Unless you’ve been living under a rock – and if you have and can still get this blog you must have some kind of Internet access – y’all know about Hillary Clinton’s latest woes: that while Secretary of State the Clinton Foundation took millions upon millions of dollars from foreign countries, not all of them friendly to the whole concept of women’s rights, and that while Secretary of State she eschewed the use of secure government e-mail and instead did all e-mailing via her own e-mail server and domain. Now everyone and everything is about the minutiae of politics and legalities: did she break any laws, statutes, regulations, etc? Is she still the presumed frontrunner for the Democratic nomination? Does this hurt her politically? If so, how much?

My take on this: Is anyone really surprised at any of this? Does a leopard change its spots?

Hillary Clinton has been who she is from the moment she hitched herself to Bill Clinton’s coattails decades ago. She is, and has been from the very beginning of her national political life, a smarmy, sneering, in-your-face, know it all phony elitist. From the very moment her husband Bill became a Presidential candidate and his personal foibles became public she’s played an equal role in distancing Clinton, Inc. from public scrutiny and accountability (and some might say, reality). The darling of the liberal media, she hates the media with a passion. Immersed in politics, she despises the rough and tumble of the political arena and – many would say – is a lousy politician. Think about it: is there anyone out there who truly thinks if her last name was Smith she’d be sniffing the Democratic nomination for President? Of course not.

More than anything else, in the words of legendary New York Times columnist William Safire, Hillary is a congenital liar who from the very beginning has played fast and loose with the truth. She’s always seen herself as above those silly standards and ethics expected to be practiced by you and me. And she gives “disingenuous” a whole new meaning: her trumpeting of herself as the standard bearer of women’s rights is a joke, a cynical and calculated persona designed to get her into the White House so far removed from her own record as to be breathtaking in its scope. Taking money from foreign countries with abysmal women’s rights records, defending rapists, attacking her husband’s accusers with vigor, and paying and placing women in the Clinton Foundation less than men – it’s all a façade.

Of course, Democrats love her and will go to the hilt for her, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone – after all, they’ve wildly supported a President who has played pretty fast and loose with the rule of law himself – it’s all about power and keeping it in the White House. But I have to wonder exactly what Hillary’s chances are. I mean, she’ll get the liberal vote, but how much more than that? Look at 2008 when she was in the same position as the de facto nominee: she ran a lousy campaign, was viewed as a lousy candidate, shrill to the point of obnoxious, aloof, and unlikeable. Sure, Barack Obama ran a solid campaign against her, but what’s to stop the same thing from happening in 2016? Who knew about Barack Obama at this time in 2007?

The one given about Hillary is that the more you see her the more she’s diminished as a viable candidate. And the latest scandals surrounding her ought to serve as a warning sign to Democrats. Do they really want to hitch their wagon to someone so completely divorced from any measure of ethical standard, so divorced from reality that she thinks people will buy her laughable excuses for having all her e-mail as Secretary of State on her own e-mail server? That there was no risk to our national security? That she can be trusted to decide which e-mails belong to the State Department and which ones can be destroyed without an independent arbiter? Are you kidding me?

The fact that Hillary Clinton is utterly void of personal integrity doesn’t disqualify her for the Presidency; the fact that she willingly and recklessly put her own personal interests above the nation’s security most certainly does. But I don’t expect that to bother Democrats a bit – after all, they put Barack Obama back in the White House. Twice. The difference is, Hillary Clinton is no Barack Obama, and Democrats ought to think carefully about if this is who they truly want carrying their banner into 2016.