Who is the Real Criminal?

It’s prime time opening night at the Republican National Convention and a quaint, well dressed, possibly fragile, seventy-something woman is helped to the podium.  There she begins to deliver a heart-exposed recounting of the death of her son, which soon evolved into a spewing of vitriol…like a homeless person who starts with a soft plea for a touch of generosity and ends with unloading her AK-47 across a line of bank tellers.

Patricia Smith appeared by all accounts to be displaying her true feelings.  It was this quality of genuineness that makes the accounting of her words all the more serious and revealing.  Commentators who likely disagreed with her entire story only reacted with compassion and sympathy rather than criticism.

Unfortunately they were at a loss for words, which a sad commentary in itself.

At the end of her heated moment on a National stage, Mrs. Smith began a theme that remained as one of the few constants across the remainder of the Convention: that Hillary Clinton was personally and totally responsible for her son Sean’s death, and, as such, is a criminal and should be in prison.

Picked up by Chris Christy the next night, the crowd, adorned in their stars and bars, began to chant “lock her up”, several times interrupting Christy, leaving him only to smile and nod his head encouragingly.

There was a mob feeling about it, like the old fashioned, pre-lynching enthusiasm we’ve all seen in movies that recount a darker past.  Instead of repulsed or angered, I primarily felt embarrassed for our Country, not unlike how I felt when Trump decided to discuss his genitals during a Presidential Debate.

I will not give an account here of the absurdity of Patricia Smith’s claim that anti-Western Islamic extremists were bit players in Hillary Clinton’s conspiracy to have her son murdered.  The wasted resources of the Federal Government over four years of investigations have already done that. What I want to discuss is the real crime itself, as displayed Monday night.

 A mother likely shattered by the sudden and violent death of her son has the potential of being as unmolded clay.  Any of us would be desperate to seek answers to explain what is impossible to understand in a state of intense grief.  Although true of any parent losing a child, the national attention, the reporters, the cameras, and more must have made the intense need for reason and rationality more acute.

Every set of parents of the 20 first-graders murdered at Sandy Hook must have gone through it. Despite a simple explanation of insanity, most have sought accountability to explain how such psychosis can manifest itself into such tragedy.

Patricia Smith showed clearly Monday night that not only had she sought accountability for her son’s death but that she is wholly tormented by what she has concluded.  That was also undoubtedly the reason she was recruited to the podium. 

Who gave her the tools of her torment?  She did not independently arrive at a set of conclusions that the longest, most expensive, most driven Republican Congressional investigation in the history of this Country couldn’t obtain.  She was fed a scenario for purposes unrelated to the death of her son.

Just as the House Special Committee to investigate Benghazi was, as publicly admitted by Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, created to drive down “Hillary’s numbers”, just as the fictional movie 13 Hours is used as a quasi-historical explanation (most notably by Donald Trump, Jr.), just as Fox Television and talk radio have eliminated any facts regarding Benghazi other than Hillary Clinton being the Secretary of State, so did Patricia Smith become a pawn to use in the Republican’s desire give Clinton to the mob. Lock her up.

The real crime we saw Monday night was the public use of a tortured woman who has been manipulated in such a way as to leave her plagued with sadness and anger for the rest of her days…because she can no longer assimilate the truth. Think about what that must be like. The real criminals were standing behind the stage at the RNC.

The crime committed on this woman is as ethically wrong as any con job, only more so.  Like Christy’s Tuesday night kangaroo court, the crime against Patricia Smith and the rest of the conservative Republican base can only be tried in the public forum and ballot box. Fortunately (and hopefully) that will cause the Republican Party to move to a better place.  Sadly, I doubt there is much hope for Patricia Smith.