By JOE RONCA
Contributing Writer
On Tuesday, former Secretary of State and front-runner for the Democratic nomination Hillary Clinton apologized for her use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State.
The apology came in a nationally televised interview with ABC’s David Muir, in which Secretary Clinton said about the controversy, “That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility.”
Clinton’s apology comes at a time when her campaign for the Democratic nomination, once seen as unstoppable, is quickly losing ground to Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, and faces the potential that Vice President Joe Biden will enter the race as an alternative for Democratic voters who see Clinton as too scandal-plagued and Sanders as a socialist with little chance of winning a general election.
Clinton’s loss in momentum is clearly due to the controversy about whether or not she sent classified emails over her private server and whether using the server was illegal in and of itself. These are legitimate questions about the Secretary’s past which need to be addressed.
Quite frankly, an entire book could be written on those two questions, and I don’t have the legal expertise or time to do that competently. So for right now I’ll focus on answering one question: Was Clinton’s apology sincere?
In short: no, I do not believe that Hillary Clinton’s apology was sincere.
First of all, I don’t think that either Hillary or Bill Clinton have a single sincere bone in their bodies. All one needs to do to get this impression is to look at the Clinton’s past actions dating back to the 90s. Bill denies having sex with Monica Lewinsky. The evidence comes out that he did; Bill apologizes to the nation for the affair.
Bill signs a crime bill in 1994 that increases the incarceration rate drastically and considers it one of his top accomplishments as President. Said crime bill becomes unpopular; in January of this year, Bill apologizes for enacting it.
In 1996, Bill signs the Defense of Marriage Act, a bill defining marriage as between one man and one woman. The opposition to same-sex marriage decreases drastically, Bill urges the Supreme Court to overturn the bill as unconstitutional in 2013.
In October of 2002, then-Senator Hillary Clinton voted to authorize President Bush to use military force in Iraq. Over time, as the insurgency gained strength and U.S. combat deaths mounted, the War in Iraq became less and less popular and was seen as a mistake. In her 2014 autobiography, Clinton apologized for voting to send American troops into Iraq.
These are just a few of the almost innumerable times the Clintons have done this sort of public apology for their own calculated political actions.
Are you sensing a pattern here with the Clintons? I sure am. It seems that every time the Clintons promote a policy that becomes unpopular, they then distance themselves from it and eventually apologize for it.
I’m not at all saying that a politician shouldn’t apologize for their actions or their past policies that don’t work out. I actually believe that it’s a sign of strength when a politician evolves on an issue, as it shows that they’re actually doing some research and thinking into public policy instead of just firing off party-line taking points.
However, when you do it as much as the Clintons have, it would seem to suggest that either you never actually supported the policies which you previously enacted, or that you have always supported such policies but now apologize for them in an act of simple political expediency.
If either answer is true, it proves that you have no principles that you are willing to stand and fight for as a politician. If this true of the Clintons, as I believe it is, it means that every criticism of the Clintons hurled at them over the years by opponents, both Republicans and Democrats, has been true.
The notion that the Clintons are simply greedy, hypocritical, power-hungry professional politicians who are willing to support any policy that will help them politically in the moment would be proven to be true. In fact, their actions have already proven it to be true, as the evolution of Hillary’s statements on the email controversy demonstrates.
It first broke publically in March of this year that Hillary Clinton had used her personal email account during her tenure as Secretary of State instead of using a government-created email address, as is protocol.
On March 10, Secretary Clinton held a press conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York, telling the assembled reporters that she used a private email account simply out of convenience and that she never sent any classified information via the account.
In August, the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community wrote to Congress that his investigators had found emails on Secretary Clinton’s server that contained classified State Department information.
Secretary Clinton then changed her tune, explaining repeatedly that she never sent any material that she knew to be classified at the time, but still refused to apologize for using the private server. Then, on Sept. 8, she finally apologized for using the server in the interview she gave to David Muir.
However, as late as three days before the interview Secretary Clinton was still refusing to apologize in interviews with reporters. So why did she all of a sudden decide to apologize?
The answer, as always with the Clintons, is politics. As Maggie Haberman reported in The New York Times on Sept. 8, Clinton aides conducted a focus group study of potential voters in New Hampshire. The focus group members stated that for them the email scandal was overshadowing everything thing else that the Secretary was saying on the campaign trail and that they wanted her to better address the issue. Coming amid reports that most voters describe Clinton with the words “liar” and “untrustworthy,” the focus group results seemed to have caused Secretary Clinton to apologize.
As any astute observer has come to expect of the Clintons, the decision was simply a political one. Due to the clearly political nature of the decision when to apologize and the prior history of the Clinton dynasty, I’m taking Hillary’s email apology with a very large grain of salt.
To me, it’s just another insincere Clinton apology.
