Over at Reason, Peter Suderman has a take on the Hillary Clinton email thing, coming to the totally unremarkable conclusion that “Hillary’s problem is not so much the email story itself, but how she’s handled it,” which is a way of (silently) acknowledging that the “scandal”, as Pete constantly refers to it, isn’t a scandal at all. Hillary didn’t break the law; she didn’t violate security; she didn’t tell the Marines at Benghazi to “stand down”. There’s no there there.
So why is Hillary so fucked? Because, of course, she’s fucked herself. Hillary can claim, justly, that she’s done little that other secretaries of state havenot done. Colin Powell maintained a private email account, surely for the same reason that Hillary maintained one: so that she could conduct official business without anyone knowing what she was up to. Hillary hasn’t filed her “separation paperwork form” with the State Department. The only problem is, neither did Colin or his successor, Condoleezza Rice. Secretaries of state are divas. Who knew?
But Hillary should have known, of course. She should have known that just because all of the other kids do it doesn’t mean that she gets to do it too. It’s as plain as the nose on her face. But Hillary won’t look in the mirror. And, clearly, she doesn’t have a staff that will tell her to, either because they’re too dumb or because they’re too smart. Which means that Hillary either hires dummies or sycophants. Which is the less damning?
In the meantime, even relatively “fair” Hillary watchers, like Peter, avoid noticing that the product of the “scandal” has been nothing more than the banal pleasure of reading someone else’s email: Hillary watches dumb TV shows! She doesn’t know how to operate a fax machine! Her aides are brown nosers! And so Hillary gets another bumbling, bungled non-scandal scandal, all because she’s too lazy to play by the rules–the rules that apply, not to the other kids, but to Hillary Clinton.
