Hillary
Clinton is one of the most investigated people in the history of the United
States, the actionable evidence that has been found against her during all of
that investigation does not exist.
There
will always be another new bit of information to look at about Clinton’s time
in the State Department, there will always be a new thing to look at when she
was a Senator, because she is a big deal.
It has been 100 years and we are still finding things on McKinley, it
has been 200 years and we are still finding things about Burr. People who live a life in politics, sadly,
live a life that blends service, slander, and often times shady dealings.
All
of the things Hillary Clinton has been accused of doing, all of those things
that have been found to be questionable, all of those things directly relate
either to working in government positions that require subterfuge, or working
with technology that is constantly evolving.
Let us take a moment to look at her more generally,
maintaining a bird’s eye view of her career that is in question. Clinton (as I said previously) is one of the
most investigated people in history. So
logic must dictate that there is a reason for that. Many of the people who deride her (“Hillary
for Prison”) would point to this constant scrutiny as proof of her being
corrupt. Guilty by implication. They are on some level right. Just because there is not enough evidence to
prosecute doesn't mean she is “innocent” of all wrong doing.
BUT, there has to be a point at
which you say, "okay, that is enough investigation. I am satisfied that
nothing happened." I don't know what that threshold is for you, or the
typical voter, or a Trump supporter, or some guy living in France. I do not know what that threshold is for most people,
but the level of scrutiny Hillary (and her husband Bill) have been under for LITERAL
DECADES and the lack of actionable intelligence that has emerged conclusively
shows me that there is nothing there.
How many times does a congressional
hearing (out for blood) have to be paneled?
How many times does the Justice Department or FBI have to not
bother? How many hours of reading thru
email after email has to happen before people just say, “Okay, that’s
enough?” I am sure there are people out
there that will never accept the lack of evidence as anything other than a
cover up. I am sure that there are many,
MANY people who don’t even understand that you can’t actually prove innocence,
you can only assume it until evidence of wrong doing is presented (That is why “Innocent
until proven guilty” exists as a concept).
But for ME, there is nothing there, and the continued furious search for
something-anything looks more and more like crazy people hunting to justify
their irrational biases against her.
Even the stuff they have found that
looks suspicious is so thin that I can't hold it up as an example of why Clinton
should not be looked at as a fine candidate for public service. I can’t point to anything of substance that
would bar her from elected office. Nothing I have seen looks any worse than the
generally complex stuff you see as part of being advised by intelligence
organizations and advising on both political and military operations.
There is always going to be some
holes in the data, there always be some slip ups in handling that data, there
will always be something that does not hold up to casual observation, because
regular people who work at banks or grocery stores or whatever, regular people
have some idea of what it is like to keep something secure, but they do not
understand the level of security and information Clinton has been operating on
for DECADES. Let’s look at a few things
I often see pointed out and break them down.
EMAIL
Having a private email server is
not treason.
Furthermore, when one considers how
many prominent political officials I have seen listed as having a server, a
cache, or whatever, I don't even view having the server as irresponsible. (I know Hillary Clinton has said it was
irresponsible in the media, and has apologized and taken the mistake to heart,
so maybe I don't know enough about tech security. OR, the general public doesn't know enough
about tech security and Clinton would rather just admit to mistakes and promise
to learn from those mistakes rather than explain to people why it isn’t a
problem and be accused of “rationalizing her behavior” … as if being able to
explain one’s actions rationally makes you a bad person. Whatever).
Technology moves faster than the
agencies that need to use it, and that technology is not always approved of
because the policies governing such things are not being written and reformed
fast enough.
If her emails were improperly
secured, and I am not sure that is true considering the slap dash way things
are managed in general. I have no doubt
that such insecurities are still par for the course when compared to the rest
of the US government. I would go further
to say that if there were security breaches the fault does not lay at her feet
specifically, but is instead a natural (unwanted) side effect of the volume of
digital material that is so routinely handled by so many people thru so many
points of access.
Hillary Clinton is not a cyber
security expert and (call me ageist or sexist if you like) I highly doubt this
60+ year old woman is hunkered down jiggling circuit boards to make sure all
the pins connect and then then playing bejeweled on her phone while line after
line of self-written code compiles. She
is not the tech professional that should be looked at as having done a bad
job. If the Secretary of State or her
staff says she needs some kind of computer hardware, then Lenny the tech
support guy has to be there to provide it.
BENGHAZI
WAS NOT HER FAULT. I am sorry that a terrorist attack killed
personnel in an embassy. I am sorry that
how the attack was handled was insufficient.
I am sorry that serving as an ambassador around the world (and
particularly in the Middle East) is dangerous work. BUT, Hillary Clinton was not in charge of
security, she is not a Marine Colonel, she is not even enough of a micromanager
to have known who was in those facilities at that time.
There are hundreds of diplomats and
support staff all over the world. While
the Secretary of State is ultimately in charge of those people and in turn
reports to the President, that does not mean that every attack upon that agency
is the fault of the Secretary of State.
Not every attack on a US facility is the fault of the person in charge
of that facility. People were victimized
and the confusion around that victimization meant that the whole thing is not
only tragic, but looks like some kind of mistake. I am sorry, but to claim this was the sort of
mismanagement that came from the White House or the Secretary is just too high
up the chain and is scapegoating for the failures that happened at numerous
levels. Again, this was a HUGE
investigation, and it was the FAULT OF TERRORISTS.
In retort you may say, “there
should not have been ambassadors in a country that was so unstable.” I disagree, establishing diplomatic ties with
the fledgling government was a priority at the time, and establishing connections
within the Middle East and Northern Africa remains a priority. The United States needs to have both a
military and diplomatic presence in the Mediterranean and surrounding
areas. It is dangerous, yes. It is also necessary to prevent terrorist
attacks and the formation of rouge nations down the line.
 |
| I actually think Bill was a lukewarm President. With the fall of the Soviet Union he was kind of playing the game on easy mode. So I am probably giving him both too little and too much credit. Time will tell. |
BILL CLINTON
Bill Clinton's sexual escapades
mark him as a shitty guy. Even if you
are in an open relationship and everything you do with your extramarital liaisons
is consensual, there is a time and a place.
That being said, NOT A LOT HERE EITHER.
If activity related to Bill’s infidelity can
be proven to be anything other than consensual (and I do tend to lean toward
believing the accuser) I am all for raking Bill over the coals. But, nothing
has shaken loose.
Hillary Clinton has been accused of
being a monster for attacking the women who have accused her husband of sexual
harassment and sexual abuse. So let me
say this, if someone accused my spouse of rape without evidence I would be
pretty defensive too, so maybe instead of calling her an apologist or covering
up for his behavior, you instead think to yourself how you would react in her
place to someone (from her point of view) slandering her husband and
endangering both his and her legacy. I
actually have not heard her give any opinion on these affairs except to
acknowledge (reluctantly) that Bill cheated and to then forgive him (and
really, I am sure they have an open marriage, and I don’t care).
Regardless of all of that here is
the most important thing to remember: HILLARY IS NOT BILL, and she should be
judged as herself and not for crimes she was never even arrested for. She is not her husband’s jailor. Nor is she his avatar. The fact that she is being judged for him is
indicative of some uncomfortable standards that Hillary herself often alludes to,
that it was Bill that cheated and she who is getting picked on.
Here is the
last thing that I see people mentioning as a scandal, that Hillary and the
Democratic Party conspired to keep Senator Bernie Sanders from winning the
Democratic nomination. Yeah, they did. I have no trouble believing that, and I have
no ill will towards them for it.
Why? Cause I totally get it.
While I
will fully admit to being a Bernie supporter (I find his policies to be more
ambitious and sweeping) the fact of the matter is: HE IS NOT A DEMOCRAT. He aligns with them on a majority of things
and I can see why his running for their nomination made a lot more sense than
trying to run for the Republican nomination, but he is not a Democrat.
Bernie
Sanders did far better than he expected, you can tell because if he had known
he was going to give such a good fight he would have made a better opening
announcement and done a better ground game 2-4 years ahead of time rather than
just being a Bernie come lately that kept Clinton on message and forced her to
take more aggressive positions.
But let’s
all put this in perspective, the Democratic party has had a series of long term
plans that were supposed to culminate with Hillary being President back in 2008,
she was the gifted tried and true policy wonk they had wanted for ages and it
was only because of the inexplicable success of Obama that she wasn’t President. So they pushed back the plan, and low and
behold someone else comes along, well, they took it more seriously this time.
Hillary had
the party on her side because she did a good job for them, and they were (by
and large) tried and true voters rather than the, “Well, I was excited at first
but voting for congress was a hassle” voters from years before. You don’t win long term strategies banking on
a sudden influx of voters who are so obviously flash in the pan.
Followers of a particular candidate
who happens to have the right message at the right time tend to not be constant
voters, and then tend not to have the stamina for long term hope and change (look
at the 2010 congressional blowout against the Democrats, WHERE THE HELL WERE
THE OBAMA VOTERS?).
To make real change on an institutional
and societal level, you want the tried and true. It is not dramatic, it is not sweeping, it
ain’t exciting, but you know what they are going to do, you know who will vote
for them, and you know what they have and haven’t done to earn the position.
THAT’S RIGHT. For me, Hillary is the boring one because she
wasn’t immediately LIBERAL enough.
The
Democratic party is an institution, and while they are a democratic one, they
have super delegates specifically because they have a central message they want
to stick to over the course of decades. Sanders did not align with that central
message entirely and Clinton did (she helped write it). So rather than cool grandpa, they went with
un-cool grandma. Is it
undemocratic? Yeah. But maybe if Bernie had been part of the
system instead of just railing at it the DNC would been more supportive of his
candidacy. And considering how many
Bernie supporters went against Bernie’s own request and joined up with Trump it
is pretty clear that issues and long term goals were not really their bread and
butter, those guys were not reliable, and wouldn’t have been useful down the
line. Screw those guys. I don’t know what caused those guys to jump
to Trump as the only thing he and Bernie have in common is that they are
running against Hillary. But they did, so
screw’em.
I am fully
acknowledging that the Democratic party did not want their carefully cultivated
plan with their carefully cultivated candidate to be knocked out (again) by an
X factor, who pushed policy that (while I and many others think it would have
been effective) would have been stonewalled (again) by congress.
It was and is unrealistic to have a
candidate that has billed themselves as an outsider. I see this all in retrospect and look at
Bernie as a valuable part in the process and a guiding star for the future of
liberalism. But for Bernie to show up
with his newly registered fair weather friends and oust all of the hard work
that the establish members have put together, that does seem unreasonable. AGAIN, I say this as someone who was a Bernie
voter and continue to look up to him for his long time principled stances.
I do not hold it against the
Clinton campaign or the Democratic party for working against Bernie. It was pretty underhanded, but I get it. And considering Bernie clearly never expected
to get as far as he did and now really wants Clinton to win while he chairs a
powerful committee in the Senate, it would be pretty stupid to see this as a
scandal worth holding a grudge over as all that will accomplish is losing the
white house to American Mussolini and a good chunk of the legislature to a
Republican party that is looking more and more like an out and proud Klan rally.
I'm sorry, I do not see the deliberate
evil in Hillary Clinton’s actions that others have been pointing to. I don’t smell the sulfur. What I see is a candidate that has worked
within and thru the system now having her record looked at as a loadstone
rather than an asset. When did having
such a deep and robust resume become a detriment? I do not get it.
______________________________
If you like or hate this
please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr,
or Facebook, and
otherwise distribute my opinion to the world. I would appreciate it.
Posts
