New Orleans Is there a woman on the planet more powerful than Hillary Clinton right now? And, that can be said, regardless of her widely expected announcement that she is running for President and is currently the preemptive choice by many for the Democratic nomination. And, fair is fair, is there a woman also more fervently hated by the rightwing zealots, the misogynists, and millions of others, mainly men? Is it possible that Hillary Clinton does not know that she is both powerful, admired, and hated and therefore a constant object of attention and therefore has to be extra careful about public scrutiny? Is it not also true that Hillary Clinton is a lawyer, is rich, and has a huge, dedicated, and loyal staff constantly at her beck and call?
Let’s also stipulate that both individually and as first Senator and then Secretary of State, she undoubtedly had technical whiz-kids and internet geniuses on constant ready alert that would make Edward Snowden look like a schoolboy. How in her wildest imagination could she have possibly made the bonehead move to use her personal email exclusively in conducting all government and other business as Secretary of State? This admission is so startlingly in its arrogance and entitlement, its commitment to personal privilege, secrecy, and obliqueness from any public transparency or accountability that it simply, how can I express this any other way, blows my mind!
How can there be anyone in the United States today that does not understand that their professional emails and correspondence are not personal possessions but the property of their employers? Every worker knows this like they know their social security numbers. Heck, that’s why we all have personal emails for crying out loud, because we know there are boundaries between the personal and the professional or we only use our professional emails realizing that there is no privacy. Are we to assume that there is one chance in a million that Hillary Clinton, lawyer, politician, public figure, and woman wizard, did not understand this?
What was her email? Hillary@HillaryClinton.com or something? Surely she wasn’t using Google’s gmail, which retains all emails on its cloud servers forever. Surely she couldn’t have presumed that her archives were more essential than the government’s own archives. Was her email encrypted or anything? Oh, geez, hasn’t she learned anything in all of these years?
Certainly the emails released by Snowden that included communications from Hillary Clinton of emails sent to other government officials on issues like the war and her hawkishness have already given many cause for concern about what the country-and-western song might call the “cowgirl in her.” But, worker bees like me even know someone to call and ask how to protect emails on their company servers or can read Wired or enough of the Wikileaks and Snowden reports or heck even the daily papers to have a sense of how to encrypt and use email that immediately disappears and is protected, that is if we bothered to do so, believe there is still such a thing as privacy, or that our secrets were so special. And, if you and I know how to either hide our stuff or, even better, have learned to be more careful and thoughtful in our electronic correspondence, are we really supposed to believe that Hillary Clinton, one of the masters of the universe, didn’t know how to have her people or the State Department zip her stuff up tighter than a drum?
Sure, this isn’t the biggest issue or scandal in the free world, but now I’m worried already, years before voters start pulling the levers in the next election, that this is a symptom of huge troubles to come if Hillary Clinton hasn’t learned the lessons she has sworn she now understands fully.
State Department business with a personal email? You have got to be kidding me!
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This is for you Mike . . . Ry Cooder’s No Banker Left Behind. (this video pulled from archive.org).