Ideology of Power

An 800-page report and $7 million later, the House Select Committee on Benghazi has found no new evidence on the circumstances of the attack: more importantly for the Republicans, they are no closer to indicting Hillary Clinton or diminishing her presidential prospects. This is telling, given that this has amounted to being, according to David M. Herszenhorn, perhaps one of the most 'bitterly partisan congressional investigations in history'. The committee was led by South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy, who among other things accused Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, and the Obama Administration of purposefully withholding evidence and stymieing earlier investigations into the culpability of the Defense Department, Central Intelligence Agency and State Department in their failure to protect the personnel stationed at the outpost. Taken in its entirety however, the report does precious little to substantiate accusations of negligence on the part of Clinton; it presents ...

Despite the bluster of the Republican presidential nominee, it seems quite unlikely that recent poll results on the popularity and support of his campaign can universally be discounted. The recent ABC/Washington Post Poll brought matters to a head, showing an immense 12% lead for Hillary over Trump. Of course, poll results vary (probably a result of both sample bias or political maneuver, but in what proportion is anyone's guess), yet there seems to be a consensus no matter which poll one looks at: Clinton is firmly in the lead. Of course, with about a hundred days left till the start of the primaries, there is hardly any certainty about the results; the volatility of recent events attests to that fact. From the Orlando shooting to Brexit, to the resulting fallout in the financial markets where more than $2 trillion in equities was wiped out, the last few weeks has been spectacularly chaotic. Politics is a vast public undertaking, relying on mass communication to  galvanize  ...