From the left: Hillary’s Lies Could Elect Trump

Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi says it’s bad enough that Hillary Clinton “must overcome judgments about the tone of her voice and the color of her pantsuit.” Her really serious problem is that she also must overcome the “less-than-honest answer” answer she gave Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday” falsely claiming FBI Director James Comey backed her public statements about her e-mail server. Because that could push undecided and independents to Donald Trump. Voters, she writes, are “weighing one candidate’s untruthfulness against the other candidate’s untruthfulness.” And while lipstick and pantsuits are laughable, “the answer she gave to Wallace is not.”

Media critic: The Democrats’ Radical Campaign Theme

Clinton and the Democrats aren’t just claiming Trump is “an existential threat” that would mean “the breakdown of democracy’s fail-safe mechanism,” writes Michael Wolff in the Hollywood Reporter. They’re actually suggesting something more radical: “a historical departure . . . arguing legitimacy over policies” by suggesting “Trump cannot be allowed” and that his election “would not be an example of democracy but a failure of it.” The Democrats’ predicament: “Respectable America kept saying he was shocking and appalling, which seemed quite likely the exact reason not-respectable America found him so satisfying and compelling.” Meanwhile, “Trump’s message is clear: The other side’s virtue always is at the expense of the interests of Trump voters.”

Historian: Trump’s ‘Opportunity Cost’

Veteran political historian Michael Barone explains for the Washington Examiner that an “opportunity cost” is “what you lose when you divert your investments and attention to something less profitable.” And that, he says, is precisely what Trump has been doing: “The opportunity cost for Trump and for his party is that he failed to direct attention to what he could have made Hillary Clinton’s glaring weaknesses.” Given the dire economy, her misrepresentation of Comey’s remarks and her snide remarks about the Benghazi families, Trump “had plenty of fresh raw material to fill multiple campaign days discussing the mendaciousness of ‘Crooked Hillary.’ ” Instead, his “eccentricities threaten to elect as president a congenital liar who is way to the left of the public. Lots of opportunity cost all round.”

From the right: America’s Luckiest Political Family

Why is it, asks National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke, that “at every turn, good fortune has found its way to Bill and Hillary Clinton”? In 1992, even though “the most talented national politician of his generation, Bill Clinton was nevertheless a routine beneficiary of improbable good fortune.” Thanks to “a deteriorating economy, a spate of Republican infighting and the vagarious behavior of a popular third-party candidate,” Clinton managed to “overcome his manifold character deficiencies” and pull off “a historic upset.” And his re-election and subsequent survival of an explosive sex scandal and perjury charge “hinted at Providence itself.” Now comes Hillary, who “seems set to profit from events in a similar fashion,” despite her proven propensity “to crumble and fall.” Indeed, given her dismal record, “that Clinton remains the favorite in November is, when one stops to reflect for a moment, nothing short of extraordinary.”

Olympic call: Find Games a Permanent Home

Increasingly, the Olympic Games have become an operational and/or financial disaster for the host city — and Rio de Janeiro is no exception. So Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris, writing in The Washington Post, has a simple solution: Pick a permanent site for the Olympics — just as long as it isn’t in the United States. The International Olympic Committee “has grown accustomed to the clout that comes with choosing Olympic sites,” he writes, which has “inspired decades of corruption by IOC officials” and allowed authoritarian regimes a global showcase. “Any number of places could do,” he notes, “but Greece is the obvious choice, at least for the Summer Olympics.”