So she doesn’t know how to use a fax machine. Big whoop. If there is a “smoking gun” in the 3,000 pages of Hillary Clinton e-mails released by the State Department this week, it’s not in her technological ineptitude, or her calling her hairdresser “Santa,” or her continuing to encourage Sid Blumenthal to offer bad advice, or her fetish for ice tea, or her bizarre demand that John Podesta wear socks to bed. The most revealing dispatch, the one dripping with unintended irony and status detail and sanctimony dressed as social conscience, is the e-mail Lynn Forester de Rothschild, centimillionaire, addressed to Clinton on the morning of August 26, 2009. It is 122 preening and obsequious words long. I reprint it here:
H,
I spent yesterday with Les Gelb on Nantucket. He had lots to say which might be of interest, but I thought the most important thing to tell you is to make sure are aware of the Parade magazine piece he wants to do about you. He would like to do a day in your life, when you meet with members of Congress and international figures. He wants to show the impact you are having domestically and internationally. He said he would give you a veto over content and looked me in the eye and said, ‘she will like it.’ Maybe you know this, but did not want it to fall between the cracks. Enjoy your vacation and love to all of you.
Xoxo
L
Ah Nantucket! The island redoubt of the well heeled and au courant, where the billionaires go to escape the proles of the Vineyard, where you watch John Kerry windsurf from the starboard window of your private jet. Only a matter of time before this exclusive hideaway made an appearance in the correspondence of Hillary Clinton. And how perfect that it was during a summer in Nantucket, with the breeze coming off the sound and a Waterford pitcher of Cape Codders sitting on the patio table, that Lady Lynn communed with Dr. Gelb, who has worked in the Senate, at the New York Times, at the Brookings Institution, and is now president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. Difficult to find such established and credentialed personages. In Nantucket they’re everywhere.