As Hillary Clinton seeks the Democratic presidential nomination, she’s likely to encounter little if any opposition from within her party. What concerns Esquire blogger Charles Pierce are 1) obstacles the Republicans, and maybe the media, might manufacture, and 2) unforced errors from Hillary herself, such as her use of a personal e-mail account for official duties while she was Secretary of State.
Pierce doesn’t exactly minimize the e-mail revelation, but he’s much more upset about Hillary’s failure to fully understand that she’s a wacko magnet: “For going on 30 years, she has been the target of every strange conspiracy theory…Just in the past six years, she's watched the Benghazi, Benghazi! BENGHAZI! dreamscape blossom lushly with the wilder flora planted in the public mind by the seedpod that is the brain of Darrell Issa...She had to know what [the e-mail story] would mean because she's lived her whole life under The Clinton Rules, by which every glitch is a crime, and every blunder is a conspiracy.”
From Pierce’s Tuesday post (bolding added):
For going on 30 years, [Hillary] has been the target of every strange conspiracy theory that the half-bright mind of man can dream up. She knows they're out there, pining to have a coldie with Vince Foster at the cocktail lounge of the Mena Airport. Just in the past six years, she's watched the Benghazi, Benghazi! BENGHAZI! dreamscape blossom lushly with the wilder flora planted in the public mind by the seedpod that is the brain of Darrell Issa. So she knew that what began with a bust-out Ozarks land deal had not faded just because her husband had skated through his second term. And still, we have [the e-mail story]…
And let a thousand paranoids bloom.
She had to know what this would mean because she's lived her whole life under The Clinton Rules, by which every glitch is a crime, and every blunder is a conspiracy. It's not entirely fair, and we'll get to that in a minute, but somebody on the nascent campaign should have been D'd up for this kind of thing. A campaign by Hillary Clinton is a different thing, and anyone who doesn't know this by now is somebody who needs burping on the half-hour…
And yes, I am Troubled by the whole lack of transparency thing, too.
All of that said, the Times story is pretty full of fudge. It's not clear whether Clinton and her aides are being accused of violating the regulations of the National Archives, or some undefined federal law, or simply the delicate sensibilities of various watchdog groups...
…[I]t's hard not to see the historical and journalistic connective tissue between this story in the Times and the legendary Jeff Gerth stories that jump-started the Whitewater extravaganza during the first Clinton campaign in 1992. As Gene Lyons wrote in his groundbreaking examination of that fiasco:
Gerth's original story was recently praised in the American Journalism Review as containing 80 to 90 percent of what the press knows about Whitewater today. Rival reporters complained, though, that the 1992 article lacked a "nut paragraph" summing up what the Clintons had done wrong and why it was important.
There is a difference, of course. Clinton's been through the Whitewater situation. She knows the mechanics of scandal better than almost anyone. She knows how the gears mesh and the parts move. There is another difference. In 1992, the mainstream press went along for the ride. Clinton knows that, too. It's past time for her to get her damn act together.
