As Governor of Indiana, Vice-President Mike Pence used AOL for private emailing of public affairs. So it's time to lock him up right?

Several outlets are now reporting that while he was Governor of Indiana, Mike “Here, Have Some AIDS” Pence used a private email address to conduct official state business. This means that as I get ready to march on the streets, shouting “Lock him up,” I can count on throngs of Republicans to join me, right? Because what I learned last year is that people are so against a politician using private email to conduct public business that they’d rather elect an orange-faced, unprepared, corrupt puppet for the Russians than vote for a qualified candidate who perhaps made an error in judgment in their email standards and practices.

I mean, if i don’t find a bunch of Republicans out there chanting with me, that would seem to imply they’re hypocrites. Because if they aren’t all that concerned with Mike Pence using private email as a chief executive in one of the fifty states of the union, but were up in arms about Hillary having a private email server, it would seem the only differences between the two situations are as follows, by my math anyway.

Hillary Clinton is a Democrat

Mike Pence is a Republican

Sure, I could potentially hear them screaming about one position being more powerful than another, one being a federal position while the other is a state position, but, well, that’s what we in the biz call “Utter and complete equivocation and bullshit.” And here’s why:

There has yet to be anything criminal turned up in Clinton’s emails. They didn’t cover up anything real. People aren’t running pedophile pizza rings, okay? So basically, what Hillary did was a big, dumb mistake, probably not wise, and certainly not as transparent as we’d want her to be. But again, nothing criminal has been turned up, and if it had, if you think the FBI and CIA wouldn’t take her down over it, you’re probably so partisan you don’t think Pence and Clinton’s actions are remotely the same.

But, well, they are, truly.

Both Clinton and Pence decided to conduct the taxpayers’ business with private lines of communication. I have to admit that to me, someone with both years of IT experience and some education in history, it doesn’t seem a big deal to me that either did. It’s not like every letter Washington wrote as president was first publicly printed in the papers. I am sure that in 240 years of America-ing there have been private missives and communications in every administration. That doesn’t bother me.

What would have bothered me is if Clinton’s emails turned up criminality and genuine, impeachable corruption. The same holds true for Mike Pence. I think it’s beyond dumb he held onto an AOL account and used it for government business, and I think all those emails should be subject to release, but I’m not going to really go bang a drum for locking up the Vice President for this, because I’m not a fucking idiot who thinks living in a free country generally means we lock up our political adversaries without any evidence of breaking any actual laws that carry prison time with them.

So maybe, just maybe Republicans and Democrats should use this opening as an opportunity to a) figure out how many fucks we give as a country about elected officials using private email addresses for public business, b) what we do about it when we catch them doing it, and c) build a bridge, hold hands, and get over this subject together. Call me nuts, but I think I like living in a world where you have to have evidence of actual wrongdoing before you put someone in jail for essentially using a different mailing address for correspondence.

All that being said, for the next…oh…forever until I die, anytime I hear a Republican screeching about Hillary’s private email server, I’m going to say three simple words, and hope they understand the reference. Their realization of their hypocrisy depends on it. So here’s what I’ll say the next time some Republican wags their finger about Hillary’s emails.

“You’ve Got Mail!”









Follow James on Twitter @JamboSchlarmbo.





