But the Key Was in the Ignition, Mr. Podesta

When I go to the store, I park my car, lock it and walk away.  Back when I had a car with a "key" as opposed to keyless ignition, the process was to park the car, turn it off, take out the key and lock it.  We lived in northern Virginia, but no matter where we lived; no matter where I traveled to on business and rented cars, I did the same thing.  I always lock the car.

So do you.

What would not occur to me would be to park the car, leave the key in the ignition and go in to work, or the store, or whatever, and certainly not leave the car running with the key right there.  Gee, let's ask, why would we not do that?

Because there are such things as "car thieves" out there for one, that's why.  But that's not it entirely, either.  Admit it, if you walked by an empty car with the engine running and the key right there -- and you know you have before -- you would have at least a fleeting thought that the car was right there for the taking.  And I don't care whether you thought it was there for you to do the taking; you would certainly think it was set up for a GTA, as they say in the law-enforcement biz.

Ron White, famous as a member of the Blue Collar Comedy group and a very funny guy, had a tag line that applies perfectly here -- "You can't fix stupid."  He meant exactly that, and if you think about it, he's right.  By the time you are old enough to make a decision to leave a car running and empty of people, you're old enough such that you're not going to get any smarter.

Ron White would walk by an empty car with its engine running and mutter "You just can't fix stupid" to anyone who would listen, although he probably wouldn't take the car.  OK, he might move it a few rows over to teach a lesson, but probably not (because you can't fix stupid).  And we all would think that the person who left the car was stupid, indeed.  That's important, and part of the point here -- we would think the person was so stupid that whatever happened as a result of leaving the running car unattended was a just outcome for stupidity.

Why do I care?

Because John Podesta, who was the chairman of Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign, left his car running with the key in the ignition and walked away.

OK, he didn't exactly leave his car running, not exactly.

But he did something that is a perfect analogue.  Two things, actually.  He set up his email account with the password "password", and he answered a phishing email by clicking on the link that ultimately facilitated his emails being blasted all over WikiLeaks.  This embarrassed the Democrats, day after day, as we came to understand how they had rigged the entire primary campaign so that Hillary Clinton would end up as the nominee.

We also discovered that there were racists and anti-Semites and, apparently, virulent anti-Catholics in the Democratic National Committee.  We also discovered that at the same time Hillary was calling half the country "racist, sexist, homophobic, islamophobic" and the rest, the DNC in general did not think a whole lot of a goodly part of America themselves.

The Democrats, and Hillary in particular, lost whatever moral high ground they ever might have had when all that came out.  Did it influence the election?  It's hard to say either way; no one is actually coming forward to say that they changed their votes because of the exposure of the contents of those emails, but then Hillary never had her poll numbers go over about 48% anyway.

But here's the thing.  Hillary and Hollywood and the press and the organized left (but I repeat myself) can scream all they want to about the exposure of the truth costing them the 2016 election.  But we out here in the USA that voted in the majority for Donald Trump (i.e., leaving out five counties in California that were her whole margin, plus some), don't look at it that way.

Nope.  We look at what happened as a moron being in charge of the Hillary campaign, so stupid that he not only bit on a phishing email but had a default password, even though his email account was a pathway to incredibly expository and condemning communications among the Democrats.

John Podesta left his car running, key in the ignition, and his car got stolen.  We in the USA just shake our heads and have zero sympathy for him, or for the outcome his stupidity wrought.

You can't fix stupid.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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