CT Blue

Count me as one that dreads a Hillary Clinton presidency. While she will be better than the alternative, there is no chance that she will be the Franklin Roosevelt we need. Wall Street has had a friend in Obama in the last 6 years, and that will not change under Hillary. Nonetheless, I take no pleasure from the ginned up email controversy, because it 1) won’t appreciably deter Hillary from getting the nomination and 2) is grossly unfair in a manner eerily reminiscent of what are now almost bygone times.

Once again we have the New York Times setting out to destroy a Clinton, and once again the evidence of wrongdoing is remarkably sparse. There’s a full discussion here, from which we learn, among other things:

But after reading the rest of the Times piece with a fine-tooth comb, I found no mention of any specific regulation that was actually violated. And that’s because there wasn’t one: The regulation to which they seem to be referring was signed into law nearly two years after she left the State Department, as USA Today later clarified in an amazing feat of actual journalism:

The laws and regulations regarding the handling of electronic communications among federal agencies has undergone several changes in recent years, including an amendment to the Federal Records Act that President Obama signed into law in November, 2014. The bill requires that e-mails dealing with official matters that are sent from a personal account must be forwarded to an official account within 20 days.
A September 2013 bulletin from NARA suggests federal employees “should not generally use personal email accounts to conduct official agency business.” The bulletin suggests exceptions could be “emergency situations” or on occasions where the employee is contacted through their personal e-mail account.

Both the Federal Records Act amendment and NARA bulletin took effect after Clinton left the State Department in February, 2013.

Now that you know this, carefully read that second section from the original Times piece again and take note of the journalistic sleight of hand: “Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.”

Catch that? To actually be damning, the words “at the time” would have to be at the end of the sentence: “Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers, as required by the Federal Records Act at the time.”

There’s more, and the entire article is well worth reading. Whatever the rules should have been, Clinton was totally in compliance with what the rules were, and her actions were no different than those of her predecessors, who, being Republicans, of course get a pass.

If you’re old enough, you may recall that the Times set off in hot pursuit of the Clintons in the early 90s, running forever with a trumped up Whitewater controversy, which never was a scandal of any significance whatsoever. The Times took nearly 10 years to engage in a similar level of journalistic incompetence, when it chose to allow Judith Miller to help lie us into war.

So, the article is unfair, but I might even be able to live with that if I thought there was the slightest chance that these baseless attacks might derail Hillary’s candidacy. But that will not happen, for a very simple reason. The Clinton’s have been inoculated against right wing attacks, even if those attacks are pushed in the pages of the New York Times. The frenzied cacaphony of the Clinton haters has become political muzak, noticed only by the true believers who care about stuff like Benghazi. Everyone else ignores the noise, having long since absorbed the fact that the Clinton haters are irrational. The only way to beat Hillary is for some candidate to come along who will catch the imagination of the Democratic electorate, as Obama did in 2008. But that task is doubly hard this time around. Once burned, twice shy and besides, there’s no one out there who seems up to filling the role. Those of us who want Bernie to run, by and large, have no illusions about him winning, though we do think that he’ll get more votes than the smart money believes, thereby pushing the discourse leftward, to about where it was in the radical days of the mid nineties. So, nothing changes, really. We have a political season ahead of us that will feature fawning articles about the likes of the loathsome Jeb Bush, and hatchet jobs on Hillary. What else is new?