The frenzy and furor over Hillary Clinton's email habits while at the State Department, now into their 16th month and still going strong, have predictably and effectively chipped away at her reputation, so a sizable majority of Americans (67 percent in a poll last month) find her "untrustworthy."

That's what a year of FBI investigation—leading to no recommended charges—a budding congressional investigation and a relentless right-wing watchdog's lawsuit buy you in American politics.

But take a moment away from pawing through the tens of thousands of her personal and professional emails now on public view and consider the long list of elected and appointed Republicans who have done exactly the same thing as Clinton—and worse.

Between 2003 and 2005, the George W. Bush White House "lost" around 5 million emails, including messages related to the firing of federal prosecutors who didn't adhere to Bush's conservative agenda. A federal judge ruled that the White House didn't have to look for them.

Those emails were among some 22 million messages that the Bush administration "lost" during its time in power, most from right around the period that it was crafting a scaffolding of lies to sell what turned out to be the greatest American foreign policy debacle in a generation: the Iraq War. The emails were eventually found in 2009, when Bush and Dick Cheney were safely back at their ranches, but long after thousands of young Americans were dead and maimed and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were dead, and as Islamists were mustering to eventually capture swathes of lawless, war-ravaged turf for their hideous "caliphate."

Colin Powell—Bush's secretary of state and the team player dispatched to the floor of the U.N. to deliver some of the lies about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction—also used a personal email account while at the State Department. He didn't even bother to set up his own home server but chose the eminently hackable public email giant AOL. And he was hacked, by an Eastern European criminal who used the nom de plume Guccifer.

Years later, at a 2009 dinner party in Washington, he recommended to Clinton that she use a private email account. In his upcoming book, Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton, Joe Conason describes the conversation, which took place at a dinner for Hillary Clinton soon after she was appointed secretary of state: "Toward the end of the evening, over dessert, [former Secretary of State Madeleine] Albright asked all of the former secretaries to offer one salient bit of counsel [to Clinton].... Powell suggested that she use her own email, as he had done, except for classified communications, which he had sent and received via a State Department computer on his desk. Saying that his use of personal email had been transformative for the department, Powell thus confirmed a decision she had made months earlier."