Wednesday, July 06, 2016 10:29 AM
It was convenient for Hillary that no charges would be filed—but it was equally convenient for the FBI director to cast aspersions on her without the need to prove them in a court of law. He says there’s no evidence that she was spied on, but that she MAY have been spied on. He says that out of 30,000 emails, about one hundred held classified info—but only eight held info that was classified at the time of the email—plus, he doesn’t give us anything regarding how HE decided this stuff was classified. Basically, Director Comey said ‘no harm, no foul’ out of one side of his mouth and ‘shame, shame’ out the other. It seemed a little partisan to me.
If you look at the email-server findings and the Benghazi findings, they both condemn the State Department. One wonders if it isn’t a little too easy to have someone be the head, the Secretary of State, and then, once he or she is done, lay a bunch of incompetence and malfeasance at their feet. An under-funded beltway bureaucracy, two centuries old, that gets a new boss appointed every few years—there’s your real bad guy.
Bill, the big dog, was less than circumspect in visiting aboard Loretta Lynch’s jet in AZ—but it sounds a little forced when people howl with laughter at the thought that these two could talk for thirty minutes about personal stuff. Really? You can’t blow a half-hour bullshitting with a friend? Has Bill done anything but, since he left office? Trump-eters who hail this as a sign that our ‘entire government is rotten to the core’ are being just a little bit hysterical. Nothing new there.
As always, the GOP witch-hunters who failed yet again to make a legal case against their nemesis have found ways to tag little PR addendums onto the statements clearing her. Politics is a rough game and no two ways about it.
The FBI’s computers don’t work. The Pentagon still uses 8-inch floppies. My students have no idea what those are.
Boy do I miss the floppy disks–I was a top man in my field back then and being a ‘nerd’ had just begun to make us a commodity. People today can’t realize how marginalized studious introverts used to be–had always been, until then.
But on your larger point–our infrastructural neglect creates the greatest vulnerability in the digital areas–that our bureaucracies crawl along with obsolete tech is an embarrassment, especially in the age of nationalist hacker-regiments and online terror cells. But, like our macroscopic infrastructure neglect, it only gets mentioned in passing while our leaders chase vainly after Hillary and block any Obama bill, just because it’s Obama’s.
I think the best thing about a more socialist-leaning administration would be the increased opportunities for construction and job-creation by the government–the one percent have reached a point where new businesses and business expansion are less profitable than playing around on Wall Street, and it’s having a stagnating effect on our economy just when growth is needed–and called for.