OPINION:
Caesar’s wife was just born too soon. She paid the price of someone else’s hanky-panky, actually someone else’s attempted hanky-panky. Had she been born a millennium or two later she would have fit right in to a time and place where everything goes.
Any woman who thought she could game Julius Caesar’s palace intrigues, particularly the bedtime intrigues, was always at the risk of getting what she may not have asked for. Loretta Lynch, by reliable accounts, didn’t really want to entertain Bill Clinton aboard her airplane at the Phoenix airport, even to hear about his new grandson, assuming (and almost nobody does), that giving a report on his new grandson was the point of the visit that Bill forced on the attorney general.
She, like Katie (whoever she was), should have barred the door, and taken into account an ancient and one of the most instructive stories of Western history, the sad tale of Caesar’s wife. When Caesar’s first wife died in childbirth, he married the fair Pompeia just as he was declared chief priest of the state religion.
She was honored at a grand blow-out, the festival of the Bon Dea, “the green goddess,” to which only women of the highest ranking families were invited. No man was permitted to attend. A young and handsome patrician, Publius Clodius Pulcher, was determined to seduce Pompeia, however, and he donned gay apparel and managed to slip in. He was arrested in the act and was charged with sacrilege for attempting to despoil Pompeia. Caesar, setting no example of gallantry, declined to give evidence against the intruder and divorced Pompeia instead, declaring that “my wife ought not even to be under suspicion.”
The corollary to Caesar’s law is that the higher a person flies in public life, the more innocent he or she should be of the appearance of corrupt behavior. Public morality, even with its shortcomings, remains the bulwark of democratic government and its institutions.
Ol’ Bubba, as is his wont, has muddied the waters, whether with the help of Mrs. Lynch or not. Both as lawyers and veterans of high public office, they both knew that any contact between them would be open not only to scrutiny but to suspicion. Mrs. Lynch understands that now. She acknowledges that it was a mistake to have met with the spouse of a subject of FBI investigation. She says she won’t do it again if she ever gets another opportunity to say no.
She might very well get such an opportunity. Bubba might become a co-defendant in the FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation and its donors, and what the donors expected to get for their money. The Lynch-Clinton meeting threw a shadow over the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails and her concern, or more to the point her lack of concern, for the nation’s security secrets. If the Clintons were a vaudeville act, it might run forever.
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