Last Call For The End Of The Clinton Email Idiocy

The Clinton "email scandal" has just jumped the shark.

As Brian Fallon, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s press secretary, defended her on Wednesday during a conference call about her email use, he made a novel argument that got lost in the haze of questions. 

Mr. Fallon spoke to reporters after Fox News had reported that two of Mrs. Clinton’s aides while she was secretary of state had sent her classified information over her private email server. 

Mr. Fallon insisted that the report constituted a “watershed” moment that helped identify which emails an inspector general had flagged as containing classified information. That’s because, he argued, the definition of what is classified is subjective, and the emails weren’t marked as classified at the time they were sent. The inspector general referred to four classified emails in a letter to the F.B.I. about the security of Mrs. Clinton’s server. 

Then Mr. Fallon tried to turn the theoretical tables on Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, the chairman of the House select committee investigating the Benghazi attacks, which has focused in recent months on Mrs. Clinton’s email use. If she was at fault for having classified information on her server without her knowledge, Mr. Fallon suggested, then aren’t other people in the same boat? 

Uh-oh.

“Just as an aside, for the I.G. to now declare the material as classified, since it was provided by State to the House Benghazi committee earlier this year in unredacted form, presumably that means that members of the House Benghazi committee may have unwittingly handled classified material on unclassified systems within the House of Representatives,” Mr. Fallon said. 

“Now, I don’t think that anybody here at the Clinton campaign is going to say that members of, say, Chairman Gowdy’s staff should have their computers confiscated for having possibly trafficked in classified material,” he said. “I don’t think we would say that. But that is, fundamentally, the same logic behind the I.G.’s referral to the State Department with respect to Mrs. Clinton’s server, since she was at worst a passive recipient of unwitting information that subsequently became deemed as classified. Let’s raise that as an aside.”

And this is the moment where quite suddenly the Clinton email scandal ceased being anything close to a real issue, and officially became a partisan witch hunt like Benghazi and everything else.

On Thursday afternoon, a spokeswoman for the House committee said that “The Committee has taken a year to complete all of the complex procedures required by the Executive Branch for review and certification of its systems to manage and handle classified information in electronic form. Despite the substantial complication and inconvenience to complete all of the necessary requirements, the most important thing was to make sure we did it right.”

When does Trey Gowdy's computer get confiscated in order to make sure?

FBI might want to have a little talk with him about unsecured "classified" material.

Your move, Republicans. This scandal is 100% over and done.

Fighting The Battle Of Who Could Matter Less

I've talked about how both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have been less than stellar on the issue of Black Lives Matter, and then Scott Walker comes along to remind me that there are much, much worse people who are running for president.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker sidestepped 'ridiculous' questions on Friday about whether he would be willing to meet with organizers of the 'Black lives Matter' movement, saying he would limit his time in New Hampshire to commenting on 'things that matter.' 

'I'm going to meet with voters. I mean, I've said, it's not just – who knows who that is?' Walker said of the amorphous civil rights group, following his breakfast speech at a 'Politics and Eggs' forum in Manchester, New Hampshire. 

The presidential candidate likened the prospect of a sit-down with the aggressive civil rights group's loudest voices to the idea of meeting with top representatives from a leaderless movement on the political right. 

'I'm going to talk with American voters. Period. It's the same way as saying you're going to meet with the tea party,' he said in a rare moment of agitation. 'Who's the tea party? There's hundreds of thousands of people out there.'

So the question of meeting with black activists is "ridiculous."  Then he literally says it's ridiculous because all voters matter, like the Tea Party, which apparently matters because there's hundreds of thousands of them.

Never mind that the guy is running for president when 17.8 million black votes were cast in 2012 and 93% went to the dude who won.  We literally don't matter.

I may have issues with Clinton and Sanders, but they are infinitely better than the asshole Republicans who literally could not give a damn about black voters, period.

Finding Fault Of Fools

Jeff Greenfield over at WIN THE MORNING decides that this whole “President Obama kicking ass for the last year or so” thing is getting boring, and giving a black President a positive can’t possibly be right, so we’re back to everything is Obama’s fault as to how he has destroyed the Democratic party.

Under Obama, the party started strong. “When Obama was elected in 2008, Democrats were at a high water mark,” says David Axelrod, who served as one of Obama’s top strategists. “Driven by antipathy to George W. Bush and then the Obama wave, Democrats had enjoyed two banner elections in ’06 and ’08. We won dozens of improbable congressional elections in states and districts that normally would tack Republican, and that effect trickled down to other offices. You add to that the fact that we would take office in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and it was apparent, from Day One, that we had nowhere to go but down.” 

The first signs of the slowly unfolding debacle that has meant the decimation of the Democratic Party nationally began early—with the special election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s empty Senate seat in Massachusetts. That early loss, even though the seat was won back eventually by Elizabeth Warren, presaged the 2010 midterms, which saw the loss of 63 House and six Senate seats. It was disaster that came as no surprise to the White House, but also proved a signal of what was to come. 

The party’s record over the past six years has made clear that when Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017 the Democratic Party will have ceded vast sections of the country to Republicans, and will be left with a weak bench of high-level elected officials. It is, in fact, so bleak a record that even if the Democrats hold the White House and retake the Senate in 2016, the party’s wounds will remain deep and enduring, threatening the enactment of anything like a “progressive” agenda across much of the nation and eliminating nearly a decade’s worth of rising stars who might help strengthen the party in elections ahead.

The really weird part is that nowhere in the entire piece do I see the words “Debbie Wasserman Schultz” who, as chair of the DNC, would ostensibly be the person in charge of the election strategies and GOTV tactics that Greenfield is complaining about, but I guess Greenfield has never met her or something.

Also, there is the small matter of the impressive number of Democrats who lost by running as far away from Barack Obama as possible in 2010, 2012, and 2014 but no, the problem is of course Obama.

That’s the Beltway wisdom, and it will be for a very, very long time.

Sweet Home Trumpabama

You know what they say, in politics, you play Peoria to Peoria, and you play bigot protectionist jackass to Mobile as The Donald held a Friday pep rally at a football stadium in Alabama.

Trump fans came by the thousands, driving from the Florida panhandle, from Mississippi, from Tennessee and Texas. Traffic was backed up for more than a mile.

On the street, Olaf Childress, a neo-Confederate activist, gave out copies of “The First Freedom” newspaper, which had headlines about “Black-on-white crime,” “occupied media” and “censored details of the Holocaust.”

The most-enthusiastic Trump backers began arriving at the stadium at dawn, hoping to get a spot close to the stage. The first in line were Keith Quackenbush, 54, and Bill Hart, 46, co-workers at a retail giant in Pensacola, Fla.

“I’m telling you, everyone who is a worker at our store, they’re excited about Trump,” Quackenbush said. “I don’t care what race or gender, whatever age — they love Trump. This is a movement.”

It's a movement alright, one as old as America itself.  And it's one hell of an ugly one.

But none has put on a show like Trump. The scene Friday night resembled something between a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert and the Daytona 500.

People came to see a celebrity, Trump, but also to hear his fiery call to revolutionize the nation’s politics. Many folks here said they had never before attended a presidential campaign event.

Cheryl Burns, 60, was on a road trip from California when she heard that Trump would be in Alabama. She turned her car around and got in line, warning people of what happened to states when liberals took them over.

“There is no more California,” Burns said. “It’s now international, lawless territory. Everything is up for grabs. Illegal aliens are murdering people there. People are being raped. Trump isn’t lying about anything — the rest of the country just hasn’t found out yet.”

Pretty sure the rest of the country has found out about Trump at this point, and what he stands for: Punishing those people whenever possible.  Sticking it to China, "illegals" and "inner-city gang members".  Of course he's doing well in Alabama.  Well enough to make these lovely "patriots" ignore his record and go all in for his dangerous rhetoric on immigration and race.

It's what they want, to lash out and "make them pay" so they can "take back our country".  And those who are not like them aren't welcome at all.