The Manchurian Candidate?

We could tell you what film this still is from, but then we'd have to kill you.

There is an aphorism, “never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by ordinary incompetence.” That may be so; there is much incompetence in the world. But I fear, as I grow older, it is too optimistic. There is also a good deal of malice.

Why did Hillary Clinton use a private server during her time as Secretary of State?

Was it pure incompetence? That is her own defense. She says she wanted it so that she could do all her messaging on one device, one smartphone.

However, it is perfectly possible to have two email accounts on one phone. Did she not know this? Did she ask no one? Given that the Clintons, were tech unsavvy, they managed to get someone to set up a private server for them. Could not get someone to set up a cell phone for them?

And didn’t she know about the need for security? Wouldn’t any one of us know? She was no neophyte to the issue—having spent eight years in the White House. Could nobody in the State Department have ever advised her on security? Moreover, if she was so naïve about security, how is it she took the trouble to have her private server scrubbed before it was turned over to Congress?

Nah. We must rule out incompetence. Although this level of incompetence in itself would disqualify her from the presidency.

No, it must have been cunning. Clinton must have had a motive, from the beginning of her tenure as S of S, for keeping her official business off the record. Not simply the matter of sending classified materials in the open. She had no motive for that. That much must have been collateral damage. Whatever her motive was, it must have been so disreputable that she was ready to accept such collateral damage, and even perhaps letting the public know about it, in order to keep the real secret.

Beyond that, we can only speculate.

What was I doing behind the couch? Oh, just looking for spare change...

The most obvious and perhaps least disreputable thing she might have had in mind was the peddling of influence; using her official capacity to enrich herself. Every politician, after all, seems skilled in it. Fundraising is a constant necessity. Most seem to become lobbyists as soon as they leave office. Theoretically, of course, this is not supposed to happen. Theoretically, there is a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.

But, unfortunately, even that does not seem an adequate explanation. By using a private server, Clinton was concealing what she was doing from the American public. But she was probably revealing it to Russia and China. Both, we have long known, have teams of hackers busily at work. They have cracked US government servers. They no doubt would have found a private server a beginner’s exercise. It is hard to believe the State Department, and the Secretary of State, had never been briefed on this issue.

So Hillary was not doing this for secrecy, exactly.

In fact, if Clinton was trading influence in the usual way, with businesses and lobby groups, she was opening herself up to blackmail by foreign powers.

If so, it would be a very bad idea to elect her president. Was she politically suicidal?

Which leaves, I think, only one possibility. Forgive me if I am missing something here, but doesn’t this mean that Russia and China must have been complicit in whatever she planned to do? If so, they could not blow her cover without blowing their own, and losing a valuable asset. They would not blackmail her, because they had no need to.

It all sounds a little paranoid, but what’s the alternative explanation? What am I missing? As I said, mere stupidity seems ruled out.

Oh, Dmitry, you can press my 'reset' button any time!

And now that I think about it, what other thesis better explains the Obama administration’s foreign policy record? Not just Benghazi, which still seems to make no sense on the information we have: there was that line in the sand that Assad crossed in Syria, and then Putin dramatically riding in and saving his ally from US intervention. Could that have been set up, in whole or in part? There was the bizarre inability to come to a SOFA with Iraq, and all the US troops leaving, obviously counter to both US and Iraqi interests. There was Putin’s apparently breathtakingly risky gamble of annexing the Crimea. Did inside information give him the confidence to try it? There was the deal with Cuba, asking virtually nothing of the Castros at a point when Cuba was on the ropes and probably could have been forced to make concessions. There was the failure to back a significant popular uprising in Iran. There is the current nuclear deal with the Ayatollahs. There’s that time Obama’s mic picked him up saying to Russian President Medvedev, off the record, that he would have more freedom to give Russia what it wanted after his re-election. Can it all have been mere American incompetence?

Of course, to explain all these apparent bungles, our conspiracy theory must extend beyond Clinton herself, to include Obama, and probably John Kerry. On the other hand, if she were a particularly effective operator, she might have crippled the American position badly enough that they had few cards left to play.

Perhaps one day we will know. It would certainly not be the first time in history that a foreign minister or other important courtier turned out to be in the pay of a foreign power. All that ever prevents it is personal ethics, fear of exposure, and pure patriotism. For there is obviously a lot of money to be made.

But in the end, we are left with this: either Hillary Clinton is too stupid to be trusted with the presidency, or she is not.

Pray that she is stupid.