It takes a village to defend Hillary Clinton.
Such noted conservative rags as The New York Times and The Washington Post have been all over Hillary Clinton’s, shall we say, unorthodox email habits when she was secretary of state.
The details of Clinton’s email habits, which appear designed to skirt public transparency requirements, keep getting worse, even though mere ambassadors got canned for lesser offenses. Even TMZ is hot on Secretary of State Richard Windsor’s trail.
Sarah Palin could see Russia from her house. Hillary Clinton can see the server hosting her emails.
Clinton may not be good with email. Many grandmothers aren’t. But she has gotten the band back together: the tireless propagandists who have been full-time defenders of Hillary and her husband. And they see this as the work of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
My fellow American Spectator alum David Brock has been all over cable news trying to convince viewers that Clinton is being set up worse than the late Marion Barry.
No wonder it’s snowing here in Washington, D.C. When Brock stops swimming Scrooge McDuck-like in his piles of money and appears on television, it means six more weeks of winter.
Brock’s outfit Media Matters posted a clip of his CNN appearance in which he tries to “warn” the media that the Clinton email story is a “Republican operation from top to bottom.”
Fellow Clinton apologist Joe Conason agrees. “Angry Republicans on [the Benghazi] committee, plainly frustrated by years of failure to find any evidence that incriminates Clinton or President Obama in the loony conspiracy theories cherished by tea party Republicans, are behind the email stories first published by The New York Times,” he wrote.
Donna Brazile tweeted that Hillary “wants you to read and see her emails without the partisan filters.” She asked, “Can the media handle this one without the usual bias?”
Because if there’s one thing the media is known for, it’s Republican bias.
Sidney Blumenthal and James Carville cannot be far behind.
All this talk about the Clintons, the vast right-wing conspiracy and how to use email feels so 1990s it makes me want to break out my Nirvana and Pearl Jam CDs.
I haven’t felt this way since Chumbawamba was tearing up the charts and Brett Favre was in his 20s. And I still own a CD tower and an AOL email account.
Aside from the questions about Clinton’s email habits and the reemergence of all her old friends, this is something that might be a problem in 2016. It’s not so much Hillary’s age — four of the last six Republican presidential nominees were hovering around 70 and Dubya was the only recent GOP standard-bearer under 60 — it’s that she’s from another political era.
When Hillary last threatened to run our national health care system, “Seinfeld” and “Friends” were still on television. Young men wore cardigans, young women those denim overalls.
The ’90s have a lot to recommend them. Expect Clinton to remind us of the Internet boom and the budget surplus, both of which look good compared to present economic and fiscal conditions.
But the Democrats are usually the party of the fresh face. With the significant exception of Jeb Bush, this time it’s the Republican field that looks fresher. The Democrats are prepared to nominate someone whose political emergence is as far removed from today as Jimmy Carter’s administration was from the ’90s.
Next time Hillary goes on “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon, remember that Bill appeared on the program when it was still hosted by Johnny Carson.
Even the Clintons’ media defenders are from another era, as are their talking points.
Look, I’m a conservative. I love the past. Elections, unfortunately, are about the future.
Nobody tell Hillary’s village people.
W. James Antle III is managing editor of The Daily Caller and author of the book Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped? Follow him on Twitter.