Lawrence Solomon: For lies, corruption and scandal, Hillary is Trump on steroids

...Trump is a liar, continually making things up and changing his story. In the last week alone he claimed the NFL contacted him to complain that presidential debates would conflict with the NFL schedule (the NFL denies it), that he avoided the Vietnam draft due to a lucky draft number (government records show he obtained a medical deferment) and that he never met Vladimir Putin (contradicting his own earlier claims). His lies are often silly, about matters of little or no consequence, calculated to please his audience or make himself look good. He may not even realize his lies. As his Republican primary opponent, Ted Cruz, put it: “I actually think Donald, if you hooked him up to a lie detector test, he could say one thing in the morning, one thing at noon and one thing in the evening, all contradictory and he’d pass the lie detector test each time. Whatever lie he’s telling, at that minute he believes it.”

Clinton is a liar, too, but in an entirely different league. She lied about having destroyed government emails, about having exposed classified U.S. government secrets to Russia, China and other hostile nations through an unsecured server in her own basement that, according to U.S. intelligence experts, almost certainly led to the outing of covert CIA operatives. She lied to the parents of murdered Americans in the terror attack at Benghazi, Libya, about the cause of their death, and her role in their death. She lied under oath when testifying to Congress, and she lied about FBI Director James Comey’s public indictment of her lies, which he delivered to the nation.

Her lies are nothing new and they are legion. Hillary Clinton is a “congenital liar,” in the words of famed New York Times columnist William Safire, whose 1996 essay, “Blizzard of Lies,” explains that she lies “for good reason: To admit otherwise would be to confess taking, and paying taxes on, what some think amounted to a $100,000 bribe” allegedly arranged through some very suspicious-looking cattle-futures trades. For good measure, Safire also chronicled her other alleged criminal activities, including fraud, obstruction of justice and corruption...