OPINION:
With 22 days until the presidential elections, Americans look to be on the cusp of electing Democrat Hillary Clinton into office, despite saying government corruption is their No. 1 fear.
More than 60 percent of Americans said corrupt government officials are one of the greatest fears they have, according to the third annual Chapman University Survey of American Fears.
The 2016 survey showed a shift from 2015, where many of the top fears were economic and “big brother type issues,” Christopher Bader, a professor of sociology at Chapman University in Orange, California, said in a statement.
“People often fear what they cannot control, and we find continued evidence of that in our top fears,” Mr. Bader said.
Yet, the U.S. electorate can control the outcome of this presidential election.
The New York Times on Monday explained the business ties of Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer, Cheryl Mills, who personally profited from her State Department effort to rebuild Haiti. WikiLeaks exposed Bill Clinton received a $1 million birthday gift from Qatar, a country Mrs. Clinton has blamed for funded the Islamic State terror group. Chelsea Clinton, worried about conflicts-of-interest between her family’s charity and public service work, requested an audit of the Clinton Foundation, which found donors had “an expectation of a quid pro quo benefits in return for gifts.”
Mrs. Clinton has admitted she never sought permission to set up a personal email server at the State Department, contrary to public admissions, and knowingly lied that she didn’t send or receive classified information on it.
New FBI files contain allegations of a “quid pro quo” in evaluating Mrs. Clinton’s emails — with the State Department seemingly negotiating with the FBI to down-classify an item in return for extra FBI posts abroad, a Fox News report shows.
And after her emails were subpoena by Congress, Mrs. Clinton’s team sought all avenues to subvert the subpoena, from asking President Obama to extend his executive privilege to blaming State Department bureaucratic delays.
This is the definition of government corruption — and it’s just the headlines surrounding the Clintons within the last week.
In the most recent ABC/Washington Post poll, Mrs. Clinton beat Mr. Trump by 8 points on who voters trust more to handle ethics in government. How is this even possible?
Perhaps it’s that Mr. Trump’s sex scandals received more coverage, 7 to 1, than Mrs. Clinton’s WikiLeaks scandals last week. Perhaps Mr. Trump isn’t hitting the ethics issue enough in his rallies and public appearances.
Either way, America is set to elect the thing it fears the most. Help us all.
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