When we think of politics as murky, devious, slippery, self-enriching and utterly void of shame, we naturally think of the Clintons Inc. The standing they enjoy and the esteem in which they are held, not only in their own country but all over the world, East and West, should leave us shivering in outrageous astonishment.

WASHINGTON — Responding to accusations about her personal email accounts, Democratic primary front-runner Hillary Clinton held a rare press conference Tuesday during which she said she did nothing wrong when she used her personal email account while secretary of state.

She said she opted to use her personal email address, not the State Department address, out of convenience.

“I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails, instead of two,” she said.

The former U.S. first lady quickly added in light of the recent controversy it would have been “smarter” to keep her personal and government-related emails separate and use a state.gov account.

Twenty years after Bill (Chaser of Skirts is the Homeric epithet) and his wandering eye prowled the White House and settled on a young and dazzled intern, a now 40-year-old Monica Lewinsky has returned to the public arena trying to rehabilitate her reputation. Lewinsky became the punch line of a million jokes, while Bill, who was after all was a president, went on to rapturous fawning from the international set and Croesus-level panhandling on the good-causes circuit. Philanthropy and the Philanderer — could be a novel. Lewinsky was dust in the rear view mirror.

Zip right to the present day and the other half of the Corporation, the inexorable Hillary. As all the world knows, Hillary is now officially back on her predetermined march, an automaton of pure drive and purpose.

Her current scandal — you’d need a spreadsheet to keep track of them all — centres on the entwinement of the monstrously endowed Clinton Foundation, Bill’s cosmically inflated public appearance fees (as high as $750,000 per pep talk) and a possible case of influence peddling by her while Secretary of State. The New York Times of Thursday has a good digest of the story. If true, it’s murky and devious and slippery and self-enriching and utterly void of shame. If true, it may collapse her assault on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Till then, number the silverware, and for God’s sake back up the computers.

But it is not his past or her extremely current present that concerns me. The other scandal enveloping Hillary is probably familiar to all Canadians, and certainly to all Ontarians. For it involves her emails while serving as Obama’s factotum abroad. Hillary, during her tenure as Dowager Empress at State, decided, all on her imperious own, that normal practice for record-keeping, as required by law and precedent, did not apply to her. (How could it? She’s Hillary.) For her entire tenure — so she tells the world — she stayed off the State Departments own encrypted and secure system, and instead set up her own computer, on her own server, in her own house.

On that private and secret system she conducted both personal and State Department business. Then about two years after stepping down, under force of exterior revelation, she held a press conference to announce she had her staff review them all, extract what she said were official emails, and sent those self-selected emails back to State. The rest, 30,000 according to her, were personal, and they — along with the server! — were then destroyed. There is now a memory hole in the history of U.S. foreign affairs. The record of the second-most powerful office in the world, where it is not a perfect void, is questionable, selective and, inarguably, imperfect.

At the distance we are from U.S. politics it puts some pressure on the mind to understand this choice of hers. The very daring of it appalls. The head of the State Department took herself off the security systems of the State Department, and conducted the most delicate foreign affairs of the world’s greatest power from the same machine she used to order Chelsea’s bridal veil and map out the less rigorous routines of her daily yoga fits.

Where is the tumult? Where the outrage? Allow me an overused rhetorical flash here: What would the response in the western press be if Dick Cheney the Grim had used a private computer, on a dedicated personal server, and then deleted what he saw fit to delete, and then asserted he did so purely, as did Hillary, “for convenience”? There would be trials, plural, and impeachment proceedings, plural, and probably torchlight processions of protest by horrified Democrats all over the country.

These emails are not text messages from a high school dance organizer. The Secretary of State is not a teenager. The record of diplomacy, the electronic conversations with staff, with foreign leaders, with her President, are not for her to dispose. She has blotted out part of her own country’s diplomatic history. This one practice alone should bar her from seeking the presidency. It was the most monumental piece of official arrogance since that ancient Chinese Emperor declared the beginning of his reign was Year One.

We, in Canada, have nothing to compare with this. The Duff stuff is puff stuff by contrast. However, we do have, let us say, a petty analogy. Ever since the awkward, self-serving, political and costly cancellation of the gas plants by the Dalton McGuinty team during the election campaign of 2011, one thing, more than any other, has really stood out. That was hiring, and subsequent payment of $10,000, to an outsider — a boyfriend of an assistant — to go into the Office of the Premier and eradicate forever the emails covering that inestimable gambit. Now this is not Hillary scale. It involved no foreign governments, no contracts on uranium, no donations to a foundation.