I can't believe I'm typing this: In Defense of Republicans!!!
We have a lot of people on this board who have an "auto ignore" in place when their candidate is criticized. This seems especially true for those who admire, respect and support Hillary Clinton, who has candidly been the target of more right wing vitriol than anyone other than her husband since the pair first came onto the national political scene in the early 1990s. She has NEVER been a "stay home and bake cookies" type of woman, and her keen intellect definitely irked the "sit there, shut up and look pretty" crowd.
I was an adult during the 1990s, and I believed the Clintons were unfairly attacked on a regular basis. Some of it was undoubtedly their own fault as they struggled to adjust to their new neighbood and made a fair share of mistakes, and some of it was bitter partisan politics, and a great deal of it was hypocritical political theater. I though Bill was a good President, but honestly, the ongoing drama got old.
The Bush years were the worst. (shudder)
When Benghazi was mentioned, I started rolling my eyes. Of course the State Department lied a bit to the public in the beginning - duh! Don't reveal the extent of your surveillance of criminals on the nightly news! - and the hearings seemed like "Clinton Witch Hunt 2.0" to the point where after a cursory skim of the topic, I tuned it out. The "silly email scandal" seemed like more of the same...
BUT.
It's not.
Like it or not, the Republican led subcommittee actually did their jobs. They uncovered a serious, actual real live SCANDAL involving issues of national security. There are dozens of articles and threads on this site explaining the sort-of complicated/but not really difficult to understand story, but bluntly, at the end of the day, this is 100% a Hillary Clinton Epic Screw Up.
And the Republicans caught her.
Now, this is the hard part for me: They did what they were suppose to do.
That is hard to swallow for me, but the reality is we have a two party system so they can keep an eye on each other and make sure neither abuses the system. They are BOTH supposed to hold each other accountable, and we as citizens EXPECT them to do that.
It's only when "both sides" collude to hide wrong doing that things get messed up - the fact the Democrats didn't scream bloody murder about the non-existence of WMDs in Iraq is a great example - because, while we want them to "get along", we also know the more eyes watching each other, the better because we are talking about access to power and money at levels that tempt and corrupt most mere mortals.
Hillary Clinton is now going to be deposed under oath in two separate law suits about hiding government records from groups using the Freedom of Information Act. The FBI is ALSO completing an investigation into whether any criminal charges should or will be brought for her actions. These things are NOT SMEARS - no Republicans took her by the hand and instructed her to behave like an entitled idiot "because she didn't want to carry two devices" to quote her justification.
She screwed up. The Republicans did their jobs. I am stunned to say it, but I think the system worked as intended.
I would have preferred if the offender, however, hadn't been someone on the Democratic Team.
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THANK YOU! 
Thank you for your support - it was a challenging post to write. 
