This column has spoken a lot about Donald Trump so now it’s time to draw some comparisons between Trump who we have vigorously attacked, and Hillary Clinton who has been just as vigorously attacked by the Right.. There was a discussion on the tube this weekend about people who found her shrill, angry, pushy, etc. Of course from time to time she has been all of these things but so has every candidate who has had the stones to run. You want to see shrill and angry, just take a look at Carly Fiorina, who is furious that the voters can see her obvious lack of qualifications and have therefore ignored her. Then, of course, there is no thinner skin that the one worn by The Donald.
There is also the argument about Hillary being criticized because she is a woman. That’s probably true, because there is a certain aspect of misogyny that prevents a large number of men from accepting an intelligent, determined woman as an equal. But none of this is as important as the accusation that Hillary is not trustworthy. Maybe she isn’t, maybe she is, but the reality is, what politician is completely truthful? The art of politics is, being able to bend the truth to your advantage without actually being caught out in a lie. I know this is a very cynical position but if you see a politician who is 100% trustworthy, someone is lying about it. Even more true to my point of view is if you see a politician who is 100% trustworthy you will also be seeing someone who is more than a little ineffectual.
The fact of the matter is, there is no politician alive today that has had to put up with as many baseless attacks as Hillary Clinton. No one gives her points for this because after all, no one asked her to run for President. But if you are really looking for the candidate, who has the best credentials for the job, on either side, you really can’t look anywhere but at Hillary.
Hillary’s resume so far outdistances anyone else’s, that she makes them all look like little kids. She has been working for women, children, the poor and other humane and laudable causes since she came out of Arkansas and even before. She did it as the wife of the Arkansas governor, the First Lady of the nation, a Senator and the Secretary of State and she’ll do it as President. Why do I say that? Because leopards don’t change their spots! Trump has been a greedy, dishonest bigot, ever since he was a kid. Hillary has been a worker for progress all her life. They will each do the same as President.
Two of Hillary’s biggest problems have come from the noise being made about her emails and Benghazi. These accusations have caused her the most problems about trust. But let’s look at them.
I was in a discussion the other night, with an old friend, a man who is a staunch Catholic and a serious Hillary hater. I had been slowly eroding some of his positions about everything from Whitewater to her emails when he put his foot down and stated firmly that the one thing he couldn’t forgive her for was lying to the families of those killed at Benghazi.
“You’re a combat vet, aren’t you?” I asked. He assured me he was.
“So what’s it like when you’re taking fire and you can’t retreat?” I asked.
“It’s chaos.” He replied
So the point I made was that Clinton was thousands of miles from the combat site with people sending her frantic, confused, conflicting reports every ten seconds. Men who were under fire and trying to protect themselves even as they sent information to Washington. Hillary was trying to answer questions from families and government officials all of whom wanted to know the status quo. What would you do in a situation like that? Yes. The politically expedient thing to do was to tell everyone that there was no confirmable information but she understood that this wasn’t going to satisfy terrified families so she told them what she knew and what she knew changed by the minute, as new information came in.
Those four families have endured a stunning loss and as most of us who endure such losses, they want to strike out, they want to know who’s to blame, but we were in a war in Benghazi and in a war there isn’t always someone to blame. Sometimes, it’s just circumstances.
Hillary didn’t have any command responsibilities for the garrison; that was up to the CIA who maintained that post for intelligence purposes. In this case it was the CIA’s job, to protect the post, in others it is the military’s. So why has the GOP convened seven panels to investigate this matter, costing us millions of dollars and come up with spit. Because they understand that they can convince hordes of uninformed idiots of whatever they want if they just lie about it enough.
If they really wanted to know what happened in Benghazi they would have gotten the head of the CIA in front of all those committees and made him tell them why the CIA didn’t get it done. But they didn’t want to know the facts. All they wanted was an excuse to attack Hillary. Kevin McCarthy, chairman of the Committee said exactly that when he declared that the purpose of the committee was to smear Hillary. This mat have been the dumbest speech of the year. The GOP sent in the scrubs and Hillary beat their brains out on Natioinal TV.
It’s pretty much the same with the emails. Hillary did nothing different from her predecessors in that job. No one in any responsible position has accused her of making any information available to anyone who could use it to damage this country. What this is really about is a pissing match between State and the FBI. And the really important thing to note is, it doesn’t mean squat in terms of what she would do as President. The GOP needs this desperately phony accusation because she actually has policies on how to run the nation and none of the GOPO candidates has any idea how to find the john.
But if the problem with Hillary is that she lies, let’s look at some of Trump’s statements from his Hitlersque speeches, made before his adoring nincompoops.
Trump says that our GDP is at zero. Actually it grew 3.9% just in the last quarter. He says there has been zero job growth under Obama. Actually we have added six million jobs in just the last two years under Obama after losing 800,000 jobs a month under Bush.
Trump loves to suck up to veterans and the military but when he was in a position to serve, he ran and hid behind his old man’s money. Now he whines that the Military is gutted, but it is actually growing out of control. More money is being spent on our military than on any other area of our spending. Much of it is wasted because of the power of the military industrial complex which lobbies and bribes congress to keep manufacturing obsolete weaponry so they can keep taking billions of taxpayer money.
The problem with identifying a lack of veracity in Trump is that he lies so fast and so often that fact checkers just can’t keep up with him. His speeches contain more lies per page than they do periods. These lies have developed an electorate that is scared shitless of being invaded by Lichtenstein. This is what leads to Trump’s 40% of the GOP primary voters. Unfortunately Cruz isn’t far behind Trump.It must be noted that in important matters, one doesn’t find these same kinds of lies coming from Hillary.
So what’s more important, that Hillary didn’t use the right computer system and that she told the families of these killed at Benghazi something about their deaths before she had all the facts, or that we are going to build a wall that Mexico isn’t going to pay for, that we are going to kick eleven million people out of the country, that w are going to put Muslims in camps or that we are going to invade everyone we can find and that this is going to make America great? If you really don’t know the answers to those questions then you really aren’t equipped to vote anyway.
Yes, elections are often about how much bullshit you can generate but it would be a catastrophe if the Right was able to sell one of the mental cripples they have running for office to the American people, especially if it were based on the phony attacks they have so far managed to create.
AMEN!!!!