Pay to play, anyone?

So far, Team Hillary's defense of what the New York Post on Wednesday called the "Dough Nation" scandal reminds me of Mark Twain's joke about the girl back in Missouri who sought to excuse her illegitimate child on the ground that it was "so small."

"Only 3%," Hillary's spokesman told Politico on Wednesday, of Mrs. Clinton's total visitors while she was Secretary of State fall into the category of “nongovernmental visitors.” But half of those, it turns out, had previously made generous donations to the Clinton Foundation. 

Yes, he said, but the Associated Press' investigation only dealt with the first half of Mrs. Clinton's tenure at Foggy Bottom.

So, you know, the AP's story is 'flawed”. Nothing to see here. Keep moving.

Malarkey.

This one's got legs, folks. And there's at least another 15,000 emails coming by mid-September.

Furthermore, NPR reported Thursday morning, the 750 emails released this week are heavily redacted. That means that the quid pro quo which Team Clinton, so far, is loudly proclaiming is not there may, in fact, be there. We just can't see it yet.

In short, this truly is a presidential election without precedent. Even a leading Democratic columnist has had enough.

Mr. Trump's call for a special prosecutor now puts the stakes in this year's presidential race in sharp focus. No one believes, of course, that this attorney general will seek the appointment of a special prosecutor. But for Mrs. Clinton, Trump's demand means that she will almost certainly face new federal investigation and, quite likely, prosecution if she loses the election. 

This takes the 2016 race out of anything before seen in American history. It's Hillary's own fault, of course. But it still makes this contest uncomfortably like an election in a Third World country.

"You lose, you die." Or at least end up in jail or have to flee the country.

Are we becoming Nigeria?

For Trump's supporters, the election of Mrs. Clinton to the White House would spell (a) ratification by the voters of President Obama's legislation, regulations and executive orders and (b) the certain capture by the Left of a Supreme Court majority. In other words, a historic disaster.

The possibility of a rollback of the latest wave of Progressive legislation -- something which hasn't happened since 1933 -- would disappear.

There were, of course, no Good Old Days (just read Mark Twain's The Gilded Age, Henry Adams' Democracy or any of H.L. Mencken's stuff to see that). FDR was known for his mendacity. LBJ had his Credibility Gap.

But underlying the success of the Clinton Cabal, there's something deeper. Many people, including my own father (born 1910), believed that Prohibition fundamentally corrupted the American people -- because it taught a generation to disobey the law while hypocritically pretending to support it. Mencken thought so as well, along with many others in the Lost Generation.

John O'Hara, a member of that generation but never an expatriate, made the case in his 1960 novellas, Sermons and Soda Water. All the scandals of the late '50's – the rigged game shows, the cheating scandals at the military academies –  O'Hara said were traceable back to “the cynical disregard for the law of the land” during the Prohibition Era.

The subsequent decades, these observers thought, brought only corroboration. The electrical price-fixing cases and Big Steel's confrontation with the Kennedy White House were no surprise. Nor was LBJ's aforementioned Credibility Gap. Nor Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook." They were the legacy of Prohibition.

"They voted Prohibition at election time," Dad used to say, "and drank bathtub gin the rest of the time."

The moral rot which pervades Clintonism proceeds apace. As Bob Dole said in 1996 (when campaigning against Bill Clinton), "where's the outrage?"

We shall see, come November 8th.