6th July 2016, 7:42 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Clinton's other investigation, regarding that cell phone business, is now closed. This one is a bit less satisfying than the last though. While the FBI won't be pressing charges, they did make it clear that there's enough evidence to say Clinton was extremely careless in managing her e-mails. Not really sure what to make of that one. If it was true carelessness, I wouldn't be surprised. Old people are notoriously out of touch with technology and many out of touch users in larger settings notoriously take IT requirements as suggestions they can ignore the very first time it becomes an inconvenience. I have little doubt the same would apply to equally old Bernie, I'm sad to say. Aside from the judge that recently made a ruling on the Google v Oracle case, very few politicians seem willing to take the time to learn about anything tech related.I would say that there are three major causes of this email scandal.
1) The State Department's diplomats and the FBI's spies have a major, longstanding disagreement over what should be considered classified. Basically, diplomats want to actually talk about things, while spies want everything possible to be kept as secret as possible. As a result there is a natural conflict there, as diplomats use not-fully-secure systems to discuss things the spies wish they would only email about under strict security. I am most definitely on State's side here, we call far too many things "secret" in this country! See this article for another example of this issue, not related to Hillary's email server: http://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-emai...1465509863
So, for me, the one maybe valid question about this mostly-irrelevant "scandal" is this: are any of the so-called classified things in this report actually things that State also thought should be classified at the time, or are they just things that the FBI did but State did not? I expect most, if not all, of it to be the latter, since that certainly fits with the pattern we know of, of diplomats wanting to actually discuss things versus the FBI wanting everything to be secret. I think diplomats should be able to discuss things with eachother without insane layers of secrecy attached to every discussion of things that are in the public record whether or not the FBI wishes they weren't.
2) Old people don't understand the internet; this is surely part of why Hillary had her own server. Also, government systems are not always great; apparently State's secure email system was kind of a pain to use, or something.
3) The Republican Party is going to massively exaggerate anything they can about the Clintons, as they have since 1992. Even beyond the FBI v. State conflict, the FBI director himself is a Republican Bush appointee who Obama kept for some reason, so he probably is biased against Hillary to at least some degree. It's quite noteworthy that he could not come up with any grounds to indict, despite all that.
So ultimately, I still think that this whole scandal doesn't really matter. I've never cared if she used a private email server or not, beyond how it opened her up to this line of attack, and this report doesn't change my mind on that. The most that will come out of this are more Republican wastes of taxpayer money on failed anti-Clinton investigations and some attack ads this election that won't go anywhere due to their candidate being Trump.
Quote:I wanted to clear one thing up. I am not suggesting any vast conspiracies here. I'm suggesting a bunch of really tiny conspiracies, the sort that actually do exist in the real world. That is, of the back room "you scratch my back, I'll scratch your's" type that define a lot of politics. The main difference is that I don't think anyone has any huge plans. These are purely "in the moment" conspiracies that have no real goals beyond the next election cycle, and all of these backroom deals all conflict with each other because, again, it's all a bunch of tiny machinations, Game of Thrones style. That said, the vast majority of government's injustice has less to do with those backroom deals and more to do with sheer incompetence on a large scale.Okay. Well, it is true that government officials often do do things that could be seen as corrupt for money or political support -- the old "war on pork" is an example of fighting this, though that had some negative unintended consequences, as pork programs like those were a good way to get someone to support a bill (by putting in something for their district into the bill), which now are much harder to pull off. But actual full-on corruption? Yes, it happens of course, but I don't think it's quite as common as you seem to.