What is so bad about Hillary Clinton?

Fox

Sun, Sep 11 2016, 9:22 pm

Jeanette wrote:

Trump's 9/11 quote is only the tip of the iceberg. The fact that he profited of 9/11 funds? The fact that he claimed to personally see thousands of muslims cheering in NJ?

But we have already seen that there is no quote moronic or extreme enough for Trump's fans to waver in their support. I just hope the majority of the country is wise enough to see through his phoniness.

I am not a huge fan of Trump, though I will be voting for him. You are 100 percent correct that he often speaks first and thinks second.

However, his lies aren't the tip of the iceberg; they're the whole iceberg.

Clinton lied just a few days ago about her experiences taking the LSAT; she's lied repeatedly about her email server; she's attempted to throw both former Secretary of State Colin Powell and the late Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens under the bus by shifting blame to them.

I think I'd call it even in the prevarication department.

Jeanette wrote:

Yes it's a shame that Hillary is not a better campaigner. Being a thinker who prefers to prepare rather than speak off the cuff is a real liability in this election cycle.

I'm eagerly awaiting all this thinking that's allegedly going on. So far, I've heard repeated speeches telling me that things will be better if we all pull together. I've heard repeated statements that she'll work hard to make America a better place. But I haven't heard a single policy or legislative idea. And increasingly, she seems to be spending almost all her time criticizing Trump, his supporters, or fundraising.

Jeanette wrote:

As a freshman senator I'm not quite sure what else you would expect her to do. At least she showed the capacity for empathy, something that Trump is sorely lacking.

You can't have your cake and eat it, too.

Clinton ran for the Senate in part based on her "Washington experience" and the political capital she'd acquired as First Lady. She was supposedly a good choice for NYers because she knew how Washington worked and could employ her connections for their benefit.

But now she's just a little ol' freshman Senator who don't know nuthin' 'bout 'nuthin?

Displaying empathy is different from actually feeling empathy. I found Kruse's article chilling: in what is supposed to be a pro-Clinton piece, Trump is depicted as a loose cannon, but Clinton is portrayed as a cynical manipulator, choking back tears at the right time and raising her voice in song.

Empathy is fine, but not if it's misplaced. We learn this from Shaul HaMelech. And if that lesson doesn't take, we learn it again from Machiavelli. While I regularly roll my eyes at Trump's latest shoot-from-the-hip escapade, I find it less disturbing than Clinton's over-the-top performances followed by contradictory actions.

Jeanette

Sun, Sep 11 2016, 9:33 pm

Are you really interested in policy? Check out Hilary's website. Then check out trump's. In fact I thought it was Hilary's wonkishness and attention to policy details that makes her a less appealing candidate. Trump brings up her boringness all the time. When I hear Hillary speak, she answers to the point and brings up actual policy ideas and solutions. Trump just throws around slogans he doesn't even mean, he just likes the shock value. Does trump himself even believe in the wall?

There were 15 republican candidates I'd have happily voted for over Clinton. Too bad they had to pick the one that I absolutely cannot and will not support. Remember, trump and Hillary are the only two choices. Of the two Clinton is clearly the more stable and prepared, regardless of whatever dirt you can dig up on her.

Do you really want a president who will run this country like Putin runs his (or at least try?). I sure don't. Don't blame the left wing media for that either.

Jeanette

Sun, Sep 11 2016, 9:45 pm

Fox wrote:

Again, please specify what Clinton should have done in the aftermath of 9/11 that she did not do.

And for whom did she have misplaced empathy?

Fox

Mon, Sep 12 2016, 12:02 am

Jeanette wrote:

On the contrary, I find Clinton's policy statements to be so general and written in such simple vocabulary that they're almost insulting. For example, she claims that she'll use diplomacy to end the Syrian conflict and Sunni/Shiite conflicts that have empowered ISIS.

Am I supposed to honestly believe that Ms. Clinton expects to end a 1300-year-old religious conflict by just sitting down with everyone and "reasoning together" as LBJ used to say.

And she'll end the Syrian conflict the same way? Even though the U.S. State Department under her watch was widely seen as an impediment to a peace agreement in 2012 (Huffington Post)? And even though the war is acknowledged by everyone to be a proxy war with Iran? Thankfully, of course, we've ensured Iran can continue to arm Shiite Muslim interests throughout the region.

I am extremely concerned by her pledge to work with tech companies to "fight" jihadist propaganda online. It's unclear what she means by that, but Facebook and Twitter have long histories of ignoring explicit jihadi posts while Clinton, in her role as Secretary of State, has said absolutely nothing. This kind of censorship actually sounds a lot more Putin-like than most of Trump's ideas.

Does Trump have better answers? Not necessarily. Defeating ISIS is not an easy 1-2-3 problem. However, I'd rather get an answer I don't like than an answer written in public-relations-speak.

Jeanette wrote:

Again, please specify what Clinton should have done in the aftermath of 9/11 that she did not do.

And for whom did she have misplaced empathy?

Truthfully, I don't fault her at all for not having a quick answer in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. No one had a quick solution, and our intelligence services were caught so unprepared and unaware that there was no quick solution.

However, I fault her for using her highly limited involvement as building block to enhance her image as a public servant.

And I find extreme fault with the fact that the Clinton Foundation accepted tens of millions of dollars from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia -- many, many years after it became clear that, at the bare minimum, Saudi Arabian financial support of Islamist radicalization was responsible for Al Queda.

Misplaced empathy? I think her concern over Islamaphobia is completely misplaced. While it is obviously important to ensure that Muslim citizens are adequately protected, I think it is entirely appropriate to exercise caution when accepting immigrants from regions with high levels of radicalization; to limit student and tourist visas to residents of those regions; and to carefully scrutinize vulnerabilities to radical Islam. I don't find such concerns "deplorable" at all; I find them realistic.

Last edited by Fox on Mon, Sep 12 2016, 12:11 am; edited 1 time in total

Fox

Mon, Sep 12 2016, 12:10 am

sequoia wrote:

Wait, what was untrue about the LSAT story? She just said some guys made sexist comments.

She claimed that men accosted her and accused her of cheating them out of slots in law school, thus preventing them from receiving an educational deferment and increasing their chances of being drafted and sent to Vietnam.

The problem with this is that LBJ eliminated graduate school deferments (except for a few areas) before Clinton would have sat for the LSATs.

I don't consider this a serious misstatement of fact -- it's possible that she simply combined a number of memories into a single incident or perhaps she just forgot. I'm sure she received plenty of sexist remarks, even if they didn't occur precisely as she tells the story.

There are so many more serious problems with her candidacy that I'm perfectly happy to let her slide on this one.

amother

Linen

Mon, Sep 12 2016, 7:31 am

Fox wrote:

I'm not because this is a pattern of hers, like when she claimed that her mother told her she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary but that couldn't possibly have been true. http://www.snopes.com/Politics.....y.asp

Tiny little inconsequential lie. What's the big deal? The big deal is this is how Hillary Clinton grooms us to accept and overlook increasingly bigger and more significant lies, of which there are many. She's about to be elected president so clearly her grooming strategy has worked.

PinkFridge

Mon, Sep 12 2016, 9:39 am

sequoia wrote:

Why is she walking around with pneumonia? Isn't that a good way to die?

Maybe she's on antibiotics. If she doesn't have underlying health concerns she could bounce back, she's young enough.
But it wasn't great for her that this happened and that we're only now finding out about the pneumonia.

Oh, and let me preempt the "basket of deplorable" discussion. I don't think it was awful, though she of course has now lost any possibility of half of Trump's supporters switching for her. It's the other half that is not being discussed properly (pity Hugh Hewitt's likely not following this thread). The soundbite I heard sounds like she's wooing half of Trump supporters by sympathizing with their disillusionment with government, unhappiness about the economy, etc. Is she going to explain what her plans are to change things that won't be in concert with the last 8 years? Wouldn't she want to distance herself from that? How can she? I'm not asking in any kind of accusing tone. I'm completely curious.

marina

Mon, Sep 12 2016, 10:45 am

Fox wrote:

Because men's sexist attacks always make sense? Because those losers surely would have had their history right?

Fox

Mon, Sep 12 2016, 10:48 am

amother wrote:

Tiny little inconsequential lie. What's the big deal? The big deal is this is how Hillary Clinton grooms us to accept and overlook increasingly bigger and more significant lies, of which there are many. She's about to be elected president so clearly her grooming strategy has worked.

This is an excellent point. As I often joke, I live in a state where former governors are given their own cafeteria table in federal prison, so my standards for elected officials are probably artificially low.

Believe it or not, I am not really a rah-rah Trump supporter. In fact, I think that there are several substantive questions that no one on the liberal and/or Democratic side is asking. I can't for the life of me figure out why -- these are things that are regularly discussed among the more wonkish participants in conservative Twitter, but for some reason Democrats seem to be committed to the "I can't even . . . " argument.

When Clinton Cash came out last year, I was perfectly willing to be skeptical. It was written by a Breitbart editor (Peter Schweizer), and to paraphrase The Guardian's analysis of Breitbart, their reporting is solid but they have an acknowledged and intentional bias in where they focus their attention.

So I started looking for rebuttals to Clinton Cash. Normally, Google is my friend, but not here. Every single rebuttal, including those on Clinton's website, boiled down to "It was Monday, not Tuesday"; quoted some low-level assistant to an assistant saying, "I never saw any evidence of pay-for-play"; or said, "Well, there's no smoking gun!" I even put the question out here on Imamother, and no one responded.

I was completely willing to believe that Schweizer had exaggerated or taken things out of context, but the more I dug, the more corroboration there seemed to be.

Then I started reading the reporting of Ken Silverstein. Silverstein's bio hardly links him to the "vast right-wing conspiracy." Yet his conclusions echoed those of Schweizer's and were even more damning in some cases. Even NPR, hardly a bastion of right-wingers, aired an hour-long interview with Silverstein.

I went through the same process with Dinesh D'Souza's Hillary's America. Yes, it was embarrassingly cheesy and seemed more like a really well-done PowerPoint presentation than a true documentary. But again, Google was not my friend. None of its critics refuted any of the facts; they just rabbited on and on about how despicable they found it. Again with the "I can't even . . . " argument

And that was all before the DNC email scandal; Clinton's private email server scandal; President Clinton's meeting with Loretta Lynch; and allegations of the Clintons' history of "soft intimidation." Let alone Clinton's excellent health . . . er, seasonal allergies . . . that is, overheating . . . or, actually, pneumonia.

I completely understand voters who find Trump to be disagreeable, though I'm not so bothered by his insults. I think the U.S. could stand to be a little more insulting at times. But whatever his faults, I have high hopes that he wouldn't steal the silverware on the way out of the White House. For Chicagoans, that's a pretty high madrega!

marina

Mon, Sep 12 2016, 10:52 am

Fox wrote:

After I read the supreme court's Bob MacDonnell decision, I stopped caring abt Clinton Cash. Private donors got more access? Is that the gist of the film? No one cares, that's what politicians do.

marina

Mon, Sep 12 2016, 10:55 am

amother wrote:

This is really only the kind of thing you can post after comparing all other presidential records of lying. Do share what comparisons you've analyzed. Perhaps you've considered the untruths Bush offered the country? Reagan? So interested in your data.

marina

Mon, Sep 12 2016, 10:58 am

Fox wrote:

Huh? Don't snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I'm giving her a pass on the whole thing.

Though having been alive in 1968-1969 and living on a college campus -- a little pitcher with very big ears -- I can assure you that every single male student could recite the minutiae of military draft regulations verbatim. No male undergraduate who was capable of walking erect would have been mixed up about the criteria for a deferment.

Again, my faith in misogynistic college students' accuracy and honesty in their attacks on women is ... Nonexistent.

It's like saying " oh surely an employer wouldn't have said I'm not promoting you because you'll probably get pregnant, since employers know that many women don't pop out babies every year."