I question their ethics, and I’d love to “punish” this behavior if I thought there was a more ethical (and realistic) alternative. Further, I think this kind of unethical behavior is far, far less damaging to the country than the unethical behavior promised by most of her opponents.
If she was running against Abraham Lincoln, I’d strongly consider Lincoln. But in the real world, aside from considering a vote for Bernie (which I am strongly considering), not only is she least bad option compared to the Republicans, she’s the least bad option by orders of magnitude, in my opinion, even if the worst case in these accusations are true.
I’ll add that I think it’s rare to the point of near nonexistence for anyone to have the combination of drive, ambition, and ego required to both contend for the Presidency and believe oneself to be qualified and capable of doing it well, along with no beliefs that one is “special” with accompanying "special privileges. So I doubt I’ll ever get the chance to vote for someone like that.
Which is exactly what a lot of conservatives believe as well. And we end up with liars and cheats leading the country.
Yes, you are part of the problem. Same as all the other folks who consistently pull D or R even if the candidates are total scum.
There is, as far as I can tell, only one way to get honest politicians into office. That is to stomp any pol who is caught doing anything unethical.
With the present game we are in, the only real winners are the pols. The ideological divide plays into their hands. The ‘Always vote D(or R)’ people are in effect giving the pols a free pass to do whatever the hell they want.
Regarding this:
I think there are a ton of people out there with the drive ambition and talent to run for President and win. In fact, I believe there are a ton of ethical people out there with the drive, ambition and talent required to win.
I believe the problem **is **that they are ethical and don’t want to jump into the ethical abyss that is politics.
So, we end up with liars, cheats and thieves.
And it won’t change because the partisans are playing the short game, who gets in office right now instead of looking longer term. It makes a certain sort of twisted sense, in that whichever liar you vote for has to try and implement some of the things they said they would do. However, long term we end up getting more partisan and the liars just keep on lying.
I have many criticisms of Obama, but I have never heard of Obama believing rules are for the little people. Such behavior has been a part of the Clintons for a long time and it’s a big reason why the word “entitlement” often gets attached to them. They’ve covered themselves in sleaze and rule bending since the day before they left office(starting with the Rich pardon) and think that it’s not supposed to matter because they are royalty or something.
According to the news she had Top Secret SCI emails. That is as high a classification as it gets. I’m a military Officer. I’m 100% certain that if I had TS SCI at my house the following would happen:
-My clearance would instantly be suspended and ultimately removed
-I’d be be Court Martial and be convicted
-This could be one of the rare times when I could loose my pension
-I’d spend time in jail
-When released I’d never have a clearance again, never have a government job again and I’d have a felony conviction and God know what type of job I’d ever have again
Within the government where I work, it’s beyond belief that people think it’s OK to have Secret, let alone TS or TS SCI material at once house. Mind boggling.
(Previously posted in a virtually identical thread.)
If the Top Secret material wasn’t accounted for? No she couldn’t
If the Top Secret material was routed though an unsecured line? No she couldn’t
Do you think all of the government employees with clearances should just make up their own rules as they go along?
Cabinet members are hardly simple government employees. They are on 24hr call. You honestly think that they all have to drive to the office every time they need to look at classified information?
They either have a government approved safe, and or they have a government provided secure email line, classified computer and classified printer.
Do you honestly think that Top Secret SCI information, which is the highest classification that the government has, just just send over aol or sent to your iPhone without any special encryption or special handling? Do you not understand that classified material is handled differently on unique, dedicated increased security lines and computers from non-classified information?
No. But you were going on and on about having it at her home. That’s what I was addressing. I doubt she intentionally used private email for stuff she thought classified.
The record does show that you are wrong anyhow, the emails were not marked secret then, AFAIK Powell has been found to had the same issue, and that points yet to another issue that the right wing media is misleading you, the intent of the one that allegedly mishandled the email is important in assigning any punishment.
The most likely end to this will be just what amounts to a slap on her wrist, and the only sad thing here is that no matter how the media has misled you, you will dislike more the ones that you think are just partisans that are giving you better information and you will continue to rely on the ones that will continue in the future to do the same.
If she had used the account she was supposed to have used, any spillage that she had would have had would have been on a government computer on a government server, with a much higher likelihood that it would have be caught and secured. And as a government employee, it your responsibly to contain that. It doesn’t matter what it’s marked, it’s her job to know it’s classified. And unclass is a long way from TS. 22 TS emails is a lot.
As a guy who has voted for Clinton, Bush and Obama (i.e. a middle of the road guy) I am angry that she put her desire to control all of her political and private email over the interest of national security. That’s why I and all of the Officers that I know use government computers for government business.
But as I said up thread, if you like Clinton, you don’t really give a crap that she had top secret material on her unsecured iPhone, any more than republicans would care if Bush had TS on his. We get the elected officials we deserve and those whose conduct we allow. And at this point, if she can have TS on her iPhone, and people like you are jumping though their asses to make excuses for it, she knows there isn’t anything she can’t get away with.
So on a personal level, I’m stuck with Trump who is a complete and total buffoon, or Clinton who is a liar of the first magnitude who knows no rule or law applies to her. Fuck.
Are you sure about that? Are you suggesting that she believed that she would never have to deal with classified material as secretary of state? For example, my understanding that private communication with foreign leaders is considered to be automatically classified, and her training would have told her that. Are you suggesting that she never communicated with foreign leaders through her unclassified system?
As for intention… There is this, from the E-mails that have been made public:
This sounds to me like there was information Clinton wanted that was stored in the secured system, and which DID have a header indicating that it was secret. It was supposed to be sent to her by secure FAX, but the system wasn’t working right, so Clinton instructed her employee to hand-copy the material into an E-mail, stripping it of classified headers, and then to send it to her unsecured mail system. Is there any other interpretation?
Now, it turns out the staffer didn’t comply with her request, but it sure does seem like Hillary had no problem with this kind of behavior. It also calls into question her insistence that nothing she received was ‘marked classified’. Well, if the practice was to remove the classification markings before sending it to her, that could be technically true but still very questionable behavior.
The thing is, Clinton is doing the same old trick of carefully parsing everything in legalistic terms. But in an election, the standard isn’t whether you can be charged with a crime - the standard is whether the public believes you are trustworthy. Stuff like this looks very bad to people who aren’t already big Clinton fans.
This speculation is interesting to me. Is there any evidence about what people think of this scandal who do not already have strong views about Clinton one way or another?
Unclassified stuff is marked classified all the time due to overzealousness and just plain laziness. Unless we know what was on this potential fax, we don’t know whether the information itself was actually classified or not, even if it was marked so. Directing someone to remove classified markings for information that is not actually classified is very, very common and routine.
Piffle, as none of the points have been countered by you it is clear that I’m basing the defense of her on precedents and the fact that the media has gotten many things wrong on this issue and most of what you are using as “evidence” is coming from partisans that already came forward as using the scandal for political purposes.
Trump kowtows to racists and should not be in any place close to the nuclear button and the bully pulpit that is the presidency, his climate change denial and anti-vaccination ideas are enough to vote for any democrat.
And as mentioned before most of what you are using about the emails against Clinton is wrong or made up.