Hillary Clinton Continues To Dodge And Dismiss Questions About Her Private Email Server
While new information seems to come out on a daily basis, Hillary Clinton would rather that everyone think that her private email server wasn't really a very big deal.
Once again facing questions about her use of a private email server while in office and how classified information was handled on that account, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once again dismissed many of the questions that are being raised in a press conference that many are calling ‘testy’:
[T]he Democratic front-runner faced another group who had waited patiently to ask her questions: the press. This time, in an empty and quiet gymnasium, Clinton grew testy as the back-and-forth with reporters became more heated and focused pointedly on her emails and her use of a private server while she served as secretary of state.
“What was supposed to be convenient has turned out to be anything but convenient,” she said, reiterating that she “wants Americans to understand” that when it comes to whether or not she sent or received any classified emails, the process would be the same whether or not she had used a government account. “It has nothing to do with me and it has nothing to do with the fact that my account was personal,” she said of inspectors general investigations into whether or not classified material was discovered.
“Isn’t leadership about taking responsibility?” she was asked.
“I take responsibility … in retrospect this didn’t turn out to be convenient at all,” she said. “And I regret that this had to become such a cause celebre,” reiterating that what she did was legal and she has tried to be helpful to law enforcement agencies.
“No matter what anyone tries to say, the facts are stubborn,” Clinton said. “What I did was legally permitted, first and foremost. No. 2, I turned over an abundance of [emails in] an attempt to be helpful, over anything that I thought was vaguely related [to work]… and I said make them public.” She acknowledged “anxiety” about it, but stated: “The facts are the facts.”
The Justice Department is now investigating whether there was any improper handling of sensitive material. Clinton’s campaign has said she is not the target of the probe.
But when pressed multiple times about whether she had tried to wipe her entire email server clean, Clinton was not able to answer the question.
“I don’t know, I have no idea,” she said. “Like with cloth or something? I don’t know how it works digitally at all. I know you want to make a point, I will just repeat what I have said: in order to be cooperative as possible, we have turned over the server … we turned over everything that was work-related. Every single thing.”
(…)
As she exited the gymnasium, a reporter asked her if the questions were an indication that the email controversy isn’t going away, and will dog her campaign into next year.
Clinton turned around, her hands raised in the air in a shrug. “Nobody talked to me about it — other than you guys,” she said, and then exited with her top aides around her.
The video of one part of Clinton’s exchange with reporters is worth watching:
Notwithstanding Clinton’s claim that the press is the only entity that seems to care about the email story, it seems fairly clear that the story is far more substantial than her dismissive tone would seem to suggest. The matter has already been referred to the Justice Department due to concerns about whether or not classified information was being transmitted in a manner that was forbidden by law. Shortly after that, it was reported that the FBI had been brought in to investigate the matter, a move that led Clinton to finally turn the server over to investigators after months of insisting that she would not do so. More recently, it’s been reported that the number of emails that may contain classified information had already reached more than 300, that Clinton had made use of a private company that may not have been cleared to handle government information at all to back the server up at its own location, and that said backup server was kept in an unsecured location in a closest in a bathroom of the company’s Colorado offices.
Throughout this whole time Clinton, and many of her supporters, have dismissed concerns regarding her private email server in much the same way as the Clintons have dismissed other questions that they have faced in the past. In yesterday’s press conference and in others that she’s had where this issue has come up, for example, Clinton has claimed that the only people who seem to care about this issue are Republicans on Capitol Hill and the press corps that follows her campaign around. In reality, several reporters have begun to note anecdotal reports of conversations with people who have shown up at Clinton rallies in the past several months who have said that they do find the whole episode troubling, and the fact that recent polling continues to show Clinton’s favorability and trustworthiness slipping significantly while a seemingly insignificant candidate like Bernie Sanders gains on her and a new poll that shows that even Donald Trump is closing the gap with her in a hypothetical General Election matchup, would seem to indicate that this isn’t the non-story that Clinton and her more loyal supporters would like to pretend that it is.
According to Politico, though, some of Clinton’s allies are becoming concerned about how the campaign is handling the issue:
As Hillary Clinton faces a new round of questions about her email use as secretary of state, some longtime allies are increasingly worried that she’s learned little from past scandals, and is falling back on her tendency to mount a legalistic defense that only encourages perceptions that she has something to hide.
A key concern is whether top campaign operatives new to Clinton’s orbit have enough influence in crafting her response to the email controversy. A source with inside knowledge of the Clinton campaign voiced concern that the candidate and her longtime attorney David Kendall are the only ones calling the shots — and can have a tin ear when it comes to the politics, rather than simply the legal status, of the email saga.
Others have expressed dismay at how testy Clinton appears when answering questions from the press with regard to her email. A news conference on Tuesday in Las Vegas grew heated as Clinton was grilled about whether or not she had tried to wipe her email server. Some were shocked that Clinton did not have a simple answer. “I don’t know, I have no idea,” she said. “Like with a cloth or something?” (On twitter, her spokesman responded immediately that Kendall had said months ago that the server was empty.)
Even Clinton’s staunch ally David Brock, founder of the rapid response organization Correct the Record, told POLITICO he has heard concerns from the donor class about how the barrage of headlines about criminal probes and FBI investigations are harming the campaign. He added that campaign surrogates — allies who appear on television to defend Clinton and explain the sometimes complicated facts about her email use — have sometimes done a poor job of presenting the argument to win what he deemed another wholly partisan fight.
Some Democratic strategists said their advice would have been to “get it out there, get it done with, get it behind you,” by turning over everything — emails, server, thumb drives — to the Justice Department months ago to move on. Instead, it was not until last week that Clinton agreed to turn over her server to DOJ.
The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, meanwhile, argues that, regardless of the legalities involved, Clinton’s fundamental error has been one that can best described as arrogance:
Clinton was no stranger to the rules of the federal government. She had to know that if she used a State Department account, her 60,000-plus e-mails would become part of the official record. She certainly knew, without any doubt, that her political opponents would delight in rummaging through her communications. Let’s be honest: Hillary and Bill Clinton do have enemies, lots of them, who show no compunction about launching unfair and vicious attacks. She must have wanted to make sure they never got the chance.
But all of that is beside the point. If you accept the job of secretary of state, you inevitably surrender some of your privacy. Any public official’s work-related e-mails are the modern equivalent of the letters, memos and diaries that fill the National Archives. They tell our nation’s history and belong to all of us. Even if your name is Clinton, you have no right to unilaterally decide what is included and what is not.
So I wish Hillary Clinton would be respectful enough to say, “I’m sorry. I was wrong.” I wish she wouldn’t insult our intelligence by claiming she only did what other secretaries of state had done. None of her predecessors, after all, went to the trouble and expense of a private e-mail server.
I wish she would explain why, after turning over to the State Department the e-mails she deemed work-related, she had the server professionally wiped clean. The explanation that she didn’t want people prying into private matters such as “planning for [daughter] Chelsea’s wedding . . . as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes” is unconvincing. Does she have some secret yoga move she doesn’t want the world to know about?
And I wish I could be sure that Clinton is now, finally, doing everything in her power to ensure that any extant e-mails are turned over to the State and Justice departments. Unfortunately, I can’t. She stonewalled for so long — there’s no other word for her stance — that recent pledges of openness and cooperation ring hollow.
If Clinton now has political problems because of the e-mails — or, potentially, even legal trouble — it’s her own doing.
Robinson is absolutely right, of course. Even leaving aside the point that the original decision to use a private email server rather than an email address provided by the government was, at the very least, irresponsible even if it wasn’t expressly forbidden by existing regulations, the way that Clinton has handled this story has only served to guarantee that it would continue to fester. Her original explanation for why she did this, that she didn’t want the inconvenience of having to carry two different mobile devices, something which many employees in government and private industry do on a regular basis, quite simply strained credulity. The further revelation that the people who were making the determination as to whether or not particular emails should be turned over to State Department after she left office were people solely loyal to Clinton, rather than State Department employees, makes it difficult to believe her protestations that she wants full disclosure of all of her “work-related” correspondence. She said from the beginning that she never used her private email to transmit or receive classified information, and now it seems clear that at the very least she may have received such information or that others who worked around her who also had accounts on the server may have done so. Rather than being open about this story from the beginning, Clinton has prevaricated and dodged. Now, with the contradictions piling up behind her and the Federal Bureau of Investigation involved in the matter, it’s fairly clear that this story isn’t going to go away any time soon. Indeed, when Clinton takes the stand later this year before the House Select Committee investigating the Benghazi attack, it’s likely that many of the questions will center on this issue. As Robinson says, Clinton has nobody but herself and her dismissive attitude to serious questions to blame for what happens at this point.
It’s not that Hillary Clinton has enemies, it’s that her enemies are incredibly stupid. I mean, there’s been no two people alive in American politics more investigated than Bill and Hillary Clinton. Not counting a couple of blowjobs, what exactly have we learned? Nothing. Even the blowjob was basically innocent. Despite who terrible and horrible the two of them must by their infernal nature be, what did they do to stop it? If Bill Clinton had anything of Nixon’s instinct in him, he would have been bugging Lewinsky’s apartment and would have broken in and stolen the stupid dress.
Compare them to George HW Bush, who pardoned Cap Weinberger. That’s real corruption. The Reagan government broke laws running guns to Iran in order to fund death squads in Nicaragua. They all believed they were above the law and they acted like it.
Or George W. Bush–most sane liberals assumed that he got into the baseball business because of his dad’s connections. They shrugged their shoulders and went on, because they had some sense of how the world works. The conservative reaction would have been to tie Bush into numerous drug deals and Enron and offshore money in the Cayman islands and then to go through decades of errata while asking ominously why Bush was not more forthcoming about what was really in his wastebasket on 3/8/90.
The proper response to the Clintons in 1993 would have been to shrug your shoulders and get on with the real work. But instead, misogyny and projection compelled you people to start attacking. And when nothing happened, the obvious answer–that you were childish idiots–had to be rejected, so you kept on attacking.
Honestly, it’s pretty clear that Hillary Clinton’s personal emails regarding money and her ambitions would be fodder for the people who believe that there’s a constitutional right for the Koch brothers to smother a state in dark money, or for a judge to take 500K from some far-right group and then rule that people connected to the same group were in no way in violation of the law. I don’t blame her for being cautious. She’s in to win the presidency, not flatter the broken half of the country and their pathetic mouthpieces.
@Modulo Myself:
Didn’t Romney say something similar? I think so.
This is the Benghazi story of the day, lots of accusations and claims of numerous crimes committed without any actual facts or proof mentioned.
I do think Hillary needs to get a narrative out in front of this instead of being in reactive mode.
I don’t think in the end it will amount to any more than Benghazi did, just a lot of sound and fury for the right wing to obsess over.
@Jack:
Romney was rejected because he was a man whose Horatio Alger-like rise from being a son of a governor and CEO to being a governor and CEO made his arrogance sound empty and unearned. The Clintons have earned their arrogance. They know who their enemies are and what they’re about. Mitt Romney knew nothing about the 47%.
@Modulo Myself:
It doesn’t hurt when you sell real estate and then steal it back from the buyers. Yeah, they earned it.
From what we have learned in the last few months Hillary’s sever in a closet in Colorado was just if not more secure than the constantly hacked government systems.At least she didn’t outsource her IT to a contractor in China with poorly trained and poorly vetted employees.
Well there just must be a huge scandal here – there is no way Fox would run all those screaming headlines unless there was… right?
@MikeSJ:
I disagree, I think this story has way more legs than most Democrats want to admit.
This email thing is toxic.
And it’s not even whether anything “illegal” or even unethical necessarily happened with the email. It’s the fact that setting up a private server in the first place was boneheaded. And more importantly, her dealings with the press about the issue over the past couple of days have been cringe worthy.
I’m a Democratic leaning Independent, but I’m sorry, I’m not buying the “it’s a vast right-wing conspiracy” excuse on this one. This is a symptom of the fact that Hillary Clinton is a deeply flawed candidate, and I don’t think she has the judgement or temperament to be a very good President. If by some chance she’s the Democratic nominee, I honestly think the Republicans have a good chance of winning, regardless of who they run.
I will not vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, no way no how. As such, I really hope she’s not the Democratic nominee.
@anjin-san:
Not for nothing, but Eugene Robinson, Bob Woodward, and Ron Fournier don’t work for Fox News, and they’re hardly what anyone would call politically conservative.
I’m sure you’re right. Benghaazziii™ is pretty well played out.
@Todd: I’m not a big fan of Hillary either but I would vote for her over any of the people in the Republican clown bus.
This “scandal” is about as close as you get to a zero-sum game in Washington. No minds are changed. No Democrat will vote Republican over this “scandal” and Republicans decided 22 years ago that they hated the Clintons. The potential problem is with turnout – will Democratic turnout be lower because of ‘Clinton Fatigue?’
Unless there is an email that shows that Hillary ordered security forces at Benghazi to stand down, it is likely nothing happens except for partisan hand wringing over “technical violations of the law,” the Clintons being “above the law,”and so forth.
The problem Republicans have is two-fold: (1) this is extremely early in the game and while Hillary might see approval ratings decline, Democrats aren’t going to change allegiance to the GOP, and (2) Republicans have been investigating the Clintons for 20 years and have run 8 “investigations” of Benghazi while claiming that the sky is falling – except for Republicans most people have tuned out this ambient noise.
To be sure some people might decide to sit this out – I won’t indulge that urge, the stakes are too high. QUESTION: Who would I rather have making nominations to the Supreme Court – Hillary Clinton or any of the 16 Republican possibilities? Do I want a Kagan or a Scalia-Alito-Thomas? Nope, not sitting this one out over email-servers.
I think her own comment on the matter pretty much sums it up…and applies directly to the OTB coverage of Clinton to date:
Clinton has done a bunch of policy speeches which got no play here.
@Ron Beasley: I’ll skip the Presidential line if she’s the nominee (relatively easy for me to say since I live in Arizona). But I won’t vote her. I think she’d be a horrible President, and more immediately, she’s a really bad candidate. I’m more and more worried there’s a reasonable chance the Democrats could lose the White House in 2016 … despite the Republican Clown car.
BTW, my opinion is not based on anything anybody is saying about her, or even the email issue itself. It’s a lot to do with that press conference in the video above. I can’t/won’t defend that. It’s the attitude. About as un-Presidential as I could imagine.
LOL, note to self: Any negative talk about Hillary Clinton gets down votes by the OTB commentariat 😀
OT…
More news from the “Well-Regulated Militia files:
http://www.newson6.com/story/29826547/man-accidentally-shoots-self-while-guarding-muslim-free-oktaha-gun-store?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Another anti-Hillary post from Doug Mataconis. As with any Republican, Doug will do anything to keep these issues alive and ignore all of the specific policy proposals she has advocated so far during this campaign. I will guess that Doug will ignore every other proposal she makes in the future. It is one thing to criticize HRC for the way she has handled the politics of this latest kerfuffle as Robinson did but another to state that she committed a crime or that there was a criminal referral as Doug did for which he has not apologized. Other than her tendency to display a bunker mentality when accused and the constant drumbeat of Republican faux outrage and selective leaks, HRC’s problem is as described by Jeff Toobin in the latest New Yorker: The government classifies everything including materials that have absolutely no relationship to national security. As to the trio Doug comments about, Eugene Robinson is no conservative but loves his face time on Morning Joe and the Sunday talk shows. Bob Woodward is a hack who was a cheerleader for GWB’s excellent Iraq adventure and for your libertarian buddy, Alan Greenspan. Ron Fournier is in competition with Maureen Dowd for the title of leading anti-HRC journalist and is an admitted fan boy of Karl Rove.
@al-Ameda:
I agree with this. I do not want a Republican nominating Supreme Court Justices. Which is why the Democrats need to nominate someone other than Hillary Clinton. Mark my words (bookmark this post and come back after election day to verify), if she’s the nominee she will lose. It makes me sad to say that given the alternative, but I honestly believe it. :-/
@Todd:
… for the record, I ‘up-voted’ you on one of your items, I believe it was the “despite the Republican clown car” post about 3 items upstream.
Like you, I’m not thrilled by the Hillary candidacy, however I’m not sitting this one out. After nearly 8 years of a toxic opposition party, I’m not voting to give them the keys to the entire federal government. In really simple terms: I’d rather have a Kagan nominated to the Court than a Scalia or a Thomas
@Doug Mataconis:
Ron Fournier? You Jest.
Woodward has biases that do not favor HRC as well – though he is nice to anyone who leaks to him.
@al-Ameda: I agree (about the court). Which is why I guess I’m glad I live in a State that won’t matter. For 8 years, I’ve been willing to defend President Obama, even when I didn’t personally agree with him. Because I trust him, and I think he’s got the perfect temperament for the job. I don’t want to ever have to be in a position where I feel obligated to defend Hillary Clinton. She’s got all the ethical issue that her husband (who I liked) had … but without the ability to talk her way out of it. Bill was LIKEABLE, no matter what he did. Hillary is just the opposite. There’s good reasons she lost the primary in 2008, and really nothing much has changed (about her) this time .. other than the feeling that any potential alternatives might not be totally “viable”.
@Todd:
Oh. I definitely think that Democrats might lose this election, in fact the only energy that might avert a loss is the “First Female President” (FFP) thing. I think that there is definitely fatigue out there and (rightly or wrongly) Republicans will benefit from it.
I’m not sure whom else Democrats could nominate that would have broad appeal within the Democratic Party – Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders? Both seem to me to be left populists and I’m not sure that there are as many of those types as there are right populists. Warren might get some of the FFP juice, but she’s nearly as dull as Hillary as a speaker.
@Todd:
The “it’s a lot” phrase suggests that your opinion was just formulated in the past 24 hours. Is that so? Or had you already formed your opinion before the email issue?
@al-Ameda:
@Todd:
I don’t think it’s reflexive down-voting. My guess is that us on the left will vote for Hillary because the policies she advocates and the supreme court justices she would appoint are more likely to be aligned with our values than a Republican president. If I have to endure her bad attitude at a press conference, that’s a small price to pay 😉
@Bob @ Youngstown:
I already didn’t much care for her, but was willing (and I’ve said so in these comments plenty of times) to vote for her if she was the nominee. That video really did seal the deal for me. There’s just something about her. I can’t stand powerful people who play the victim. Don’t get me wrong, there’s been plenty of people out to get Hillary Clinton for a long time. But I think in this case, it’s a largely self-inflicted wound, and her trying to get out of it by playing the victim card just makes me mad. I hate to sound all like the Obama haters, but if I had to pick out a word that turns me off so much, it’s the arrogance. Go listen to the part in the video where she talks about the private emails, and how that’s her business, and nobody has a right to see those. Technically it may be correct (although I think there’s a fairly strong argument that since she mixed business and personal on the same server, they really should ALL be fair game), but politically it’s a really dumb answer .. especially the way she said it.
That video is really bad. She comes off like an asshole. What, did someone strangle a dog in front of her before this press conference?
Which is weird because I thought she did rather well with the candid talk in the video with the BLM folks. They can’t be separated by that much time.
For those who say Clinton should have done something different about this, or the way she handled Benghazi, or any other Fox issue, I think you may be misunderstanding the dynamic. It’s not a question of whether she could have avoided this or that “scandal”. The Republican smear machine and the MSM will absolutely have a “scandal” about Clinton. And one of the talking points most effective with Democrats is “There might not be anything illegal here, but she should have known better and it indicates a failure in not anticipating the fallout” But that’s a false argument. There WILL be a “scandal”. There WILL be fallout. If it is not this it will be something else.
Remember how the Republican smear machine successfully turned John Kerry’s purple hearts into a liability? How they made a liability of Al Gore’s very active chairmanship of the committee that commercialized the Internet? If you fall for the “she should have know better” line, well, I’m reminded of what poker sharks say: “If you look around the table and can’t identify the sucker, it means its you.”
@Todd:
Well, she’s right to be arrogant. She’s a politician. She’s ambitious. That’s it. There’s no ‘there’ there. The whole thing is abusive. It’s hard not see it as somehow going after the woman who exceeded her station. I don’t like Hillary Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy and I think she’s corny and annoying, but no more so that any politician in a bubble working the normal folks angle. (Obama, bless him, had such expressive disdain for this.)
I also think given how grotesque America has become–from Trump and Scott Walker down–that her attitude will barely be a factor. This is 2015. The establishment sounds as tasteless as the slumlord.
@Modulo Myself: what exactly have we learned? Nothing.
Actually, we learned a good bit. People went to prison over Whitewater. Bill Clinton was found to have committed perjury. Several other things as well, though none of them rose to the Constitutional crisis level of Iran-Contra or Watergate.
We also learned that Bill Clinton is a pretty despicable human being in many respects and that some people care a lot more about beating Republicans in a dick-measuring contest than they do about profound and long-lasting damage done to the Democratic Party and the liberal political movement.
And we also learned that “the cover up is worse than the crime” and other good government/citizenship stuff is just malarkey. Power and importance is all that matters. If you are powerful and important, like Bill Clinton, people will defend you no matter what. If you are not powerful and unimportant, like Anthony Weiner, the same people will happily destroy you for far less serious offenses.
Mike
@Todd:
Really. It’s arrogant to think your personal emails should remain personal?
@Tillman: They can’t be separated by that much time.
Bill and Hillary’s life in politics is primarily about wanting to help people with their problems, much like Obama. When she can interact with folks on that level, she can be quite good. Politics is about more than wanting to help people and Hillary is shockingly bad at the basic skills politicians develop to deal with that larger, more complex environment.
Mike
@MarkedMan:
If she wanted personal emails, they should not have been on the same server as her official emails. If I send personal emails from my .mil account, I can’t go back later and claim privacy because they weren’t work related. Look, I’m onboard with the whole Benghazi thing being much ado about nothing, and I even somewhat doubt there’s really much “there” there when it comes to the classification of the emails part of this problem. But ultimately, setting herself up on a private server just feels fishy to begin with. It was a dumb move, and she’s (deservedly) paying the price for it now. It’s not like she didn’t know back in 2008 that she would be running for President. This whole thing should have been predictable … and if she, or whoever advised her to set up that server thought differently, then it’s a case of horrible judgement, which is just as bad.
Look, by all logic, in the “game” that our country’s politics has become, she’s on my “team”. But I guess I’m just not partisan enough to avoid calling it like I see it.
The Benghazi stuff is bullshit.
This is real … or at least potentially real.
@MBunge:
The people who went to prison over Whitewater defrauded Bill Clinton, or were tied into the shady Arkansas financial scene. Either Bill Clinton was not involved with any of this, or he was a super criminal who managed to cover all of his tracks and evade capture and erase all traces of the coverup.
As far as the perjury goes, for some reason an investigation into a failed S&L ended up with the President of the United States being asked under oath questions regarding his sex life. I would say it’s a measure of how ordinary and average Bill Clinton was as a politician that he ended up in that situation.
And with infidelity, I”m going to say that in many cases the crime is as bad as the coverup.
@Jack: You know, if you think there was evidence that they had done something wrong, Ken Starr would have indicted them? He indicted a pretty significant number of the political class of Arkansas in an attempt to flip them against the Clintons, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0391225/reviews. But “nothing” until the Lewinsky affair.
It was a misjudgement by Hilary. Its really simple to have two e-mail accounts, one official and one private. At the same time, I don’t think it quite the big deal that Doug makes it. There is accidental “spillage” on secured to non-secured accounts frequently. This would still be an investigation even if she had used non-secured State department E-mail account for that reason, e.g. classified information being in an non-secure, public e-mail account . As she herself acknowledge in the interview, what ever convenience she thought she was getting by doing it this way was a mistake. She also had a classified account which was a Government managed and controlled account, which by the way would the account that would have any damning or controversial information about Libya, Syria, TPP, etc.
She can’t unring the bell. I suspect that the primary reason she created a private server for her use as Secretary of State is that she did not want to be accused of using Government e-mail resources for private and or political purposes and believed or was advised that having everything in a private server would eliminate that accusation. Ha, ha, joke on her.
Doug, you’re a bad hack.
James is an even worse hack, because he at least has to pretend to academic standards, but fails miserably.
You will never be objective about the Clintons. Don’t ever try again. You strain credulity as it is with your biases.
I’ll bet you, without even looking, that you’ve already done more posts about Clinton than about Bush torture programs.
Priorities!
@Doug Mataconis:
“Eugene Robinson, Bob Woodward, and Ron Fournier don’t work for Fox News, and they’re hardly what anyone would call politically conservative.”
Getting 1 out of 3 right (Robinson) raises your usual batting average, Doug.
Woodward is the model of an establishment Republican with lots of contacts in the old boy network and a history of fawning over Republicans from Reagan to Greenspan to Bush the Younger. Fournier has a history of parroting Republican talking points and has been shown to receive private communications from Karl Rove suggesting what to cover.
@MarkedMan:
This is what I find so exhausting about politics. Here we are, 15 months from the election and the public has to listen to this continuing barrage of really minor elements. No wonder people tune out and don’t vote.
I remember going back to 1993, one month into the Clinton administration, when the steady drumbeat was going on then. It was relentless. It drives good people away on both sides.
Is it any coincidence that the top two poll getters on the Repub side (Trump and Carson) are those that are outsiders and have no record? This is what we deserve.
I’m like Todd and my presidential vote won’t really matter because I live in Texas but I’m discouraged nonetheless.
@Todd:
I personally doubt this. First, it’s long been conventional wisdom in Democratic circles that Gore did make this mistake, and Hillary of all people is likely to believe it since it’s a compliment to the Clinton magic. Second, the main reason Gore distanced himself from Clinton was because of the Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment; nothing comparable has happened to Obama (despite the whole Benghazi nonsense), so she doesn’t have any reason to worry about guilt by association with the president.
@Jack:
Gee…if you have proof of that you should contact Ken Starr.
But I remember that you small-government, frivolous-lawsuit-reform, fiscally-conservative kind of guys spent years of Government time and millions of dollars of Government money trying to hang something, anything, on the Clinton’s…and all you came up with was a extra-marital blow job.
If on the other hand you are making something up to rationalize your irrational hate of the Clinton’s…maybe you need professional help. Obamacare will likely cover it.
@Scott: The Clintons are not ‘good people’. Driving them off from anywhere should be a goal.
@bandit:
This kind of nonsensical comment that creeps into and debilitates our political system. The Clintons are not perfect but they are not evil and nefarious. The left does it also BTW (e.g., Bush crime family). I’m just sick of it.
I give you the utter lack of charisma Hillary has as well as her lacking the all important “schmooze” factor that Bill and Obama (and Dubya) had. All in all she’s a terrible candidate. She reminds me of Dukakis and Kerry in many ways.
I still don’t understand why she hasn’t had professional voice and public speaking training. It’s not due to lack of money or access to the best in the business. I think she doesn’t understand how off putting she sounds to many people. (I will be voting for her and donating as well so I mean this as constructive criticism)
The key for me is this: President Walker vs President Hillary. Which is more likely to go to war with Iran? My bet is on Walker or any of the Republican candidates for that matter. I don’t think the risk is zero with Hillary but hopefully she understands it won’t be a 30 day cakewalk and we won’t be greeted as “liberators”
I’m not convinced any of the rightwingers understands this. If God Forbid Walker became president I’d expect an Iranian war costing trillions with 10K+ U.S. troops dead and 100K+ seriously wounded. Not in the least hundreds of thousands of dead Iranian men, women and children.
That’s a lot of people to see dead just because someone lacks charisma and is a terrible, arrogant politician with a poor speaking voice.
@Todd: Okay, I’m confused. I don’t comment here often, but I do read comments and generally agree with you. However, I just absolutely don’t see what you and couple others say you see in this video – that HRC comes across as arrogant or an asshole.
Maybe it’s because I’m a 50 year old woman (married with kids and full-time career in a traditionally male field), but at worst she strikes me as tired and trying to remain polite in answering someone who won’t let her finish and keeps trying to talk past her. She answers calmly even if a bit of irritation comes through. If a male candidate (esp a Republican one) had said exactly the same things in exactly the same way, he’d be called ‘firm’ or ‘unintimidated’ (see Scott Walker), not ‘testy’. Certainly not arrogant.
I really wonder how much of your perception of her here is because she’s female because I have not seen any other women react to the video this way. Now, note that I’m not saying you’re sexist or whatever. I don’t think you are. I do think there are certain ideas of how women ought to speak and present themselves that are ingrained, particularly in people over 40 (I’ve noticed my daughter’s generation in general does not perceive things the same way).
Maybe that is cause for concern as to her electability, or maybe it isn’t, but it absolutely doesn’t strike me as a reason to say she’s unsuited to be president.
@bookdragon: Very to the point. Please comment more often. If you have time.
@Scott: What is the “Bush Crime Family” meme? I haven’t heard of it.
@bookdragon:
This is really good. I think there’s going to be a lot of panic in this election about the fact that Hillary Clinton might be likable enough or maybe even purely likable because of her attitude. That’s why I don’t entirely trust the unfavorable numbers for her. I don’t like Hillary Clinton as a candidate, but I can listen to her without losing it. I think there’s going to be a significant gap in these two types of perceptions. Unfortunately for the GOP the people who can’t handle a word she says are going to run their side. It makes me wonder if this election will be as close as the last two.
Wouldn’t it be hilarious if somehow the herd runs free from the wranglers and Bush isn’t anointed the nominee?
I can’t wait for the pretzel logic Doug and James will employ to justify their vote for Cruz or Trump.
But she had this email server!!!
@MarkedMan: Revolves around oil, middle east, Saudis. In some people’s minds, basic business and government networking is conspiracy to commit absolute corruption and absolutely criminal. Cheney and Halliburton would be a better example.
@Scott:
You know, waging an unnecessary war tends to lead people to ask questions about why it was waged. So to with trying to conceal Saudi involvement in 9/11.
Stipulate that the Bush family was not evil. Because they are who they are, they have been neck deep in some of the shadiest stuff that has happened in this country (the CIA, Iran-Contra, the second Iraq War).
Meanwhile people who think the Clintons are evil have only Vince Foster to point to.
It’s a disservice to everybody involved to pretend it’s the same.
The problem is not the emails. I do agree that public archives are very important, both for historical reasons and for accountability. But Hillary´s response has been terrible. She is being condescending and arrogant. She should have admitted that she was wrong and then handed all the emails. We would not be talking about that today.
@gVOR08:
That automatically disqualifies her around here. 😉
@bookdragon: I specifically said she came off like an asshole because assholes are not limited by gender.
But the comparison to the BLM video is the important part. She’s demonstrating the exact same qualities when she’s talking to the BLM folks as to the press in each video. She’s testy (or is it tetchy?) in general — that’s just her, I’ve known plenty of people similar — but she respected the viewpoint of the BLM folks, and it led to what Larry Wilmore’s writing staff had to admit was a rather authentic moment. In this, she’s showing contempt for the line of questioning. She’s already paranoid about media conspiracies.
She’s pulling a Belichick, and Belichick is the most exemplary of modern assholes.
As somebody who respects Hillary Clinton quite a lot, I find it dismaying to watch the Democrats swallow the Republican line about her with scarcely a murmur. The right owns the definition of HRC now, owns the whole narrative of her essential untrustworthiness and sneakiness, and there is virtually no pushback from the left. The press hardly covered her incredibly dynamic and well-received speech in Iowa; her extremely good dialogue with the BLM representatives was downplayed or relentlessly misrepresented. All anybody talks about is the ridiculous e-mail issue, the kind of thing that received barely a raised eyebrow when any other politician did it.
Not only have the Dems swallowed the Republican narrative, they’ve gotten to the point of repeating it. They will lose the election an will wonder what happened. How did America’s most admired woman, year after year in the 2000’s, become America’s least trusted politician?
(sorry if this message is a bit incoherent, am writing in the midst of a conference session…)
@Andre Kenji:
Funny how when a considerable segment of our populace look at Donald Trump (or John McCain, or Mitt Romney, or Barack Obama, ad infinitum), those are considered assets.
@ElizaJane:
Because she is that Clinton woman. You have to remember the GOP has been banging this drum for over 2 decades.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Goodness, I wonder why that could be. See this analysis from “Hillary Men”:
http://www.hillarymen.com/latest/2016-gender-bias-thesaurus
@OzarkHillbilly: Trump has very large rejection among Women, besides that, Romney and McCain were not elected for some reason. Besides that, that´s a low bar.
@Tillman:
@OzarkHillbilly:
Quite frankly, I prefer leaders who are a bit arrogant and sure of themselves. I hope Clinton continues this trend and displays strength. She is not going to earn respect by being milktoast. I want her to be able to take a punch and swing back.
@MikeSJ:
This is exactly why I think this scandal is helping her, given that it’s a great big nothing burger that the anti-Clintonites are lathering up about. I’ve been saying for a while that Clinton’s biggest drawback is that she is kind of boring. She’s a wonk and doesn’t have a lot of time for nonsense. I’m a supporter, but understand people want someone personable as a leader. But the right railing against her and calling her arrogant (because they know better than to say “uppity woman”) kind of inoculate her. When the larger voting public starts to become aware of her their reaction will be “hey she’s not so bad after all” rather than “hmm, kind of dry”. The former is much better for her than the latter.
@bookdragon:
“Don’t you think she looks tired?”
Ah, Doctor Who, always appropriate. The Doctor manages to ruin Harriet’s political career with just those 6 words. Because women are never held to the same standards as men, much to our deteriment. People are this thread as calling Hillary arrogant over emails while Trump, self-proclaimed King of All A-holes, is declaring he’s going to force a soverign nation to pay for a construction project they oppose because his macho self said so.
We’re going to see more of this. She will be called bitchy, pushy, frigid, arrogant, self-absorbed, conceited, cold-hearted, loud, unladylike. There will be comments on her clothes, hair, weight, bags under her eyes, wrinkles. Her actions will be questioned through a lens the other males won’t, not even the Democratic competitors. Her health and age will be doubted, despite the fact that Trump is actually older then her (October 26, 1947 vs June 14, 1946) – many of them are very close in age like Carson and Bush.
My fellow Whoivans and I have a bottle of vodka on reserve for the first time FOX specifically states she looks “tired”. We’re going to down it, watch “The Christmas Invasion” and ponder why women have to put up with this crap. You’re welcome to join us 🙂
@KM: One of the reasons why if I ever build my Space Elevator I’m going to be as arrogant as Donald Trump about it and shove the double-standard back in the face of anyone who complains about my demeanor.
@bookdragon: @ElizaJane: @KM:
Thank you all for reminding us that there can be a double standard concerning women in the public sphere whether it is about looks, speech, proper behavior, etc. I, for one, need reminding often. I could blame my wife since she’s been busy lately to call me out. But that would be wrong also, wouldn’t it?
It was reported that two of her emails were actually at intel level TS-SCI. If true, she has committed a very serious breach of security that would be prosecuted to the fullest if a normal person did it. Whether it was marked TS-SCI or not makes no difference, since she should have been fully aware of the security level and the sources of the information. The SOS is fully briefed on key intel sources, so there is absolutely no excuse for this breach.
@mannning:
And where was this reported?
@Scott:
No problem, my friend.. Everyone in society need a reminder on something once in a while – we all get way too comfortable with our paradigms so a friendly poke to alert someone of unintentional asshattery is just a good public service to indulge in. My good deed for the day.
FYI – It’s when we have to take the Clue Bat to a guy’s skull a couple of times that women tend to start taking it personally and holding it against you. And if we have to break out the Clue Tank and back it over someone a few times, they’re approaching lost cause status. At this point Trump needs the equivalent of Clue Fat Boy and Little Man to make a dent…..
@grumpy realist:
Dibs on first trip up!!
@mannning:
By whom?
@mannning:
hahahahahahahahahahaha….
I found this on the FreeRepublic…
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3323528/posts
which links to the Daily Caller…
http://dailycaller.com/2015/08/11/top-secret-emails-stored-in-hillary-clintons-private-server/
Nice sourcing there, Manning. I see you read quality propaganda.
Sweater Vest, Comb-over, Glasses…we do the same superficial analysis about all of our candidates.
@MikeSJ:
I don’t see her that way. For one thing, I think she’s a lot more proactive in responding to attacks than those two were, and a far more aggressive campaigner, too. Remember the 2004 Democratic Convention? Right at the height of the awful Bush presidency, and they hardly attacked the Bush Administration at all–almost the entire convention was a congratulatory exercise toward Kerry and his military service. It was the political equivalent of willfully sticking a “Kick me” sign to your back. And it was about as un-Hillary-like as you can get.
It’s true that the candidates who have won presidential elections in the modern age have generally been the ones perceived as more “charismatic,” “telegenic,” and so on, while the losers have tended to be a bit “boring.” We well remember the charm and public speaking abilities of Reagan, Clinton, and Obama, contrasted with the awkwardness of Dukakis, Dole, Gore, Romney, and so on. But this tendency is a lot less than meets the eye, and it speaks to the way political junkies ascribe far more power to candidates’ personalities than is probably the case.
The 2000 election is instructive. Despite the fact that Gore got half a million more votes than his opponent, and despite the fact that even his “defeat” in the Electoral College was highly questionable, there has been no shortage of diagnoses over the past few decades about “why Gore lost.” I call this the Gore Fallacy. It is a major fallacy and reflects the lazy thinking that goes into so much post-election analysis–particularly the habit of treating elections as all-or-nothing events, where one factor can explain it all, and which made the election’s outcome inevitable. In reality, election outcomes are a result of many factors, and when an election is very narrow (as in 1960, 1976, 2000, 2004), you have to be very cautious about treating it as if it were somehow foreordained. Yet this is just what most analysis does.
It’s like that story about someone approaching Robert Kennedy after the 1960 election and telling him “You’re a genius!” and he replied “Change 60,000 votes and I’m a bum.”
Indeed, for those who think personality is all that matters in presidential politics, I have just three words: “Richard E. Nixon.”
@Tillman:
This strikes me as another instance where the power balance is so skewed, it turns the whole thing absurd. How in the hell do we accept a press in this country designed not to inform, but to score points?
Of course, she respected the BLM folks. They were confronting her, but doing so respectfully, so she heard them out and made her responses. Some of those responses came off as defensive, but they were asking her to accept some accountability for the racial environment in this country and it’s a rare person indeed who can accept that kind of accusation with grace. All the same, it was a conversation with both parties contributing mostly as equals.
On the other hand, the reporter was treating her with contempt in an obvious attempt to get her on the record admitting to “wiping” the server. She answers and each time he comes right back to the same question – but did you wipe the server? – her answers completely irrelevant to what the reporter would ask next. And one must bear in mind that this was not an isolated instance, but pretty much par for the course for every press availability Mrs. Clinton has held in the last 25 years.
Clinton sought to start her campaign by engaging directly with voters, but she was met almost instantly with the press whining that she was avoiding them. She’s spoken repeatedly on policy and she can’t get any of that aired on the news or posted about on the internet. Of course she’s frustrated and “testy.” I’d be livid!! She’s trying to talk about important things and the press has decided to focus on the most unimportant crap imaginable.
I completely understand that this is the way things are and any politician hoping to succeed has got to build the skills necessary to navigate the morass that passes for “journalism” these days. But, the public doesn’t give into this relentless garbage.
Hillary came off as arrogant talking to reporters on TV and that’s disqualifying? I fear for us all.
@mannning:
This is exactly why Dems/Clinton supporters are suckers for even engaging. As far as I know, no credible source has said that she even received emails at this level, much less sent them. All we know from credible sources is that none of the emails checked had any markings on them, but there is now a dispute as to whether four of them should be retroactively classified. The report in the NY Times (?) is that they concern an email discussion of a broadcast news report so it seems not to be anything that someone should have assumed was classified even if it wasn’t labeled as such.
So bottom line, and despite what anyone said on this list, there is no evidence that she sent any classified email over this channel or even that she received it. She has publicly stated she did not use email at all for classified material. I don’t know what else the foreign service people use but knowing the speed our government adapts new technology, it’s probably carrier pigeons…
@Todd:
Look, Todd, you and I know that government employees send and receive personal emails on their government account. Most of the time, no one cares.
We also know for a fact that Colin Powell, Clinton’s predecessor (1) used his personal email top conduct SoS business (2) deleted all his personal emails upon leaving the SoS position.Now I (and I suspect you) have problems with Powell’s tenure as SoS, but I (and I suspect you) have zero problems with his email policy. Why is Clinton different?
I’ll tell you why-because it’s Hillary Clinton and because the Republicans are busy whipping this into a faux scandal.
Note that neither Doug or James has said one word about Powell’s email policy, other than to excuse it as being somehow different, because reasons. Now Powell helped lie us into a war that cost 4000 American dead. If we should be concerned about anyone’s email policy , it should be Powell. Yet somehow we are concerned about Clinton, who did what exactly that was so nefarious or illegal? Actually, no one can say.
Where there’s smoke, there’s a smoke machine.If you are concerned about her attitude, attitudes aren’t facts, and even people with bad attitudes can be the victim of a witch hunt. Think about that.
Todd, I feel your pain. I am an old New Deal liberal (borderline Marxist) who hates the GOP (and would literally ban them if I could be King for a day) and I get “flamed” on OTB when i dare mention that the Clintons are plutocrats and have zero interest in the current middle class destruction which Bill helped immensely by sucking up to the Wingnut Congress and signing welfare “reform”, insane prison sentences for drugs, and of course the Gramm Bliley Leach Act which did away with Glass Steagall and ushered in the era of unregulated derivative trading.
But, hey, “I didn’t have sex with that woman” was no doubt comforting to the kool aid drinkers as is “move along, this server business is no big deal. Colin Powell did it”.
Just to prove how worthless she is as a candidate, most people will vote purely on the Supreme court appointees issue and not on her policies or character.
She is a hawk, did not comment on the Alaska drilling until Obama announced it (2 years in the making) and has not publicly opposed Keystone.
The Clinton playbook is simple: Cheat until you’re caught. Then lie about it hoping the truth is not found out. Then say “everybody does it” and let the chorus attack the accusers when you are found guilty. The sad thing is IT WORKS. Just look at all the HRC sycophants defending her.
@the Q:
It is an odd understanding of Marx that places you on the barricades in order to defend the middle class from capital.
@bookdragon:
I’m going to be blunt about this-I think this is a sausage problem. God forbid a woman running for President not be polite and deferential at all times, even when dismissing what should be dismissed. Some of the sausages here-and let’s face it we are mostly sausages , including every front pager-seem to feel this way, apparently.
When she said that even if she used a .gov address, the Republicans and reporters would be asking the same questions, she was speaking the absolute truth-a fact glided over by both Mr. Robinson and Mr. Mataconis.
Let’s rewind tape. Let’s say she had followed “policy” -a policy that was non-existent during her time in office, lest we forget-and conducted government business using a .gov account and had a private account for private email, scrupulously doing what Colin Powell for one did not.
Is there any doubt that the Republicans would be combing her .gov emails, looking for technical classification violations? Is there also any doubt that the Republicans would be calling on her to turn over her private emails and private server, in order to “ensure” that she did not receive classified emails on her private server?
You would have to be the biggest dunce in Dunce Town not to believe that the Republicans would not do do this. So Clinton is right, and rightly exasperated that the press is buying this.
I reiterate the above requests that you post more often-if only to get more of the non sausage point of view.
@al-Ameda:
But without the baggage. Warren would be a decent choice, but I don’t think she’s running.
@MarkedMan: I think if you go to a site like “Freedom Now,” you can get links to “Bush Crime Family.” A friend from Korea has used the term and I’ve seen it before, but I don’t slog through the muck on either wing enough to get you closer.
@Kylopod:
And of course one of the problems with her being an aggressive campaigner is that she is not as sweet and demure as some people think she should be. How soon do you think it will be before people start using the B word to describe her attitude and her responses?
Here is a Bob Somerby quote via Kevin Drum, that I think sums this up pretty well:
And here is Drum’s synopsis which, again, I think is dead on:
@ElizaJane: Look, we do get it, but Hilliary’s history with “tetchy-ness” (I hope you don’t mind the borrow, Tillman) goes all the way back to “didn’t stay home baking cookies” during the 1992 campaign. The GOP didn’t invent the drum. Hillary has the same sort of personal qualities that other alpha-types do. And she hasn’t been particularly good at turning the lemons in to lemonade, lemon drops, or lemon bars. It comes with the territory if you want to support Hillary.
(To Webmaster: I wish you’d put the Turing test before the “post comment” button–in the manner of most websites that use one. 🙁 )
@George:
Haven’t you heard about her falsely claiming Native American heritage, and how that’s somehow proof that she is not fit to hold office? Where the mighty right wing propaganda machine is concerned, there is no such thing as a Democratic presidential candidate having “no baggage”.
Heck that was supposed to be one of the advantages of Obama and before you could say Reverend Wright …
What irredeemable hacks Doug and James have revealed themselves to be, time and time and time again. Why do I keep coming here?
@MarkedMan:
Hillary nailed it when she said: “If they can’t attack you on the issues, they attack you on this stuff”.
Take this blog for instance. Hillary has given several confident, meaty policy speeches and has recently had a substantive encounter with the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Yet we have not had one post about Clinton’s policy views-and a gajillion about email.
It seems like “The Online Journal about Politics and Foreign Policy” has become the “Online Journal about Email Policy”-at least with regard to the Clintons.
I dunno, maybe the Clinton policies are so perfect that none of the front pagers see a need to discuss them.
@stonetools:
I’m betting about 20 years ago.
@DA:
For the scintillating comment threads. And because James and Doug (I know, libertarian, whatever), despite their biases are some of the best spokespersons for the Republican side we’ve been able to find. They’re rational, knowledgeable and articulate; due to which I’m not sure they represent any currently active faction in the Party. And they’re both evolving. Want to start a pool on what date one of them confesses he’ll actually vote for Clinton?
@gVOR08:
8 years of Dubya had no effect whatsoever so I think you’re in fairy tale land here.
@bookdragon:
Hi, I appreciate your thoughts. You know, I’m a big proponent of the idea that we all have our biases and see things through the lens of our own experience, so it’s certainly possible that may be a small part of it. However, I can honestly say that I would have had no problem with the idea of Elizabeth Warren running … and I do not have the same reaction when she gets “testy” with the press. Up until 2 years ago, while I was active duty, I voted in Florida. I was a strong supporter of Alex Sink’s run for governor. So I think on balance, for me it’s more of a Hillary Clinton thing than a woman thing.
Yes, I believe there is cause for concern. I am not an anomaly. I know more than a few other people (in States that may matter) who, like myself, are inclined to vote Democrat most of the time, but just can’t get excited about the prospect of a President Hillary Clinton.
@Kylopod:
Gore lost in 2000 because he ran a really bad campaign. Distancing himself from Bill Clinton (despite the Lewinsky scandal) was a fatal mistake. That election should have never been close enough to be stolen in the first place.
BTW, for comparison sake, and to somewhat defend myself when it comes to the possibility of sexism playing a part in my feeling about Hillary Clinton; the soft rumor recently about Gore considering if it might be feasible to jump in the 2016 race evokes almost the same reaction for me …. oh please no!!!! .. he would increase the chances of the Democrats losing again too. (IMO)
@Todd: Well, I have the same feeling about Hillary’s techiness that I don’t have with Elizabeth Warren’s. Maybe it’s because I know that Warren has a solid history of intellectual firepower behind her, while Hillary comes off as a brilliant woman who has tried to ride her husband’s coattails into the White House but hasn’t ever really staked out her own area of expertise, notwithstanding her time at Foggy Bottom.
I would feel much better voting for Hillary had she run a state as Governor for a few years. She comes off more Mary Stuart than Elizabeth Tudor, to use a historical analogy.
(And I’m a woman, so there’s that.)
@Todd:
There’s a lot of cross-over with commentors here and at Panglossian Democratic propaganda website BalloonJuice.
Critical thinking allowed only against Republicans.
@MarkedMan:
Facts are stubborn, but they just don’t win out over gut impressions. Because the email affair feels fishy to Todd and the Q just knows she’s cheating and just hasn’t been caught.
And everyone who thinks otherwise is just a sycophant. Geez, who can argue with that?
@Todd:
Todd, can you even hear what that sounds like? “It’s not about whether she actually did anything wrong — it’s about…” What? What is it about? I still can’t figure that out. I hear lots of complaints about optics, and about attitude, and about failure to be warm and fuzzy — all of which still adds up to nothing relevant to either ethics or leadership ability.
If she didn’t do anything illegal, unethical, or unprecedented, then what the heck is the problem? Can someone explain it to me in concrete terms that make it clear why this thing she did is so much more heinous and important than embroiling the US in unwinnable wars, torturing people, bankrupting the nation, or wanting to create a new Trail of Tears?
@DrDaveT: I can hear myself, and yes it may not be totally rational. But I keep coming back to the thought that just having a separate email server was boneheaded to begin with. While I’m still on board with the idea that nothing intentionally illegal may have been done on that server, with the FBI now digging around in this matter, it wouldn’t shock me if something at least “technically problematic” arises at some point.
As a potential “crime”, I don’t view this as particularly “heinous” or “important”. But as a political issue, I think it’s naive to expect that this is all just going to blow over, or that it’s no different from the obviously partisan witch hunts like Benghazi.
Scott F can mock me all he wants, but this just “feels” different … and I’ve generally got pretty good instincts about these things. I’m mainly glad that this is all happening now, rather than next summer after she was already the nominee.
I don’t want to see a Republican in the White House. But while there’s still time, I also don’t want to see Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee … because I think she’s actually one of the riskier candidates when it comes to the potential for losing the general election.
@Ben Wolf: Interestingly, there also is some crossover in the comments of The American Conservative. I’d like to think that most people are multi dimensional, not reflexively left or right.
My first President USA vote was for George McGovern when I was 24. Since then the power to appoint Judges of the supreme Court has been the overriding factor when I have cast my ballot.
(So why do I have to fill in a current ye@r* box to comment on OTB?)
@Todd:
Keep in mind that the FBI has said that they are not investigating Hillary Clinton’s actions here; they are investigating whether emails that should have been marked as classified were sent unmarked to Hillary’s server. That distinction eludes Fox News, for obvious reasons.
This reminds me so much of the Al Gore thing, where the Republican sleaze bags successfully turned two things, one of them perhaps his greatest accomplishment, into a completely false narration of “Gore is a self aggrandizing serial exaggerator”. And the lazy MSM chewed it up and regurgitated it ad nauseum.
First, he ridiculously claimed the that he and his wife were the inspiration for the ’70’s bestselling book and smash movie “Love Story”. Man, how the all knowing press mocked him for that, spurred on by the Republican sleaze machine.
The reality? First, he never claimed it. When an MSM reporter asked him about it he simply said “I know there was an article about that in my home town paper” (not remotely an exact quote). But the truth is that his college roommate was the author of that book and did tell the home town reporter that Al Gore was the inspiration for the male protagonist. He didn’t say anything about Tipper, so there’s that. But bottom line, the lazy and cynical MSM were taken for a but-ride by the Republican sleaze machine because… Al Gore didn’t deny something that was true.
Second, he ridiculously claimed that he had invented the internet.
The truth: What he actually said was that he chaired the congressional committee that led to the creation of the internet. And in fact – he actually did chair the congressional committee that created the internet. And during the time he was promoting the transformation of DARPAnet into the Internet he was resoundingly mocked for being a nerd and a geek (before those were cool) and a pie in the sky dreamer. There were many competing network technologies – how could one created by the military and negotiated by the government ever succeed? But it did and he was an important part of the effort. And the MSM, lazy morons that they are, egged on by the Republican sleaze machine, laughed and laughed at him.
So is it any wonder that Hillary is impatient with the morons in the MSM? Or that old fogies like me adapt a “prove it” attitude? Frankly, I think way too many of the people on this thread succumb to the “well so many people are repeating that she’s sleazy, it must be true”. The most unethical thing proven thing Hillary has ever done was to get pissed at the White House travel agency head and demand he (she?) be fired. And that is pretty small potatoes.
@DrDaveT:
That was a week or two ago. Now they’ve got the server, and are looking into possible backups that may have been made; trying to recover the data, including that which was (apparently intentionally) erased.
That’s the other thing. I’m bothered by the fact that the “personal” emails were deleted rather than archived. This is not me being susceptible to the Republican smear machine, this is me thinking “wtf, I’ve got ‘personal’ emails from 15 years ago that I wouldn’t want to delete”. Even if there was a totally innocent reason for doing it (wiping the server), it certain feeds into the perception that there was something worth hiding. As a legal matter for a private citizen, ok, sure, she’s done nothing wrong. But as the presumptive nominee for a major party’s Presidential bid, perception matters. This is not a case of the Republicans, or the media, or whoever being “unfair” to Hillary Clinton. It’s a self-inflicted wound. And the “jokes” in the recent press conferences are just making it worse.
Bottom line, I don’t trust her judgement.
@KM: You got the Dr Who reference!
I may take you up on that vodka.
@Scott F.: I cannot possibly up-vote this enough. She showed disrespect for an obnoxious press guy who was obviously out to score points? Gee, how awful…
The day what’s become of our press deserves respect, I’ll consider the difference in her demeanor toward them and the BLM folks important.
@bookdragon: She showed disrespect for an obnoxious press guy who was obviously out to score points?
Being President is not the same thing as being a cable TV host.
Mike
Funny thing. As recently as even a week ago, if you’d put a gun to my head and forced me to predict who would be taking the Presidential oath of office in January 2017, I would have answered Hillary Clinton. Today, same gun to my head, (and mock me all you want), I’d probably (lamentedly) say Donald Trump.
… and that answer is not reflective of my wishes, or even what I think should happen in a “rational” world. It’s an indictment of the joke that the American political system has become. As much as people love to hate on the politicians, we tend to get pretty much what we deserve … and right now, the American voting public (as a whole) probably deserves Trump.
(btw, I think someone else already mentioned this in another thread, but go read Scott Adam’s blog http://blog.dilbert.com/ for some interesting thoughts on why Trump is having so much success, despite the conventional wisdom that he’s unelectable.). Politics = marketing .. and no matter what anyone thinks of Trump, there’s no denying he’s a master marketer.
@MBunge: Have you looked at the GOP candidates lately…?
@Todd: Wait, I’m confused again. You say:
“…Hillary Clinton is a deeply flawed candidate, and I don’t think she has the judgement or temperament to be a very good President.”
and in a later post wrt to the video:
“… It’s the attitude. About as un-Presidential as I could imagine.”
but you think Trump is a viable candidate?
@bookdragon: No, in a rational sense, I do not think Trump should be a viable candidate. But in the reality that is the American body politic at the moment, I think that Trump probably has a better chance of being elected than Hillary Clinton at this specific point in time. That may change down the line as further events unfold.
@gVOR08: Is November 4 2255 taken?
We (those who might be described at political junkies) make a mistake in thinking that elections (especially for President) really have all that much to do with “policy”. They don’t.
@C. Clavin:
I. Charles McCullough III, the inspector general for the intelligence community, said he has concluded two of Mrs. Clinton’s emails met the standard of “top secret/SCI level,” while other messages are still being scrutinized to see how secret they should have been.
Google Clinton TS-SCI for more reporting.
@Todd: My question was to the idea that HRC’s attitude was disqualifying and “About as un-Presidential as I could imagine.”
I simply don’t get how Trump comes across to you as more Presidential. I understand that you don’t like him and don’t want him as POTUS, so it’s even more baffling to me that his overblown arrogance is something you see as making him a winner while HRC’s much lower degree of arrogance makes her a weak candidate in your pov.
As to the marketing thing, yeah… people who remind me of used car salesmen don’t strike me as good candidates. Bigoted, misogynistic used car salesmen even less.
Again. maybe it’s a male v female reaction/perception. However women make up 51% of the electorate. If nothing else, at some point all the cr@p we’re seeing wrt to how HRC is treated differently will tick a lot of us off enough to make sure we get out and vote.
Correct. Link:
More here.
Yet another instance of conservatives showing off their ignorance while trying to be funny.
@bookdragon: I don’t think Trump is “Presidential” at all. But I also think that there is a vast percentage of the American people who don’t pay attention to, or frankly don’t care about what he specifically says .. they simply like the way he says it. Again, keeping in mind that I’m not a Republican, and I regularly mock my conservative friends for saying things like what I’m about to type … but Donald Trump would eviscerate Hillary Clinton in a televised debate … no doubt in my mind. (Bernie Sanders on the other hand, might be the one Democrat who could punch back effectively … at least personality, not necessarily policy wise).
As for the man vs. woman thing again; look, I would love to see a female President. By all rights, we almost certainly should have had at least one already. I just don’t think Hillary Clinton is the person who deserves to occupy that place in future history books.
mannning:
McCullough said this (pdf):
Also, you did not quote McCullough. You quoted Grassley.
@jukeboxgrad: On this specific subject, I’m actually closer to your side. See my previous comment (https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/hillary-clinton-turns-over-server-after-new-classified-emails-are-revealed/#comment-2030603) about how information in emails is (too) often over-classified.
That being said, from a non-partisan, purely logic based point of view, I do find it kind of baffling that much of what the SoS would have been communicating via email in an official capacity wasn’t being done via SIPRNet (the secure classified side). When I was in Iraq and Afghanistan, probably 95% of my daily communications took place on SIPR … and I’m just a weather guy … nothing I was doing is nearly as sensitive as State Department business.
@Todd: Look if it comes down to just one-liners and entertainment, only Al Franken could win against Trump. On any serious question about policy, Trump can’t explain his way out of a paper bag.
But wrt HRC I don’t think he’d win except among the MRA/gamergate crowd. It would be almost impossible for him to not come across as sexist and patronizing b/c that’s his base setting when talking to or about women. In the GOP debate he came across as a complete @ss to Megyn Kelly and that was the perception even among a lot of conservatives. He pulls anything like that in a national debate that moderates or independents are watching and he’s toast.
Now, I am going to object to this:
“As for the man vs. woman thing again; look, I would love to see a female President. By all rights, we almost certainly should have had at least one already. I just don’t think Hillary Clinton is the person who deserves to occupy that place in future history books.”
I object not because I love HRC (I voted for Obama in ’08), but because this is a prime example of the perfect being the enemy of good. Seriously, do ANY of the white male candidates really deserve to occupy a place as POTUS in the history books? Why does a woman have to be exceptional to qualify?
Someone recently described white privilege as really being permission to be average and screw up occasionally like a normal person without it being seen as defining your whole character or that of your whole race. I think something very similar could be said of male privilege and I, for one, am sick of going along with it.
@Todd:
You appear not to have understood what I said, because you’re committing the very fallacy I outlined.
Gore’s campaign blunders–which I agree were significant–cannot explain “why he lost.” Because he didn’t lose. As you point out, the election was stolen. And regardless of what happened in Florida, he got more votes than his opponent in the nation as a whole. Therefore, he wasn’t the “loser” in any meaningful sense other than that he wasn’t the one occupying the White House in the end.
Let’s put it this way. Imagine the following hypothetical: It’s the 2012 election, and the campaigns go exactly as they did in the real world except that in the end Obama faces a situation like Gore in 2000, where he wins the popular vote but badly designed ballots, a stopped recount, and a Supreme Court decision cause him to be denied an Electoral College victory by a hair.
If that had happened, I can tell you with full confidence that numerous commentators would say thereafter that “Obama lost because of his pathetic debate performance.” And they’d be making the same mistake you’re making now. It’s possible Obama lost votes because of his poor performance in the first debate, and if the election had turned out to be narrower for other reasons, that could have made all the difference. But that doesn’t mean that if the election gets stolen from him, you can fairly say that “he lost because of such-and-such blunder”–because it’s not accurate to say he lost in the first place.
Similarly, Gore would almost certainly have become president if he’d made some better campaign decisions. It’s also true he’d have become president if not for the Butterfly Ballot fiasco. Quite frankly, given that the election ended up coming down to 537 votes in Florida, it’s possible that something totally random like the weather affected the outcome.
I don’t think it is ever appropriate to say “Candidate X lost because of Y.” Election outcomes can never be reduced to one factor alone; they are always a complex tangle of factors affecting who comes out to the polls, and who each voter decides to pull the lever for. Every candidate in every election makes mistakes that lose potential votes. But there’s a tendency in post-election analysis to pretend as if the “winner” never made any mistakes, that the whole campaign was one big inexorable path to victory, and that there’s some sweeping “narrative” explaining why one candidate lost and the other won.
Take the 1960 election. All the conventional analysis acts as if Kennedy’s youthful charisma was the “reason” he beat the awkward Nixon. What this explanation overlooks is the fact that Kennedy still very nearly lost to Nixon. His charisma may have been enough to put him over the edge, but his victory wasn’t in any way inevitable. Nixon could easily have won despite his less-than-magnetic personality, and indeed he eventually did.
But conventional narratives like these have a powerful impact on the way political junkies think about elections, and I’ve always felt the 2000 election is sort of the ultimate reductio ad absurdum to this tendency. Everyone knows what really happened that year, yet people insist on diagnosing Gore as a conventional story of “defeat” with some grand explanation involving his stiffness, his campaign blunders, and his treatment by the media. I do agree there’s a lot of evidence he underperformed given the state of the economy and Clinton’s popularity. But “he did worse than he should have” is not a story anyone ever tells about candidates who made it to the White House, despite the fact that it may very well be true about many candidates who have won presidential elections. The fact that people continue to apply the “loser” label to someone who got more votes than his opponent shows how lazy and superficial so much of the analysis is.
@bookdragon: I don’t think Hillary Clinton is a very good candidate period … man or woman. I don’t think she needs to be “exceptional” to be elected as the first female President. But I also don’t think that someone who would be viewed as at least “flawed” even if she were a man, should somehow have a better chance of being elected simply because “it’s time” that we had a female President.
She always struck me as being the least slimy of the Clintons, and nothing has changed there. My personal dislike for Bill Clinton is matched only by my dislike for George W. Bush, Sarah Palin (although I also love her, as every dollar she pockets is a dollar that could have usefully opposed things I care about), and Adam Sandler.
Hillary is like able enough. The George Herbert Walker Bush of Democrats. A bit arrogant, a bit aloof, but genuinely wanting to help.
She’s arrogant, but that is a minor flaw in someone who wants to lead the free world.
And the email server is just boring and stupid. HillaryCare is more of a strike against her than that. This is weak sauce as far as imaginary Clinton scandals go.
@Kylopod: I base my assessment of Gore’s campaign at least partially on my recollections of my own feelings at the time. I voted for Gore (absentee in FL, no less), but I was not at all enthused about it, and I had my doubts about what type of President he might have been (certainly better than George W. Bush, no doubt). Hillary Clinton reminds me of Gore. That lack of enthusiasm, and the resultant potential to under-perform may end up being just enough to give us another disastrous Republican administration.
@Todd:
This is what confuses me about your position. You acknowledge that the likely republican candidates would be disastrous as president, yet because Hillary can come over as an arrogant ass to you you’re willing to sit on your hands in Florida of all places. You know you would much prefer her picks to the court, but you would sit on your hands and not vote for her in a swing state. I could understand if you lived in Massachusetts or Alabama where your lack of enthusiasm non-vote wouldn’t potentially matter even if you could cast it 100 times. Hopefully between now and when it really matters you’ll think more constructively on how much her coming across to you like an ass really matters in the big picture.
@Todd:
I agree. I’ve been warning my fellow Democrats about being too complacent about 2016 for some time. Here is what I wrote more than a year ago:
Still, I disagree with you about a couple of things: I think you overstate some of the reasons why Hillary is vulnerable, and I think you are wrong that she’s the weakest candidate in the field right now.
I plan to vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary. But I’m not convinced he’d be a stronger candidate in the general election than she would. Because of his self-identification as a “socialist,” he would be cast by the media as a McGovern-style extremist, and a lot of voters would eat it up, even those who agree with his positions. I don’t think his proven ability to excite crowds of white liberals is going to overcome that.
As for scandals, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Hillary is one of the most vetted candidates in history. Not only is she one of the best-known candidates, her activities have been scrutinized and investigated literally for decades, and if she had some real skeletons capable of destroying her career, they’d have been found by now. Of course whatever the Republicans throw at her the media will use to support their overarching narrative that she attracts “scandal,” and that may hurt her with some voters. But as stonetools pointed out earlier, no candidate is immune from “baggage,” as demonstrated by Elizabeth Warren’s “Native American” fiasco or Obama’s Rev. Wright. You never know how well a new candidate can handle the “scandals” that get thrown at them, but Hillary’s been handling it her whole career. The bottom line: there are likely to be fewer surprises with her than there would be with other candidates, despite the constant GOP belief that some smoking gun is about to emerge (or already has).
And I don’t think her boring-ness matters anywhere near as much as you seem to. Her commanding lead in the primaries isn’t because she’s been coronated, it’s because the party, by and large, likes her. That doesn’t automatically mean she wins with independents, but it does probably make her stronger than Sanders, Warren, and Biden who all would, I suspect, struggle to unite the different factions of the party–and who might have trouble with independents anyway.
@Grewgills: I’m not in Florida anymore. I am now an Arizona resident, so realistically, my vote for President doesn’t count for much anyway.
And really, at risk of making myself look kind of bad, if I’m totally honest, that initial post about “no way no how voting for Hillary Clinton” was probably a little exaggerated. Obviously if it was a choice between President Hillary Clinton or President Scott Walker for example, I would not discourage anybody from voting for Clinton … and in the privacy of my own election ballot, the only sure bet is that the (R) box will not be filled in.
All that being said, I stand by my assessment that this (email) issue has more legs than many Democrats want to admit. Fair or unfair, it’s not going away.
@Kylopod: I’m generally in agreement with your comment … and I’m open to the possibility that I may be wrong.
However, this:
It brings me back to the recent dealings with the press over the past couple of days, such as the video embedded in the post. That joke in response to the question about wiping the server: “what, like with a cloth or something?” then the smile. Horrid. Especially if anything at all even the least bit inappropriate is found by the FBI in the recovered data. Add in the snapchat joke from a day or two earlier, and it’s even worse.
After decades of dealing with these sort of crisis, she should be Much better at it.
… and she has been in the past.
Which leads me to wonder, why doesn’t she have better answers this time?
Again, I’ll risk being mocked for relying on “feel”. But this just doesn’t feel like it belongs lumped in with all the other Republican/media manufactured scandals. Whether it’s a particularly heavy shoe or not is definitely in question, but I’m fairly sure there’s still another shoe to drop in this story.
@Todd: All you’re describing sounds to me like very standard Hillary awkwardness. This is the same woman, remember, who coined the term “vast right-wing conspiracy” while the Lewinsky scandal was going on. (She was right, but the way she phrased it made her come off sounding like a kook.) And who can forget the comment about RFK being shot while she was still battling it out with Obama? Awkwardness is practically her middle name.
@MarkedMan: It is when you mix your public with your private on the same server in the same account. She should have had someone unconnected to her from the state department review all her emails and made the decisions about which to delete and which to forward to the state department. It looks hinky that only her aids made the decision.
Hard core Dems aren’t going to stay home because of this the damage comes from left leaning independents who may stay home or hold their nose and vote for the Repub candidate because of Clinton fatigue.
I don’t know if we’ll be able to recover Hillary’s emails, but my guess is that we’ll probably find some of Bill’s in the hacked Ashley Madison emails! 🙂
@bookdragon: Well, we’ve had the same problem with our first black president, night wahr? Barack Obama: Senator, J.D. from Harvard, married to a lovely brilliant wife with two beautiful little girls, background as community organizer—and just look at the trash that was thrown at him.
I wouldn’t mind Hillary as POTUS. I’ll vote for her as candidate. I think it’s quite possible that the Republicans are going to overreach on this email thing (as they did on Benghazi and all the rest).
But LORD does Hillary not have the nous of someone like Obama nor does she seem to understand how to deal with the American public. If she gets into the White House, it’s going to be because the other side will overreact in the wrong way AND because of the famous Clinton political machine. It’s not going to be because Hillary was able to glide into the position.
(I’m reminded of an analysis our Toastmaster Club did comparing Bill Clinton’s acceptance speech of the nomination as opposed to Bob Dole. It was eye-opening. Say what you want about Slick Willie, but he connects with his audience. Which is why Trump has quite a good chance.)
@Todd: I’m not arguing that she should be elected because she’s female, only responding to your argument that she isn’t of high enough caliber to ‘deserve’ to go into the history books as the first woman president.
I don’t know if she can win, but given a choice between her and any of the others, I’d vote for HRC regardless of gender. We’re focusing on one out take from a video (which is actually 7 minutes long and consists of reporters being incredibly disrespectful and asking the same question over and over and over again. I bet most of the guys running would have gotten ‘testy’ long before she did) but her speech at the Wing Ding was great, her interaction with a mother who slipped past the reporters and crowd to ask her about medical marijuana to treat her ill daughter was human and genuine. And, I know some folks who work at State. She is generally well thought of. See, for instance, this article by one of our former ambassadors:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/16/opinions/kounalakis-hillary-clinton-accomplishments/
I’d argue that HRC is a much better candidate and better qualified to be POTUS than anyone else running. Perfect? No. My dream candidate? No. But given the choices, if she were a man, I’d still be planning to vote for her.
Kudos to everybody.This has gone 126 comments and is still thoughtful and quite civil.
And @Todd:, I’m reminded of a comment I read many years ago, perhaps on OTB. The writer was bemoaning that Gore was not president. Said he’d seen Gore post-election at an event. Someone in the audience asked a good question and Gore responded ex temp in several well structured paragraphs. Deep knowledge and thoughtfulness tend to produce a somewhat stilted delivery. Trump, on the other hand, can’t finish a sentence without spinning off on a tangent. Maybe this is a cross we Dems bear as the reality based party. You only get one Bill Clinton in a century.
Your earlier comment about elections not being about policy is true, they’re about perceived tribal affiliation and turnout. The consequences, however, have a lot to do with policy. Think we’d still be ignoring AGW had Gore been elected? Or fought two decade long mismanaged wars?
@grumpy realist: I agree. HRC does not have any Bill’s charisma or easy charm. That makes her a poor campaigner in some ways, but let’s not forget that Bill wasn’t solely responsible for that Clinton political machine.
So wrt the comparison to Obama, I’ll add one more: like him, she cast by the other side and by the media as both weak and dangerously Machiavellian. Obama is for instance depicted as both weak and ineffectual …and a looming dictator about to round up dissenters and put them in FEMA re-education camps. HRC is a weak ineffectual candidate …and also a devious manipulator with a huge machine at her disposal.
Conflicting narratives much?
Totally OT, but it looks like you-know-who of the Family Research Council got caught paying for an account at Ashley Madison.
Schadenfreude–it’s not just for breakfast any more!
@grumpy realist: There’s another slug of coffee I have to clean off the monitor.
@grumpy realist :
Not just one, but two accounts!!! And this is totally thread-related as it goes back to the whole character, facts and feels discussion.
Now, since a presidential candidate has actively defended Duggar on his past “indiscretions” and given the prevalence of cheating, serial divorces and other sexual misconducts that God-fearing Middle America Should Not Approve Of in the current pool, this should be Megan Kelly’s next starter question for the debates.
And you know who DOESN’T have that problem? Hillary. Bill does of course, but that’s a different question (“why is she still married to him”?). Hillary Clinton, to my knowledge, has never had an extra martial affair, is still on her first marriage 40 years later, has no founded accusations of impropriety of that nature. It’s a tricky beast but if I were her, I would point out my staying power in a marriage through good and bad vs finding pretty trophy wife no. 4 when no. 3 gets a little worn around the edges. Speaks to good character, dontcha know……
The danger to Hillary of e-mailgate lies precisely in its fuzzy ambiguity. With Benghazi, there was a relatively clear narrative and you could state fairly clearly what Hillary did/did not do or should/should not have done. With e-mailgate nothing is terribly clear. It’s not like she was or was not passing secrets to the enemy. It’s just some vague thing about judgement and protocol. It can easily be made to sound questionable, problematic; the standard charges of “arrogant” and “sleazy” etc. can be thrown about even if there is nothing particular for them to stick to. They only have to stick to her.
@Todd:
I’m with you on this. I don’t have a strong sense of how this will play out, but there’s some danger here, Will Robinson.
And now I have to go see if Netflix has Lost In Space.
@grumpy realist: “…AND because of the famous Clinton political machine.”
Yes. I remember that guy – O-something-something – who was crushed like a bug in ’08, after daring to think that he could take on the Mighty Machine.
@ElizaJane: “The danger to Hillary of e-mailgate lies precisely in its fuzzy ambiguity. ”
No. That’s a problem, IMHO. With other scandals, the accusers can paint a picture – a false picture to be sure – of Something Bad.
Lee Atwater was right: when you are explaining, you are losing. And Hillary has been explaining a lot.
@grumpy realist:
You are dead right on this. I lived in NY when she was running for Senator there and this is exactly why the Repubs failed so miserably. There whole campaign consisted of painting here as this evil Machiavellian demon and when the general public started paying attention they just kept seeing this wonky, kind of boring hard worker. And the Repubs never changed their narrative. They just kept up an increasingly shrill drone of “But it’s Hillary!!! She’s the devil!!!”
@jukeboxgrad:
If you have any knowledge at all of the sensitivity of TS-SCI material, you would know several facts: 1) Lopping off the classification of a message before sending is a serious breach, 2) info over unsecure channelsis yet another serious breach; and 3) Holding the emails that are in fact TS-SCI in another poorly or unclassified sever is a third serious breach. Plus you would know that the receiver of such material actually knows the info I classified TS-SCI whether it is marked as such or not. SOS secretaries are totally briefed on the sources and methods of intel and their consequent classifications. Disclosure of the info and its source seriously harms national security, and can get people killed.
SOS is totally briefed on sources and methods of intel gathering and hence knows the classification inherent in a message regardless of marking.
Any junior employees of State cleared for TS-SCI would know that too.
Marshall put it better when the email whatsit first surfaced, and I essentially share the same opinion.
Anybody that has worked with Classified information before knows what Clinton did was wrong. What’s even more discouraging is we have people in this thread excusing this because it makes sense in the context of the violator’s future political aspirations. I guess we have to accept dysfunctional behavior from our Representatives because they have political futures to protect? Not me, I’m nobody’s boot licker or water carrier.
Im about sick of the “the other guy did it too” as an excuse for behavior not in the best interest of the Country. This whole thing would have went away has she said she violated policy and moved on. The SOS has and understanding of what’s classified and what isn’t–everybody that works with Classified does regardless to whether its marked or not. If you think anything is classified and is on an unsecured network…there is an obligation to report it. That’s the policy you sign when you get the clearances. Americans ought to have an issue with their State secrets being hosted on a private network that’s not subject to generally accepted practices of Data security–especially in this era of extremely sophisticated data thieves.
The bottom line is she violated established/acknowledge IT security policy regarding how classified data is transmitted and stored…for future Political considerations. Probably not a big deal if its acknowledged as a blunder. That she is choosing to expend political capital to fight this shows a lack of judgement. Obama jettisoned Rev Wright in a New York minute. HRC water carriers better wake us and understand that their candidate doesn’t have the cakewalk they think she has. Anybody that thinks her interaction with the BLM crowd resonated positively with young people of color (who supported Obama overwhelmingly) is delusional. @Todd has been speaking alot of good sense in this thread and the amount of downvotes are yet more proof that team blue kool-aid drinkers aren’t much more sophisticated than team red ones.
@Pharoah Narim:
No, the bottom line is that this is a lie. People keep repeating it, but it is simply not true. The data in question were not classified, and the policies you refer to did not exist at the time.
I’m still open to an argument that Hillary did something horribly wrong — but I know that it wasn’t failure to follow established IT policy, and I know it wasn’t mishandling of classified information. She has already been cleared of those allegations.
I think you’ve misunderstood the argument. The argument is not “Colin Powell did bad things too, so it’s OK”. The argument is “Colin Powell handled his email the same way, so it’s fatuous to say that “established IT policy” prohibited it.” See above.
mannning:
You are implicitly and belatedly admitting what you were too dishonest to mention earlier: none of the emails were marked as classified.
And your claim is ignorant nonsense. There is no such thing as “the classification inherent in a message.” If the classification status of every document was always inherently obvious, then we would not have an elaborate system for marking documents. Classification is a choice, and it happens because someone made a decision. Being “totally briefed on sources and methods of intel gathering” does not magically enable you to recognize that a certain name or number or fact has a particular classification status.
And speaking of dishonesty, I’m still waiting for you to explain why you quoted Grassley while falsely claiming that your quote was from someone else.
OK, 148 comments. Lets boil it down. HRC is Stalin. Any of the other wingnut candidates is Hitler.
Ok, we go with Stalin.
Now do you get what Todd and I are trying to convey?
Yes, I hate wingnuts, but I can’t gainsay the obvious corruption and sleaze of the Clinton machine. The sad thing is I will hold my brain and vote Dem since the other choice is not an option.
But, for all you knee jerk sychophants of HRC, this issue isn’t in a vacuum, its testiment to the ouvre of the Clinton history and has to be seen in that perspective.
@the Q:
Thanks for the summary; I think it helps to highlight how we’re talking past each other here.
Here’s how I would have summarized, using your template:
The key difference, of course, is in how I feel about my mother-in-law compared to how I feel about Stalin. Stalin was a monster who deliberately murdered tens of thousands and accidentally murdered tens of millions, and really didn’t care either way. My mother-in-law can be unpleasant and difficult, but there’s no real comparison.
I’m still waiting for someone to point to any actual fact about Hillary that puts her in Nixon territory, much less Stalin or Hitler. Or even Spiro Agnew territory. Anything actually related to her qualifications as an executive or potential risk to the US.
@DrDaveT: Oh so HRC was SOS in 1995 before EO 12958, EO 13292, or 13526? Thanks for the History lesson! What’s even more comical beyond the empirically verifiable falseness of your statement—is that it got 10 upvotes. Bootlick away!
Two of those three are no longer in effect, so you should explain why you mentioned them. Then you should explain how Hillary violated the third.
@the Q:
This. Drives. Me. Batty.
“you knee jerk sychophants of HRC” – like people here haven’t pointed out her flaws repeatedly on this very thread and all over the site for months. You sound like someone screaming that all Muslims must condemn terrorism and conveniently ignore how many actually do. We get it, you don’t like her. Good for you. Neither do I: I had a chance to work for her campaign last time around and turned an extremely high-paying job down flat because I couldn’t fathom it. But I’m not demanding people denounce her from the belltower twice a day despite the fact I had personal reservations about working for her.
Pointing out logical flaws in arguments is not being a sycophant.
Demanding actual proof is not boot-licking.
Noting she’s getting flak for stuff that is boosting other candidates is not knee-jerk defense.
Demonstrating that detractors seems to be acting on impressions/feelings rather then good solid facts is not automatic ass-kissing.
Friendly fire kills just like enemy bullets do. This country has had sleazy politicians since virtually day one. Sleazy is vastly preferable to incompetence, paranoia or flat out insanity. We are not “ignoring” anything – we are making the conscious choice you say you eventually will by voting for the lesser evil. You just feel the need to loudly proclaim to all and sundry how much you hate what you’re doing so you can distance yourself from her “corruption” even as you pull her lever. Methinks the lady doth protest too much, indeed.
KM, I think you doth protest too much about me protesting too much.
But then, lying down for the DLC and the Robert Rubins, the Podestas, the Hillary Rosens, the Larry Summers, the Marc Richs just gets to be too phucking much as the Dems care little about small business, the destruction of the middle class the runaway defense budgets the complete neglect of anti trust enforcement (CIGNA my HMO, just was bought out by ANTHEM, the worst HMO in history – how the phuck did that happen. Is there not a Dept. of Justice?)
Like I said, this schitt ain’t in a vacuum. Geoff Morrell, who was the head spokesman for the Pentagon under President Obama’s Pentagon, has become the chief Washington spokesman for BP.
Who helped craft BP’s PR response to the Deepwater Horizon crises. All those commercials showing how much BP is helping the coast recover etc? Try. Hillary Rosen, Tony Podesta and Jack Quinn.
KM you’re an insider (so you say) what about this sleaze: Jack Quinn was the White House counsel under Bill Clinton. He went onto cable a lot and defended the president during a lot of his campaign finance problems during his two terms. He met Ed Gillespie, who was then a Republican operative in green rooms. They had this green room friendship. People become friends. And in Ed and Jack’s case, they went into business together. They started Quinn Gillespie, the first real major sort of bipartisan lobbying firm. Jack Quinn got into some trouble in 2001 after he successfully lobbied Bill Clinton to pardon his law client, Marc Rich. Fugitive Marc Rich.
There was a big to-do then. Jack was big time in the barrel. He’s hauled before Congress. He feels like he’s being looked at in restaurants. And Ed Gillespie said, “Look, Jack, in a few months everyone’s going to forget about this and all they’re going to remember about you and this incident is that you got something big done.” And sure enough– Jack did a good job for his client. The outrage dissipated. And the firm– the lobbying firm thrived with the rest of the industry.
Four years later, they sold out for $40 million.
You elect HRC AND ITS FOUR/EIGHT PHUCKING MORE OF THIS SCHITT AND YOU LICK HER AZZ.
Yes i am pizzed at how you sychophants enable these corrupt azzhats get it now?
mannning:
Making shit up is also “a serious breach.” You have no evidence that anyone did any such thing. Likewise for the other nonsense in your comment that was apparently stuck in moderation all day.
@Todd:
Interestingly, she won the popular vote count in the 2008 Dem primaries. Her loss was mostly attributable to the DP stripping Florida and Michigan of delegates
@HarvardLaw92: According to Factcheck.org, that isn’t exactly true. Even if you count Florida, Obama got more votes. He only trails Hillary if you also count Michigan, where he wasn’t on the ballot. On those grounds it may be technically correct that she won the popular vote, but it doesn’t really prove what this stat is meant to imply; you can’t discern anything meaningful from the results if one candidate was denied the chance to compete.
@DrDaveT: Gee, I dunno; I would even pick Nixon or Agnew over any of the freak show that is running on the GOP side of the isle.
@the Q :
Well, there goes the civility of the thread gVOR08 mentioned. Very well, if that’s how it is…..
Like it’s going to be any different with Walker or Rubio or Cruz. You do protest too much because you want a frigging candy-coated unicorn and are whining when given racehorses that they are donkeys. Yes it sucks that in order to be a successful politician in this country you cannot have the morals of Atticus Finch and get to the highest levels of power. Know how to fix that? RUN BETTER PEOPLE AND BUILD SUPPORT FOR THEM. Somewhere out there is the leader of your dreams -go find them, encourage them to run and glory in knowing your vote isn’t “tainted” . Meanwhile, the rest of us live in the real world and these are the choices we have. We will vote for her because alternatives are terrible at best.
I didn’t take the job because I didn’t want to be an insider. I didn’t want to be the token female in the group. I didn’t want to live in DC. I didn’t want to work for her. I took a huge pay-cut to get away from all that. I’d rather play in traffic then be in the same building with her. I PERSONALLY DON’T LIKE HER.
But that’s not enough for you, is it – stating my dislike? No no, there must be invective-laden hyperbole on how dirty and corrupt she is. If someone isn’t loud enough screaming how utterly sleazy she is, they MUST be a toady willing to sell their soul and you righteously called them ass-lickers. I’ve already acted and taken a stronger stance on my moral opinion of her then your keyboard warrior self ever will. I could very easily turn that one around and call you a Republican ass-licker for pushing voters away from her and into their path when they do the exact same crap (see Walker for details)!!! Change the name/party and you’re virtually screaming RINO or cuckservative. We’ve all been pleasantly discussing this in a calm and civil manner but you need to make this personal; you need to be insulting to those you feel have “sold out” or aren’t pure enough for your tastes. You are not telling it like it is but are just being rude to people supposedly on your side. You are not coming across as an truth-wielding iconoclast but as a personal-bias party-purist hater.
You hate the system that rewards people who backroom deal and commit loophole abuse to enrich themselves. GOOD, we all should. We SHOULD have better candidates – America deserves that. We SHOULD NOT have to settle for the lesser of two evils – arrogant and dodgy or arrogant and stupid? We SHOULD have honest, hardworking, intelligent leaders who don’t give a damn about their checkbook but use only logic and facts to make decisions. We DON’T have any of those running right now, goddamnit.
Lets boil it down for you Q: You’re going to get 4 more years of @&!% no matter what from your perspective. So pick the manure shoveler of your choice and learn to deal with it. Your blood pressure will thank you.
@jukeboxgrad: The changes were minimal and cursory….it demonstrates that policy governing the handling of classified did not start AFTER HRC took office. Everything she did was also included in the EOs no longer in effect.
@Pharoah Narim:
Executive Orders? Please. They get about as much respect as fortune cookies. Get back to me when federal agencies actually start complying with the Plain Language EO for promulgating regulations.
Policy governing the handling of classified information does not apply to emails received over an unclassified network and not marked as classified. Or, to be more precise, the sender of such emails could be in deep tofu, but the recipient is not.
@DrDaveT: Almost everything you’ve said in this thread is as false as a 3 dollar bill. Yours is a special brand of boot licking. Oh and regulations for handling classified are network agnostic….. Where do you come up with this stuff? LoL I guess if we take the labels off the information….it magically becomes unclass. LoL
@Modulo Myself:
any person who is the wife of the Bill—I did not have sex with that women-should of stayed in the senate because her work as secretary of state -she travelled too much but had NO foreign policy success’s