Let's imagine a world in which Hillary Clinton used a .gov email address. Are we to honestly believe that there would not have been a fake scandal rigged up by Republicans and their willing accomplices in the media? Anyone familiar with the facts would answer that question with a resounding no. Even if she has used a government email many of those emails would have been classified after the fact when there were FOIA requests made for them, so that part of the "scandal" could not have been avoided. Furthermore we also now know that the State Department was not archiving emails the way it was supposed to; so save for Hillary using a private server her emails would not even be available today. Anyone familiar with the Lois Lerner saga can tell you that Hillary would not be off the hook because the agency she worked for failed to archive her emails, and she would have been blamed by Republicans who would claim she maliciously had them destroyed. This is a "scandal" and considered newsworthy because Republicans and the press want it to be. Short of not being Secretary of State, or not communicating via email there is little Hillary could have done to avoid it.
What bothers me is that no one seems to be speaking about the sexism that underlies this whole narrative. Since the story broke the press has justified their decision to cover it ad nauseam by claiming that it was newsworthy because it reinforced the narrative that Hillary was not trustworthy- a narrative developed for years by the press through the hyping of fake scandals that proved to be all smoke and no fire. A narrative that cannot be divorced from the sexist trope that any woman who seeks a position of prominence or power is some sort of Lady MacBeth figure. Since women in power are seen as unnatural and an aberration, it only follows that any women who seeks it will be painted in a negative light.
This is also another example of the type of sexist double standard that women in power are held to. Women in positions of power are often attacked and undermined for things that are done by men, but are somehow only an issue when a woman does them. Both Colin Powell and Jed Bush used a private email address for official business. Collin Powell failed to preserve ANY of them, Bush decided which he would release to the public and which he wouldn't. Neither has faced any real repercussions for doing so. The best example of this would be Jill Abramson who was fired from running the New York Times for being too abrasive. As if no man who ran a major newspaper was ever abrasive? There is certainly little evidence any man in a similar position has ever been fired for such reasons however. Women who rise too far up the ladder are often pushed off it for doing the same things that men do but don't ever get in trouble for.
The way in which those in the media try to justify their own behavior by blaming Hillary is outrageous as well. It is premised on the idea that sexism should simply be accepted as a fact, and that the burden to overcome it should never be borne by those who perpetuate it; but solely by those who have to work to overcome it.
