On Hillary

I don’t like defending Hillary Clinton. At best she was my third or fourth choice from among the original slew of candidates. However, that was about politics, not honesty.

I watch TV, browse the Internet, and read the news so it’s easy to believe that she has made a career of skating along the edges of ethical behavior. I have to admit that I have sometimes found her attitude grating. She projects a sense of entitlement that I find uncomfortable. However, I can't be proud that my attitudes formed in no small part due to constant exposure to the headlines, memes, and repetition. If you say a lie often enough, it really does come true.

So, pulling gathering together all of the resources at my disposal, I went on a Google expedition to uncover the “crimes” of Hillary Clinton.

My final determination: There was no there, there. I found accounts of her business dealings, Whitewater and cattle futures and such. However, each of these episodes came across more like bad episodes of ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ than high crime. That she would find herself mired in several get-rich-quick schemes may suggest a certain lack of character but it doesn’t even begin approach the depths of evil with which she is so often discussed.

But what about Benghazi? Benghazi proved that she isn’t Rambo. What should she have done? Has anyone questioned how many more Americans might have died had a guns-blazing, face-saving, futile gesture been authorized?

That the email story continues to thrive is also nonsense. She acknowledged having a private server. What more must she do? If it violated a policy – something that should have been easy for a competent Congress to determine—then wouldn’t there already be a specified sanction. Instead they (the Congress) spent millions on hearings and investigation all for the sake of political theater. I also believe that the security concerns are political nonsense. Anybody, including the Pentagon, can be targeted by hackers. It’s possible, although it would not excuse any violation, that Clinton’s security bettered the State Department’s system. Don’t forget that the State Department’s system did allow mail to go back and forth from a private server. Back to the point, Clinton was Secretary of State, everything was potentially sensitive and carried the possibility of future classification. That she had the server, that she used it for work-related mail is all established fact. Unless, she’s being accused of deliberate espionage, that’s really all there is. Combing through the 80,000 emails in hopes of finding something embarrassing has no value beyond political intimidation.

Still, I’m not saying there aren’t enough questions about Clinton’s judgements, actions, or attitudes that it would be unreasonable to think (hope) that a better alternative might be found down-ballot What I am saying is that she isn’t the anti-Christ, or even a less extreme variation of Trump.

I Just Don't Know

The Republican Party, which was bordering on deranged, has found a standard bearer who may actually be deranged. Alzheimer’s, Dementia a combination of the two? I don’t know whether to despise Trump or feel bad that syphilis, or something equally debilitating, may be eating away at his brain.

However, the party that continues to fund him can’t hide behind a mental illness excuse. (Or maybe they can if they really think that lead in their drinking water is OK, but I’m guessing that they don’t.) A few Republicans are tepidly jumping off the bandwagon, but in large part that’s only because they sense it might he heading over a cliff.

The party of “No”, the party that for 8 years has known how bad Obamacare was but couldn’t come up with a single idea to fix it, the party so fearful of the law that they won’t appoint a judge until they can be assured of how that judge would rule, so obsessed with personal responsibility that they would default on the obligations they incurred but can’t seem to find the will not to continue spending, worried more about who’s pissing in the next stall than preventing the next economic collapse, obsessed that BLM wasn’t ALM rather than giving a damn about why it is a thing in the first place…

Wow, what a self-indulgent rant; time to put a plug in it. Suffice it to say that the Republican Party has been careening towards this moment for decades. The crazy-man standard bearer is no accident.

Yeah but... What about Hillary? It’s not an equivalency; Hillary is far from my perfect candidate. I find her too hawkish. Her indebtedness to Wall Street is uncomfortable. Her ethics are always on the side of good, but sometimes by less than a hair. She is a little too elitist as it applies to herself. I also think she packed the DNC with cronies to ease her path to the nomination. I don’t like that. But I think the DNC remains healthier than the RNC. The movement within the party is taking a progressive slant. But, most importantly, no matter what you think of Hillary; she’s not crazy.