Barbara Boxer: Let's face it, Republicans are going after Hillary because she's exciting the public

Via Newsbusters, the funniest version yet of Democrats’ “who gives a sh*t?” e-mail spin. If there’s any word to describe a new national campaign by a corrupt, droning near-septuagenarian whose policies are seen by a clear majority of registered voters as retreads of the past, “exciting” is surely it. But then, this is the same show that speculated two days ago that Hillary must have been telling the truth about not wanting to carry two separate phones for e-mail because a lot of people “in her demographic” feel overwhelmed by technology. We’re talking about a woman who now operates four devices by her own admission, who went to the trouble of setting up a private server to handle e-mail messages, and Ed Schultz’s theory of why she’s probably innocent is that she’s too old and addle-brained to handle two phones. Actually, that’s the funniest version of “who gives a sh*t?” this week.

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The more I think about it, the more I prefer Mark Steyn’s theory of why Hillary didn’t try to hide the shadiness of how she handled her e-mails in that trainwreck press conference a few days ago. It’s not just that she thinks she’s above the law, says Steyn, although she does. She’s testing the media here to see how wide of a berth they’re planning to give her during the campaign.

That’s why all this stuff is coming out now. If Hillary can get away with something so obviously and uniquely and intentionally wrong, and that compromises national security to boot, and for which she offers nothing but the most laughable explanations, then she will have set the rules for the next 18 months. If she can make the court eunuchs of the media and the Democrats’ own base complicit in this absurd and unconvincing lie, they’re hardly in a position to complain about all the others in the months ahead.

Tech experts say the e-mails she deleted are probably recoverable even now, assuming an independent analyst could access her server — which she refuses to allow. That’s the core of the test. How insistent will the press be that she turn over the server? State Department regulations say you can’t hide e-mail from the archives; that server exists only because Hillary insisted on hiding them anyway, which left the door wide open to foreign spies. If political media lets her slide on a deception that brazen, they’ll let her slide on anything. They’re already doing it, in fact, unwittingly or not, by treating her e-mail corruption as just another Hillary Clinton scandal to lump with the rest, another wearisome, disheartening unethical detour in the race she’s been running for two decades. (See last night’s QOTD for 10 or so examples.) It’s not that they’re claiming she did nothing wrong; they’re claiming that you should expect wrongdoing as the price of having the Clintons in public life. Hillary can live with that narrative, happily, even though it concedes that she was up to no good because it has the effect of submerging the outrageous details of what she did to evade accountability in the larger swamp of “Clinton scandals.” When someone’s been charged with 100 different offenses, no one pays attention when the state amends the complaint to add the 101st. In a weird way, the fact that the Clintons are perceived as being so corrupt actually works in their favor at this point by reducing the marginal outrage generated by each new act of corruption. See now why Carville was so eager to recite previous scandals she’s been involved in when he was spinning for her the other day?

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That’s the way this is going to go. With a Democrat in the White House, there’s not a whisper of a chance that Hillary will face charges for deliberately withholding records from the State Department. The House GOP will investigate her, but without access to the server, there’s not much they can prove. The media will move on because there’s always a newer, hotter news story to cover. E-mailgate will end up tacked on as an afterthought at the very end of the complaint, where most voters will never notice. That’s why she knew she’d get away with this: At this point, no one’s surprised by what Hillary Clinton does. There’s a slogan for her “exciting” 2016 campaign.

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