The dead enders defending Hillary Clinton’s frankly bizarre decision to break protocol and use a personal email address while conducting official business have seized on several arguments to defend their heroine. They trumpet the fact that current Secretary of State John Kerry is the first person to hold the position who has used an official .gov email address. Kerry is the first “to rely primarily on a state.gov email account,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf says. This is alleged to exonerate Clinton – after all, it’s not as if she were breaking precedent.
This excuse doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. For one, the regulation that mandated that the secretary of state use a government email address wasn’t in place until 2009; neither Colin Powell nor Condoleezza Rice were in contravention of any regulations. Moreover, as John Podhoretz pointed out, email was still something of a boutique product back during the Bush administration – especially during Powell’s tenure. At this rate, next the Clinton clique will seize on the fact that – gasp – Henry Kissinger didn’t use a government email address when he was secretary of state either!
Television spin doctor, Paul Begala, meanwhile, has decided to insult the intelligence of the American people, rather than actually defend Clinton’s conduct. “Voters do not give a s*** about what email Hillary used,” he told CNN. “They don’t even give a fart.” In Begala’s telling, “Real ‘Muricans” are too busy sitting around the fabled “kitchen table” to care about things like the basic integrity of their leaders. Now, unlike Begala, I’m not presumptuous enough to speak for any and all “voters,” but I can say this: “who cares” rarely works as an excuse for gross misconduct. Nor should it.
