Proclaimed political “dynasties” in American history have never persisted beyond two generations.  The Adams family produced two presidents in two generations, followed by an author of significant accomplishments who disdained democracy and never ran for political office.  The Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin D., came from two branches of the family and later produced several public office holders of no importance.  The Kennedy “dynasty” amounted to one president and two presidential brothers, one of whom got himself appointed attorney general by his brother, and both of whom were later elected U.S. senators.  Their progeny, while following careers in government, fell far short of the expectations so-called dynasties engender.  The Bush “dynasty” lasted, like the Adams one, through two presidents from successive generations, and since last fall appears to be going nowhere.  Now it is the turn of the Clintons, a husband-and-wife act representing a single generation with ambitions to succeed itself, so to speak, and their daughter, groomed by the couple from an early age to wear the family mantle, bear the Clinton torch.  This latest dynasty, following Hillary Clinton’s soporific, unimaginative, and incompetent campaign last fall, seems destined to be the briefest of them all as Democrats reflect candidly on the party’s need to shake loose from the control of its former First Family and go its own way, free at last of the Clintons’ egomania, power-lust, material greed, and mania for manipulation for its own narrow advantage.  Among President Trump’s accomplishments since November 8, 2016, is the political destruction of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the likely nipping of Chelsea Mezvinsky’s career in the bud.

As if Mrs. Clinton’s humiliating loss to Grendel in the presidential election weren’t damaging enough, personally and politically speaking, her public behavior since her emergence from behind her political weeds late last winter has surely put an end to her political career and that of her husband, who appears not to have applied the guiding patriarchal hand to restrain his wife’s suicidal behavior throughout her appalling, self-indulgent, and self-abasing rant of some weeks’ duration, exonerating herself from all responsibility for her defeat while throwing blame on a cast of recognizable villains like Putin and Comey and a number of faceless and abstract ones, including “misogyny.”  From this tantrum she might possibly have recovered, in time.  But when, weeks later, she went on to attack the Democratic National Committee and what she alleged was its faulty data bank for the catastrophe, she crossed the Rubicon beyond which, for her and her husband, there is almost certainly no political return.  What the Democracy will look like in its post-Clinton future, no one can say.  But while it will likely be no improvement on itself from the Clinton Era, the purging of this coppia iniqua from Arkansas from the American body politic is, to paraphrase the Englishman, an outcome devoutly to be wished for.