Hillary Clinton’s twin eruptions, revelations about the Clinton Foundation slush fund and her private email system fiasco, are testing Hillary’s plumbing tradecraft in keeping the Clinton sewer pipe from blowing its cap.

Forty years of unseemly, unethical, and illegal effluent, effortlessly and unabashedly discharged by both Bill and Hillary may have finally splashed over the manhole covers on their political septic tank, clogged the leach field, and now backing up into the house threatening to splatter their live-in coterie. No mere journeyman plumber can fix these breaches; only operating engineers with a commercial grade backhoe, and a few tons of hydraulic cement might have a chance.

Is Hillary Clinton’s sleaze factor and plumber’s license inherited or acquired? What difference at this point does it make?  Her genome map is unlikely to ever be revealed.  Nonetheless the presentation of her ethics deficit, and her defense of all that is tawdry and disreputable, is hardly new.

While Hillary Clinton’s ideology was inspired by Saul Alinsky, her tactical politics were acquired from watching Richard Nixon. 

Hillary first displayed her predilection for deceit, cover-up, obstruction, and lying while on the job as a staff lawyer to counsel for the US House Judiciary, Watergate Select Committee.  She had ample opportunity to absorb the lessons of the disgraced 37^th president.

Hillary’s one-time boss Jerome Zeifman, chief of staff of counsel to the Committee, when interviewed by Dan Calabrese in 2008 had this gem to unveil on the occasion of recalling Hillary’s staff tenure:

Because she was a liar, She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.

Attempts to discredit Calabrese’s reporting, particularly about Zeifman’s claim that he actually fired Hillary, have been unresolved.  And the Clinton camp has never satisfactorily explained why such a bright, gifted, and oh so promising, young attorney was unceremoniously dismissed from the Committee staff.  Yet the account concerning Hillary’s conduct was apparently corroborated by Franklin Polk, Republican counsel to the Committee.

According to Calabrese: 

“Polk confirmed Clinton wrote a brief arguing Nixon should not be granted legal counsel due to a lack of precedent. But Clinton deliberately ignored the then-recent case of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who was allowed to have a lawyer during the impeachment attempt against him in 1970. Moreover, Zeifman claims Clinton bolstered her fraudulent brief by removing all of the Douglas files from public access and storing them at her office, enabling her to argue as if the case never existed. Polk confirmed the Clinton memo ignored the Douglas case, but he could not confirm or dispel the claim that Hillary removed the files”.

Calabrese concludes:

“Disingenuously arguing a position? Vanishing documents? Selling out members of her own party to advance a personal agenda? Classic Hillary. Neither my first column on the subject nor this one were designed to show that Hillary is dishonest. I don’t really think that’s in dispute. Rather, they were designed to show that she has been this way for a very long time -– a fact worth considering for anyone contemplating voting for her for president of the United States.”

OK, so Calabrese is an unapologetic Hillary basher.  Nonetheless, the incendiary tone of Zeifman and Polk’s commentary is extraordinary. Why would recounts of bad conduct by an otherwise obscure and inconsequential freshly minted legal apprentice, who should not have attracted such derisive attention, remain so vivid?  Unless her conduct was so egregious then, and followed up with forty years of identical behaviors at the epicenter of American political life, finally meriting astringent recollections from whence it all commenced.

Hillary’s timeline working for the Committee predates Nixon’s resignation, but follows the revelations about Nixon’s secret tapes. Of course it has always been an article of faith that if Nixon had destroyed the tapes, he would have avoided his pending impeachment, and resignation. But the tapes’ demise was left in the hands of Nixon’s chief-of-staff, H.R. Haldeman, who didn’t carry out Nixon’s wishes.

Did this lesson in failed political warfare survival escape Hillary? Of course not.  Maintaining and personally managing absolute control over evidence would be Hillary’s most profound lesson from her proximity to Richard Nixon. After all, while the usual axiom is that the cover-up is often worse than the crime, for a cover-up to be damaging, it has to be documented, and no evidence means no case, on any level.

Thus Hillary’s private email system, organized out of her home in Chappaqua, NY perfectly fits with her strategy of never leaving behind any incriminating documents, or a communications trail accessible by anyone else. If Richard Nixon possessed remote wireless recording technology to maintain the WH tapes at his private residence, La Casa Pacifica in San Clemente, how would such personal privacy have been be pierced?

Hillary shares with Nixon the most self-destructive attribute -- unrestrained hubris. Nixon’s hubris was that he believed his presidency was not only noteworthy but would be historically monumental, thus the desire to preserve all of his White House conversations, not unlike LBJ’s belief in marking conversations for posterity with his own Oval Office recording system. Of course Nixon, whose hubris overran discretion, never imagined his self-incriminating tapes would seep out behind the bladder of presidential executive privilege.

Hillary’s hubris arrives from derivative power as presidential spouse, afterwards spawning an undistinguished stint as a US Senator, and then as an incompetent and baleful Secretary of State.  She has never accomplished anything historically significant, except successfully shielding her husband from charges of assault and rape. If she were to become the first woman president, it would say more about the electorate’s unserious infatuation with identity politics than her prospects as a statesman.

Anointing her with the oils of imperious inscrutability, draping her with designer chain maille deflecting any accountability has been a job heretofore embraced, albeit guardedly, by the fawning mainstream media. Will the MSM want to preserve whatever flimsy self-respect it may still possess by pivoting from Hillary, to embrace their more kindred spirit, Elizabeth Warren?

Despite Hillary’s shameless apologists dismissing any suggestions that she is unfit to be a steward of the public trust at any level, let alone the presidency, they must now worry that their own depleted ethical reputations are beyond rehabilitation with their continued association with such a political malignancy.

The stories embedded in Hillary’s stash of coyly masked obstructions will never be fully known. But the content is less instructive than the motive. It is Hillary’s instinctive penchant for pre-emptive sleight-of-hand far exceeding a normal politician’s circumspection, that may have finally crushed unquestioned faith from her long-suffering loyal minions.

Yet Lanny Davis, long time Clinton journeyman plumber and pool-boy, still in harness for an unrepentant and disagreeable client, was pummeled by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday on whether he ever gets tired of “cleaning up after the Clintons”.  Apparently not:

WALLACE: Finally, as we said at the beginning, you served in the Clinton White House handing legal matters like campaign finance, like impeachment. Do you ever get tired of cleaning up after the Clintons?

DAVIS: No, you say cleaning up because you have a certain perspective. I am proud, given the public career and the public good of Bill and Hillary Clinton, as reflected by the popular goodwill they have across the country. Unlike Chris Wallace, I don't regard it as –

WALLACE: When you say unlike Chris Wallace, unlike me in what way?

DAVIS: Well, you call it cleaning up. You're entitled to your viewpoint. I am proud to defend a great public servant.

WALLACE: Proud?

DAVIS: Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton –

WALLACE: Proud of Monica Lewinsky? Proud of campaign finance? Proud of the private e-mails? So, those are moments of pride for the Clintons?

DAVIS: There've been mistakes. The last time you got very heated about the Clintons was Whitewater for four years –

WALLACE: I never discussed Whitewater, my friend.

DAVIS: You never decided that Whitewater is a scandal?

WALLACE: Nope.

DAVIS: All right. Well, then you're about the only person that I know –

WALLACE: Nope, I never did.

DAVIS: -- in the business of the media.

WALLACE: No.

DAVIS: Remember Whitewater. This is another bogus –

WALLACE: I thought campaign finance was a scandal.

DAVIS: And what precisely ever happened with the Clintons on campaign finance.

WALLACE: Do you think that that was a great moment? Johnny Chung? You really want to re-litigate that? Do you want to re-litigate Monica Lewinsky, and misleading a grand jury and disbarment? Do you want to re-litigate all of that?

DAVIS: You ask me whether I'm proud, you call it cleanup. I don't call it cleanup. After all that you just mentioned, Bill Clinton left with a 65 percent approval rating. Hillary Clinton today is the most popular politician in the country. And you're discussing a non-scandal, nothing illegal, full access. And it's all politics.

WALLACE: Lanny, thank you. Thank you for, as always, whatever you call it, you've been doing it for a long time. Thank you we'll stay on top of this.

Well, Lanny, when Hillary’s sewer pipe blows, wear goggles, and a respirator.