Kiln, Mississippi Let us be clear and make no bones about it, it was a huge misjudgment for Hillary Clinton to use a private email address and server while Secretary of State. No organization in their right mind would ever have allowed it, and it establishes an unfamiliarity with working for others, as opposed to yourself, which is worrisome at a very fundamental level in my view. There’s the whole transparency thing, which worries me less. She’s got folks gunning for her figuratively and literally, so it is not unreasonable to be cautious about information. The accountability issue is more my concern and the ability to subsume self-interest to collective enterprise.
Saying that she stubbed her toe does not equal believing she should take a fall. And, reading the actual reports of her emails is reassuring in some ways because there seems little smoke or fire. Long emails from your daughter giving you a heads’ up that essentially Haiti is going to hell in a hand-basket and it could end up on Mom and Dad’s shoes is good advice and what every parent should hope to hear from their children. Hearing from Chelsea that the State Department website is archaic and sucks, especially when Hillary as Secretary of State in all likelihood never did more than cast a passing glance at it every blue moon is also a tip from a young one bringing Mom back to modernity that would be invaluable I would think. Who knows what this really says about Hillary, since there were no reports of her action upon getting the down-low from her daughter, but definitely Chelsea’s stock went up in my book.
As did Hillary’s in a weird way. I like the fact that she might be perversely flattered that a robber used a Hillary mask in a heist, even if her tongue was in her check. Be honest with me, that’s hilarious, and the spot on response from the Clinton family lawyer, David Kendall, profiled recently as a courtroom killer of rare powers, assuring her that though robbers have used Nixon masks repeatedly and Reagan masks as well, she might be the first Democrat so honored, is also just plain a hoot. Even the reports of her wondering about the real skinny on White House gossip or whatnot is a fair play. She was riding for the brand, so she should care what was happening at the ranch house. This kind of stuff in my view makes her look human, and Hillary desperately needs to be seen more often as human, rather than a 21st century calculating machine.
Then there’s the tempest in the teapot aspect to all of this that leaves you feeling like you are peeping at someone’s personal emails over their shoulders. The skinny on that according to The New York Times on these emails that were…
4,368 documents totaling 7,121 pages, posted online …by the State Department as part of a monthly disclosure ordered by a court after the revelation that Hillary Rodham Clinton had used a private email server while she was secretary of state. The department initially said it had redacted information from roughly 150 emails because they contained sensitive information, then reduced that estimate to 125. The information was deleted because “confidential” materials — the lowest classification of government intelligence — had been discovered in the correspondence. None of the documents were marked classified at the time they were sent, said Mark Toner, a spokesman for the State Department.
Best join me in laughing about bank robbers in Hillary masks, because up close this little dust-up is starting to seem little more than boring no matter how bad it looks from a distance.
