“Forget it, Hill. It’s Chinatown.”
Allah reports that the New York papers finally discover Clintonian mischief in their own back yard:
The New York Times reports today that the campaign was so curious about how dishwashers could afford to drop thousand-dollar wads in the collection plate, they decided to do a little spontaneous investigating of their own. And by “investigating” I mean that they sent out form letters asking the donors to give them comfort by stating for the record that the money was theirs.
And the best summation of why so little has been heard about all this:
The saddest thing about all this is that no one has a very strong incentive to do the legwork on researching it. The campaigns don’t want to know if their donors are shady, as we saw in the willful blindness towards Norman Hsu. Hillary’s rivals have an incentive, of course, but there must be fundraising skeletons in Obama’s and Edwards’s closets too, just as there must be plenty on the GOP side. That makes it a game of mutually assured destruction among the oppo research teams and no one wants to play that game. The media doesn’t have a grand incentive either, the LA Times’s laudable example notwithstanding, because investigations like these are resource-intensive while basically amounting to fishing expeditions, with little guarantee of finding any wrongdoing. Plus, once you investigate one campaign, you open yourself up to charges of bias by not investigating them all
If I’m a Republican hit-man (and I’m not, though I’m open to taking envelopes stuffed with twenties from them), I’m going to have nice little 30-second spot ready for the general election reminding people of Bill’s Chinese (money) laundering, and how Hillary is just taking over the family business.