It's Not About The Content

This Hillary email thing drives me nuts. Let’s say someone is driving without a license, in an unregistered car, and is stopped for speeding. The car is impounded. Are we going to contest that impound by arguing about how fast the guy was driving, with some insisting that he was not actually exceeding the speed limit? Are we going to utterly ignore that the car was not registered?

Now, in pointing out that Caroline Kennedy also used a private server, we are saying that if some other dude drove an unregistered car then this unregistered car should not be impounded. That is the same hilarious argument that was used by Obama defenders for many of his shenanigans; “Bush did it too,” utterly abandoning logic by ignoring the premise that Obama was supposed to be different.

Whether or not there were any classified documents on the server is pretty much irrelevant, the problem is the private server itself, and no one denies that she was using a private server exclusively, Hillary included.

The requirement for using a government server is to provide an official record of government communication and to assure that no one can tamper with that record. Hillary cheerfully admits that she bypassed that recordkeeping and that she tampered on a massive basis with the records that she kept on her private server.

Classified materiel be damned, how can we pretend that what she did in, to repeat, bypassing official records requirements and massively tampering with the records she kept privately is not a huge problem?

If not a legal problem, it is a massive problem with respect to transparency and trust.

Hillary threw up this smokescreen about classified material herself and quite deliberately by, when challenged about using a private server, dodging the actual question and saying that the server contained no classified material, creating a conversation and a controversy that would be at best difficult and possibly impossible to prove. This is her style. This is what she does.

And it worked because no one is talking about the private server itself. We are all arguing about how fast she was driving whether or not there was classified material on the server, which is utterly beside the point and is precisely what Hillary wanted us to do. It’s not working as well as she thought it would, but it’s working, because it hasn’t buried her yet. If we had stayed on topic it would have buried her in a couple of weeks.