Hypocrisy goes to 11

Since the NYT has a paywall and if you've been clicking on my links you may have hit it, I'll link to Jonathan Chait discussing the latest NYT ephemera. As you may recall, the single most important issue in the 2016 presidential election -- in fact, probably the only issue that mattered -- was Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server when she was Secretary of State. It is not clear that this was even contrary to official policy when she started doing it -- she did at on the advice of Colin Powell, who used a similar setup. And there is absolutely no evidence that her system was ever hacked or that any confidential information was ever compromised.

But this transgression was the basis for the "Lock Her Up!" chants at you-know-who's rallies, and in fact they continue. This was the issue that was the basis for three front page stories in the New York Times on a single day. This was the horrifying scandal that threw the election.

Now it turns out that the current Resident uses an unsecured i-phone to talk with his buddies at Faux News and other pals from Wingnutistan, that U.S. intelligence knows that the Chinese are listening to these conversations, and have told him so, but he refuses to stop doing it. Apparently the White House staff and intelligence community are at least somewhat reassured that "he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities." In other words he's too ignorant to give away important secrets. As Chait concludes:

There is so much gross misconduct in this administration, it’s not clear Democrats will even bother holding hearings on this issue if they gain control of Congress. That is itself telling: Trump has clearly exceeded his opponent’s culpability on her worst scandal, and it’s probably not even one of the 100 worst things he’s done, so far.

Well yeah, maybe we won't have congressional hearings. But will we ever hear about this again from the New York Times? I vote No.

Administrative note: It turns out that Blogger no longer has a system for commenter registration. What I'm going to try for now is comment moderation. I'll turn on comments but they won't be published unless I approve. If I don't, I'll mark them as spam, and that may train the Blogger spam filter to catch the sewage. We'll see. I hope it works. (I can restrict comments to users with Gmail accounts, which will eliminate anonymity, but I don't want to force people to get one.)