The Matchup-Part 1

The race enters the fall with Donald Trump having one of the worst months imaginable for a candidate. He insults the logic and the intelligence of his listeners by his contradictory statements, spits in the face of every concept of the way American’s think, he demagogues all democratic processes and insults anyone who doesn’t share his bigoted, misogynistic positions. He embraces racists, fascists, white supremacists, gun nuts and every imaginable sort of crackpot that is the antithesis of what we think of as “American”… but…still…inexplicably… he remains in striking distance of Hillary Clinton.

How can this be? Accepting that Trump has a hard core of illogical, fanatic, hate mongers that will never abandon him, no matter how un-presidential he acts, what about the rest? How can it be that at least 65% of the country doesn’t recognize that Hillary Clinton is really not just he best, but the only choice for President in this election?

Accepting that all the old junk like Whitewater, Vince Foster and the rest should have already fallen into disrepute with anyone who can read or even minimally think, let’s deal with what has come to the table in he last couple of years.

“I don’t trust her. She’s not believable.” That seems to be the biggest comment when you speak to anyone who is not down with Hillary. The favorable or unfavorable numbers in all kinds of polls seems to emanate from that statement or statements just like it. Her poll numbers, which show her to be decidedly unpopular with voters, are also based, if those voters are to be believed, on the same vision of untruthfulness.

These negative poll positions, all seemingly coming from her image of not being trustworthy, seem to come from three places. First there was Benghazi for which the right has tried to blame her for everything from arming the terrorists who attacked our mission to being the direct cause of the deaths of the four Americans who died there.

There have now been seven congressional investigations, all led by Republicans, costing taxpayers many millions of dollars and resulting in a Republican committee chairman admitting that the reason for the investigations was that the GOP was looking to put an impediment in the way of Hillary’s Presidential search. All rational, reasonable persons of interest have come to the conclusion that there is no fiber of evidence that any of the Right Wing claims had any truth. Hillary had nothing to do with any part of the Benghazi affair except to repeat to her daughter and to one of the mother’s of one of the dead contractors; information that was sent to State from CIA and other intelligence sources. This evidence turned out to be contradictory to what had been sent to her offices earlier from those very same sources. So the bereaved mothers, whom we all feel for, were victims not of anything Hillary did but of the same tainted intelligence that Hillary received from the CIA. So much for Benghazi!

Then came the emails. So let’s start from the point where Hillary installed her own email server. At that point she had done nothing different than the previous two Republican Secretaries of State, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powel. Her crime to this point was that she was a Democrat. Then the government issued a ruling that all offices must be on the government system, the one that was considered immune to hacking by all but the Russians, the Chinese, WikkiLeaks and any kid in junior high school with minimum computer skills.

So she was already set up and like many of us she was too busy to start the whole thing again and like many more of us, she ignored a government edict, which was issued, seemingly without rhyme or reason, by the bureaucracy. For this she has apologized, been investigated and cleared by the FBI and released many thousands of emails that went through that computer. For that ignoble crime the press and the GOP, have accused her of everything from high treason to eating trans fats. Classified information, scream the pundits and the rabble-rousers. Classified information, moan the reporters who know a hot story with serious legs when they see it. Okay, one asks; what is this classified information and how does it refer to national security?

“Oh,” say the government officials and the GOP, “we can’t reveal that. It’s classified.” So this classified information that because of Hillary’s server not being a government server, is now in the hands of our enemies, but it’s still classified, so we can’t talk about it. But if it’s already out in the informationsphere what are we hiding? If Hillary, through her private server has already revealed all our secrets how are they still secrets. Is it possible that despite the hacking of practically all our government servers by any and everyone on the Internet, that no one got into Hillary’s server? And even if they did, were they able to get anything off it that would be considered important? The basic question, the bottom line, has to be, has any harm been done? So far, the answer has to be – no – at least not that the government will tell us about and if they won’t, or can’t tell us that any harm has been done, there have, obviously, been no results of that harm. Ergo, no harm done! So what the hell is everyone been carrying on about?

Contrast that with the actions of Trump who has openly encouraged Russia to continue their cyber attacks on American sites in the hopes that something will emerge that will help him get more votes. Talk about treason!

Chuck Todd interviewed Bernie Sanders and brought up the famous Clinton email statement made in October of 2015. This led Sanders to point out to Todd and all his other media geniuses that Clinton’s emails have nothing to do with this election. What the American people, led by the media, have to be interested in are the programs of the candidates and how they pertain to the voters. Americans need to understand that Hillary’s emails have nothing to do with whether or not they will get a job. Americans need to understand that whether or not Hillary can tell the difference between a classified notation and a smiley face has nothing to do with whether or not your kid will be able to afford college. The American people must, for their own good, accept the fact that nothing about emails or the Clinton Initiative has anything to do with whether or not we will get our crumbling infrastructure rebuilt or whether they will get the healthcare they deserve.

The American media has already failed. It has decided that because Trump sells more soap, they have to promote the fight he wants to fight even if it is not the discussion that informs the people, with the facts they need to make an intelligent decision.

In a recent edition of Meet the Press, Alex Castellanos, the reptile that walks like a man, reiterated the oft repeated lie that Clinton hasn’t conducted a press conference in however many months. This fallacious claim is oft repeated to offset the fact Hillary has put forth position papers on almost every important issue that the American people should be aware of, while Trump has managed to change his position on immigration, the wall and everything else he has campaigned on, every time he has opened his mouth.

Trump has based his campaign on the concept that it is not 2016 but 1816 and that there is no communication available between cities other than pony express. He therefore believes that he can tell the people in Arizona that he is going to build the wall and kick out eleven million unwanted Latinos while he tells he people in Philadelphia that he only wants a virtual wall and that he will only evict the criminals. He expects that neither city will find out what he just said in the other and this is to some extent working, because the media just isn’t doing its job. It would rather talk about Hillary’s email because it smacks of a juicy scandal, than about the effect of a Trump presidency on eleven million people and their families.

So it’s up to you to do your homework. It’s a simple process. Read about or listen to the candidates. Decide what is most important to you and what will help you most in the future. Are Hillary’s emails more important to your future and the future of the country than her plans for how to solve unemployment, education, the environment and how we deal with the rest of the world’ or are Trumps unprecedented personal attacks and wild, unsupported promises going to get you what you want? It’s up to you, if you vote. If you don’t vote you’re useless anyhow so nobody cares what you want.