Veteran journalist John Harwood, according to his Twitter home page, covers "Washington and national politics for CNBC and the New York Times."

Saturday morning, despite all of his experience, Harwood tweeted a question (HT Twitchy) so naive that a freshman journalism student would have been embarrassed to ask it:

So now the standard of conduct for the person who wants to the be the next president of the United States is whether her illegal possession of classified (not in quotes, John) material generated during her service as the nation's top diplomat did any harm?

Harwood has justifiably received a great deal of tweeted heat.

A story out of Connecticut Friday evening demonstrates how blatantly obvious Harwood's double standard is for Mrs. Clinton (presented in full because of its brevity):

So a sailor appears to be on track to serve serious jail time for "unauthorized retention of defense information" and "obstruction of justice." Meanwhile, John Harwood appears to want to keep Hillary Clinton from being held accountable in any way, shape or form for retaining perhaps thousands of classified emails (the four identified as such thus far were from a tiny sample of 40; projecting that result onto 55,000 emails would yield over 5,000) and destroying evidence of her alleged misdeeds.

I guess the next goalpost move would be whether or not anyone died. Oh wait. We know from Benghazi that even that isn't enough to deter Mrs. Clinton's press cheerleaders.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.