COMMENTARY

Brummett online: About those leaks …

There are three ways to look at the email leak from the Democratic National Committee.

We should avail ourselves of all three. The points do not exclude each other. Often the right answer is to mark through the true-or-false option and write in “all of the above.”

First: The dust-up over this new hard evidence of DNC favoritism for Hillary Clinton and ridiculing disdain for Bernie Sanders doesn’t really amount to anything scandal-worthy. We knew already that party regulars were embedded in a cozy tank for Hillary.

But there is no indication of any DNC-engineered cheating against Sanders. It’d be hard to do, since the state parties run their own affairs.

What happened was that the independent will of primary voters and caucus-goers kept getting in the way of fast-tracking Hillary’s coronation.

On 60 Minutes on Sunday night, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine deflected this tempest much more effectively than the halting Hillary. He said he’d been DNC chairman and could tell you those employees were opinionated. But he said there was nothing to suggest the DNC managed to “put a thumb on the scales” to affect any outcome in any state.

It’s a no-harm, no-foul deal.

Second: The development reveals that the Democratic national party — its central apparatus — is pretty much the same kind of static, closed, insular clique of Clinton hangers-on as the hapless Arkansas Democratic Party.

These Clintonites resented Sanders because he and his largely young and previously independent 13 million voters were not longtime payers of party dues, but new to their engagement.

Thus these Clintonites more resembled a laughably exclusive college fraternity or sorority than a political party trying to grow membership and gain alliances toward the objective of winning elections.

The party knew it could raise more corporate money off Hillary than Bernie, who — horrors — was raising gobs of funds on his own in small donations from regular people driven by something other than access and special interest.

What good is a college fraternity if the rag-tag geek kids can get in for a few dollars?

Third: The mere suggestion by the Clinton campaign that the Russian government’s intelligence masterminds might have had something to do with hacking these DNC emails — for the purpose of enhancing the election chances of Vladimir Putin-admiring Donald Trump — is, while wild, demanding of the most thorough and highest-level federal investigation.

We previously were told that Russian hackers had infiltrated the DNC’s network and helped themselves to opposition research on Trump. The new conspiracy theory is that, while they were at it, these Russians helped themselves to the email data bank and timed the leak for optimum benefit to Trump.

The Republican nominee has business interests in Russia and is an avowed Putin admirer — because Putin is a strongman, you see, and the Trump message is that the United States needs the same in this dangerous new world.

Meantime, Trump has said lately that he wouldn’t necessarily want the United States to remain in NATO with a commitment to help allies if Russia invaded them.

It’s a bizarre and astonishing set of suggestions — that maybe a President Trump would find America’s interests better served by Putin’s muscle than all these lily-livered socialist democratic republics in Western Europe with their Muslim immigrants running around killing people every couple of days.

But it bears looking into, and the FBI is doing so.

Well, to be precise: The FBI is investigating the hacking, and potential Russian involvement, not whether Trump is Putin’s partner in an anti-democratic scheme for new world domination.

Beyond the specific issue of whether it was Russian officials doing the hacking and leaking, voters ought to give serious thought to the general foreign-policy concept of a Republican presidential candidate admiring Putin while publicly distancing the nation from longtime democratic friends and allies.

Are we that afraid? If so, hasn’t terrorism won already?

So to conclude: This email brouhaha is no big deal except in the ways that it is.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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