Duh.
Are these people for real?? Of course it’s a sign of status. The more important your job is to getting things done, the more likely to get an email address on the server. You automatically get prestige from the position. Jeez, and these people are called journalists, seeing slights in every little thing and not recognizing when a working group is not a clique. It’s not a matter of favoritism. It’s a matter of battening down the hatches and keeping confidential material from being compromised.
I seriously wish she had sent copies to her .gov account just to shut up the conspiracy theorists and because, hack attack or not, I suspect it was the more correct thing to do. But let’s not forget that the Republicans have done this for years and they saved official correspondence on a GOP server. Then, they deleted all those emails. Yup. Just gone. Poof. No record, no backup. That administrator probably got a raise for losing all those important emails between Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby or whoever. Republicans have no one to blame but themselves. No sane governmental official is going to let their email fall into the hands of politically motivated indivduals if the other side got away with it previously.
Hillary has asked that all of her emails from her personal account be released. That probably won’t be enough to sate the bloodthirsty zombies who have been after her for decades. But now we can request that all Republican candidates do the same with all of their official personal email accounts. Put up or shut up.
Peter Daou, Clinton’s former internet director from 2008, tells us why the “innerati” have been gunning for Hillary for more than 20 years. I think he is partially right. They don’t know what to make of her as a powerful woman and their jaws robotically chomp away at her as a consequence of some internal germ they were infected with when they were growing up in the 50s and 60s.
Daou says the reason why Hillary has such loyal friends is because she is a loyal friend. She doesn’t forget you:
I have a personal take on why Hillary Clinton’s reputation is so resilient. Early on a Sunday morning in the summer of 2006, a week after she had hired me as an advisor and after an outbreak of violence in the Middle East, my home phone rang. “Peter, it’s Hillary, I was just calling to make sure your friends and family in Lebanon are OK.” It immediately struck me: the reason Hillary Clinton has so many fiercely loyal friends and advisors, so many fans and supporters, is because of her character, her friendship, her loyalty.
We here at The Confluence have a similar story. We were never official bloggers for Hillary but we took up her cause back in 2008 because, well, frankly, what the rest of the blogosphere was doing to her was outrageous and we were paying attention to the kind of person she was. Later in the primary campaign season, she had a conference call with us and other bloggers to thank us. Katiebird got to talk to her on our behalf. We didn’t ask for any recognition, and I’m not sure she really wanted us to go the PUMA route afterwards, but it was a very thoughtful gesture.
All of this reminds me of what Jane Caro said in her Dangerous Ideas video. (Pick it up at about the 13:00 mark) She was talking about Australian prime minister Julia Gillard who never seemed to catch a break either. She was either praised excessively as being some kind of female iconic heroine or villified by the Australian version of the innerati.
“Poor bloody Julia Gillard”, says Caro. “She’s just a person who got to be prime minister.”
I recommend Jane’s commentary on merit, women, quotas and politics to anyone who is trying to figure out why someone as accomplished as Hillary Clinton has to fight so damned hard to be president when we have many men on both the left and right who aren’t nearly as qualified, or on her level, who are being considered as legitimate opponents. I mean, some of them on the right don’t even believe in evolution. How is it they can even get on the ballot?? Something as elemental as believing in evolution should be a requirement for office. It’s bizarre but I’m sure Hillary is used to it by now.
We’re used to it too. We’re definitely in the Jane Caro contingent. We’re not shutting up.
For the Record: We do not have email addresses on Hillary Clinton’s private server. We do not feel slighted.
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