Charles Pierce has a very straightforward assessment of the current state of the Clinton Rules side of the email non-story. He’s not very happy.

The nation should now be convinced of the obvious fact that that the elite political press learned nothing at all from the fact that, throughout the 1990s, they got played like tin whistles by every poolroom liar in Arkansas. We’re back in the bullshit hell-maze again. The crucial document is just…inches…away. We know it’s out there because…it’s out there, because Clinton, and for no other reason. If David Brooks really wants to know why HRC has “an embattled combative posture, and sometimes an air of reactiveness,” he should take a trip down to Parker Dozhier’s fish camp again and see if he left any Weekly Standard staffers down there in ’99.

There was much muttering yesterday about just why Hillary Clinton had her own email server. She said it was for “convenience,” muttered Chuck Todd, then proceeding to come up with his own explanation - she’s hiding something - with precisely zero evidence to back it up. Similarly, Andrea Mitchell said it was suspicious that Hillary didn’t know how to charge her iPad and kept having problems with bounce back emails, so the “convenience” argument was obviously false.

Pierce will have none of it. He thunders in response:

So fcking what? Even if the darkest suspicions harbored by these people is true, and HRC kept the private e-mail server for reasons beyond convenience—and I know people who will go all around Robin Hood’s barn on the internet rather than learn a shortcut; I happen to be one of those people—where does that leave us? What “classified material” there was mainly was classified ex post facto. What case are they trying to bring? That HRC is less transparent than they would like her to be? OK, let’s go back to Dick Cheney’s energy task force and start from there. Or all the e-correspondence that Colin Powell vaporized. That the key to Benghazi, Benghazi! BENGHAZI! is in there somewhere? That she, somehow, somewhere, at some time, mishandled sensitive material? Show me the money on that one, or show it to Valerie Plame. She should get a good laugh out of it.

To which I’d add the 22 million official government emails that the Bush Jr. administration ran through RNC email servers and then deleted without even a cursory review, allegedly at the direction of Karl Rove. No media hullabaloo, no investigation, nothing.

How to judge the next time your favorite media outlet discusses the Clinton email non-story? Here you go.

Here is another tip: if somebody in your newspaper, or on the Intertoobz, or on the electric teevee machine tells you that something like today’s e-mail dump “raises more questions than it answers,” it means that person’s got nothing and you’re being played.

Yuppity yup yup. That’s a good indicator there.