The Panic In Noodle Park*

As desperate Republicans and their handmaidens in the media flog the Clinton email non-scandal, and resultant "panic" among "some Democrats," Jay Bookman at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution gives us a little perspective:

The hypocrisy in this case is also pretty rich, because the use of outside email accounts is a pretty standard and open secret in government at almost all levels, from local to national.  The former and current Republican governors now attacking Clinton — Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal — have all dealt with similar controversies, as did Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.

And during the George W. Bush administration, some 88 senior officials in the Bush White House were discovered to have used non-governmental email accounts to conduct government business and evade transparency requirements; email from more than 50 of those officials — amounting to somewhere between 5 million and 20 million emails — somehow disappeared and most were never recovered. Nobody was prosecuted for it.

One more point: There’s no evidence that Clinton’s email system was ever compromised, and as we’ve seen from recent hacks, keeping her emails on a “protected” government server would not exactly have been a guarantee of secrecy from prying foreign eyes. That doesn’t excuse her decision, but it’s nonetheless true.  (our emphasis)

Whether it's Whitewater, or Benghazi!!!, or the Clinton Foundation, or this, Clinton-haters have always been engaged in throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks.  Sometimes, as Bookman notes, unforced errors by the Clinton operation compound the situation.  But mostly it's a lot of noise generated by Republicans with the avid assistance of puerile Clinton-hating "journalists" who love a good horse race, to hell with the implications for our country.

The Beltway Boyz love to write about "Democrats in panic mode" (never offering any names, because sources!).  We fully believe that there are spineless, hand-wringing Democrats (=cough= Schumer =cough=), and Democrats who are shilling for one candidate or another.  But for every "Democrat in panic mode," we bet there are 50 Democrats who still wouldn't trade places with wrong- side- of- history Republicans and their catastrophic clown show.

* Apologies to Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, and James Mills.

BONUS:  Nate Cohn would also like to inject some reality into the equation.