CI#1: Presidental Candidates

This being the first Civic Issues (CI) post, I will be explaining what my series of five posts will be centered around. 

For my CI blog I hope to be able to not just tell you about a civic issue but to foster a interest in learning more on your own.  In a series of short blog post it would be impractical to go into any more depth than is needed to simply make you, as my readers aware of the issue. 

My approach to this blog will be to examine five different civic issues that have been permeating social media due to the actions/beliefs of a presidential candidate. For my first one I will be talking about the issue of government transparency, which has been highlighted by the Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton.

Recently two actions have come to the public's attention on Hilary Clintons actions while she was Secretary of State under Obama, first the Benghazi incident and her personnel email server.  Which has been found to have been active in sending and receiving classified information.  In both these instance it has taken a few years before much information is made known about them.  As it turns out Hilary Clinton in the early stages of both investigations made statements that contradict what has been revealed through the investigations.  She continually made statements to try to miss -construe what actually happened. Through these two investigation it has is becoming apparent how much she actually lied.

Its not that this strategy is uncommon in politics, what is uncommon is that these actions are actually being investigated and a blind eye is not being turned.  This facts leads to the logical question, how many incidents similar to these are out there?  How many people in authority are simply choosing not to investigate?

The e-mail servers are significant to the transparency issue in the government because nobody in the government even knew about this.  A lot of times the people are the ones information is withheld from, but in this case the government-to-government relations are not even transparent.  How can transparency expected to be practiced between the government and its’ constituents if this is the case?

For many people who wonder why the email server issue is such a big deal it can be seen in the punishment of former Army General and Director of the CIA David Petraeus. Petraeus was given a $100,000 fine and will never be able to hold a high-ranking government job again.  This came about by simply having some old top-secret information in his personnel archive at his house.  Then letting his biographer look at the information. 

The FBI investigation is still ongoing in Mrs. Clintons case, but if the presidents set from the David Petraeus case is any indication of a possible punishment.  Hilary Clinton could be ousted from politics.