Jeffrey Toobin: Why the D.N.C. E-Mails Aren’t Scandalous

I think the "scandal" if there is any is how little power the National parties actually have nowadays. Exhibit A - Donald Trump. Exhibit B - Bernie Sanders.

Why? The growth of corporate media, Citizens United and the internet. This is particularly clear in the Republican party where the real power brokers are folks like the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and other big billionaire donors who can singlehandedly make anyone a viable candidate, particularly in the primaries.

Also, primaries are still largely State driven affairs. Indeed, back in 2008, Hillary suffered by virtue of Florida's effort to move up in the primary calendar. States are pretty protective of how they run their respective primaries, and any national effort to try to come up with more uniform rules will be met with opposition at the State level.

So, instead, at best you have a lot of insulting e-mails whose release appears timed to sow discord among Democrats, but also tends to show that the national parties really do not have the juice they once had. If they did, Hillary would have won in 2008 and Trump would never have been the RNC nominee.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/why-the-dnc-e-mails-aren%E2%80%99t-scandalous/ar-BBuXr1h

Why did D.W.S., as she is known, have to leave the D.N.C.? Well, the gist is that Bernie Sanders and his supporters took offense at what appeared in several e-mails to be bias in favor of Hillary Clinton at Democratic Party headquarters, which is supposed to be neutral territory in a nomination fight. (The Washington Post has helpfully laid out “the most damaging things” contained in the e-mails.)

Sanders and his campaign had long publicly maintained that D.W.S. and the D.N.C. had worked to help Clinton during the primaries—by, for example, scheduling only a handful of debates, often in the viewing ghetto of Saturday night. In other words, there was already bad blood between the Sanders team and the D.N.C., which made this week’s unpleasantness deeply unsurprising. What was so terrible about the e-mails? In one, a D.N.C. staffer raised the possibility of Sanders being asked about his religious views, though it appears nothing came of the suggestion. In another, D.W.S. referred to a Sanders campaign official who had criticized her as a “damn liar.” A third showed her explicitly criticizing Sanders himself, saying he had “no understanding” of the Democratic Party. (This might be because Sanders has never been elected as a Democrat but, rather, always as an independent who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate.)

Do these e-mails strike anyone as appalling and outrageous? Not me. They strike me as . . . e-mails. The idea that people might speak casually or caustically via e-mail has been portrayed as a shocking breach of civilized discourse. Imagine! People b**********g on e-mail!

But that is what people do on e-mail. They spout off, sound off, write first, and think later. Of course, people should do none of these things. They should weigh carefully the costs and benefits of each e-mail that they write, and consider the possibility that someone might make the e-mails public someday. (They should also change their passwords regularly and get lots of exercise.) Last year, unfiltered talk on e-mail also got several people in trouble in the notorious Sony hack. But the real question is whether any of these e-mails really matter. Do they reveal deep-seated political or philosophical flaws? Do they betray horrible character defects? In the case of the Democrats, it seems clear that the answer to these questions is no. The vast majority of the e-mails contain normal office chatter, inflated into a genuine controversy by people who already had axes to grind.