Shall Hilary Go, As Traficant Once Went?

Pity James Traficant isn't around to explain to Hilary what is being done to her. My guess is she seriously pissed off a lot of people back when she was first lady, and they aren't going to let her back into the White House. Sure, Republicans are making hay out of these emails, but the machinations of the state come from the Democrats.

I have a few, probably weird viewpoint on this. First, despite not being a Hilary fan, I don't like this idea that all these emails must be available to the government and/or to the people. I think the desire to leave a door open so that things can be subpoenaed by courts tends to keep various systems unsecured while not actually providing us with much in the way of protection. Hilary did what she did. The emails may establish what she did, but mostly they are currently just acting as one of the billions of laws- we all violate something, and as Traficant could have attested, when you lose your political capital, they'll pick whatever is convenient and hang you with it.

But on the mere email level, everybody should be using encryption and the fact that the government doesn't seem to be doing so is, in my opinion, more illuminating than Hilary's decision to have her own server. Her security was bad, but little proof can be given that it was any worse than the government's. The government has also reported several hacks recently in which taxpayer and employee data was stolen.

Additionally, when I consider good governance, I generally consider it to be a very simple affair. It is precisely the sort of thing most people shouldn't be paying attention to- good governance ought not to be noticed, whereas as bad governance ought to be outrageously obvious and, therefore, no one would be in need of extra documentary evidence in order to mount a legal case. This seems odd in our world mostly because horribly bad governance is championed, and it's practitioners are rewarded rather than jailed. In fact, much like Al Capone went down for tax evasion, rather than, say, the murders, or his laundry list of other crimes, Hilary shall likely have to bow out of the race (at the very least) for none of her meaningful crimes, but only this particularly dull one about emails- and probably that gossipy one about making all the Secret Service people really, really, mad at her when she was first lady.

So, just to recap, I would think, for instance, that it would be far more preferable to have a good Secretary of State capable of having completely private and encrypted chats throughout his or her career- completely untraceable and unverifiable even by a court. This, of course, would be in a sort of world where we could actually punish the idiots who thought invading Libya, not to mention a slew of other countries, was actually a good idea.

The emails are not the crime. The crimes are the crimes. We are taught to think we somehow need the emails, but we don't. What we need is to somehow pierce the veil of the state, by which I mean they should no longer be able to perform their magical incantations and validate their crimes as government actions and therefore somehow legitimate.