Hillary Clinton has one of the highest disapproval ratings of anyone who could realistically become president (Trump’s is higher, of course, but I digress). And it seems like it’s conventional wisdom why - she’s a liar; she’s crooked; her entire public life has been marked by scandal and corruption. Hell, she had one of her close friends (which one? take you pick!) killed!
Well, I don’t buy it.
None of it. It’s all just a smear campaign that has dogged her since her husband was governor of Arkansas.
While she has certainly made mistakes, misstatements, and blunders, she doesn’t show a pattern of lying, and she’s not an incompetent fool. While she has been politically connected (and politics is dirty), she is not corrupt. While she is married to a serial adulterer, she is not responsible for Bill’s foibles.
I know there are names…Benghazi, Emails, Whitewater, Travel Gate…don’t forget travel gate! But for the life of me I can’t figure out where substance lies with any of them. They all depend on a conviction that Hillary acts in bad faith, and imputes motives and assumes facts without evidence.
And when I couple that clean slate with her stellar education, her knowledge of governance, her travels around the world, her reasonableness, and her likelihood of continuing the positive direction of the past 8 years, I find myself ready to vote for her. (Trump makes it a slam dunk).
So help me be a good and decent Doper by fighting my ignorance. Why am I wrong?
You’re not. No one has been vetted as much to be PotUS as Hillary. The republicans have been trying to get shit to stick to her for over 20 years. I’m not claiming that she’s as pure as driven snow. But there isn’t always fire where there’s smoke, either.
She might be a bitch. I’ve heard stories (emphasis on “stories”) that she has been horrible to the State Troopers who provided “secret service” protection when she was First Lady of Arkansas, and to actual secret service in the White House. If your husband was fucking around, I bet you’d be pissed at the security detail, too.
But then there are people like this guy on Facebook (he’s the only one!) who refers to her as Killary. For real??
She’s a politician. Politicians are sleazy and dishonest. Therefore she’s sleazy and dishonest.
I would say she’s totaled up more instances of lying and sleaziness then an ordinary politician. Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps you could argue that we hear more about her missteps than those of other politicians. Perhaps if a typical Representative or Governor were subjected to the same degree of scrutiny, an equal amount of sleaze would be uncovered. (Looks like another one may be biting the dust soon.)
But some facts about Hillary: for this campaign, she plans to raise a record-shattering 2.5 billion dollars. She holds fundraisers where attendees pay up to $353,400. Then there’s all that money she got from Goldman Sachs, one of the most criminal Wall Street enterprises. And the Clinton Foundation, which takes huge payloads of money from all kinds of disreputable people. So Hillary and Bill like getting money. They like getting money a lot. Seemingly they enjoy bringing in bigger amounts of money, from more sources including highly questionable sources, than anyone else in American politics, ever. And where there’s so much money flowing in, reasonable people are bound to question whether it would have an undue influence on Clinton’s presidency, if said presidency does occur.
a disgruntled GOP after Clinton broke their 1968-1988 electoral college lock and tossed it into the ocean
a press corp that was jealous of those who got jobs in the first Dem admin in what was then 12 years, Chris Matthews a good example back then (tho he has reformed his anti-Clintonism, to his credit)
baby boomers who didn’t feel they owed it to show respect to Clinton since unlike Bush/Reagan, he wasn’t a member of the “greatest generation.”
But as I noted in my OP, in order for any of this to rise to the level of a scandal you have to impute motives without evidence. You can make guesses that this all “means something”, but that’s all they are: guesses.
We didn’t have to guess at the scandals associated with other politicians. They committed confirmed acts.
I think Bill’s political opposition started in on her from the beginning of his career in Arkansas. In the best Rovian tradition, if a politician has a strength, hit him there. One of his strengths was that he had a highly educated, successful attorney for a wife. So they hammered her on not changing her last name, of not being feminine enough, and being an “outsider”.
It’s actually kind of said to see early campaign video of the Clintons, even in 1992. She had adopted a southern accent to try to fit into Arkansas life; as we plainly see now, it was not authentic.
I think that this woman has been accused of all sorts of horrible things for as long as she and her husband began to ascend the political ladder. Now, they chose that life for themselves, and I don’t spend time worrying about their psyches. But I imagine it would have had to have been tough.
Not only that, but she was a Senator from New York State . . . which includes Wall Street. WALL STREET, home of the devil incarnate, Capitalism! She actually represented Wall Street in the U.S. Senate! How can she be trusted?
Conservatives are going to hate her for whatever reason is convenient. Ask yourself why liberals/Democrats don’t like her. They don’t like her because she seems to need to look at polling data before she can answer any question or stake out any position.
I always found this complaint a little amusing. I mean technically, we elect representatives not rulers, but somebody who follows the polls is considered bad. Like somebody who changes their stance depending on what the people want is a moral coward. It’s funny what people decide to cling to as important for a good dep
One friend of mine once went through 3 accents in a year and a half. Northeastern US, Southern US and British. He tended to absorb the accents from where he was living, though it took him a couple of months for them to drift. So visits back to one of his hometowns were interesting.
I had another friend who opted for a trans-Atlantic accent when he worked in the UK. He thought it smoothed things over.
I don’t see any of these actions as inauthentic whatever the hell that means. It certainly isn’t unprofessional.
So, who is against campaign finance reform again, liberals or conservatives. Conservative Supreme Court justices create a system where the money explodes, and you blame Hillary for dealing with the system that exists? Trump would raise that much also except that he is starting late and a bunch of big donors are telling him to go fuck himself.
You think she invented expensive fundraisers? As for Goldman Sachs, you guys need to find the right bartenders. You think Romney was going to release what he said? Somehow I doubt she said you guys are the greatest ever, and preaching to the sinners, not the choir, is sometimes a good idea.
I don’t see that many disreputable people in that article, no matter how hard they try. Now if David Duke were donating that would be one thing. And there is no law against Bill granting access for charitable donations. Basketball players do it all the time. Since he neglected to start a giant corporation he’s got to beg for money to help people in Africa.
Yeah it would be great if we did away with all this stuff and had government funded campaigns. Get back to me when that makes it in the Republican platform.
I don’t know what she got hammered on during their days in Arkansas, but when I first began to notice her alienating people was when she made some remark about not staying at home, baking cookies and standing by her man (paraphrased). Plus she has an incredibly smug face, demeanor and way of speaking, and that put a lot of people off. Then the biggie: she tried to take over the nation’s health care under the auspices of being married to the president. People really resented that. Then there’s the feeling that she knew and didn’t care about her husband’s philandering, and then attempted to blame Bill’s alleged (and ultimately proven) contretemps over Monica Lewinsky on a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ to bring down her husband. And then there’s the constant chicanery and stonewalling that went on in the White House every time an investigation was attempted on the two of them, with evidence mysteriously disappearing only to be discovered later in their living quarters, etc., etc., etc. The impression has been that the two of them are crooked as hell, but being lawyers, devious enough to know what they can get away with without being arrested.
And then there are Hillary’s blatant lies, even about having lied:
What kind of bullshit is that? This is exactly the kind of equivocation and double-talk that have turned so many people against her. Notice first of all her attempt to shift the question of lying to one of leveling. Not the same thing. And then she “always tried” to tell the truth? More bullshit. Either you tell the truth or you don’t. What she’s really saying is the as long as it isn’t inexpedient in some way she’ll tell the truth.
Except she lied many, many times during her previous campaign about how she and Chelsea landed in Bosnia and had to run for their cars under a hail of sniper fire, only to be exposed for lying about it when the comedian Sinbad spoke out about having been there too and there was no sniper fire. Hillary then lied and tried to pass it off as a one-time thing, saying she was exhausted from campaigning and merely ‘misspoke’, apparently unaware that everything is recorded these days and many instances were found where she’d told the same story time and again to different audiences. Plus, I’ve been pretty damn tired on occasion in my life, but I don’t believe I ever imagined myself to have come under sniper fire or any other thing that never happened. So she lied about being shot at, and then lied about how many times she’d said it, then lied about why she said it in the first place, and then lied again when she told Scott Pelly she’s always been truthful in the past. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the Clintons lie like they breathe - easily and constantly.
And yes, Hillary’s a bitch behind the scenes and everyone knows it. That cat was let out of the bag way back in the 90s when Connie Chung conned Newt Gingrich’s mother into revealing what her son had told her about what Hillary was really like. Given the way liberals hate it when someone has power of any kind, I’m surprised to see them glossing over the way she uses her position to act like an asshole to people who have no choice but to take it. (And why you think her husband’s philandering makes it okay to be shitty to secret service agents or anyone else is anyone’s guess, but as for me, I was brought up to believe it’s wrong to behave badly to other people just because I’m in a bad mood or something’s troubling me, so I naturally think it’s wrong when somebody like her does it.)
She and her husband are both crooked as hell and pretty much everyone knows it. But just like Bill’s behavior toward women drew bupkis from feminists, they’re allowed to get away with it because they’re ‘on the right side’ politically.
For quite a while people have been complaining that we elect presidents based on whether we’d like to have a beer with then, not smarts or competence. Now we have a competent candidate who may not be super-likable, these same people are having a fit.
I don’t know if she is a bitch, but I hope she is. Obama would have done a bit better if he tried it. As LBJ, the master, said, get them by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.
She obviously chooses her words very carefully, and is a total political animal. But her fundamental positions on the vast majority of issues don’t really change that much.
I’ve talked to a lot of people who say they “can’t trust her,” but those people can never give me specific core issues that she might “betray.” What in particular do they think she’s going to do–steal the Whitehouse china?
I can think of various issues or tendencies on which I don’t agree with her–but she’s generally consistent with those things.
They don’t trust her because she appears not to trust herself. Instead she attempts to morph into whatever the polls or current political headwinds make it appear the voters want, which creates the impression that she feels if people knew the real her they’d find her wanting. So she fakes it instead in an attempt to fool people into believing she’s something she’s not.
The problem with always following the polls is that one can be perceived as insincere and lacking conviction. It tends to suggest that the person is an empty suit who just wants to be elected for the sake of power.
What people really need in a politician is not someone who always does exactly what they want on every issue, but someone who is smarter than they are and generally does the right thing instead of the popular thing.
Hillary is both of those things – a power-seeking professional politician who sounds like one with her carefully scripted statements, but she’s also a smart lady and will probably be a good leader.