Tuesday, November 01, 2016                                           10:50 AM

It’s such a mess. FBI Director Comey decides to entangle himself in the presidential election—by very loudly saying nothing. Trump very loudly declares that Comey’s nothing means everything. The Justice Department says they told Comey not to say nothing. And Hillary Clinton says Comey said nothing because there is nothing to say. And the White House very quietly says nothing about Comey.

After a year of furious depositions, investigations, and hearings, and despite the over-eagerness of Republicans to see Secretary Clinton brought low, no one has yet found the Holy Grail—actual proof of wrong-doing. The private server was an honest mistake—and pretty understandable, when we consider that it was obsessive Republicans that created Hillary’s penchant for privacy. It is easy to point fingers here in 2016, but at the time of HRC’s service as Secretary of State, she was just one of many people in government who were ‘winging it’ when it came to cyber-security. Neither were there any laws on the books involving email security.

Hopefully, by now, the State Department has an IT Czar, an IT staff, and IT security consultants for any new Secretary from day one. One assumes that any future Secretary of State will not be expected to create their own communications network from scratch. You see, Hillary did have a secure .GOV email account, which she used for confidential and secret government communication. But she needed a personal account, to communicate with regular friends and family (people without security clearance) to do things like helping plan her daughter’s wedding and so forth.

Otherwise, appointment to the cabinet sentences those persons to remaining incommunicado for the length of their terms—and while it is cute to hear the President whine about losing his Blackberry, you can’t have an entire administration confined to itself. And it is worth noting that, of all the email accounts hacked by the Russians, the Clinton’s private server is strangely absent. HRC surrendered her emails to the FBI and thus to Congress—but the Russians never got their hands on them—and if they had, according to Director Comey, they wouldn’t have found any state secrets, just wedding plans.

The people who scream for HRC to be imprisoned over her email server are conveniently forgetting that email is a relatively new gadget—and that senior citizens were especially unfamiliar with both the concept and the hardware, never mind the hacking possibilities, of email. Viewed objectively, HRC’s email trouble will live in history not as the great crime some would label it, but as the tipping point when the establishment finally came to grips with the cyber-security problems inherent in our shiny new age of electronics.

So we see that our two-party government system is deadlocked and tied in knots of incompetence and rivalry. It has no need of Trump to add to its dysfunction or its insanity—and it certainly isn’t going to be improved by someone who is dishonest 70% of the time. If he has broken the Republican party, so be it—they made their own bed—but we mustn’t let him break the whole country. Let him move to Russia, where all his friends are.

Vote for Hillary!