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In the nick of time for Halloween, the American presidential race has entered what Simpsons scholars would identify as its Treehouse of Horror phase. Jason Voorhees is lumbering back out of the lake, pondweed draped over his hockey mask; the meatballs on that pizza all at once have Freddy Krueger’s face on them; and the Email Story That Would Not Die has at least reopened the possibility that Donald Trump will enter the White House and the Hellmouth under Sunnydale High will swallow the lot of us.
Is it an exaggeration to say that a Trump presidency could be the worst threat to Western civilisation since the Cold War? If it is, it’s not much of one. It boggles the imagination that someone so manifestly unfitted in every conceivable way for high office should now be within striking distance of the highest office on Earth. And who’s to blame for all this?
There’s a long list of candidates — but at the moment Hillary Clinton is coming well ahead of the director of the FBI on that list. She calls his behaviour “unprecedented” and “deeply troubling”; but is that a mote in her eye?
It seems worth trying at least to disentangle some of what we know from what we don’t. Because in this post-truth election, it’s not the substance that makes the running; it’s the way it can be distorted. No: it’s not a “re-opening” of the investigation. Nor are these a cache of smoking-gun emails that bring new information on Secretary Clinton’s conduct and could see her charged: Newsweek reports that not one of them was either from or to her.
They are evidence in a separate investigation into the wretched Anthony Weiner. All the FBI has said is that it wants to determine whether they have any bearing on Hillary’s conduct. But none of that matters much when the front pages either state or imply that the FBI is taking a fresh look at its chances of putting the Democratic candidate in jail.
I think we can dismiss the notion that the director of the FBI was deliberately out to sabotage the Clinton campaign, though. He was in a damned-both-ways situation: if he’d withheld the information he’d have been painted even more blackly. What we can say is that the way he announced the new cache of evidence, and his failure to elaborate, has been culpably ambiguous. He opened space for mischief.
What remains inconvenient for Hillary is that the email thing is not, and never has been, trivial. Storing her emails on a private server wasn’t just a minor boob. She was Secretary of State.
This is not on the level of you or me sending the odd work message from our Gmail. State security was at risk; as was her duty to archive all official emails for the historical record. She didn’t come clean nearly early enough; and she handed the Trumpite conspiracy machine a howitzer when she deleted 33,000 “private” emails. They may very well have been private emails: but if she can’t produce them she can now never prove that.
So what’s happening now — the prospect that this late stumble may actually end up handing the White House to the Insane Clown Posse — is, at root, on her.
Hillary Clinton v Donald Trump: US Presidential Election
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Petty face of child migrant issue
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A newspaper investigation has discovered that one of the supposed “child migrants” admitted to the UK was enrolled at university in Afghanistan more than three years ago, and has a profile on a dating website where he claims to be 22.
Does this matter? However liberal we may be on the refugee issue, I think we have to admit that it does. Not because chasing down and making a great performance of the exceptions that slip through makes us look anything other than petty; nobody seems to be questioning this young man’s account of being the last of six siblings alive.
But it’s powerful propaganda for those who’d harden hearts against all refugees: it’s too easy to turn the odd stubbly “child” into the fraudulent public face of a genuine refugee crisis.
It gives us all an excuse to turn our backs. You could find yourself half-wondering whether they let through the odd young adult deliberately.
Post-Brexit, we'll be queuing more
Asda became an unlikely new champion of the “slow-food movement” this weekend. Its checkouts ground to a halt after its card-reading technology underwent a nationwide meltdown, leading to hour-long queues and a certain amount of shouting from frustrated shoppers.
The company’s social media account signed off its apology to customers, winsomely, with a frowny-face emoticon :(. It does show how far we’ve come. Brits used to be second only to Stalin-era Muscovites in queuing. Affluence has made us soft. Now,even novice hackers can use the Internet of Things to knock major websites offline; and post-Brexit, we’re going to be at the back of the queue for everything anyway.
So we could see Asda’s snafu in a more positive light: not an inconvenience so much as a training exercise. That frowny-face emoticon is going to see a whole lot more use over the next few years.
Ashes to ashes stunt hits the opera bull’s-eye
What a way to go. The Metropolitan Opera in New York was evacuated at the weekend because, it’s reported, someone started sprinkling the ashes of a deceased loved one into the orchestra pit during the second interval of a performance of Guillaume Tell, thus depriving opera-lovers of the best bit and bringing hair-wash night forward for the second violins.
There are so many appealing details. Was the opera itself significant? Why, I wonder, the second interval? And how far did the ash-sprinkler get before the alarm was raised; will he or she will be back to finish the job during the next Die Fledermaus? He or she apparently absconded before the authorities arrived but they have been described as “an individual from out of town”. The Met has its own Person from Porlock.