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Welcome Back, Hillary. We Missed You!

Trust me, the new Clinton Years are going to be fantastic. Well, at least for the most vital people in civil society: professional pundits.

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Trust me, the Clinton Years redux are going to be awesome. And especially awesome for society’s most important people: professional pundits.

As you’ve probably heard, the Clinton Foundation – more specifically, The Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation; although do not expect to see its proper name again – accepted millions of dollars from seven foreign governments during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, violating the ethics agreement she had signed with the Obama administration and whatever is left of her integrity.

As Christopher Hitchens noted when Hillary first ran for the presidency in 2008: “I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory.’

Now, I’m resigned to that fact that Hillary – named after the great Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest – will become the first women to ascend to the office of the presidency. But before we start accusing every Hillary critic of harboring misogynistic disorders … this Clinton Foundation fiasco is utter corruption, right? No one really believes it’s OK for high-ranking government officials to accept money from foreign governments – autocratic governments, government lobbying the United States for favors –while they’re still on the job? Not even if it’s to pump up the husband’s vanity project.

Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Algeria all helped build the Clinton Foundation, which is an arm of the couple’s political machine. The foundation said it had received unsolicited donation of $500,000 from the latter, for its Haiti earthquake relief fund because there was simply no other way for the good people of Algeria to help out.

Coincidentally, Algeria was also spending hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying the State Department around this time. But the foundation claims that the donor’s motivation was about nothing more than addressing “critical global challenges.” This is why Algeria contributed nothing to the United Nations world food program and never gave the foundation another penny.

Algeria just wanted to help Haiti.

Is this contention more or less plausible than the following statements:

We’re dead broke.

I remember landing under sniper fire.

That allegation is false.

Around 60 companies also lobbied the State Department during her tenure, donating more than $26 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to the Washington Post’s report. While Clinton was urging governments “to sign deals and change policies to the advantage of corporate giants such as General Electric Co., Exxon Mobil Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Boeing Co.,” all of them were helping make The Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation so that it can create “Partnerships of Purpose.”

Indeed. I bet you can’t wait to raise $300,000 so the future president can lecture you about the intricacies of crony capitalism.

If there was one thing lacking in the Bush and Obama years, it was the corruption of personal enrichment – the kind of old-fashioned tawdry, self-serving dishonesty America deserves. As far as entertainment value goes, the idealistic, ideologically driven abuses of the past decade simply don’t stack up. It’s difficult to convey how wild those first Clinton years were. You had feminists defending middle-aged sexual predators in the pages of liberal newspapers and social conservatives freely discussing fellatio on national TV. Bimbo eruptions. Pay-offs as pardons. Files disappearing. And nothing really getting done. It was pretty glorious.

Now, in a decent world, the media establishment would annihilate this sort of deeply unethical candidate and drive them from Washington. But this isn’t any candidate. This is the candidate. When it’s all said and done you’re the ones who are going to be the wild-eyed right-wing nuts for even mentioning “The Clinton Foundation.”  There will be far more pressing matters for the media to deal with.

In 1965, while a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School, Mitt Romney purportedly teased a younger schoolmate for his “nonconformity and presumed homosexuality.” Leading up to the 2012 elections, we talked about this decades-old event for about a week or so.  Then, who can forget poor Seamus, the helpless Irish setter who rode 12 hours on the roof of Romney’s station wagon?  What story could be more symbolic of the deep disdain conservatives have for the weak and defenseless? We talked about this for a couple of weeks, as well.

These stories were the backbone of a larger narrative about the ruthlessness and ugliness of a man who, in completely legal business practices at Bain Capital, made tons of money. We know every single morsel of this story, because making money through a private equity firm that salvaged poorly run, bloated businesses is like betting against America. Funneling money from foreign government to enriching your own political aspirations? Welcome to the Clinton era.

The Washington Post broke a huge story, but how the rest of the media now treats it will be telling. I’ve already noticed an undercurrent of defensiveness on Twitter from some national reporters. Hey, Hillary is somehow always “finding” herself in trouble. And that’s the beauty of it for the rest of us.