Still waiting to hear which felonies Hillary has been convicted of (or charged with)…
OP - I think several people here have listed the main “scandals” and some high level information on them. Could you come back with specific questions on any that give you concern?
Like many, my overall view is that she has been in under a public microscope for decades as the Republicans have tried to find anything at all to take her down. It will take actual charges from the Justice Department or something similar for me to believe anything criminal is going on.
Many people seem to actively dislike or even hate her. I think she’s fine. My husband is convinced she’s a horrid person, but will vote for her anyway. If I press for details, he’ll mutter about “Wall Street”. I’ll point to her platform and he doesn’t believe it. Even before the Convention, I took him through a point by point comparison showing him that Bernie and Hillary were not that far apart on most issues. He was still convinced that she was a Conservative in Liberal clothing.
I think personality is part of it. The whole, would you have a beer with her? I would. I gather many people would rather drink with Trump. shudder I guess he seems more authentic and she seems more self-controlled, and less personable; after decades of public attacks I might be very restrained too. It’s rather frightening to think that our election might come down to likability rather than qualifications, but it’s happened before.
Wikileaks, by the way, has their own agenda, and it doesn’t support Hillary. They are clearly cherry-picky and trying to discredit her in their little information release drops.
If you went to the bar with Sanders, he would talk to the crowd and convince everyone to pool their money together to buy drinks. But then all you’d be allowed to buy would be a wheat-grass energy drink.
If you went to the bar with Clinton, you could get a martini, and then she’d see a high-roller from her past at the end of the bar, and convince him to buy your drink.
If you went to the bar with Trump, you’d get a beer, and then at the end of the night, your wallet would be missing, the white dudes at the end of the bar would be drunk, and Trump would be nowhere in sight.
I think using campaign donations to fund the building of a media empire for your post-election loss is far worse than anything Hillary Clinton has ever been rationally accused of.
So, basically its the Benghazi thing and the emails thing? I’d wondered if there was something I hadn’t heard about but no, it seems to be all about those.
The problem now is that those reasons don’t explain a damn thing. Hilary seems to get Pol Pot levels of hate and vitriol so I would have expected to hear that back in the day she did something so awful that Americans could never forgive nor forget, and yet there doesn’t seem to be anything at all. Where did all this start? Why did so many Americans decide to start looking for reasons to hate Hillary Clinton?
I really don’t get it. If it was Kerry or Romney or some other politician the emails and Benghazi thing would barely be news and then nobody would give a shit. Seems like you can make a list of negatives about Trump a mile long with cites and witness statements yet nobody cares about that, yet these weak sauce complaints about Clinton seem to have made her the anti-christ to a lot of American people.
Looking on from here it seems absolutely crazy. Its like on one side of the street there is a guy jaywalking while on the other side there is a guy looting and burning, but the lynch mob is trying to chase the jaywalker.
“It’s because, in the liberal mindset, it doesn’t matter that the right has accused her of felonies for 20 years, and then got pissed off when our accusations were shown to be utter crap. After all, we insult her all the time but nobody listens to us.”
There are two email issues that the opposition tries to link.
The first is the use of a private email account - regardless of whether it was a private server or a commercial server; whether it was in the someone’s office or someone’s basement. It was not illegal. It was not against State Department rules at the time. Apparently she should have asked permission but the idea that the top person in the department would be denied an admin process is unlikely but she didn’t get permission.
Classified material on an unclassified system is a second and separate issue. Classified information should only be on accredited systems. Having that information on an unclassified server is the same problem whether it was at Google, AOL, someone’s basement or the unclassified network in the state department.
Government agencies have records retention policies; she (or her staff) did not comply with those. To the extent she sent from her personal account to a state department account, those should have been available in a government system but harder to find.
The classified messages are complicated by the fact that different agencies have different rules and different classification for information. One agency might only consider the content while another might consider the capability to gather information that is revealed.
There are rules that classified material should be marked in a specific way and there were no classified emails found on her server with proper markings. There were some with partial markings and some with no markings that should have had them.
Those are subtle distinctions from the perspective of criminal prosecution but valid for evaluating judgement and knowledge. They would keep me from voting for her if there were a viable alternative.
With Behghazi, there is a view that the head of an organization is responsible for anything that happens in the organization. From that perspective she is responsible for Benghazi.
What I don’t know is how many requests for additional security were sent. 400 is quoted but some sources say that includes duplicate requests - asking again this month - as well as requests that were actually filled. Plus 400 is a meaningless number without a reference point. How many requests for assistance are routinely sent from similar facilities around the world? How many are filled? Maybe more than average were filled for Libya and maybe not. Who appropriated and authorized the department of state’s budget? Did the opposition party reduce the security budget?
There is not enough information for me to feel outrage.
Speaking personally, 25 years of attacks on her has worn thin. And when I looked into a few of those things, they were much ado about nothing. No crimes, maybe some mistakes, but nothing more serious than a long-time politician occasionally makes. Nobody bats 1.000.
Its classic “Boy who cried Wolf” syndrome. The GOP makes every single thing about her the WORST POSSIBLE THING and when nothing pans out, I’m supposed to keep caring about what her political enemies think? Even if she wasn’t running against a human cheeto like Trump, I would still enthusiastically support her over any of the other 16 GOP candidates. Any of them, even the supposedly normal ones like Kasich
Yeah actually there is statistical evidence that she did give favourable weapons deals to countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation vs those that didn’t when she was Sec of State. But you know what, I don’t care, that level of corruption is still preferable to what Trump would do if he was in charge of such weapons deals and personal enrichment.
Even the left jumped in on spreading some of the smoke. The Sanders campaign jumped in on the Goldman Sachs speaking fee and Clinton Foundation influence peddling allegations. It’s almost like a martial arts movie where the hero stands in the middle of the circle getting attacked from all directions. (Just try to get the mental image of Bernie Sanders jumping into the fight behind a flying side kick out of your mind :D)
It’s still mostly smoke obscuring maybe a couple of small embers. If my party had given me a candidate even the minimally acceptable I might care, a little, about those embers. They didn’t. I don’t.
Yawn, I’ve quoted it before. States that donated to the Clinton Foundation got statistically significant levels of weapons deals greater than those that didn’t. As said I don’t care, as corrupt as she is, she’s still better than Trump. Do your own research.
Benghazi was kinda the CIA’s fault anyway, not the State Department. We’ll probably never know the true extent, but there were times when offers of additional security were declined. The true scandal and cover-up isn’t what Republicans want it to be.
You’re making a claim. And it’s nonsense. It seems like it’s your homework to do.
You’d need to know what the State Dept would have done without any donations. If it doesn’t reverse policy, and if the decision wasn’t Hillary’s alone, it’s meaningless.
Um, yes? And Sanders tried to prevent Clinton from winning, and Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Jeb, and Kasich all tried to prevent each other from winning. That’s what a primary is. As it happened, Clinton and Trump both succeeded, and the others all failed, but that isn’t really a judgement against any of them.
I think we’ve moved into the “that doesn’t count” part. She showed an appalling lack of judgment - but it doesn’t count because she hasn’t been convicted of a felony.
I don’t grant that it’s an appalling lack of judgement. I’d say in retrospect, it’s a mistake, but honestly, if that’s the worst thing Hillary has done, she’s a better person than anyone on this board.
coremelt, I responded to this in another thread. Any major weapons sale does work it’s way through the Department of State, but if it’s $14M in Major Defense Equipment or $50M in total, then that is officially REPORTED TO CONGRESS and put on record by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, where anybody (including you) can read it.
So unless you can show where some country got a deal via State on a major purchase without Congressional overview, I think I’ll have to be skeptical about your opinion.
And I’ve got thirty years experience in the field of Foreign Military Sales, so I might know a wee bit of what is going on.