A young crab and his mother are spending the day on a beach's warm sand. The young crab begins to walk around, but can only walk sideways in either direction. The mother crab scolds him and tells him to point his toes in front of him and walk forwards. The young crab explains that he would love to walk forward, but he doesn't know how to do it. He asks his mother to show him. The mother crab gets up and tries to walk forward, but she too can only walk sideways. She sheepishly apologizes lays back down in the sand.
This is one of Aesop's tales. He was a story teller that told fun little anecdotes with a moral to the story, a lesson that we should all learn. In this case, the moral of the story is to remember- "Do as I say, not as I as I do" or possibly, it could be, "lead by example". In either case, the recent scandal involving Hillary Clinton and her private email server is a perfect textbook example of a person who operates outside the system and can't be held to the same standard that she herself loudly proclaims that others need to be held to.
The crux of the recent scandal surrounding Hillary Clinton is that shortly before she became the Secretary of State, she set up a private email server in order to…. well, and that is where the story gets a little murky. Hilary Clinton hasn't exactly explained why she set up the private email address and server, instead of just using the government email address that she would be given as part of her job. The only excuse she has given, as reported by the New York Times, is that she didn't want to carry around 2 different communication devices with her. So, in a sense, it was for her own convenience. Which maybe is ok, since as Secretary of State, she would be expected to work around the clock on various pressing issues. Except of course, as the Guardian.co.uk writes, that ever since 2009, US government rules have been very clear about this. Specifically, the National Archives and Records Administration stated categorically in that year — the first of Clinton's term as secretary — that "agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record keeping system." Now, I am not a lawyer, but it seems as if she broke the rules here because her emails were kept secret. In fact, the only reason we know about the private emails was because a hacker named Guccifer noticed a strange email address in top level government correspondence.
A writer at medium.com has penned a piece defending Clinton by saying that "she did it so that she could remember every minute of it to be able to recount it with authority", which if you read it another way, says that it was ok for Hilary to break laws so that she would be able to control her own image. To get ahead of the bad publicity, so to speak. Which of course, is yet another way of saying that she could disappear any emails that might hurt her image in the future (which might have just happened, btw). The author of that piece goes on to note that Hillary was so busy, unlike say, General David Petraeus, that she possibly couldn't have kept a handwritten journal like the General did. Of course, the General, who was the top commander in Iraq for years, the head of the CIA for a short time, as well numerous other high ranking positions in his career as a public servant, couldn't have been as busy as Clinton. And that is why he kept a handwritten journal, as opposed to Clinton, which kept her emails on a private server. And if that didn't make any sense to you, dear listeners, you aren't alone. The author's position doesn't make any sense at all, except that nothing that HRC does is wrong.
But, back to the Clinton email scandal and several other questions emerge, such as, "was the email server secure?", or "why did Senior State department officials allow her clearly break the rules?" Although there are many unanswered questions, this last one is striking for one reason- Hilary Clinton actually fired an ambassador in 2012 for doing the exact same thing she was doing- using private email.
The daily caller.com reports that former U.S. ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration said that Hillary Clinton's chief of staff fired him based on an inspector general's report which found that he routinely used an unauthorized email account to conduct official government business. In an interview he said- "I make no apology for ‘rocking the boat' in the State Department to improve physical security, to enhance cyber policy, and to conduct several other initiatives that the State Department Inspector General misrepresented to build the case that Secretary Clinton's Chief of Staff used to terminate my tenure as the US Ambassador in 2012".
Summing it up, the people over at the Sunlight Foundation put it best when they wrote: "There is shock at what Secretary Clinton did because the most likely explanation of her intent seems clear — she created a system designed to avoid accountability, potentially in violation of the law." And that really is the catch. Hillary Clinton was not leading by example, since other people had lost their jobs by doing what she herself did, and by saying, "do as I say, not as I do", she was clearly taking a position as a hypocrite.
So, what do you think dear listeners; Is it ok for government officials to say one thing, but do another?
