The Hillary Clinton E-Mail Scandal

I’m an equal-opportunity pointer-outer-of-stupid-stuff here at WND Watch. And Cheryl Chumley is making a lot of posts … her “About” paragraph says she is a full-time reporter for WND, but I’m guessing she was hired very recently because until this week, I have never seen her posts, and I’m too tired to go back and search. (Okay, fine: She had a few WND posts starting in July 2014, but only around a dozen. Suddenly on March 2, she’s writing around 9 per day.)

Anyway, back to the story: It has emerged over the last few days that when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she used a private e-mail address. WND has reported this as: “Hillary-Gate? Email Server Traced to Clinton Home.” (FYI, I’m really sick of people attaching “Gate” to every scandal or pseudo-scandal.)

The news is really that basic headline. The problem is two-fold: (1) The law (Federal Records Act) requires that official e-mails of government workers take place from government accounts such that they are subject to open-records requests (in other words, what Hillary did was probably illegal, in my very un-legal opinion); and (2) security reasons, for government servers tend to be more hardened against hacking attempts as well as being better backed up.

Because of that first reason, I remember early in President Obama’s presidency, headlines were made about him being the first “Email President” because both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton eschewed e-mail because of those open-records laws. Obama was at a point where he was unwilling to give it up.

There is a lot to still be said for this developing story, and I don’t know how it will turn out. Did Mrs. Clinton violate the law? I don’t know, but it would seem like it. Is this a massive scandal? I don’t think so, but “scandals” tend to be scaled by one’s own personal politics.

Will this affect her possible White House run? I doubt it because the people who won’t vote for her because of this weren’t going to vote for her anyway, and those who would vote for her aren’t going to let this get in the way. For the most part.

But, if she actually did break the law here, I think she should be held accountable. That said, it remains to be seen whether the report is accurate and what the specifics were if it was accurate.

Is There Such a Thing as a CINO?

As in “Christian in Name Only” (begatten from the “Republican in Name Only”).

I ask because of an April 3, 2014 story that WND lifted from Washington Examiner, “Poll: Hillary Winning 36% of Evangelicals.”

And some of the subsequent 39 comments, such as from top-rated “kurtis:” “This doesn’t surprise me about Clinton getting 36% of the Christian vote. 50% of all self- proclaim Christians aren’t even register to vote and of the 50% that are registered, 50% of them don’t vote. Secondly, this 36% who claimed to be Christians, I would have to challenge whether they actually live their Christian faith. Not to judge, but if you are supporting/voting for candidates that support abortion you are not living your faith.”

Or third-highest “Bill731:” “These are not ” evangelicals ” in the traditional, historic sense of the word. All of the apostates will no doubt vote for Hillary.”

Are we back to the No True Scotsman Fallacy? Where if you don’t fit my definition of the term and ALL that it entails, you can’t be a member of they group regardless of whether you consider yourself to be a member? Me-thinks that’s the implication. And, because many don’t fit WND’ers’ narrow and über-conservative views, I think that we see this fallacy used quite a bit.

Benghazi – The Cover-Up that WND Keeps Propping Up

Let’s do a quick rehash: In Libya, last year, four Americans were killed (including the US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens) and ten were injured in a terrorist attacks. For months, the Republicans tried to make this into a major scandal for the State Department, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (and I can guarantee you that they will bring this up again if she runs for President in 2016), and of course for President Obama.

After all those hearings and tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars spent, nothing happened. It was a failure of US intelligence and planning and not some big conspiracy.

Unless you read WND. Just like the Obama birth certificate “issues,” WND is about the only outlet that seems to think there are issues here. And they keep trying to get other people to care, too. That’s the subject of actually two WND articles today, one by Gina Loudon titled “60-Foot Petition Demands End to Benghazi Secrets” (committing the “begging the question” logical fallacy by assuming there are secrets), and Aaron Klein’s post titled, “General Can’t Explain Why Forces Not Deployed to Benghazi.” Klein’s article has little to no meat and very few comments at the moment (5) while Loudon’s is a tad more interesting and has well over 200 comments.

Well, by a “tad more interesting,” it spends a few sentences talking about the publicity stunt of unrolling a petition with over 1000 names, “unrolled near the Capitol building Tuesday.” I’d like to imagine that meant it was in some little diner’s bathroom a few blocks away and used as toilet paper, but I digress. And to do a bit of math, 60′ of paper, assuming 8.5″x11″ paper (standard US), would be 65.5 pages. That’s about 15 names per page. To get 60 ft out of this, they must’ve been printing in size 72 font or something. …As I said, a publicity stunt.

The rest of the article is just rehashing the old conspiracy stuff that WND has been publishing for nearly a year.

The top comment right now with 62 up-votes is by “milmac” stating, “There are no leaders in Congress. Boehner should be fired. The entire Obama administration should be impeached.” “Lizard” replies with 33 up-votes, “How true ..Obama telling lies 24-7 makes me sick” That’s pretty much the tone.

Next-most popular comment is by “ta187610” who says, “In what’s left of America how can anyone expect an investigation when what evidence there is points to the highest levels of the administration as complicit in murder?”

Basically, all these people are saying that of course there’s a conspiracy and Clinton and Obama should be thrown to the cobras because of it.

We also have the obligatory reference to Obama not being a legitimate president, in this case by “roberted” with 48 up-votes and no down-votes: “When the politicians ignored the obvious coup of America’s federal government in 2008, and the selection of an ineligible, identity fraud con-artist as their puppet, they waved the flag of surrender in front of an evil cabal who hate America and want her weakened into complete submission. We are now witnessing the “wrap-up” as the job is mostly accomplished and resistance is virtually non-existent.”

There were a couple that were more sane, one comment which was moderated and I can’t see. A comment with 1 up-vote and 12 down-votes is by “capitolalb” and states, “Benghazi is a GOP Fantasyland. A made-up wannabe scandal. It’s not working, even Issa has given-up. The American People are tired of the phony hearings and investigations.” Similarly, “capitolalb” also posted (and has 0 up-votes and 14 down-votes), “Benghazi happened almost one year ago, it’s time to move on people. There is nothing more to investigate.”

The calm, measured response to him or her has included:

• I WANT TO KNOW WHERE WAS OBAMA THE WHOLE TIME….WHERE?? I have always wondered WAS HE ALREADY ON AF1 TO LAS VEGAS ??? C’mon Obama….FESS UP !!! Mareman 7/23/13
• As those negative feedbacks stack up it’ll be hard for you not to realize who’s living the scandals and the fantasies.
• Crawl back under your rock. Truth still has value among many Americans, the more so as it becomes ever more scarce.
• Crawl back under your rock. Truth still has value among many Americans, the more so as it becomes ever more scarce.
• Oh, but you are one of those who would love to hide the truth behind this criminal government. Who are you, Nancy Pelosi or Valerie Jarrett?
• capitalalb,
  I hope and pray that someone as stupid as you doesn’t vote

Ah, that last one. As Karl Mamer, The Conspiracy Skeptic, likes to say (paraphrasing), “Whenever you fear that the world is too sane, head over to World Net Daily.”