So, in the first part of this investigation we discussed the way the Clinton’s have been harassed for years with little proof and no conclusion to any of the accusations while Trump who is deeply involved in criminal and anti-social activities all over the map seems able to avoid media scrutiny that matches his crimes. The fact that intelligent voters already view him with such distain, has so lowered the bar that our minimal expectations give him a huge advantage.
Then this morning I listened to Joe Scarborough who, in his Republican stooge mode, proved my point when he and his sycophants went off on a fifteen minute rant about Hillary’s emails; how the FBI didn’t do it’s job, how they released the info that they were not prosecuting on a Friday, as if that were a violation of national security.
How unimportant can these things be? And yet, a major media outlet that is supposed to have some sense of balance is back at it again. Scarborough, by the way, is a guy who gave Trump millons in free airtime that allowed him to murder his opponents in the primary. Now he attacks Trump but nowhere nearly as much as he does Clinton.
So the FBI did investigate Hillary’s emails. For what? What was the crime that they were investigating? This has never been established. Usually when the FBI investigates, there is an obvious crime involved not just a snipe hunt. No crime was ever named. Was she sloppy and did she ignore departmental orders? Sure. Are those crimes? Don’t make me laugh. You make that a crime and every member of congress will be in jail. Her crime here is simple. She’s a Democrat running for President against a clown that under normal circumstances would get buried by his own party.
Trump has more criminal and moral charges against him than Hillary will if she lives to be 200 but in which the media seems, at best, uninterested. The GOP whines continually about the liberal media but unless that liberal media is as incompetent as the House of Representatives it just doesn’t exist. All the noise is about Hillary’s emails and the Clinton Foundation. Why don’t we hear about the donation that Trump’s charitable foundation gave to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, which seems to have effectively stopped her investigation into Trump University after a number of Florida residents complained about being scammed by the same con that has scammed thousands across the country?
Paul Waldman published a story in Saturday’s Washington Post in which he listed a dozen criminal activities that Trump has been involved in, which if perpetrated by either Clinton would have made headlines for months but which, although mentioned in the press briefly, are now being virtually ignored by press and public.
The fair way to judge the kinds of activities we are discussing here has always been to look at the benefits that accrue to those involved.
What were the benefits to Hillary for using her emails the way she did, instead of the way the State Department wanted her to? Well, for one thing she avoided having to change her whole arrangement in mid-stream because, don’t forget, the system she used was okay and had been used by her predecessors until State decided to change it halfway through her tenure. So she got a little bit of convenience and maybe a little bit more privacy and what else? I don’t know. Can you think of anything?
So for the moment it looks like the benefits to Hillary from using her own email server are convenience and privacy.
So let’s take a look at any one of the dozen possible crimes that Trump has committed as listed in Waldman’s Washington Post article. Let’s take gifts to public officials for which, in his words, they then owed him a favor. This in common language is called a bribe. It is totally illegal. Whether or not he does it is not in contention. Trump has brazenly admitted that he does it.
So Hillary’s gain for her act was some convenience and some privacy and Trump’s for his admitted crime was the acquisition of favors that led to huge sums of money.
Okay, which do you think is more important? To whom do you think the label “Crooked” should be affixed?
The facts are in evidence for this discussion to continue on exactly the same lines for another hundred pages or so but I’m sure I’d bore you to tears, or maybe not. Don’t forget, repetition is exactly how Trump plays out his message. You call Clinton, “Crooked Hillary” enough times in a row and the small minds of your followers will start to think along those lines, whether the attribution is true or not. It’s the big lie theory established by a guy named Adolph, someone who Trump loves to emulate.
But there is still one of the three attack points on Hillary that we mentioned in the first part of this blog that has not been dealt with. The Clinton Initiative, one of the most successful charities in the world and one that has done as much good as could possibly be wished for.
Yeah, it does seem a strange place for the Republican’s to be attacking, but not when you consider that many of the problems which the Initiative tries to solve have been created by Republican policies and programs. What am I talking about? I’m talking about GOP programs that acerbate environmental problems or health programs to put money in the pockets of the military industrial complex, the scammers of big Pharma or the fossil fuel billionaires that are poisoning our planet. It is repairing the decimation done by these GOP programs that is taking up much of the money donated to the Clinton Initiative but that has made it a target of the greedy, self-serving, powerful, moneyed interests that want, regardless of the good it is doing, to see it closed.
But let’s look at the Clinton Initiative in its simplest light. It s a big charity and it takes money from wherever it can get it, regardless of the politics or the legality of those that give it. So how do the Clinton’s benefit from this? They don’t take one cent in compensation from the Initiative. They actually donate money to it. Of course there are cultural benefits in the form of prestige and that sort of thing but in legal terms there is absolutely no benefit that can be ascribed to them from the Initiative that can be considered in any way illegal. Even the cultural benefits are, for the most part, something they already enjoy simply because they are who they are.
Now let’s look at Trump and his charitable gifts. Let’s take the one to his cheaply purchased, Florida DA, Pam Bondi, after she announced that her office was looking into legal complaints of fraud against Trump University. Shortly thereafter Trump’s charitable foundation gave a $25,000 donation to Bondi’s campaign fund, which is illegal, even in Florida. Charities cannot legally give money to political causes. The point of the charitable deduction is that the giving of the money doesn’t do you any good. This donation obviously did Trump a hell of a lot of good because after receiving it Bondi dropped the investigation. When the IRS found this out, the shit hit the fan and IRS fined Trump $2,500, which he paid, thereby admitting guilt. So once again Trump is acting in a way that brings financial, illegal, reward to him or his companies while Hillary is not. So maybe it should be “Crooked Trump,” and not ”Crooked Hillary.”
Then on Wednesday night Trump and Hillary came together – almost, on an ill-conceived little program, mistakenly called The Commander in Chief Forum, led by a would-be newsman named Matt Lauer who heads up a morning “news” program that led to the birth of CNN and MSNBC as serious news programs. Lauer proved his lack of worth by asking half-assed questions and allowing both candidates to run right over him as soon as they realized how weak and ineffectual he was. This was supposed to be about foreign policy but the inept Lauer wasted 10 minutes, one-third of Clinton’s time, on her emails, obviously because it plays a big part in his gossip and entertainment world.
Obviously, not much got done on this mess of what had been advertised as a debate on important foreign policy issues. Almost none of the issues were addressed, thanks to the incompetent Lauer. But when he finally did get to something of importance, the future of Iraq and what to do about ISIS, the two candidate’s answers were significant. Clinton answered straight forward with, “we will not put ground troops in Iraq. We will solve that country and Syria without ground troops. We will do it with air power and special forces, assisting local forces.”
Trump, on the other hand, has no plan or seemingly any knowledge of what to do. All he’s interested in is that we keep the oil. His only problem with how Iraq was handled the first time is that we didn’t get the oil. That’s what he sees as wrong with that inestimable catastrophe. He sees no problem with the thousands that died or the fact that the nation is no longer a functioning entity. His only problem with Iraq is that we didn’t steal their oil.
His idea of taking the oil includes leaving troops in Iraq to hold oil wells that will pump for us. It’s beyond stupid. In his ignorance, Trump has created a master plane for an Arab world where everyone hates everyone else, to unify – against us. Trump is an intellectually lazy, crooked, egomaniacal sociopath, with no idea and seemingly little interest in finding out how to do the biggest job in the world; one to which, he is dangerously close.