That We All May Be One

Hillary Clinton is not perfect. She is not only a strong-willed and ambitious person, but often seems incapable of the simplest act of contrition for things done or things left undone. Witness the latest release of information from the State Department about her infamous e-mails and their server.

While clearly part of a decades-long lack of oversight and appropriate scrutiny of e-mails by State Department employees, Ms. Clinton’s particular decisions with respect to personal accounts and servers seems over the top. The ongoing F.B.I. investigation may shed further light on this, and I sincerely hope she will agree to appear before them to testify should she be asked.

The campaign’s response so far seems pretty inadequate, largely repeating what they have said before about her not being the first one, about the fact that everybody knew what she was doing, etc. etc. etc. But, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results from the public is the definition of…what?

I don’t know exactly what she needs to say to make this go away. She has admitted that it was a mistake and that she would not do the same thing if she had it to do over again. What she has not said, to my knowledge, is simply to say, “I’m sorry. I screwed up. It was not done for any nefarious reasons and I do not believe any national security information was compromised. I hope that you can forgive me for this bad decision. And I can assure you I have learned from my mistakes and I will never do anything like this again.” Full stop.

Perhaps the reason she seems incapable of doing this is that she has been the target, along with her husband, for decades now, of that “vast, right wing conspiracy” (which, believe me, dear reader, is as real as the earth revolving around the sun) which has taken every flaw, every mistake in judgment, every bad decision and sought to weave them into a narrative of lies and deception and treason which paint a picture of the Clintons as public enemy numbers one and two.

Nonetheless, part of her own narrative is that she will not sink to their level and that the test of real character is that, when you get knocked down, you keep on getting right back up again. But, when the wounds are at least partially self-inflicted, the better part of valor is to start with:

“I’m sorry.”

This entry was posted on May 26, 2016 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Blogroll, Ecumenical, Emergent Church, Interfaith, Justice and Peace, Politics, Politics, Religion, The Episcopal Church, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.