Dear America,
I can't understand the Republican persistence in what seems to me a transparent strategy of desperately clinging to any "scandal" that they can possibly characterize as such. The most recent is about emails...Hillary Clinton's emails. What is it that they are trying to accomplish by castigating her for using private email for official communication rather than the state run system, which by the way is probably more likely to get hacked than the private server she has in her house. If you think about it, there can be only one motivation for the Republicans: they want to see her personal emails, not the only ones to which they have at least a colorable right--those that have relevance to her tenure as Secretary of State. But, if she had wanted to sequester her personal communications from those related to her official duties, she would have done just the opposite of what she did. She would have used her official email account for anything she didn't want to hide, and she would have used her personal email, which no one has a right to see ordinarily, for everything she wanted to hide. That is why eventually, the public is going to figure out that the Republicans aren't looking for any kind of scandalous official behavior that merits sanctions or, more importantly, the opprobrium of the voters; they are looking for scandalous personal behavior.
My guess is that there probably is some of that personal indiscretion in her personal communications, but my opinion is that it isn't anyone's business unless it was illegal. Indiscretions don't count among those illegal things. They aren't anyone's business any more than was the fact that Bill Clinton couldn't keep his fly closed. I have to admit that Bill was significantly diminished in my opinion because he turned out to be such a roguish infidel, but that doesn't diminish his accomplishments...and for those who admire roguish infidels, it doesn't mitigate his failures either. Similarly with Hillary, I think she is probably a pretty shady business person, and maybe in consideration of areas other than sexual dissoluteness she is just as amoral as her husband. But when the public begins to say "so what" every time Trey Gowdy rants about transparency in emailing, it's going to be one more demerit for the party to go along with the other thing Gowdy rants about: the nearly three year old Benghazi murders committed not by Hillary Clinton, but by rabid Jihadists in Libya. No one cares whether Clinton, the State Department and the CIA didn't know who the assailants were for a few days. To reference an old political axiom supposedly coined by Abe Lincoln, you can fool some of the people all of the time...etc. The Republicans are getting into a delusionary mode in that regard in that they seem to be operating on the belief that you can fool all of the people all of the time if you just persist. Three years after Benghazi, they still haven't found anything inculpatory...at least not as to Hillary Clinton. But still they persist as if the millions of dollars they are spending and the lack of result, much less the lack of portent for any result they might get, will not be significant to an electorate being squeezed on all sides by Republican austerity and self-declared sanctimony.
And now, that lack of apprehension of the potential electoral consequences of all their flailing around without even the prospect of anything meaningful eventuating has been manifested in another way: a letter from 47 Republican senators to the government of Iran about the nuclear negotiations of a coalition of nations led by the United States, which comes directly after the invitation of House Speaker John Boehner to Israeli prime minister BiBi Netanyahu to address the American congress on the same subject. The question all this evokes has to be, what were you thinking and what purpose did you think you were serving. As to Boehner, I just attribute his decision to invite a dogmatic reactionary like Netanyahu to speak before congress to intellectual kinship and partisan obstructionism. But as to the 47 senators who signed that letter, even those who did so are beginning to equivocate on having done so, and their natural allies in the local presses of the states where they run for office are briskly castigating them too. Then there are people like Senator Rand Paul, who says contrary to any rational interpretation of events that the letter strengthens The President's hand...what? How? No one is going to subscribe to the notion that it makes clear to the Islamic state of Iran that Mr. Obama has to bring home the bacon with these negotiations, and I chose bacon deliberately. Everything the senator signatories said was inimical to any kind of treaty...good, bad or indifferent...from the Iranian perspective. Why would they agree to forego further development of their nuclear potential for two years until another president and congress take office with the knowledge that they might well be right back here where they started at that time? No, the only legitimate interpretation of these events is that 47 Republican senators, led by a neophyte who just seems like another Tea Party loose canon, are doing more flailing about in an attempt to diminish their opponents' political prospects. It's nothing but partisan scratching and biting because in the war of ideas, the Republicans seem to be unarmed.
Your friend,
Mike
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