There is, I am afraid, no cure for stupidity.
Posted on 09/02/2015 12:14:16 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
In the current issue of the New Yorker, Steve Coll, Dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, has a brief piece on Hillary Clinton’s private email problems. He traces the current scandal to…Rush Limbaugh!
Hillary Clinton, in her memoir “Living History,” recounts her struggle to defend her privacy while residing in the White House. Some of her stories have a gothic tone. After Bill Clinton’s first inauguration, Harry and Linda Thomason, friends from Hollywood, found a jocular note under a pillow in the Lincoln Bedroom. It was from Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host. How did the note get there? “I don’t believe in ghosts, but we did sometimes feel that the White House was haunted by more temporal entities,” Clinton writes.
Was Rush George H.W. Bush’s last Lincoln Bedroom guest? Did he really leave a note? Or did the White House staff already detest the Clintons so much that someone left the note as a joke? I don’t know. Perhaps Rush can tell us. But the real question is, what on God’s green Earth does this have to do with Hillary Clinton’s decision to conduct official State Department business on an unsecured, off-the-books server? Mr. Coll thinks it is a matter of privacy, explained by Rush’s “haunting” of the White House:
In late 2008 or early 2009, the incoming Secretary installed a private server at her New York home. She has said that she wanted to avoid carrying multiple e-mail devices, something that using the State Department system might have required.
She had to use multiple devices anyway. In any event, this is a dumb excuse for violating State Department regulations relating to official communications.
Late last year, Clinton turned over to the State Department about thirty thousand e-mails from her home system. But, before doing so, she and her attorneys singled out more than thirty thousand other e-mails, which they deemed to be “private,” and, as far as is known, deleted them permanently. Clinton has said that the deleted notes concerned only “yoga routines, family vacations,” and the like. Her unilateral culling raised eyebrows, but her lawyers approved her action, and her assertion of privacy rights seems to have resonated with Democratic voters.
See, here’s the thing: privacy was never the question. No one cares if Hillary uses a private email system to schedule her yoga lessons and plan her daughter’s wedding. On the contrary: that is what everyone does, and it would be inappropriate to use the official (and relatively secure) State Department system for this purpose.
Rather, the issue is that Hillary chose to carry on her official State Department correspondence, in which she had no legitimate expectation of privacy, through the home server that housed information on yoga lessons. Hillary is in trouble because 1) her decision to circumvent the State Department computer system for substantially all of her official communications unquestionably violated State Department policy, and 2) if she had classified information on her home server–as she evidently did–she is in violation of federal criminal statutes.
Therefore, whether Rush Limbaugh did or did not “haunt” the living quarters in the White House 23 years ago, there is no excuse for Hillary’s flouting of laws and regulations that are vital to national security.
You might think that this is a trivial deconstruction of an unusually stupid magazine article, and you would probably be right. But note: Steve Coll currently is the dean of what used to be regarded as America’s foremost school of journalism. It may still be, for all I know. Not only that, Coll was the managing editor of the Washington Post from 1998 to 2005, has won a Pulitzer prize, has authored numerous prize-winning books and has served as president of the New America Foundation. He is a model of contemporary liberalism, and he apparently doesn’t understand that Hillary’s use of a private email system for official correspondence has nothing to do with privacy. Let alone with Rush Limbaugh’s haunting the White House. Sadly, this is the state of today’s dominant, Democratic Party news media.
One more thing: I subscribed to the New Yorker for a decade or more, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, and finally canceled my subscription because the magazine had become devoted to brain-dead, boring leftism. Since then, the New Yorker has continued to decline. Now, not even the cartoons are consistently funny. This is the magazine’s Cartoon of the Day:
There is, I am afraid, no cure for stupidity.
Paranoia knows no limits and is unfazed by any known form of logic.
I blame excessive alcohol consumption for much of the woe to which Herself, Madame Benghazi, the Cold & Joyless, is now subject. Several attempts to detox in the past have resulted in some classic rages, most of which were directed at Slick.
Compounded with the growing evidence that the brain damage resulting from the fall and concussion in December 2012, was MUCH more extensive than has been so far revealed.
At the time, the fall was claimed to be due to “a stomach virus” and excessive dehydration (also explained by alcohol toxicity), causing Herself to faint and fall, striking her head, and resulting in a blood clot as well as the effects of a concussion.
Herself may have a “traumatic brain damage” condition, severely affecting memory and motor skills. Herself does seem to be running on automatic pilot much of the time, with someone always at her elbow, and no direct questions allowed.
If you want to learn the truth about anything related to Hillary—forget about it. Remember that Churchill quote: “protected by a bodyguard of lies”.
“Clinton’s private email problems.............traces the current scandal to…Rush Limbaugh!”......
Clinton’s camp once again trying to trivialize the scandal so people get bored and no longer show interest. No one is bringing any charges against her, WHY NOT?
The bitch is guilty and needs jail time.
“The bitch is guilty and needs jail time.”
Worse than jail time for her would be anonymity.
Ha. I love your name for HilLiaRy! Chuckle every time I see it.
RUSH LIMBAUGH ......living rent free in the Clinton’s minds for almost 25 years.
When your address is 1600 Pennsylvania the expectation of privacy is moronic.
People who do not have evil intent can live that way for four or eight years, but Hill would have, not the least conception of that.
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