Before the Clinton Foundation, there were emails. Before that, ACORN. Meet 'scandal by script'

By Hunter
Monday Sep 05, 2016 · 1:31 PM EDT

Did you know former Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell, like the Clinton family, also has a charity? Probably not, because nobody has ever given a damn.

So what about the charity? Well, Powell’s wife, Alma Powell, took it over. And it kept raking in donations from corporate America. Ken Lay, the chair of Enron, was a big donor. He also backed a literacy-related charity that was founded by the then-president’s mother. The US Department of State, at the time Powell was secretary, went to bat for Enron in a dispute the company was having with the Indian government.

Did Lay or any other Enron official attempt to use their connections with Alma Powell (or Barbara Bush, for that matter) to help secure access to State Department personnel in order to voice these concerns? Did any other donors to America’s Promise? I have no idea, because to the best of my knowledge nobody in the media ever launched an extensive investigation into these matters.
(Side note: I know I'm getting old because I seem to be only one of a handful of people in America who still remember Enron, and why Enron was bad, and who continues to be concerned about the flaws in the American economic model that encouraged what was essentially nothing more than a taxpayer-targeting grift that would foretell the scams that led to the great recession itself; a new Wall Street model that would show contempt for producing things when all the smart top-floor money could be had in making bets about bets about collections of other bets about companies that actually did. But I digress.)

What makes all the talk of Clinton Foundation "scandals" so maddeningly familiar is that for every serious, non-fraudulent story written so far, nobody has ever been able to find a "there" there. Was there any wrongdoing whatsoever? Nobody can find any. Is the Foundation a legitimate charity doing key, worldwide charitable work? Nobody disputes it. Are they good at what they do? Charity watchers say yes. We are nonetheless chained to a news game of Telephone, in which small snippets of fact are rolled and molded into stories that can never produce any actual scandal, but which we are repeatedly told might look bad if you considered only a few snippets here and discounted all the other snippets over there, repeat, and so on.

And it would not be so risible, were it not for The Drudge Effect.

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http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/9/5/1565281/-Before-the-Clinton-Foundation-there-were-emails-Before-that-ACORN-Meet-scandal-by-script