[UPDATE: Here's the video of Mark's appearance on Hannity]
[And, here's how Breitbart covered my interview: "This is Queen Mary Antoinette, instead of 'let them eat cake,' 'let them eat spin,' and not even good spin at that."]
I'll be talking about today's Hillary Clinton press conference later tonight with Sean Hannity on Fox News, but it was an amazing performance. Amazingly wooden and unconvincing, of course, but in a sense that was part of its brazenness. Its sheer implausibility underlined her central message: Yeah, and what are you gonna do about it?
Most political figures would be terrified at having to advance this thin a defense in public:
Oh, well. I didn't have a government email address because I didn't want to be forced to carry "two devices". Who'd she get that one from? Bill? "Aw, honey, you know I couldn't possibly be [email protected], and [email protected], and [email protected], and [email protected], and [email protected], and all the rest, because I'd have to have 12 different devices. And, if I had 12 different desktops on the desk, there'd be no room for the intern, would there?"
But apparently it's easier to set up your own email domain on a personal server at your home than ask a State Dept underling if there's anybody there who can figure out how to get two email addresses on one "device". And apparently your reluctance to carry two "devices" trumps anything so footling as the law. And, in any case, you said on camera just two weeks ago that you had an iPhone and a Blackberry.
Hillary announced today that she'd deleted everything other than the 55,000 pages of emails she handed over to the government. And, while 55,000 sounds like a lot, it boils down to fewer than 38 a day for a four-year term. The average person in work has over 120 business-related emails a day. So Hillary's 55,000 sounds a little on the low side. Happily for her, she handed them over to the feds as print copies only, so Trey Gowdy is going to have to wait until some State Dept minion has scanned them all in in a searchable form before he can enter search terms like "Benghazi".
The risibilty of these defenses is the point. To reprise one of my favorite Theodore Dalrymple quotes:
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.
That's why all this stuff is coming out now. If Hillary can get away with something so obviously and uniquely and intentionally wrong, and that compromises national security to boot, and for which she offers nothing but the most laughable explanations, then she will have set the rules for the next 18 months. If she can make the court eunuchs of the media and the Democrats' own base complicit in this absurd and unconvincing lie, they're hardly in a position to complain about all the others in the months ahead.
