"[T]he thing that drives me nuts" about Hillary Clinton's response to the e-mail controversy, MSNBC's Steve Kornacki noted on Tuesday's Hardball, is that she stubbornly can't bring herself to admit that the public would be better off had she used a State Department e-mail account from day one of her tenure at Foggy Bottom.
Instead, the Hardball guest host lamented, she's insisting it was a mere "matter of convenience" for her to use her personal e-mail account:
I think what people suspect is like it wasn't this innocent thing from the beginning where it's just like, "Well, I don't want to have two devices, I couldn't possibly have two devices on one phone."
Wrapping up the segment moments later, Kornacki reiterated his concern that Hillary's lack of transparency has hurt future generations from getting a full record of Clinton's management at State:
If we're going to preserve things that happen real time that are government-involved, there has to be an arbiter. And you're not just saying turn over the stuff that you want history to reflect about your tenure as secretary of state, secretary of defense, whatever it is, whoever it is, there needs to be somebody else making the call.
[...]
Everybody will put the stuff in that makes them look good and take the stuff out that makes them look bad. That's not how you write history. At least that's a boring history if you read that.
Earlier in the segment, Kornacki took veteran Clinton defender and left-wing scribe Joe Conason to task for deploying a predictable Bush-folks-did-it-too defense:
Why kind of a standard is that?! What did the Democrats say when Karl Rove was using the RNC server? What did the Democrats say when the Bush administration.... But why now is it OK?....Why fall back on it?
[...]
What I'm hearing was, it was good enough for the Bush administration, it's good enough for the Clintons.
