You’d
think that a public official who seriously thinks she is qualified to be
president of the United States (she probably is better qualified than any other
knucklehead who has expressed interest in the post in next year’s election
cycle) would know better than to put herself in such a spot.
BUT
IT SEEMS she doesn’t. I don’t know how many people are going to be swayed by
her statements this week at the United Nations that she regretted the way she
handled the situation.
Which
was to set up her own private e-mail server for work-related correspondence. In
a four-year period, some 60,000 e-mail messages were sent and received.
Clinton
tries to make those of us who want to turn this into a scandal feel a bit
better by saying that no classified information was ever transmitted with her
own personal e-mail messages.
But
the point is that if she had taken an official government-issued e-mail address
and used that for her work, there would have been an easily-accessed record. We’d
know exactly what was being done, and whether or not any allegations of her
wrongdoing were just nonsense.
THE
FACT THAT she says she will make her server accessible so that its messages can
now be archived is going to merely feed wood to the campfire of those who have
held their Clinton grudges for two-and-a-half decades now!
People
who don’t want to trust her will not trust her just like they haven't trusted her since the days of when she allegedly defamed the reputation of singer Tammy Wynette.
It
is an issue that could easily have been avoided if only she had just used the
proper e-mail account, just as many of us who have jobs that require constant
message sending get a work e-mail while also maintaining a personal address off
some service like Yahoo! or Google.
What
amazed me about Clinton’s desire to not use a government e-mail address is that
it appears she didn’t learn one single lesson from the plight of Sarah Palin
back in 2008.
REMEMBER
WHEN THE now-former Alaska governor got caught using a personal address for her
government business because she didn’t like the idea of her personal messages
being automatically recorded?
This
came out when some teenager got cute and managed to hack his way into her
account. Because those personal services we all use aren’t THAT secure. They
certainly don’t have the layers of protections that government messaging
services have.
That
truly was another situation that Palin brought on herself; even though federal prosecutors
ultimately got a conviction (and some incarceration) against the man who
thought it was funny to figure out her password, then post pages of her
messages on a public site.
Clinton
hasn’t undergone anything this humiliating. But it is always a possibility for
those political people who just have to think their e-mails are none of the
rest of our business.
WHICH
MAY BE part of the reason that I’m gaining a bit more respect for Sen. Lindsay
Graham, R-S.C.; who recently said he can’t face this situation because he never
uses e-mail.
That
is a situation which I must admit I wish I could resort to – even though my
work often requires I have access to sending and receiving messages.
Even
though I can’t help but think that for all the stupid, nonsensical e-mails I
get from people trying to influence the way I think about certain issues, we’d
be better off as a society if sending messages required ink on paper and the
death of a few more trees.
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