Yesterday, just a few hours after Hillary Stonewall Clinton's press conference, I discussed the whole leaden performance with Sean Hannity on Fox News. In case you missed it, it seems to have been widely excerpted all over the web today. Herewith, a few links. But don't worry: Although these are multiple websites, you can access them on a single "device".
From Fox News:
Mark Steyn tonight slammed "Queen Hillary" Clinton over her email controversy and called Americans "the chumps of the planet" for putting up with the ordeal.
Steyn compared the former secretary of state to Marie Antoinette.
"Instead of 'let 'em eat cake,' 'let 'em eat spin,' and not even good spin at that," Steyn said.
Clinton said she released about 55,000 emails from her time at the State Department, which Steyn said equals about 38 emails per day. The average person in business receives more than 100 emails per day, he said.
I got my figure from The Australian, Sean had a slightly higher number from Forbes. But it doesn't matter which you use, because Hillary's declared emails are well south of what any person receives at work each day. From The Daily Caller:
"We're supposed to be impressed because she turned over 55,000 emails. That works out to about 38 a day while she was secretary of state. The average person in business receives something like 121 business emails a day. So this supposedly high number of emails that she's turned over doesn't sound right to me, doesn't pass the smell test." (VIDEO: Mark Steyn: Obama Thinks He's Running 'One-Man State')
"And everything else, she says she deleted after the State Department requested her emails!" Steyn said. "So she - rather than any government guidelines - has been the arbiter of what emails she's willing to let into the public record. And Americans are the chumps of the planet for putting up with this."
As for all those curious comments around the media about how Republicans are sure to "overreach" in their enthusiasm to stick it to Hill, here's my view, as noted by Breitbart News:
"No Republicans need be involved in these scandals. It was a Democrat Ambassador to Kenya that Hillary Clinton's State Department fired because he used private e-mail... It was the CIA director of a Democrat administration, General Petraeus, who pleaded guilty to a crime for having supposedly classified material at his home... By her own admission, all the classified material from her time as Secretary of State, went to this private e-mail address. Why is it that if you're a low-level Democrat ambassador, you have to be — you have to obey the rules, but if you're the Democrat ambassador's boss, you don't? This is essentially an intra-Democrat fight - which Democrats don't have to obey the law, and which Democrats do?" And "because she's Hillary, we're being asked to accept that she has the right to choose which laws to obey."
Finally, and with reference to this, I took advantage of the view out my window. From Newsmax:
Steyn appeared via remote from London on Tuesday on Fox News Channel's "Hannity." He pointed to Big Ben over his shoulder, saying, "The only reason the House of Parliament exists is 800 years ago, King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta that said even a king has to bow to the law. Eight-hundred years later, Queen Hillary says no, no, no, the laws don't apply to me. The laws are for the little people."
A couple of reader/viewer responses. First, from Jerry Coon:
Now that Hillary has stated unequivocally that none of the emails contained classified material, it will be interesting to see how much of the emails are redacted by the State Department because they do contain classified material. After all, the President decides what is and what is not classified, not the Secretary of State.
General Petraeus just pleaded guilty to mishandling classified material. If any emails are redacted because an item is classified, then would not Hillary be guilty of the same act?
Given the extremely low level at which material becomes "classified", and given that her State Department minions would have no reason to assume she had a lower security clearance than they did, Hillary is surely lying when she claims, preposterously, that no classified material was ever sent to or from her email account. But, as I said to Sean, so what? The law is for General Petraeus and the Ambassador to Kenya. She's way above that.
From Alan Watt:
Back when hubby Bill was "not having sex with that woman", my comment was that I sure hoped the Secret Service was doing their job and running thorough background checks on Monica and any other women the First Philanderer invited up for late night cigar sessions. My point being once foreign intelligence services know someone has a certain weakness, it is a high percentage play to surround that person with juicy temptations exactly tailored to that weakness. Someone so placed could do all kinds of damage. To my knowledge, this aspect was never brought up in the MSM coverage.
Fast forward to Madam Secretary Clinton and the personal email server at her residence. Unless she hired absolutely top-fight IT talent with a lot of security background, the NSA could crack her system open in about as much time as it takes to read this comment. Other national intelligence agencies would be almost as fast. If there were any sensitive emails there, we can be reasonably certain multiple foreign governments have read them. It would be nice to have a competent agency examine the server for signs of intrusion, but I'm sure Hilary will say "at this point, what difference would that make?".
Most discussion on Hilary's private or secret email accounts has been about evading scrutiny and ducking FOI requests; we also need to consider the security exposure.
I'm operating on the assumption that the Chinese, the Russians and various other interested parties already have Hillary's emails. Certainly they have more - and more interesting ones - than official US government records will ever have.
We had a lot of emails along the following lines, from Alan Pugh:
Mr. Steyn,
Regarding your March 10th column "The Audacity of Hill", you're making the same mistake about the "55,000 pages" of email that just about everyone else out there is. Unless each individual email is one "page", then that will represent a heck of a lot less emails than what the number is representing. Print out a few of your own emails after they've been replied to and followed up on a few times, and you'll see how quickly a single email will soon represent 20 or 30 pages all by itself.
That's not even taking into consideration the fact they probably were printed with a 20pt or more typeface. Also, if you have an email where you respond back and forth with someone else 5 times, even if each individual reply is fairly short, how do you count that? Let's say the first email was one page (including the header information), and the reply tacks on another page, then the reply back is another, etc. So, you'd end up with 15 "pages" of emails, even though the last email also contains the contents of the first 4 as well.
I'd be surprised if this "55,000 pages" represents more than 5000 actual emails. The number is probably much, much lower.
Regards,
Alan Pugh
Well, I was dealing with ballpark figures for a best-case scenario. I had a point I meant to mention to Sean that, just the correspondence between his producers and my office to book me on the show ran to over a dozen pages.
But that's the point: An inch is a unit of distance, and a degree is a unit of temperature, but a "page" is not a unit of email. Other than to obstruct effective digital record-keeping, Mrs Clinton may have had additional reasons for printing everything. Maybe she decided to condense multiple emails onto a single page by cutting "extraneous" matter that nobody needs, such as timezones or long signatures or those little sign-offs - "Envoyé de mon iPhone" - that give you a clue from which part of the world the sender's sending it from.
I mean, once you've decided not to supply the Government with a digital record in its digital form, all bets are off. I would certainly imagine that many of the emails Mrs Clinton claimed to have handed over would not meet the definition of a trial exhibit in a court of law. So it's just a question of how brazen she was inclined to be. From Paul Foster:
I have been waiting to hear that the emails had been 'inadvertently' printed on a color printer using white ink.
Don't rule it out.
Bottom line: I think her fellow Democrats and significant numbers of voters are relaxed about Hillary's criminality. What may yet do her in is her tin-eared creepiness. For example, in explaining why she deleted all her personal email, she or her scriptwriters thought it would be worth attempting to humanize her:
At the end, I chose not to keep my private, personal e-mails — e-mails about planning Chelsea's wedding or my mother's funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends.
But that's the stuff everybody keeps. Your daughter's wedding goes in the trash along with the Viagra spam and the Nigerian dictator's-widow pitches? "Condolence notes to friends"? How would you feel if you were a "friend" of Hillary? She sends you a touching, sincere note on the death of your father, and you're moved by her thoughtfulness, and how beautifully chosen her words are. And then she's on TV saying, nah, I trashed all that, what's the point of keeping it all? Who needs it, right?
The Clintons have always had a weird and freaky relationship, but I think she rather gave the game away here in ways Bill was careful not to. As revealing as anything she said about her "official" email was this glimpse of her "personal" "life": Why would you delete that?
