Scandal? Use of Private Email is Pervasive Among 2016 Hopefuls

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“This e-mail scandal with Hillary, you know, everybody’s looking at the wrong thing again. It’s not about breaking the law. Of course she broke the law, but when have they not? They don’t care. Obama breaks the law every day with every executive order that he does. The point of this is, Mrs. Clinton was trying to hide from the official federal record.” – Rush Limbaugh podcast [3/3/15]

Despite American fascism’s best efforts, yet another “Hillary Clinton Scandal” comes and goes, as quickly refuted as concocted, and what does the GOP have to show for it?

This time it was her private emails but who knows what it might be next? Fox News is as creative as any primetime sitcom.

They tried to compare her emails to Nixon of all things, and failed. They misjudged the public’s enthusiasm for more fake scandals relating to Hillary. The beat Benghazi to death, cloned it, then beat it to death again, and thought the public would want still more.

They were wrong.

Democratic Benghazi Committee members quickly revealed that Hillary had already turned over tens of thousands of emails.

Claims that she violated the law were also quickly dashed to pieces. We actually owe it to CNN to set the record straight correcting both The Washington Post and Politico, as Media Matters explains. We should be thankful, I suppose, that there have been no recent missing aircraft to distract CNN.

As Media Matters’ Jeremy Holden concluded yesterday,

It’s a fitting end to the week, as the manufactured scandal has been marked by rushed reporting built around innuendo and reckless speculation from the outset, when The New York Times was forced to immediately issue a clarification to its first report on Clinton’s use of a non-government email.

It is this quickness to rush to judgment where Hillary Clinton is concerned that exposes the abject fear in which conservatives hold her. They know that the election is hers in 2016 should she choose to run. The rest is just playacting they are required to carry out. There is not a Republican alive who can beat her.

Even so, Republicans are busy stroking themselves in very public, unseemly ways. For example, Silvio Canto, Jr. at American Thinker claimed today that,

If Hillary Clinton were a publicly traded stock, its value would have dropped quite a lot in recent weeks. It started with the book tour, the “we were broke when we left the White House” statement, the Foundation and now the emails story.

This is the same Hillary Clinton who just flat-out walloped Tea Party darling Scott Walker, and Chris Christie in his home state.

And as Scott Walker explains that if he can handle unarmed and nonviolent unions he can handle ISIL, Canto claims, “And we have not spoken about her foreign policy yet! I can’t wait to hear how she explains that!”

You have only to review your favorite search engine to see more of the same, not only from the right-wing media but from the mainstream media.

Don’t expect facts to put an end to the madness, however, even though the Associated Press reported that other 2016 presidential hopefuls, including Rick Perry, used private email accounts

Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Bobby Jindal must be added to this list. As must, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel pointed out Thursday, Scott Walker from his days as county exec.

A top aide to Walkerset up a private router in the county executive’s office that was used to trade emails that mixed government and campaign business. Emails released through litigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel show Walker routinely used his campaign account — skw@scottwalker.org — to discuss county business.

Yeah, about that.

The complete absence of evidence did nothing to bring the Benghazi Hoax to an early and well-deserved death, but if Republicans want to keep pushing the Hillary email “scandal” they should be prepared to answer many questions themselves.

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Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen's Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.

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