The Other Side of the Clinton Email Scandal

Yesterday the State Department released another 7,000 pages of email correspondence sent and received by Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State.

Despite the announcement that Clinton viewed even more classified material through her private address, the sympathetic media is, predictably, making little of it. Clinton’s puerile blame-shifting and finger-pointing defense continues. And it is likely to do so successfully since the classification process is a mystery, necessarily so, to most voters.

But there’s a pattern of behavior even more disturbing in the trove of communication, which should probably not be surprising given Clinton’s disregard for the protective barriers federal regulations between official and private business.

The cutthroat ruthlessness of left-wing politics is abundantly evident in many of the recently released emails. A memo from long time Clinton lap dog David Brock, whose yellow journalism site Media Matters actively goes after the right, detailing his scheme to intimidate women close to conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in an effort to impeach him.

Sydney Blumenthal, known as “Sid Vicious” during his time in Bill Clinton’s service and whose partisanship is so obvious even the Obama administration barred him from holding a public post, forwarded Clinton emails his son had written about the right’s Islamophobia. He also sent a 3-page diatribe to Clinton about the extremism of modern conservatives and how their hateful divisiveness is destroying the country.

And these are among the messages Clinton did not purge from her server.

The State Department is part of the executive branch. It is funded by taxpayer money and its employees are public servants. They are supposed to be concerned with the nation’s welfare, not partisan political agendas.

The unscrupulousness of the Clintons is hardly a stunning revelation, but the sheer gall of their behavior, even as they constantly push the boundaries of rule of law further and further, remains so.

There is a deep-rooted sense of entitlement and superiority here which is befitting of a grasping, evil king in an over-the-top Shakespearean tragedy. Indeed, feudalism is a fitting allegory for the Clinton mindset. Because they clearly think there is some kind of stepped implementation procedure to rule of law that makes them less answerable to oversight than others simply because of their personality.

Clinton’s claim that she was not aware of the state of classification messages sent to her is also in line with this persona. Bad is never the fault of the ruler. They have, after all, divinity on their side. No character flaws or failures of reason can account for wrongdoing. It must be the ineptitude and inability to comprehend greatness on the part of underlings.

This is the side of this scandal that needs to be hammered home. Ignorance may be a plausible defense when it comes to the sensitivity of certain emails, but it certainly is not for the vicious hatred towards anyone who opposes the Clinton will.

If character still matters to the American people, then there needs to be understanding that this kind of behavior, if excused, becomes acceptable in future politicians with similar powers, regardless of their ideological identification. And such a system can only end in a real bifurcation of rule of law, where the underclass is held to one standard of behavior and the connected elite is held to another, more lenient standard.