October 31, 2016

A little Trump-Clinton-Bush test

Here's a test.

What's more frightening? Hillary Clinton's emails that have produced to date no indication of any criminal or dangerous behavior on her part (other than having an improper private server) Donald Trump's refusal to release his tax returns, or George Bush's "loss" of millions emails including in the period leading up to the Iraq War. A Google search finds 349,000 news mentions of Trump's tax returns, but 4,890,000 mentions of Clinton's emails. This Newsweek article may also help your judgement:

Newsweek - Clinton’s email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America’s recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.

Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server— owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. “It’s about as amazing a double standard as you can get,” says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. “If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails set up on a private DNC server?”

Most troubling, researchers found a suspicious pattern in the White House email system blackouts, including periods when there were no emails available from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. “That the vice president’s office, widely characterized as the most powerful vice president in history, should have no archived emails in its accounts for scores of days—especially days when there was discussion of whether to invade Iraq—beggared the imagination,” says Thomas Blanton, director of the Washington-based National Security Archive. The NSA (not to be confused with the National Security Agency, the federal surveillance organization) is a nonprofit devoted to obtaining and declassifying national security documents and is one of the key players in the effort to recover the supposedly lost Bush White House emails.

The media paid some attention to the Bush email chicanery but spent considerably less ink and airtime than has been devoted to Clinton’s digital communications in the past 18 months. According to the Boston social media analytics firm Crimson Hexagon, which ran a study for Newsweek, there have been 560,397 articles mentioning Clinton’s emails between March 2015 and September 1, 2016.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes W. Bush is easily as criminal as Hillary, but the important point about Clinton's emails scandal, vs. any email scandals by W. Bush and company, is that W. Bush isn't currently running for president. If W. was running for president, his email scandals would be front and center like Hillary's currently are.

Anonymous said...

Ah, G W as some kind of comparative standard, eh? Not sure of the point, is it supposed to somehow lessen any possible criminality that may have been committed by Clinton with her actions violating State Department protocol, standards, and rules? Is 'pay to play' access and private profiteering any more or less legal when it involves, say, Dick Cheney and the fortunes of Halliburton than shenanigans dealing with the Clintons and their 'Foundation'?---Oh, if only the public could have access to Cheney's email archives!

Still cannot bring yourself to publish anything about the Green Party presidential bid, can you Sam? Amazing. Everything this cycle could have been issued right from Robbie Mook's desk. Too bad. Gotta ask it again, what's the deal with so-called 'progressives' in the state of Maine, anyway?

Anonymous said...

Those are independant variables. It's rational to find them all maximally repugnant.

Anonymous said...

The election is about the issues Sanders raised as well as imperialism which he didn't raise. The Kabuki between Trump and Clinton has nothing to do with the issues at stake. As you say Sam, the election is only a new deal from the old deck and the political season will begin again when the electorate gets a chance to make the Stein-Sanders demands against the new emperor's old obsolete plans. Clinton is a known opponent as compared to unknown Trump. The left opposition unfortunately lacks the strategic power to take advantage. E.g. it has been 5 years since OWS without a result. 5 years after the Boston Massacre the US was becoming a nation. One necessity is that Stein and Sanders stay on the road and perhaps appear together in a progressive action campaign for winning a pledged Congress in 2018 while framing opinion until then on behalf of radical progressive legislation and antiwar initiatives .