Loaded with questions

Assorted unofficial representatives of the vibrant Hillary Clinton-hating right wing stay pretty closely in touch with me via email and social-media messaging.

Mostly I absorb bitter broadsides or questions seeking not actual dialogue but unilateral and self-fulfilling rhetorical flourishes.

But I've sorted through much of what I've received recently--which has been relatively heavy--and arrived at what might be a helpful Q-and-A to represent the general nature of what we might loosely call dialogue.


Q: Can the Clintons do no wrong in your mind? (Often this question invokes smooching of posteriors or other more personal physical intimacies.)

A: Well, let me think. There was the time in '91 and '92 when I wrote and said in press interviews that Bill Clinton was a chameleon devoted to political expediency and possessing no core principle.

There was the time in his second term when I said he ought to resign the presidency because he had soiled it and perjured himself, no matter that the question producing his lie probably should never have been asked under oath in a prosecutorial context.

And Hillary never much cared for me back in the day, because of something I must have said or done, and the feeling was largely mutual. I have written that she's cold and tyrannical and so politically lead-footed as to have once wanted a swimming pool built at the Governor's Mansion.

But he was a good president. And she might be.

In fact, I rather think she would be. No one is perfect.

Q: How in the world can you lie through your teeth and write that Hillary has done nothing wrong in the email matter? (Sometimes this question is accompanied by references to laughter so vigorous as to cause the asker to fall from his chair or wet himself.)

A: To be precise, I hedged in my most recent writing to say that Hillary has done nothing wrong in regard to details revealed thus far. The State Department says there was no law or policy prohibiting her keeping a personal email account for her official business when she was secretary of state.

The charge that classified material flowed over that personal account is based, as yet, on emails she received, and perhaps replied to, but did not initiate, and which were not marked classified at the time.

The New York Times reported that the FBI had put Hillary and/or officials of the State Department under criminal investigation, then hastily clarified to say the FBI had opened instead a "security review" into the State Department's handling of the court-ordered release of the emails, which perhaps permitted classified intelligence information to be made public.

And, yes, a federal judge got exasperated and cried out from the bench that none of this would be happening if Clinton had executed her government email normally, which was quite true. But a judge's exasperation does not a law infraction make.

I know it must be frustrating. You have her cornered ... and then you don't, quite.

Q: How can you justify saying Hillary has done nothing wrong on these emails when General David Petraeus got convicted of a misdemeanor for doing the same thing, or even less?

A: They're not the same thing. Hers is not worse. No amount of wanting that to be the case will make it so.

The general had a girlfriend who was writing a book about him. He had classified intelligence and military documents affecting ongoing hostilities that he kept in his home. And he let his girlfriend/biographer look at those.

Being a secretive and even paranoid politico as secretary of state and keeping your government email on a personal server that may have received messages containing information that now is considered classified ... that's entirely different in terms of intent from walking up to a civilian, or perhaps rolling off one, and saying, "Here, feast your eyes upon these babies."

Q: Well, then, what's the difference between what Petraeus did and what Bill did?

A: I don't think Bill handed Monica any classified materials. Anyway, I advocated for Bill a fate worse than a misdemeanor. I wanted him to give up the presidency.

Q: Is a woman who is that secretive, that paranoid, that manipulative and that averse to public accountability and transparency fit to be president?

A: That's what the election is about. For me, her philosophy, her positions on issues and her experience, intelligence and usual competence enter into the calculation. Mostly I compare her to the Republican field, and, in that context, I begin to find her positively compelling.

Q: Don't you know that she'll be out of the race, and maybe under indictment, within a few weeks?

A: You know, I don't know that. It interests me--and reveals much to me--that you don't want her in the race.

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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 08/30/2015

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