Occam's Weiner

So in the final week of the campaign the plot twists arrange themselves in a remarkably straightforward manner. The FBI is investigating the Clinton Foundation - because it's a criminal enterprise: if you give a million bucks to the the Clintons' charity, sixty grand goes to charity and the remaining 940,000 goes to fund the lifestyles of Bill, Hillary, Chelsea and their various malodorous associates - Sid Blumenthal, Terry McAuliffe, etc.

For four years, however, those donations also bought you access to the US Secretary of State. That's why Mrs Clinton and her coterie - Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and the other supposed "government employees" - determined to use a private server. Because the pay-for-play was so unsubtle you couldn't have it sitting on State Department emails destined for the National Archives.

We now learn that the FBI are looking into 650,000 emails discovered on Anthony Weiner's laptop, a machine Huma Abedin has told friends she never used - as you wouldn't, if your spouse had the habits Mr Weiner has. 650,000 emails is at least 20 times the number Mrs Clinton originally turned over to the government - or approximately a thousand emails per day for two years, so Weiner would have to be sexting his spambot penis to an underage girl every minute-and-a-half to rack up that total. Which would be impressive even for him. Instead, the metadata indicates that thousands and thousands of those emails were sent either to or from Mrs Clinton's private server. And she seems unlikely to be that interested in Anthony Weiner's penis.

So what are they?

Consider how total has been the former congressman's fall in the five years since his legislative branch first raised its ugly head:

In 2011, he was a man of power: an influential seven-term member of the House of Representatives.

By 2013, he was a man intent on returning to power: a candidate for the New York mayoral race.

By 2015, he was a man excluded from power himself but with proximity to power: the spouse of the closest confidante of the soon-to-be most powerful woman in the world.

By August 2016, he was a man removed even from proximity to power: after the publication of photographs he'd sexted showing himself with an erection while in bed with their infant child, Huma dumped him. The last time I saw him he was sitting opposite me on a Fox Business show: he was just another schlub shooting the breeze with cable-news Z-list losers like Steyn.

But it got worse. A month later, he was a man under investigation for the one sexual predilection to which even Democrats still attach some stigma: The Daily Mail in London (because it would be unreasonable to expect Mrs Clinton's court eunuchs in the American media to note such things) reported that he had been sexting with a 15-year-old girl.

Huma and Weiner are so close to the Clintons that they were (see picture above) married by Bill. To the casual observer, Mr Weiner was merely the Mini-Me to Bill Clinton's distinguishing characteristics. Alas, he lacked the Clintons' luck, and never enjoyed the same level of protection. It's not unreasonable to conclude that, somewhere in the latter stages of this bumpy half-decade descent, Anthony Weiner decided it might be prudent to have an insurance policy. Powerline's John Hinderaker applies Occam's razor:

His career is over, and he is a laughingstock. His wife, on the other hand, is just one degree of separation from great power, perhaps the next president. Do the math. And Weiner has had a lot of time on his hands lately. He may have thought that keeping a trove of communications between his wife and Hillary Clinton would afford him protection against criminal prosecution. Or he may have said to himself, if I am going down, I am taking Huma and her g*****n boss with me. Of course, that only works if he thinks there is something discreditable in those communications. He would know that better than we do.

Weiner is an ambitious man with apparently insatiable sexual proclivities. Until 2013 he thought those two primal drives were reconcilable. The sex cost him his ambition - and is now threatening his liberty. He has very little standing between him and the abyss - other than what he knows about his wife and her patrons.

And that's the least worst interpretation. The other is that, given the world knew Huma Abedin's husband has a taste for girls a third of his age, someone sooner or later was going to apply a little pressure to him. Maybe even those Russians the Democrats have been bleating on about for weeks.

Most of the media and political class were content to regard Weiner as a laughingstock. One who wasn't was Donald Trump. July 27th 2016:

I don't like Huma going home at night and telling Anthony Weiner all kinds of secrets.

August 29th 2016:

Huma is making a very wise decision. I know Anthony Weiner well, and she will be far better off without him. I only worry for the country in that Hillary Clinton was careless and negligent in allowing Weiner to have such close proximity to highly classified information. Who knows what he learned and who he told? It's just another example of Hillary Clinton's bad judgment. It is possible that our country and its security have been greatly compromised by this.

All too characteristically of Hillary's court eunuchs, The Los Angeles Times sneered that Trump was "trolling" Clinton. Ask not for whom the Trump trolls, he trolls for thee...

~It's not helpful at this stage of the electoral process to have your candidate's name mention in the same sentence as "...investigation into sexting underage girls". But Democrats are nothing if not fierce and absolute in their devotion.

Thursday's Wikileaks brought forth the revelation that, at the highest levels in the Hillary campaign, senior officials had been wondering what precisely is the difference between credibly accused sexual predator Bill Cosby and credibly accused sexual predator Bill Clinton. My post on the topic prompted Professor Larry A Feig of Tufts University to write to me:

Cosby drugged women you a--hole

Larry A Feig, PhD
Professor of Developmental, Molecular & Chemical Biology
Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences
Tufts University

I'm not a PhD, but I think there should be a comma between "drugged women" and "you a--hole".

Two points to Professor Feig:

1) You should have sent your response to Hillary campaign official Ron Klain, senior foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan and campaign chair John Podesta, who were the ones trying to agree a line on this particular topic.

2) Still, thanks for giving us the view from one of America's most prestigious safe spaces. If I understand Professor Feig correctly, the critical distinction is that it's totally unacceptable to sedate your victims so they wake up afterwards wondering what the hell happened, as opposed to ensuring they remain conscious for every violent, traumatic moment of the rape. "Zzzzzz" means "no", but "no" means "sure, go for it, just make sure I stay awake." You might want to put some ice on that theory, professor.

If Hillary prevails next week, expect a lot more of this in the next eight years.

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Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. His latest book is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 32% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 50% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)