Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Potok was not about to let facts change his mind.

A significant faction on the left hates them for upholding the values they have forgotten

How did a significant faction on the left become apologists for a far-right movement that they would be the first to condemn if it were dominated by white people? Some random thoughts on how this might have happened.

I suspect that most leftists have a notion that it is legitimate to criticize what other people think or do, but not what they are as individuals, which is fine to a certain point. But language is flexible. You can always invent a name for “The kind of person that thinks/does [insert ideas/behaviors]” and frame that as an “identity” or something you are as a person. And since “identities” are sacred, it follows that any criticism of said ideas/behaviors is a hate crime.

There is also the problem of overcompensation. It is certainly true that hardcore racists and bigots often disguise their hatred as a fake concern for the treatment of women in Muslim societies etc. (The obvious example being atheists who opportunistically exploit the suffering of Dear Muslima to attack Muslims while spending every free moment harassing women online), and every leftist knows it. In the absence of telepathic power there is no method for identifying all the fakers without implicating lots of sincere people in the process. If you have determined that racism is infinitely bad, it seems to follow that no consequence of accusing others of racism – whether they are in fact guilty or not – could possibly be worse than failing to call out even a single real racist.

Then there’s the well-known phenomenon of attacking others to prove one’s own righteousness: “Don’t you see how viciously I call out even just alleged racists? So how can I possibly be one of them?” One of the main things I took away from Jung Chang’s biography of chairman Mao was that the endless purges and show trials were not actually meant to smoke out any real dissidents. At least that wasn’t their main function. The real purpose was to convey the following message: “Some percentage of the population will be made to pay during the next purge whether they are in fact guilty or not. Make sure it’s not you!” And of course the way to make sure it wasn’t you was to make sure it was somebody else. So basically people were forced to compete to inform on others in order to stay clear themselves. Hardly anything can be more toxic than a culture in which insufficient eagerness to accuse others of thoughtcrime is all it takes to be accused oneself.

Last but not least, it seems to me, there have always been a tension on the left between two, not necessarily contradictory, but certainly very different perspectives, or mindsets, or modes of thought:

On the one hand there’s a perspective that says “We’re all the same on the inside”. I.e. there might be some individual differences, but differences between groups are just superficial and irrelevant like skin color or the shape of a person’s genitals. To the extent that there appears to be some real differences in the distribution of interests or talents, it’s basically a self-fulfilling prophecy, i.e. people turn out differently because we already think and act as if there were such differences, and treat people accordingly. Hence people end up different because of how they’re treated, not because of how they’re born. Bottom line, because people all function in pretty much the same way, there is no justification for treating them differently. Hence “equality” ultimately means rendering our various group identities irrelevant with respect to how people are treated.

On the other hand there’s a strand of thought that says it’s ok to be different, hence the emphasis on tolerance and the celebration of diversity. According to this perspective, people really are different, and there is nothing wrong with that. Insisting that we must all be the same “on the inside” is in itself a form of bigotry.

My personal view is that both perspectives have some validity (obviously, both can’t apply equally well in every particular case, but reality is complicated, and different principles may apply under different circumstances). For example: Are certain jobs considered “women’s work” because they’re seen as low-status (the first perspective), or are they considered low-status because they’re seen as “women’s work” (the second perspective)? I suspect the answer is some mixture of both.

I also think both modes of thought can be potentially problematic if applied simplistically, or dogmatically, or without regard for the specifics (in short, without thinking), especially if one fails to distinguish between innate and cultural differences.

The first perspective, if misapplied, can lead to a dogmatic inability/unwillingness to even consider the possibility that extremists like the IS actually mean what they say. After all, if we’re all the same on the inside, we must all be motivated by the same kinds of goals and values, hence all this talk of obeying the will of Allah etc. can only be an “excuse”.

The second perspective, if applied uncritically, leads to tolerance of intolerance, the abandonment of universal standards and a return to different rules for different groups of people. “Equality” is redefined as everybody having the same right to be treated according to the rules appropriate to their particular group identity (trans activism being the obvious example). There is also the idea that whatever your ancestors happened to believe/practice is automatically “right” for you. And this is where I think a label like “The regressive left” is indeed justified. All leftists agree that westerners should work to change their culture from within, but regressive leftists have somehow convinced themselves that nobody outside the West could possibly want to live differently than their ancestors for reasons other than internalized Western bigotry against “their own” culture. The idea that non-western women, homosexuals, secularists etc. might want the same changes we have made (imperfectly, but still) in the West for exactly the same reasons we did, simply doesn’t compute.

“Difference” is a word like “change”. Some changes are for the better while others are for the worse, and yet others don’t matter at all. This is why my head explodes when people talk about supporting Trump because he represents “change” as if “change” were synonymous with “improvement”. It is, certainly, true that Trump represents “change”, more specifically change for the worse. I just don’t see why that’s a reason to vote for him. The same goes for “difference”. Differences between languages, artistic styles, food traditions, ways of dressing (at least as long as there is no coercion involved) etc. may all be created pretty much equal. Differences in ways of treating women and homosexuals, not so much. Specifics matter.

Finally, I think leftists are right to be concerned that “universal standards” in practice means holding up Western culture as the norm to which everyone else needs to conform. I therefore hasten to say that that’s not what I’m advocating. We should aim higher than replacing the burqa with Western porn culture.

Headline:

Bono Becomes The First Man To Make Glamour’s Women Of The Year List

Because…there just aren’t enough women good enough to win it?

Glamour’s annual Women of the Year list always takes in a lot of territory, from noteworthy fashionistas and sports heroes to social justice activists and business leaders.

Enter Bono: The first Man of the Year among the magazine’s Women of the Year, all to be honored at a Nov. 14 ceremony in Los Angeles.

“We’ve talked for years about whether to honor a man at Women of the Year and we’ve always kind of put the kabash on it. You know, men get a lot of awards and aren’t exactly hurting in the celebration and honors department,” said Cindi Leive, Glamour’s editor-in-chief.

“But it started to seem that that might be an outdated way of looking at things, and there are so many men who really are doing wonderful things for women these days. Some men get it and Bono is one of those guys,” Leive said in a recent interview.

And speaking of non-violent Isamism, and the clueless non-Muslims who enforce it on the rest of us – the Guardian reports that the British gymnast Louis Smith has been suspended from British Gymnastics for two months for making jokes about Islam.

Louis Smith has been banned for two months after a video emerged in which he and fellow gymnast Luke Carson were appeared to mock Islam.

Smith, who won a silver medal for Great Britain on the pommel horse in Rio, was filmed with Carson shouting “Allahu Akbar” and mimicking a praying pose. Carson has been given a reprimand by British Gymnastics which will stay on his record for two years.

Did this happen at a public event where he was representing British Gymnastics? If so I could maybe see why they would ask him not to do that again.

But no, it didn’t – it happened at a friend’s wedding. Wouldn’t you think that would be absolutely none of British Gymnastic’s business? Wouldn’t you wonder why that video “emerged” at all?

Smith apologised for the incident, which took place at a friend’s wedding. “I am deeply sorry,” he wrote in a message on Twitter. “I am not defending myself, what I did was wrong. I want to say sorry for the deep offense I have caused and to my family who have also been affected by my thoughtless actions.

“I recognised the severity of my mistake and hope it can be used as an example of how important it is to respect others at all times. I have learnt a valuable life lesson and I wholeheartedly apologise.”

I think it’s much more an example of how important it is not to trust anyone at a party because maybe they will film you and then send the film to the media if you do anything the media might pretend to be shocked by.

I was pretty sure I’d heard of Bob Lambert before reading Nick Cohen’s piece on the SPLC’s attack on Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I was pretty sure I remembered a co-authored piece at Comment is Free making some kind of claim that Islamists Are Our Friends, and that I’d blogged about it. I was not wrong.

It was April 2009. The ridiculous title is The demonisation of British Islamism. It’s shockingly stupid and perverse – or, as Nick suggests, it’s part of Lambert’s undercover disguise.

In recent weeks an unnecessary schism has been created between government and British Islamists.

First, government failure to condemn Israel in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead exposed a bias towards Israel and an ambivalence towards the value of Palestinian lives that angered British Islamists. Next, the government’s new counter-terrorism strategy (“Contest Two“) served to amplify pre-existing British Islamist concerns at being treated as “fifth columnists”. Then, along came Hazel Blears with an ill-judged assault on Daud Abdullah and the Muslim Council of Britain. Taken together these incidents reinforce concerns that British Islamists are uniquely held out for political attack, and illustrate the power of key anti-Islamist lobbying groups. The result is a feeling that the government holds Islamists to a different political standard based on a Bush-ite principle of “either you are with us or against us”, where the “us” is clearly not Muslim.

If you replaced “Islamists” with “Muslims” and then talked about different people and groups, you could see their point. But they talked about Islamists, not Muslims.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of Islam, “Islamist” describes an Islamic political or social activist.

That’s a ludicrously incomplete definition, and you would expect a cop to know that.

Over the last year we have been interviewing Islamists in Britain. While all of them fit this dictionary definition, none match the negative caricatures provided by UK thinktanks such as the Quilliam Foundation and Policy Exchange. Ironically enough, all of our interviewees do appear to resemble Britain’s first Islamist, Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932) who was himself critical of imperial British foreign policy in the Middle East in much the same way that his modern day descendents are critical of the Blair and Brown governments’ policies in the same region. In Quilliam’s day, however, it was difficult for British Muslims to be politically engaged.

Happily, in today’s pluralistic Britain, Islamists are able to work in partnership with mainstream (though by no means centrist) politicians like Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn to present their concerns about UK foreign policy to a wider public. While British Islamists are as diverse as British socialists, the interviews do reveal important unifying characteristics, most notably a devotion to social justice and a concern for community needs over individual or corporate ambitions. British Islamists are typified by a sense of moral obligation to confront injustice, and they strive, in their own ways, to try to make the world a better place. These are messages which have more power than ever in modern Britain.

Oh dear god. Is that the spy talking, or the useful idiot?

My post at the time is as enraged as you’d expect.

Here again is what Nick said about the SPLC and Bob Lambert and Quilliam:

I asked the SPLC’s Mark Potok, ‘one of the country’s leading experts on the world of extremism,’ according to its website,  if he was Muslim himself. ‘No.’ Was he happy, then, branding a liberal Muslim ‘an anti-Muslim extremist?’ Well, Potok said, the head of Scotland Yard’s Muslim Contact Unit had accused Nawaz of  ‘demonising a whole range of groups that have made valuable contributions to counter-terrorism,’ and that was good enough for him.

I tried to explain that the then head of the Muslim Contact Unit was Bob Lambert, one of the most notorious agent provocateurs British policing has produced. He stole the identity of a dead boy and infiltrated left groups. Pretending to be one of them, he got an activist pregnant then vanished from his partner and child’s lives. He had a shadowy part in the ‘McLibel’ case, which led to two environmental activists being persecuted for years in the courts, and is under investigation for allegedly smearing the campaign for justice for the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence. There are reasonable grounds for suspecting that, when Lambert attacked Nawaz, he was trying to ingratiate himself with Islamists as he had tried to ingratiate himself with leftists.

If the suspicion is true then Lambert also did his bit to influence public opinion to see Islamists as social justice activists, which is surely a step too far for the police.

It’s all grotesque.

The BBC returns to the subject of Malawian “hyenas” – men who are paid to “initiate” young girls into sex.

In July the BBC wrote about a Malawian man paid to have sex with young girls from his village, as part of a sexual initiation ritual. Later a Malawian woman, Natasha Annie Tonthola, contacted the BBC to explain how her experience of the ritual helped inspire her to campaign for the protection of women and girls. This is her story.

I’m the oldest of five children and I grew up in a village in the central district of Malawi, near the capital, Lilongwe, and I was 13 years old when the initiation ceremony happened.

My father was from a village near Mulanje, in the south of the country, and I was sent there for the ceremony after my first period. You don’t have a choice – it happens to every girl in the village.

They were told they would learn about womanhood. She was excited about it. No one told them it involved sex. They were told a man called a “hyena” was coming to visit them, but not that he would be putting his penis in them.

We each had a piece of cloth and we were told to put it on the floor. We were told that it was time to show that we knew how to treat a man, that we knew what to do for our future husbands. Then we were blindfolded.

You’re not supposed to show you’re scared, you’re not supposed to show you don’t know what’s happening to you.

The man comes, and he tells you to lie down, you open your legs and he does what he does. We weren’t allowed to know who the man was – only the elders know.

That’s an interesting touch. I guess it’s to teach them that it doesn’t matter who he is? Because they don’t get to choose who he is at any time? They just have to take it?

We were young girls, so we were tense, and this man would push our legs open. I found it painful. When he finished, I was relieved. The female elder came in and said, “Congratulations, you have finished the initiation ceremony, and you are a woman now.”

Many girls think this is normal because we are in a way brainwashed, we think it is OK because it is tradition.

But the hyena didn’t wear a condom, and some of the girls got pregnant. If the hyena has an STD, well…

Tonthola had a rough life and an abusive marriage, and she became an organizer.

My community organisation continued to educate people but it was hard, particularly when we were challenging traditions such as the use of hyenas and wife inheritance.

In some communities they told us: “Just because you are educated, doesn’t mean that you should tell us what to do. These traditions and customs have existed for time immemorial, and we’ve practised them for ages without any harm.”

But some elders and religious leaders listened, and some have stopped the practice in their villages.

In my community work I soon learned more about the barriers for girls in school. If families are going through a financial rough patch, they’re more likely to pay fees for boys rather than for girls. If girls drop out of school, the family is eager to marry them off rather than have them sit around the house all day. And many girls miss class because they can’t afford sanitary towels.

To try to solve this problem, one of the main things my organisation is doing is distributing eco-friendly reusable washable sanitary pads and pants. They come as part of a kit including pants with clips so that they stay in place and a waterproof bag, in case girls need to change them in school. They are biodegradable, but cost effective and durable – they last for five years. I’ve also expanded into nappies. I hope these will encourage much less waste to go into landfill.

In 2011 I realised I needed to establish a formal organisation, and that was the start of Mama Africa Foundation Trust. We have distributed so many sanitary towels that I have lost count. I call this initiative Project Dignity.

The female body is a handicap in so many ways. Natasha Annie Tonthola is a hero.

H/t Seth

Ken Silverstein wrote a piece in Harper’s in 2000, The Church of Morris Dees. A site with a dubious name posted a copy.

Cofounded in 1971 by civil rights lawyer cum direct-marketing millionaire Morris Dees, a leading critic of “hate groups” and a man so beatific that he was the subject of a made-for-TV movie, the SPLC spent much of its early years defending prisoners who faced the death penalty and suing to desegregate all-white institutions like Alabama’s highway patrol. That was then.

Today, the SPLC spends most of its time–and money–on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. “He’s the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement,” renowned anti- death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, his former associate, “though I don!t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.” The Center earned $44 million last year alone–$27 million from fund-raising and $17 million from stocks and other investments–but spent only $13 million on civil rights programs, making it one of the most profitable charities in the country.

Um. They raised $27 million from fund-raising and kept $14 million of it?

Morris Dees doesn’t need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America, though this letter quite naturally omits that fact. Other solicitations have been more flagrantly misleading. One pitch, sent out in 1995-when the Center had more than $60 million in reserves-informed would-be donors that the “strain on our current operating budget is the greatest in our 25-year history.” Back in 1978, when the Center had less than $10 million, Dees promised that his organization would quit fund-raising and live off interest as soon as its endowment hit $55 million. But as it approached that figure, the SPLC upped the bar to $100 million, a sum that, one 1989 newsletter promised, would allow the Center “to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising. ” Today, the SPLC’s treasury bulges with $120 million, and it spends twice as much on fund-raising-$5.76 million last year-as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses. The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the Center one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors, estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax-exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax-deductible cent from well-meaning “people like you.”

And, he says, they choose their targets to appeal to donors rather than to address the most urgent problems.

What the Center’s other work for justice does not include is anything that might be considered controversial by donors. According to Millard Farmer, the Center largely stopped taking death-penalty cases for fear that too visible an opposition to capital punishment would scare off potential contributors. In 1986, the Center’s entire legal staff quit in protest of Dees’s refusal to address issues-such as homelessness, voter registration, and affirmative action-that they considered far more pertinent to poor minorities, if far less marketable to affluent benefactors, than fighting the KKK. Another lawyer, Gloria Browne, who resigned a few years later, told reporters that the Center’s programs were calculated to cash in on “black pain and white guilt.” Asked in 1994 if the SPLC itself, whose leadership consists almost entirely of white men, was in need of an affirmative action policy, Dees replied that “probably the most discriminated people in America today are white men when it comes to jobs.”

Hmm.

A National Journal survey of salaries paid to the top officers of advocacy groups shows that Dees earned more in 1998 than nearly all of the seventy-eight listed, tens of thousands more than the heads of such groups as the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Children’s Defense Fund. The more money the SPLC receives, the less that goes to other civil rights organizations, many of which, including the NAACP, have struggled to stay out of bankruptcy. Dees’s compensation alone amounts to one quarter the annual budget of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, which handles several dozen death-penalty cases a year. “You are a fraud and a conman,” the Southern Center’s director, Stephen Bright, wrote in a 1996 letter to Dees, and proceeded to list his many reasons for thinking so, which included “your failure to respond to the most desperate needs of the poor and powerless despite your millions upon millions, your fund-raising techniques, the fact that you spend so much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself so shamelessly.” Soon the SPLC will move into a new six-story headquarters in downtown Montgomery, just across the street from its current headquarters, a building known locally as the Poverty Palace.

So there’s that.

The Atlantic has a rather tepid piece on the SPLC’s target-placement on Maajid Nawaz.

Nawaz’s work has earned him detractors—critics claim he has embellished or neatened his narrative, some attack him for opportunism, and others question his liberal bona fides—but calling him an “anti-Muslim extremist” is a surprise. Unlike the likes of Gaffney and Geller, he doesn’t espouse the view that Islam itself is a problem; unlike Ali, who now describes herself as an atheist, Nawaz identifies as a Muslim.

That’s what I mean by tepid. Calling him that is more than a surprise, it’s a reckless and untrue calumny.

When I spoke to Nawaz on Thursday, he was both baffled and furious.

“They put a target on my head. The kind of work that I do, if you tell the wrong kind of Muslims that I’m an extremist, then that means I’m a target,” he said. “They don’t have to deal with any of this. I don’t have any protection. I don’t have any state protection. These people are putting me on what I believe is a hit list.”

And you would think that as an organization that tracks hate groups and violence, they would know that.

The report cited several counts against Nawaz. One is that he tweeted a cartoon of Muhammad—an intentionally provocative act, given that many Sunnis find it blasphemous to depict the prophet, but one that doesn’t fit neatly into the “anti-Islam” category.

I don’t believe it was “an intentionally provocative act” because I don’t think provocation was Maajid’s goal. I think his goal was what it said on the tin: to point out that Muslims don’t have to be outraged by cartoons like the Jesus and Mo one, and that it’s better to be relaxed about such things. He no doubt knew that some people would decide to be provoked by it, but that doesn’t mean he posted it in order to provoke them. Subtle, I know.

The most interesting is the fourth point, because it highlights a peculiar dynamic: The SPLC and Nawaz are each accusing the other of McCarthyism. The report states:

In the list sent to a top British security official in 2010, headlined “Preventing Terrorism: Where Next for Britain?” Quilliam wrote, “The ideology of non-violent Islamists is broadly the same as that of violent Islamists; they disagree only on tactics.” An official with Scotland Yard’s Muslim Contact Unit told The Guardian that “[t]he list demonises a whole range of groups that in my experience have made valuable contributions to counter-terrorism.”

Nawaz disputes the claim. Quilliam says the list in question was an appendix to a larger report, and simply a list of British Muslim organizations; in fact, he says, the point was to say that such groups should be legal, even if they were extremist, so long as they were not violent. “It wasn’t a terror list,” Nawaz said. “We were saying, don’t ban these groups. We’ve gone through the looking glass. It’s the direct opposite of my life’s work.”

…

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at SPLC who wrote the report (and has a long resume of similar work on extremists), told me that Quilliam’s list of groups was the linchpin of the case for Nawaz as an anti-Muslim extremist.

Well that seems like an incredibly weak and pathetic linchpin.

While Nawaz demanded a correction, retraction, and apology, Potok said none was coming.

One thing that seemed to particularly irk Nawaz was the fact that the report came from SPLC. While the group is controversial—and particularly loathed on the American right—Nawaz’s objection was that he has known and respected their work for years. “It lends the wingnuts a level of credibility,” he said.

Well exactly. If it were just some twerp, we would all have pointed and laughed and then moved on. The SPLC is not just some twerp, but it seems to have waded into this without doing any proper research.

A lawyer and law professor says the FBI director did a bad and possibly illegal thing.

The F.B.I. is currently investigating the hacking of Americans’ computers by foreign governments. Russia is a prime suspect.

Imagine a possible connection between a candidate for president in the United States and the Russian computer hacking. Imagine the candidate has business dealings in Russia, and has publicly encouraged the Russians to hack the email of his opponent and her associates.

It would not be surprising for the F.B.I. to include this candidate and his campaign staff in its confidential investigation of Russian computer hacking.

But it would be highly improper, and an abuse of power, for the F.B.I. to conduct such an investigation in the public eye, particularly on the eve of the election. It would be an abuse of power for the director of the F.B.I., absent compelling circumstances, to notify members of Congress from the party opposing the candidate that the candidate or his associates were under investigation. It would be an abuse of power if F.B.I. agents went so far as to obtain a search warrant and raid the candidate’s office tower, hauling out boxes of documents and computers in front of television cameras.

The F.B.I.’s job is to investigate, not to influence the outcome of an election.

Such acts could also be prohibited under the Hatch Act, which bars the use of an official position to influence an election. That is why the F.B.I. presumably would keep those aspects of an investigation confidential until after the election.

And that is why, on Saturday, I filed a complaint against the F.B.I. with the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates Hatch Act violations, and with the Office of Government Ethics. I have spent much of my career working on government ethics and lawyers’ ethics, including two and a half years as the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, and I never thought that the F.B.I. could be dragged into a political circus surrounding one of its investigations. Until this week.

By way of full disclosure he tells us what candidates he has supported in this election process – three Republicans and then Clinton.

On Friday, the director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, sent to members of Congress a letter updating them on developments in the agency’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s emails, an investigation which supposedly was closed months ago. This letter, which was quickly posted on the internet, made highly unusual public statements about an F.B.I. investigation concerning a candidate in the election. The letter was sent in violation of a longstanding Justice Department policy of not discussing specifics about pending investigations with others, including members of Congress. According to some news reports on Saturday, the letter was sent before the F.B.I. had even obtained the search warrant that it needed to look at the newly discovered emails. And it was sent days before the election, at a time when many Americans are already voting.

This clarifies, for me at least, how extraordinary and reprehensible Comey’s action was.

Taslima tweeted this BBC feature:

Purnima Shil was gang-raped in northern Bangladesh at the age of 13 and she has not been allowed to forget it. Twelve years later, because of the stigma that attaches to rape victims in some parts of the country, someone shamed her by creating a pornographic Facebook page in her name – with her photograph and telephone number. This story is part of the BBC’s Shame series, which examines a disturbing new phenomenon – the use of private or sexually explicit images to blackmail and shame young people, mainly girls and women, in some of the world’s most conservatives societies.

The video is only 3 minutes. It’s powerful.

A tiny history lesson via Kevin Lamarque at Newsweek/Reuters.

Clinton’s email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America’s recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.

Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. “It’s about as amazing a double standard as you can get,” says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. “If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails set up on a private DNC server?”

Most troubling, researchers found a suspicious pattern in the White House email system blackouts, including periods when there were no emails available from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. “That the vice president’s office, widely characterized as the most powerful vice president in history, should have no archived emails in its accounts for scores of days—especially days when there was discussion of whether to invade Iraq—beggared the imagination,” says Thomas Blanton, director of the Washington-based National Security Archive.

Welllll maybe there was a lot of football to watch during those days. No, maybe he had a cold. No, maybe the Internet was down. No, maybe he just did everything over the phone.

…in 2003, a whistleblower told the National Security Archive that the George W. Bush White House was no longer saving its emails. The Archive and another watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (which had represented outed CIA agent Valerie Plame in her case against the Bush administration), refiled their original lawsuit.

The plaintiffs soon discovered that Bush aides had simply shut down the Clinton automatic email archive, and they identified the start date of the lost emails as January 1, 2003. The White House claimed it had switched to a new server and in the process was unable to maintain an archive—a claim that many found dubious.

Bush administration emails could have aided a special prosecutor’s investigation into a White House effort to discredit a diplomat who disagreed with the administration’s fabricated Iraq WMD evidence by outing his CIA agent wife, Plame. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was brought in to investigate that case, said in 2006 that he believed some potentially relevant emails sent by aides in Cheney’s office were in the administration’s system but he couldn’t get them.

But that’s ok because REASONS.

The supposedly lost emails also prevented Congress from fully investigating, in 2007, the politically motivated firing of nine U.S. attorneys. When the Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed related emails, Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, said many were inaccessible or lost on a nongovernmental private server run by the RNC and called gwb43.com. The White House, meanwhile, officially refused to comply with the congressional subpoena.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) called the president’s actions “Nixonian stonewalling” and at one point took to the floor in exasperation and shouted, “They say they have not been preserved. I don’t believe that!” His House counterpart, Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), said Bush’s assertion of executive privilege was unprecedented and displayed “an appalling disregard for the right of the people to know what is going on in their government.”

In court in May 2008, administration lawyers contended that the White House had lost three months’ worth of email backups from the initial days of the Iraq War. Bush aides thus evaded a court-ordered deadline to describe the contents of digital backup believed to contain emails deleted in 2003 between March—when the U.S. invaded Iraq—and September. They also refused to give the NSA nonprofit any emails relating to the Iraq War, despite the PRA, blaming a system upgrade that had deleted up to 5 million emails. The plaintiffs eventually contended that the Bush administration knew about the problem in 2005 but did nothing to fix it.

One rule for them, and another rule for everyone else.