Hillary the Disaster
Posted on March 11th, 2015 in Uncategorized | 34 Comments »
She’s supposed to be unstoppable, but so far her imminent candidacy has been an utter train wreck. The use of private email at the State Department is a serious issue, and yesterday at the United Nations she didn’t have anything near a good explanation for it. Plus, there are a number of points where Hillary asks us to simply take her on faith on matters where there’s absolutely no reason to give her the benefit of the doubt. Such as:
1) She says that of the 60,000 emails she apparently wrote using her personal email, only one was to a foreign official, and he was British. Uh-huh.
2) Clinton says that of the 62, 230 emails she wrote, 31,830 were “private,” meaning personal. I don’t know about you, but I’d be in serious trouble at my workplace if over 50 percent of the email I wrote was personal.
3) Clinton says that she’s turning over everything that’s relevant, and not emails about things like Chelsea’s wedding. Why on earth should we believe her? She also admits to deleting a significant amount of email, so we’ll probably never know the truth.
4) A note on technology: Clinton says maybe she should have used two phones with separate email accounts. Just so you know, Mrs. Clinton, you could have more than one email account on a single phone. (Since you’re so interested in “convenience.”)
5) Clinton says there were “no security breaches” on her server, which is, apparently, in her home in Chappaqua. How would she know—has she brought in a security expert to check? (Answer: She couldn’t know.)
Here’s the main thing about this: If Clinton’s motive for using her personal email really was “convenience,” how arrogant of her to think that she can ignore rules for which there are actually good reasons to exist just because she finds them inconvenient. And that’s the best possible explanation. An equally possible one is that she’s secretive and wanted to control what emails were preserved for history, and that she holds herself above the law.
There is a great opportunity for another Democratic candidate to get in the race here. Can you imagine the amount of free media the person would receive?
But for the Democrats, I think, it’s more than an opportunity—it’s a need. If they don’t have a Hillary Clinton insurance policy, they might just be handing the presidency over to the Republican party.
34 Responses
3/11/2024 7:42 am
No breaches?
1) Mrs. Clinton admits she changed email addresses after some sort of issue with the original one that she used.
2) There have been news reports of at least one of Sidney Blumenthal’s emails to her having been made public by a hacker, with the reports stating that it was her email account and not his that was hacked. If this email is fraudulent in some way (spoofed?), you would think that would be worth reporting.
Related to #2, the leaked email was about Benghazi and should have been turned over to the State Department, but Freedom of Information requests to State come back with no such email. Curious, no?
3/11/2024 8:43 am
She also admits to deleting a significant amount of email, so we’ll probably never know the truth.
Arthur Anderson was convicted and ultimately destroyed because its trainers told new employees to follow the document retention policy. At the time Arthur Anderson had received no subpoena for any records, and the policy included a clause noting that records could not be destroyed to avoid a subpoena. They were convicted anyway (reversed on appeal, but of course the company was already destroyed) on the theory that they should have known one was forthcoming so any destruction is obstruction of an investigation.
So we’re willing to destroy the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people because record maintenance is sacrosanct, but HC can unilaterally destroy records of her business as Secretary of State even though she knew full well those records should have been subject to FOIA reviews?
3/11/2024 12:38 pm
Remember Whitewater!!
3/11/2024 12:46 pm
Unfortunately, even though no republicans want Hillary and most Democrats don’t want her, she’ll be our next president since there isn’t a single legitimate republican candidate for president in 2016.
3/11/2024 2:09 pm
Hillary claims she used one email so she wouldn’t need two devices.. LOL she is so full of shit. You can have 49 email accounts on one device.
Also, to be fair; Jeb Bush’s emails he put up.. When you look at them; something isn’t right..
3/11/2024 7:54 pm
“What difference does it make?”
Words to live by. Or something.
Actually, I do believe that even a public servant should be allowed some kind of privacy, and that includes communication. One of the problems with today is that everyone is communicating electronically, it’s as if no one has a face to face conversation anymore, which by its nature can never be archived.
I don’t really know the rules for public servants in terms of what conditions must be met for privacy. But the fact that HRC appears to have broken some rules, and also deleted tens of thousands of emails is a big deal. That is, unless we invoke the “what difference does it make?” rule.
3/11/2024 10:20 pm
I think you are mistaken on points 2 and 4.
2. You’re assuming that she wrote all of her personal emails while at work. There’s no reason to assume that, though I think it’s safe to assume that many of us do write personal emails while at work.
4. My understanding is that when the government provides a Blackberry for official government use, you cannot use it for personal email. So if she had used it for her government email account, she would have needed to carry a second device for personal email use.
3/12/2023 1:30 am
Can we let Guccifer out of jail long enough to track down the missing emails?
3/12/2023 7:44 am
Mrs. Clinton could have used her own Blackberry and connected to State Dept. email servers… that would have mooted the proscription of using a government device for personal use.
She has forfeit her right to privacy by deliberately subverting the disclosure process. She is entitled to have personal emails kept private, but she is not entitled to decide for us what she considers private… her server should be subpoenaed and a judge appointed to review all her emails and decide what is work-related.
3/12/2023 11:16 am
It’s her turn, dammit!
3/12/2023 11:37 am
P.S.: Richard, if you’re taking suggestions for featured music video on your blog, may I suggest Sleaford Mods. Now their politics are marxist shite (excuse my BrEn) but the energy!
Like mainlining a triple espresso. Suddenly it’s 1977 again and you’re a kid in the rosy bloom of life, but with the added benefit of middle-aged wordsmithery. Genius dot com will help you figure out the more obscure references.
3/12/2023 2:01 pm
I’d suggest a loop of Erasure’s STOP! with a rolling quote from Buckley: A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’
3/12/2023 10:27 pm
Hey Richard -
Are you paying any attention to the trial where Ellen Pao is suing Kleiner Perkins for sexual discrimination and asking for $10 million? She is married to your old friend Buddy Fletcher, which casts an interesting light on why she might need/want some money.
3/13/2015 7:50 am
The pressing question is, if not Hillary then who?
How about Julian Castro?
3/13/2015 12:14 pm
Let’s turn this
>> 5) Clinton says there were “no security breaches” on her server, which is, apparently, in her home in Chappaqua. How would she know—has she brought in a security expert to check? (Answer: She couldn’t know.) <<
on its head for a moment.
Leaving aside the fact that no computer is 100% secure, it's actually very plausible that there were computer security experts involved — those working for the Secret Service.
Do we really even know the extent of the security services provided to former presidents — who is to say that it's only physical security? If Bill asked the Secret Service to secure 'his' computer systems, how likely is it that they wouldn't, or even ask for permission from the chain of command (they are famously accommodating to him)?
Hillary is being mocked for her emphasis on the physical safety of her email server, which is the least likely source of intrusion, and especially given that the Secret Service is protecting it (although, given recent events with the Secret Service, that might be a questionable assumption). Perhaps Mrs. Clinton, in typical Clintonian fashion is telling the truth in a manner that intentionally obscures it, with the Secret Service is in fact providing electronic security as well.
If that is in fact the case, we now have a situation where taxpayer dollars — yours and mine — are being used to foil (pun intended) FOIL requests.
3/14/2015 8:55 am
Further to my point above, if Secret Service computer security experts were involved in protecting the server, it follows that they would make sure that anything that the Clintons wanted deleted was truly unrecoverable.
The question the media needs to be asking the Clinton’s, the Secret Service, and Obama (because anything his administration does ultimately comes down to what he wants it to do) is whether the Secret Service had any involvement beyond physical security of the Clinton property, and if so, what that involvement was in great detail — not just the general nature of it but specific details, including logs if any.
For those who don’t know, nothing is ever really deleted off of a hard drive. When something is marked to be ‘deleted,’ all that really happens is that the space taken up by that item is marked as ‘free’ and available for use.
Software for ‘wiping’ hard drives is available, and works by overwriting empty parts of the drive multiple times with random data, but the question is how do we know how many times does something have to be overwritten before it becomes truly unrecoverable? In the case of the government, they aren’t likely to tell us the truth for very good reasons. (They might say 25 times is sufficient, while in reality it might be 100 times.) Years ago a foreign government (Belgium, I believe) asked us (the U.S. government) for help in breaking the encryption on something, and we refused — if we had helped, and whether or no we were successful, everyone would have known something very useful about our abilities in that area.
3/14/2015 10:50 am
James Taranto of ‘Best of the Web Today’ had an interesting piece yesterday, and quotes a Time.com piece (I don’t have a subscription to Time and the full piece isn’t available to non-subscribers). He raises an interesting issue which I don’t think a lot of people were and therefore doesn’t seem to have gotten much play in the press- — going through 50,000+ emails manually is a hugely non-trivial undertaking. Given that it’s not surprising that Hillary’s people searched electronically based on names and keywords… which makes it as easy to determine what you don’t want found as you do want found.
3/14/2015 2:28 pm
I think Hillary and Lois Lerner ought to go into the privacy protected email business. No way anyone could have their emails hacked or snooped on if those two were in charge.
3/14/2015 3:16 pm
IntObs, formerspook at blogspot dot com had the best analysis more than a week ago. Bottom line: China and Russia already know everything.
My dream ticket, by the way, is Hulk Hogan (Prez) and Sarah Palin (Veep).
Yours?
3/14/2015 4:43 pm
I-Roller -
I think any Republicans who think Hillary is their worst possible opponent (in the sense of being able to defeat them) are smoking their socks, and they should be careful what they wish for. She has never accomplished anything of note on her own and that wasn’t tied to Bill, and I think that turns off a lot of Independents and Democrats. Who knows who will come out of the blue and how formidable an opponent they will be if Hillary loses the nomination? I know that you could say the same thing about BO as Hillary — that before he abandoned treating the senate as a no-show union job ~145 days in so that he could run for president, he had never accomplished anything of note either, but he had two huge advantages… he was black at the time the country was ready for a black and Jr. (and everything Republican) were held in absolute disdain by much of the population. The Democrats, in 2016, will likely face a similar problem in that much of the population seems to find Obama equally distasteful as they found Jr. at the end of his term, and that may very well carry over to other Democrats.
3/15/2015 9:54 am
Wow, I guess the only thing worse and less believable than professional political pundits are amateur ones. Even setting aside the above poster’s unsubstantiated speculations about what Republicans want and the cheap dig at both Hillary Clinton’s and Obama’s supposed lack of accomplishments, the rest of the content is equally absurd, historical revisionism at its worst.
Let’s clear something up then. Results of a Gallup Poll from the end of last month (February 2015) placed President Obama’s job approval rating at 48%, with 47% disapproval. Yes, this hardly indicates a universal love for the performance of the president. However, also using Gallup Polls, the job approval rating for President George W. Bush on the eve of the 2008 election (October 31st - November 2nd) stood, in comparison, at 25%, with a 70% disapproval rating.
Thus, the claim that “much of the population seems to find Obama equally distasteful as they found Jr. at the end of his term” is ridiculous, wishful thinking. These percentages are not even close. Sure, President Obama’s approval ratings may well continue to drop over the next 1 1/2 years, but they will have to plummet pretty far to equal the nadir in popularity achieved by Bush.
3/15/2015 10:31 am
SickofPartisanHacks -
Hillary Clinton:
- Only became a partner in law firm after husband became President
- Only became director at Walmart after husband became President
- Named one of the 100 best lawyers after husband became President in spite of having no record of any sort
- Only became Senator after husband pardoned Marc Rich and Puerto Rican terrorists over objections of DOJ and government body charged with determining who gets clemency… plenty of analysis on web as to how that helped her (Note: Eric Holder was the sleazebag who arranged those backdoor pardons). Sho would have had zero chance of becoming a senator without her husband’s name and involvement
- Only became presidential ‘contender’ because of previous history (see immediately above)
- Only became Secretary of State because of previous history and for political reasons related to Obama’s presidency
If you really think she is so accomplished, name one thing she has done on her own that is truly noteworthy. Note that flying more miles than any other Secretary of State is an activity, not an accomplishment.
Barack Obama:
- Became editor of Harvard Law Review not based on accomplishments as had always been the case but rather in the first ever election to that post based on personal popularity. He also never published anything on his own in that forum and only had his name attached to one other publication by someone else.
- Has never consented to his school grades being published. How do we know that he even graduated, never mind what his grade point averages were. We’re constantly told that he is the smartest man in the world, but where is the proof?
- Throughout his ‘career’ in both the Illinois and U.S. senates, he only authored one or two pieces of legislation, and non which were considered significant.
If you really think he is so accomplished, name one thing that he has done that is truly noteworthy. Note that ObamaCare was corruptly passed (if you think that it wasn’t, I’m happy to provide proof over and above the House violating its own rules), and which Obama and his administration have spent the last few years using constitutionally questionable means to keep from imploding, so that hardly qualifies.
So be a sport and put up…
3/15/2015 10:43 am
SickofPartisanHacks –
P.S.
There are plenty of accomplished women… Hillary just isn’t one of them. I’d offer up Condi Rice as an example, but you probably think she is the female equivalent of an Uncle Tom for not being a Dem.
Also, just because Obama’s popularity polls are better than those of Jr. doesn’t mean that his legacy won’t hurt the Dems… your analysis would fail a primary school logic class.
3/15/2015 11:21 am
My, my, where to even begin? This will be my one and only response to your messages, and then I’ll leave you to dwell under your bridge in peace. To be blunt, I am simply going to ignore the bulk of your first message, as I think it is of little use to attempt a response. The point of my initial reply to your post was not to argue that either Hillary Clinton or Obama were highly accomplished prior to running for president, either in 2008 or (presumably for Clinton) in 2016. Did I appear at any point in my post to try to offer evidence that they were? I only indicated that your emphasis on their perceived lack of qualifications seemed unnecessary for the larger point that you claimed to be trying to make, and I still believe that to be the case. Thus, I am certainly not going to go to the trouble to offer counter-examples now or later, though if someone else wants to go to the trouble of refuting you on those points, more power to them. Again, that’s not my argument.
As for the ad hominem attack as to what I may or may not think re: the accomplishments of Condoleezza Rice, you, for one, sure seem to think you know a lot about the views held by other anonymous posters, though I am not at all sure why. Her political affiliation does not bother me in the slightest, nor do I think it detracts from her impressive education or professional accomplishments.
But let’s run with your example of Condi Rice as an accomplished woman, and even for the sake of argument concede that she is someone with arguably more substantial accomplishments to her name than Hillary Clinton.
In that case, why didn’t she run for president in 2008? Or, for that matter, what about George W. Bush’s first Secretary of State, Colin Powell? Or, to extend the analogy, since it appears likely that Obama’s former first-term Secretary of State (Clinton), as well as Vice President Biden, will run in 2016, why didn’t Vice President Cheney try to run in 2008? In fact, why, with the exception of Tommy Thompson who dropped out even before the Iowa Caucus, was there not a single former Bush administration official willing to throw their hat into the ring to compete in the Republican primaries in 2008?
Obviously potential candidates each had their own individual reasons. Perhaps some didn’t aspire to the office, other had health or family concerns, or whatever else. But don’t you think that it’s rather telling that, however accomplished Condi Rice’s accomplishments are and were, an association with the Bush administration did not seem to have been much of an advantage in running for president. Indeed, might it not have even been that an association with the Bush administration weakened her political chances, even within the Republican party?
So, even if you dislike popularity polls, don’t take them as an indication of a president’s impact on the electoral chances of a potential successor or successors, and want to instead continue to rely on your gut feelings and apparent ability to simply intuit the mindsets of voters, it still begs the question of why it is that no former Bush officials ran, even in their own party’s primaries, for president, while it appears in 2016 that at least two members of Obama’s cabinet will. Again, I’m not arguing that the majority of the country likes Obama or approves of his performance as president, because clearly they do not. Nor do I doubt that his poll numbers may continue to slide even further between now and November of next year.
But again, your unfounded statements equating the level of dissatisfaction held towards Obama with that held towards Bush are just that - unfounded - and no amount of unrelated tangents or vitriolic name-calling directed towards me will change that.
3/15/2015 12:00 pm
SickofPartisanHacks –
And your original post wasn’t an ad hominem attack on me?
The polls all show the middle — the independents — are among the most disillusioned with Obama. That was my point, even if I wasn’t overly clear about it. And it’s the middle who decide in ‘normal’ years, short of some extreme turning out of the base, as Bush managed to do in defeating Kerry in 2004, or large parts of the base staying home because they don’t like their party’s nominee, as in 2012 with Romney.
I won’t both with the rest of your post…
3/16/2015 9:40 am
Interested observer:
You need not bother but you should spell check!
3/16/2015 10:06 am
Raspberryhollow -
You are right of course — I saw that after I hit ‘Submit Comment’… I think the lesson for me is more along the lines of ‘slow down’… haste makes many things besides waste.
3/16/2015 10:07 am
my favorite part was that she said she had secret service guarding the server. no human body can protect you from a cyber attack. whole story is full of holes.
3/16/2015 12:11 pm
Next season of 24 is Jack Bauer reading a book while a server quietly hums in the background.
3/16/2015 1:05 pm
whole story is full of holes.
She’s now revealed her so called “comprehensive review” was identifying “work” email via a list of keywords, followed by deleting everything else without further examination.
This is Keystone Kops level bumbling. Even ignoring her dismissive attitude toward security her decisions are disqualifying for sheer incompetence.
3/16/2015 1:35 pm
But maybe she thinks that having us think her a bumbling idiot is the lesser of two evils…
3/16/2015 2:07 pm
Am I the only person that finds all of this oddly coincidental?
Why is this suddenly surfacing now, a couple of years after Clinton left office as Secretary of State, when presumably Obama and his whole administration knew that she was using a private email address (if not a private server in her spare bedroom) all along? If the Republicans had known, surely they would have tried to make hay of it long before now.
It’s also suspect that such a large part of the left is taking her to the woodshed for it. Some of them will of course be sincere, but as is always the case (as with the Republicans), some of them slagging her will have other motives.
She was on her way to the coronation in 2008 when an unknown senator with no history of accomplishment off any kind took it away from her, and now, four years later, when she is again considered a certainty by many of the so-called political experts, here we seemingly go again…
Odd.
3/17/2015 11:32 am
“It’s also suspect that such a large part of the left is taking her to the woodshed for it.”
Why is it suspect? A large part of the left wants nothing to do with Hillary, and like you said, we went with an unknown black guy in ’08 instead of her.
3/17/2015 12:37 pm
Kanzanian -
For the record, I don’t doubt the sincerity of those on the left who want nothing to do with Hillary. This whole kerfuffle seems to have originated with leaking from inside of the Democrat party, instead of them openly slagging her for her views… it seems a roundabout way to dispose of her — they might not wound her enough to prevent her from securing the nomination but enough to prevent her from winning the general. I find it suspect because Democrats, like Republicans, or any other political group for that matter, generally seem to hold their noses and go with a candidate they aren’t thrilled with if they think they are a sure winner. I also think it’s a little bit early to be trying to force her out, without knowing who else they might have who is likely to be a contender, although it may well be that ‘they’ think the only way to surface those other candidates is to get rid of her first.
But you bring up an interesting point. Hillary generally seems to be considered anywhere from not ‘progressive’ enough to too Republican-like, and there seems to be a lot of sentiment for someone more like Elizabeth Warren, the fake Indian. We always hear that the Tea Party is a fringe right-wing movement that is trying to take over the Republican party and are in danger of destroying it. Given that ‘progressives’ are considerably to the left of mainstream Democrats, and how they are attempting to exert more control over the Democrats, isn’t it fair to say they are a fringe left-wing movement that is in danger of destroying the Democratic party?
(Note that when I say that they are to the left of mainstream Democrats, I referring to the Dems being almost as in bed with big business as are the Republicans… the differences are of degree and not kind.)
The Vermont legislature and the Burlington, Vermont city council both have large contingents of Democrats and formal ‘Progressives’… Republicans are a small minority. Both the Democrats and the Progressives openly describe their relationship as a somewhat uneasy marriage of convenience (my paraphrase)… the Democrats saying the Progressives go too far and the Progressives saying the Democrats don’t go far enough. You could look it up…