It's been a long time coming. Since the Clinton email scandal broke almost a year ago, most of the discussion has been sunk in the weeds of "others did it!" "nothingburger!" "Benghazi political bonus point!" "over-classification!" "she said she was sorry!" "beat dead horses much?" etc.

In the movie What About Bob, Bob (played by Bill Murray) announces that the world is split into two groups of people - those who like Neil Diamond and those who don't. As a longtime Neil Diamond unfan, the line completely cracked me up*. The political world seems almost as simple as Bob's world; there are two groups of people - those who think the Hillary Clinton email "scandal" is in fact a SCANDAL sans ironic quotation marks, and those who think it isn't, that it is one more in a long line of Republican make-believe smear jobs that a incredibly brave and resilient Clinton has been able to stave off yet again, adding even more to her Weebles-wobble-but-they-don't-fall-down credibility.

Let me say right off that I was in the first camp as of Day One of WTF Hillary. Ironically, it was the Democratic Party and even Clinton herself who had educated me that Private Servers Are Very Bad Things Used By Bad People Who Don't Want The Public To Know What They Are Up To like Karl Rove, the Bush Administration and the RNC during the Attorney Gate dust-up in 2007. In that case CNN summarized the private server issue as "Whether White House officials such as political adviser Karl Rove are intentionally conducting sensitive official presidential business via non-governmental accounts to evade a law requiring preservation—and eventual disclosure—of presidential records."

Hillary Clinton herself demonstrated her trademark umbrage at the practice of using private servers to thwart the concepts of transparency and accountability in our government:

Hillary Clinton in Take Back America 2007 Conference

Our Constitution is being shredded. We know about the secret wiretaps, the secret military tribunals, the secret White House e-mail accounts. We’ve seen U.S. attorneys fired to silence them because they didn’t bring bogus lawsuits against Democrats during election years. We’ve seen information taken off of government websites. It is a stunning record of secrecy and corruption, of cronyism run amok. It is everything our founders were afraid of, everything our Constitution was designed to prevent.

Source: Take Back America 2007 Conference Jun 20, 2007

Sounds pretty definitive to me. Hillary completely gets that secret email accounts and hiding government information is the type of Constitution shredding behavior that we can count on Democrats and her in particular to avoid as we sanitize the joint and let the sun shine in after the miscreant Republicans are out of office. Oh, wait . . . . .

From Day One of Nothingburgergate, anyone who had been repelled by the secretive and sinister actions of the W Bush administration would have been barfing in their NYTimes to discover that, far from eschewing the behavior, Hillary Clinton enthusiastically participated in the once repulsive Republican practice herself, because CONVENIENCE. Sometimes it's just more convenient to shred Constitutions than not, yannow?

Because she didn't want to carry more than one device, despite having a State Department entourage that resembled a Borax 20 mule team. You would have thought that one lackey could have born the extra weight of one more electronic device.

I was appalled at the hypocrisy and the lack of transparency from Day One of Condididittoogate, because of FOIA, the law that allows all the annoying peons like public interest groups and/or journalists to paw around in public records to try to figure out what government officials are doing on our dime. These pawers and guardians of the public commonweal are the ones who fuel the unhealthy interest of our politicians in esoteric electronics that worker bees have no need of. Most of us don't spend any time trying to figure out how to create closed loop communication systems between ourselves and our henchmen that can be conveniently hoovered of yoga appointments and invasion daydreams at the touch of a button. We don't have aides and entourages that we need to be able to speak to within a cone of silence.

I was mad on Day One of TreyGowdyhasapointyheadgate over the perception of Hillary's Rovelike subterranean tunneling under the foundations of government to create secret stashes of information that the rabble will never have access to. I didn't even need the added flourishes of National Security violations and classified information to think that Hillary Clinton had disqualified herself.

But I had no idea that the entire Democratic Party and numerous people within that Party would be willing to toss all their individual and collective integrity on the pyre of Hillary Clinton's political ambitions. That, I have to admit was a shock. Because of this scandal the Democratic Party can never again bring up issues of transparency and accountability and oversight without everyone breaking into hysterical laughter.

Because of Hillary and the Democrats, Donald Trump can roll up to the White House with moving vans filled with servers labelled "None of Your F-ing Business America!" property of Trump Inc. Good work, Democrats!

Remember how I started this whole piece off with a title that said someone finally in the MSM was getting it? Believe it or not, the editorial Board of USA Today has a great piece that correctly says that we don't even have to have the icing of Security because the underlying issue, plain and simple is SECRECY. Reader, I confess that my eyes moistened and I mouthed a silent "thank you!" when I read this:

Clinton's penchant for secrecy: Our view President Obama explained the principle himself on his first day in office in the first line of a presidential order on FOIA: “A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency.” The same day, Clinton was confirmed as secretary of State. Disregarding the spirit of Obama’s directive, she created a highly unusual private email system that had the effect of shielding her official communications from the public, nosy reporters and her political enemies in Congress. Clinton argues that was not her intent, that she merely acted out of convenience. But if she had read just two paragraphs into her boss’ memo, she'd have known that her motive was irrelevant: “Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve.” In other words, convenience does not trump openness. For the next four years, what Obama had ordered should be public was, instead, shrouded in secrecy. Clinton didn’t just ignore the commander in chief, she ignored the FOIA law, which her own party worked mightily to strengthen in the years after President Nixon’s Watergate scandal.

Because you can't discuss Hillary Clinton and her email without David Brock popping up out of a manhole, he has the Opposing Viewpoint editorial also in USA Today called hilariously and unironically: Clinton Leads Way on Transparency

The issue of how the Freedom of Information Act works or doesn’t work is an issue that cuts across federal agencies. However, when it comes to transparency, Secretary Clinton went above and beyond what the law requires. Clinton took the unprecedented step of asking the State Department to make all of her work-related emails public. She provided nearly 55,000 pages of emails that were or could potentially be work-related.

In reality, nothing could be a more cynical stretch of the truth. Hillary Clinton asked that her emails be made public AFTER 36 (I think) civil suits, countless unfilled FOIA requests, years of sandbagging and ignoring a Congressional committee, years after leaving office and only after negotiations with the State Department to reclaim what was rightly theirs.

I can't think of a more cynical and contemptuous response to the entire issue - to attempt to make Hillary Clinton as a figurehead of government transparency and accountability. But, you know, it kind of falls into that altered reality where Nancy Reagan was a strong advocate for Aids Victims.

*Neil Diamond - I never cared for his music that much but I was blown away when he insisted on appearing at Fenway to sing Sweet Caroline, the anthem of the Red Sox after the Boston Marathon bombing. I now think he is one totalloy kick-ass kind of guy.