Aug 16^th

Today it’s time to comment on the Clinton email epic. As you may know Hillary Clinton, while Secretary of State, maintained a server in her home for email purposes. This, she claims, was done for convenience. The move was problematical because she should have known that it would invite criticism from right wingers who would accuse her of hiding something. That’s exactly what happened. Then to add to her problems there is some evidence that “maybe” some (four) of her emails were labeled secret by the government. No one has demonstrated that Clinton knew this or that the documents were so labeled before Clinton got them. There is more, but this should be enough review. The right wing pundits are now all over this; the general public not so much.

Fox News has an anchor named Jeanine Pirro who has her own program on Saturday nights, titled “Justice with Judge Jeanine.” The woman is an attorney and was elected judge in Westchester County New York. This last Saturday Judge Jeanine decided to make a case against Hilary Clinton and her emails. After her show, those on the right concluded that Hilary was guilty as charged. My guess is that they were of that opinion before Judge Jeanine had even started her program.

There is a back story here: Judge Judy has an interesting past. Her husband (she is now divorced) is in the slammer for fleecing some folks out of a million dollars. There was no charge against Judge Judy, although there was some difficulty with her trying to record phone calls in order to get evidence of hanky-panky against hubby for divorce purposes. There is a record of her profanity-laced conversation with a police commissioner in which she is trying to get a recording device on her husband’s boat. Hubby seems to have been in the mob and Jeanine could play a mobster’s wife with no difficulty. She has the vocabulary down pat. None of this makes for an ideal Senate candidate but that is the office for which she decided to run, Senator from New York State.

Whatever negative things that might be said about her, lack of ambition is not among them. Unfortunately Jeanine Pirro picked the wrong time to run for the New York Senate seat; her opponent was Hillary Clinton. Before long a Quinnipiac poll showed Clinton getting 61 percent against Pirro’s 30 percent and Jeanine decided to drop out and take her talents elsewhere. Now she can roast Hillary Clinton to her heart’s content and no one will think she has an axe to grind; no one but those of us who know the back story.

There are also right wingers who delight in comparing Clinton’s imagined transgressions with those of General Petraeus. He presented his biographer and paramour Paula Broadwell, with, literally, books of military secrets. Donald Trump says that Hilary Clinton did what General Petraeus did and should get the same treatment. “She’s finished,” he says. Trump has accused Governor Perry of wearing glasses just so he would look smart. If Trump sees Secretary Clinton and General Petraeus as equivalent in their disclosing of military secrets he needs much better glasses than Perry wears.