to Clinton's mishandling of emails it would have never gotten on that computer unless her husband is also a world class hacker among his other talents.