President Obama has been making pointed comments of late as to America's need to maybe, someday, possibly do something about our nation's constant background noise of Unstable Person Buys Gun, Unstable Person Starts Killing People. He was asked about this in his
60 Minutes interview this week, but doing something about mass murders was deemed
too boring to make for good television.
During the interview that aired Sunday night, Kroft pressed Obama six times about Clinton's emails.
No questions about gun violence made it into the portions of the interview CBS aired. But it turns out Kroft actually did actually raise the topic of gun violence with Obama during the Q&A, but 60 Minutes editors cut that portion out of the final TV interview. (Viewers can only see Obama and Kroft's exchange about gun violence online.)
That's right. What America wants to hear about, the week after pretty much all other thinking human beings had given up the ghost on Republican
Benghazi! investigation number eleventy-two being anything other than an anti-Hillary Clinton PAC operating out of Trey Gowdy's office, is about email protocols of the Clinton-era State Department. Did you know that Secretary of State Clinton used her own email account to contact fellow State Department employees, just like, say, Colin Powell before her did? You did? And did you know that it turns out that top levels of the State Department have been a bit of a technological backwoods, and that they sheepishly discovered at one point that they were pretty damn terrible about keeping email records, thus necessitating a request to the then-ex-Secretary of State to please give them copies of any emails she herself had access to because they didn't have them? You did? You had that drilled into your news-consuming head within the first fifty stories on that thing, you say? And it appears the problem has now been fixed, and the policies changed?
Well, go figure. What's less clear is how this deeply fascinating story about yet another of our government agencies tottering into the information age with a shaky grasp of how these things work or how to use them was once meant to have something ostensibly to do with Benghazi! Both the Republicans and the reporters who get their leaks have stopped even trying to explain that part, so all we know is that Trey Gowdy is still pretty sure his "investigation" will last through this whole election season because Reasons. Unless Hillary Clinton were to suddenly drop out of the race, mind you, in which case his office would discover that [insert new Democratic front-runner here] was the real villain of the Benghazi! attacks the whole time.
Welcome to Media America, everybody, the magical land where mass murders in American classrooms are just too damn boring to keep press and pundit attention but stories about how the State Department's bumbling ex-email ex-policies make the president feel are considered crackerjack stuff.
Sigh. I need more coffee. Or less? Probably less.