Wednesday, August 03, 2016

I Really Don't Get Nuance

I really don't get big-brained nuanced thinking, it is clear.

So let me get this straight, Hillary Clinton said that her 30,000 deleted emails withheld from the government for archiving from her unsecured home server that she used instead of secure government email systems were all about yoga classes and Chelsea's baby, and so of no interest to Americans under freedom of information laws and other regulations requiring the retention of government emails and communications.

It was a "nothingburger" that only partisan Republicans could insist was a big deal.

Now that Donald Trump said Putin should release those "lost" emails (he said he was joking, which is highly plausible considering he also said the Clinton-loving media would appreciate the information), saying they'd be as interesting as DNC email releases by the Russian front Wikileaks, Democrats are crying "treason!" on the theory that Trump was advocating cyber-espionage by Russia that would harm our national security.

So just what was really in those deleted emails, anyway, eh? Must be quite the big deal to justify the indignation from the Democrats!

How is it possible for Democrats to compartmentalize both declarations as true?

One, isn't "treason" working for the enemy? Didn't Hillary "reset" our relations with Russia?

Two, I guess I'm heartened that Democrats consider Russia a potential enemy. During the Cold War, they couldn't be bothered to really think of the USSR as the enemy. But the Russians harmed Hillary, so that's the difference, I suppose. Hillary is the state and must not be opposed.

So I guess that Hillary finally answered that 3:00 a.m. phone call from the 1980s asking for their foreign policy back, as President Obama mocked Mitt Romney in a 2012 debate belittling Romney's contention that Russia was a geopolitical threat.

And three, so it must be true that it is a big deal that Hillary refused to use government-secured email systems and procedures to secure her emails. For Russia to release those emails, Russia would already have to have them in their possession because Hillary deleted them and wiped the server.

Yet no reasonable prosecutor would levy charges against Hillary for doing what she did with her private server and handling of sensitive and secret information?

And in bonus what-are-they-thinking territory, why would the Clinton campaign be more concerned about the FBI seeing her campaign system than the hackers seeing their mail, when the FBI warned the campaign that the system was under attack and offered to help?

In a meeting with senior officials at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters, FBI agents laid out concerns that cyberhackers had used so-called spear-phishing emails as part of an attempt to penetrate the campaign’s computers, the sources said. One of the sources said agents conducting a national security investigation asked the Clinton campaign to turn over internal computer logs as well as the personal email addresses of senior campaign officials. But the campaign, through its lawyers, declined to provide the data, deciding that the FBI’s request for sensitive personal and campaign information data was too broad and intrusive, the source said.

I guess the difference between criminal negligence and treason is tough to determine.

But I'm just a simple unfrozen caveman blogger. I really just don't get nuance.

UPDATE: Watch for Hillary's Russian connections.

Really, I worry about what Trump might do based on his rhetoric. But I worry more about what Clinton will do based on her record.