{"id":9595,"date":"2016-11-10T11:05:12","date_gmt":"2016-11-10T19:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=9595"},"modified":"2016-11-10T11:05:12","modified_gmt":"2016-11-10T19:05:12","slug":"a-blow-to-the-non-elite-elite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-blow-to-the-non-elite-elite\/","title":{"rendered":"A Blow to the Non-Elite Elite"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>By Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ <em>National Review<\/em><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Biased and incompetent elites polluted the 2016 election, and they are getting what they deserved.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>There were a lot of losers in this election, well beyond Hillary Clinton and the smug, incompetent pollsters and know-it-all, groupthink pundits who embarrassed themselves.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>From hacked e-mail troves we received a glimpse of the bankrupt values of Washington journalists, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, and wealthy donors. Despite their brand-name Ivy League degrees and 1 percenter r\u00e9sum\u00e9s, dozens of the highly paid grandees who run our country and shape our news appear petty and spiteful \u2014 and clueless about the America that exists beyond their Beltway habitat.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Leveraging rich people for favors and money seems an obsession. They brag about wealth and status in the fashion of preteens.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Journalists often violated their own ethics codes during the campaign. Political analyst Donna Brazile even leaked debate topics to the Clinton team. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank reportedly asked the Democratic National Committee to provide him with anti-Trump research.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Reading about the characters who inhabit the Clinton campaign e-mail trove, one wonders about the purpose of their Yale degrees, their tenures at Goldman Sachs, even their very stints in the Clinton campaign. Was the end game to lose their souls?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>One big loser is the Obama Justice Department \u2014 or rather the very concept of justice as administered by the present administration. It has gone the tainted way of the IRS, VA, and NSA. The Justice Department clearly pressured the FBI to limit its investigation of pay-for-play corruption at the Clinton Foundation and the State Department.<\/div>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Seemingly every few weeks of the campaign, FBI director James Comey flip-flopped \u2014 depending on whether the most recent pressure on him came from rank-and-file FBI agents, the Clinton campaign, or his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Lynch met with Bill Clinton in a secret \u201caccidental\u201d encounter on an airport tarmac while Hillary Clinton was under investigation. Immunity was granted to several Clinton aides without the FBI obtaining much cooperation in return. Clinton techies invoked the Fifth Amendment in refusing to testify before Congress.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Clinton campaign organizer John Podesta was in direct contact with his old friend, Peter Kadzik, a high-ranking Justice Department official who was tipping off the Clinton campaign about an impending hearing and a legal filing regarding Clinton\u2019s e-mails. Until he was reassigned, Kadzik was in charge of the Justice Department\u2019s probe of the Huma Abedin\/Anthony Weiner e-mail trove.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>A special prosecutor should have been appointed. But Democrats and Republicans alike had long ago soured on the use of special prosecutors. Democrats felt that Ken Starr went way beyond his mandates in pursuing Bill Clinton\u2019s excesses. Republicans charged that Lawrence Walsh\u2019s investigation of the Iran-Contra affair had turned into a witch hunt.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>But now, it is clear why there was \u2014 and still is \u2014 a need for special prosecutors in some instances. In an election year, the Obama Justice Department certainly cannot investigate Obama\u2019s former secretary of state and heir to the Obama presidency \u2014 much less itself.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Another election casualty is the practice of extended voting. The recent trend to open state polls early and over several days is proving a terrible idea. Campaigns (think 1980, 1992, and 2000) are often not over until the last week. When millions of people vote days or even weeks before Election Day, what the candidates say or do in the critical final days becomes irrelevant. When a candidate urges citizens, \u201cVote early,\u201d it is synonymous with, \u201cVote quickly, before more dirt surfaces about my ongoing scandals.\u201d<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Voting should return to a single event, rather than becoming a daily tracking poll.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>President Obama lost big-time as well. He emerged from his virtual seclusion to campaign on behalf of Clinton in a way never before seen with a sitting president. By Election Day, Obama had resorted to making fun of Donald Trump\u2019s baseball hats, and he took the low road of claiming that Trump would tolerate the Ku Klux Klan.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>While encouraging Latinos to vote during an interview with actress Gina Rodriguez, Obama seemingly condoned voting by illegal immigrants when he said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would not be investigating voter rolls. A Trump victory, along with a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, is a repudiation of the Obama administration\u2019s legacy and its effort to navigate around the law. The high-tech industry and Silicon Valley lost as well.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The new high-tech class prides itself on its laid-back attitude rather than its super-wealth \u2014 casual clothes, hip tastes, and cool informality. But in fact, we have learned from WikiLeaks that the 21st-century high-tech aristocracy is more conniving and more status-conscious \u2014 and far more powerful \u2014 than were Gilded Age capitalists such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Billionaire CEO Eric Schmidt of Google advised the Clinton campaign to hire \u201clow-paid\u201d urban campaign operatives, apparently in hopes that his efforts would earn him some sort of informal Svengali advisory role in a hoped-for Clinton administration. A leaked e-mail from tech executive Sheryl Sandberg revealed that Facebook\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg wanted to meet with people on the Clinton team who could help him understand \u201cpolitical operations to advance public-policy goals.\u201d<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>It became easy to say that a \u201ccrude\u201d Trump and a \u201ccrooked\u201d Clinton polluted the 2016 campaign. The real culprits were a corrupt Washington elite, who were as biased as they were incompetent \u2014 and clueless about how disliked they were by the very America they held in such contempt.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review Biased and incompetent elites polluted the 2016 election, and they are getting what they deserved. There were a lot of losers in this election, well beyond Hillary Clinton and the smug, incompetent pollsters and know-it-all, groupthink pundits who embarrassed themselves. From hacked e-mail troves we received a glimpse of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1094,1092,1091,1090,495,46,185],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2uL","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":10921,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hillarys-sure-victory-explains-most-everything\/","url_meta":{"origin":9595,"position":0},"title":"Hillary\u2019s \u2018Sure\u2019 Victory Explains Most Everything","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 30, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/\u00a0National Review \u00a0 What exactly were top officials in the FBI and DOJ doing during the election of 2016? 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The media are outdoing their\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Trump&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8431,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-and-hillary-are-all-too-happy-to-coerce-acceptance-of-their-agendas\/","url_meta":{"origin":9595,"position":3},"title":"Obama and Hillary Are All Too Happy to Coerce Acceptance of Their Agendas","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 22, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online What happens when the public does not wish to live out the utopian dreams of its elite leaders? Usually, the answer for those leaders is to seek more coercion and less liberty to force people to think progressively. 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Now after the latest Weiner disclosures, she is crisscrossing the country, terrified of collapsing polls, and wishing that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;The Clintons&quot;","block_context":{"text":"The Clintons","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-clintons\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9595"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9596,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9595\/revisions\/9596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}