West Virginia Lawmaker Calls for Darrell Issa to be Hanged!

No, not really.  What really happened is some whackjob who happens to be a state legislator in West Virginia said that Hillary Clinton "should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution... then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC."

This should be obvious, but since Republicans (like this whackjob, and many of Donald Trump's supporters) don't seem to understand it, it is not acceptable to publicly advocate for killing your political opponents.  We have a little thing called "due process" in this country which determines whether and when a person's civil liberties are to be curtailed.

In the particular case of Hillary Clinton and her private email server, the FBI has concluded there is insufficient basis for criminal charges --- a conclusion which seems entirely correct.  It's certainly not up to this whackjob to determine a more severe penalty.

So why did I mention Darrell Issa in the title of this post?  Well Issa, like most Republican legislators, it seems, is on one of the many, many congressional committees investigating the attacks in Benghazi four years ago.  And just a month or so after the attacks, in his zeal to get at Hillary Clinton the truth, Issa posted 166 pages of "sensitive but unclassified" material on the internet.  This would be State Department information which shouldn't be released to the general public.

This is also the same level of sensitive information that over 99.7% of the information was that Hillary sent out over her private email server when she was Secretary of State.  A lot of people thought it was very bad that she did that.  You might have heard about it.

And it was very bad, and stupid.  It was a careless mistake that many people have rightly criticized Hillary for, and one ignorant yahoo actually demanded that she be hanged for it.  But there's a very important difference between what Hillary did and what Issa did.

Hillary used a personal email server to conduct her day-to-day business as Secretary of State, and in so doing, she risked the possibility that this "sensitive but unclassified" information might leak out.  Issa, on the other hand, posted his information to the internet, with the explicit goal of making it available to absolutely everyone in the world.

Seems like kind of a bigger deal to me.  And yet, even though this happened 4 years ago, there has been no investigation, no demands that Issa resign from Congress, no calls to criminally prosecute him, and certainly no West Virginia whackjob demanding that Issa be hanged.

Republicans are right; Hillary isn't treated just like everyone else.  She actually has to deal with one hell of a lot more scrutiny.