COMMENTARY

JOHN BRUMMETT: Ethical shortcomings

Donald Trump and his supporters say the dirty rotten American media conspire to exploit a matter unfavorable to him and ignore a more egregious one that besmirches Hillary Clinton.

It’s the standard whine of an imminent loser. But the tired refrain has never been expressed as narcissistically, as egomaniacally and as destructively to the republic as Trump expresses it.

John McCain corrected a woman who, late in his presidential bid, spoke at one of his rallies to say Barack Obama was an anti-American Muslim. But McCain is, while hot-headed, a good and reasonable man.

Trump is neither. He is the horrid personification of the Republican Party’s moral and intellectual collapse in eight years.

Anyway, Trump could have averted his currently raging negative publicity if he simply had been sufficiently decent not to brag about grabbing women uninvited in their most personal region and then, according to several women, trying to do that very thing.

The issue unfavorable to Clinton was uncovered by the Republican National Committee in Freedom of Information Act requests for emails that were then shared with ABC News.

It is that, after the epic earthquake in Haiti in 2010, a staff member at the State Department, headed at the time by Clinton, was seeking assistance from Clinton Foundation officials to tag as “Friend of Bill” or “WJC VIP” the requests of the State Department for recovery business in Haiti that came from pals of Bill Clinton or donors to the Clinton Foundation.

It’s an unethical outrage, at least in terms of vital appearances. The Clintons are forever weak on ethical appearances. There should have been a high wall of separation between Bill’s humanitarian foundation and Hillary’s government department.

Yet there was no evidence that either Bill or Hillary was personally involved in those communications. It also was unclear whether these friends of Bill or the foundation got work in Haiti that they wouldn’t have been likely to get otherwise.

For example, in the most-cited case: A billionaire donor to the Clinton Foundation named Denis O’Brien was the chief executive officer of a Jamaican-based telecom company. He informed the State Department that the Army was pressuring his firm to restore communications services in Haiti, but that he was having trouble getting authority to land in the country. He asked the Clinton Foundation for five minutes with the State Department, and Clinton Foundation official Doug Bland said that O’Brien was “never a bother.”

The man had a legitimate need. That he went through the husband’s private foundation to get to the wife’s State Department is … irregular, offensive, wrong.

But a pattern of personal abuse of power — over women and generally — is a bigger direct disqualifier for the presidency than being secretary of state and the wife of a former president when that former president is engaged in a humanitarian foundation and has donors to his foundation who seek help through her department in providing services in an international disaster area.

Remember that these donors were contributing to a foundation, not the Clintons directly. Yes, an allegation is that the Clintons lavished themselves with foundation funds, spending too much on administration and too little for actual humanitarian services. But the clearer picture of charity money being diverted to personal use is Trump’s tapping his foundation to make a political contribution and buy a portrait of himself.

Remember, too, that women’s charges against Trump have as a predicate Trump’s own recorded declaration of behaving the way they describe. There is no record of self-incrimination by the Clintons in their aides’ taking special notice of their friends and donors who wanted to do recovery business in an earthquake-ravaged country.

Regrettably, and typically, much of the governmental and nongovernmental work in Haiti turned out to be inefficient, unproductive and resented by Haitians. One of the more compelling accounts of that came in a lengthy memorandum to “Mom and Dad” from Chelsea Clinton.

But inefficient and poorly delivered humanitarian aid to Haiti under the inappropriately merged auspices of a former president’s foundation and his wife’s State Department will forever strike me as less a presidentially disqualifying behavioral outrage than Trump’s sexual predation.

On this I am happy to cite my historical consistency: When the issue in the late ’90s was Bill Clinton’s sexual misbehavior in the White House — principally allegations of accosting aide Kathleen Willey when she asked for help and getting more than frisky with an intern, both of which I believed from the get-go, and then lying about at least one of those — I wrote that Bill should resign the presidency.

And now Trump should get nowhere near it.

A bad choice is still a choice. On your ballot is a line for the ethically impaired in the delivery of aid to a poor island country in need. Then there is a line for a disgusting creep.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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