I’ve said repeatedly on this blog, and will continue to say, that coming to the conclusion that I will vote for Clinton as the lesser of two evils is hardly an endorsement. It’s a recognition of practical reality. Better to know the positions of the person in power and be able to intelligently respond to those positions than to have someone running the show whose positions change every five minutes or so, and who is, I believe, dangerously unstable. Make sure you read Dr. Thomas Sowell’s excellent article on this very subject if you have not already done so. (I believe I posted this article over on facebook but did not include it on this page; I’ve used a different source here but the article is the same.)
I’ve been planning for awhile to write and/or post some articles about the three big items that are dogging Clinton in this campaign:
1. Her use of a private e-mail server, in direct contradiction to the policies she should have followed as Secretary of State. (This one issue, along with the general perception that she is untrustworthy, is the main reason why the race is as close as it is.)
2. Her actions and responsibilities regarding the attack on American personnel in Benghazi, Libya.
3. Her failure to keep a clear line between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.
I consider #2 and #3 to be important but perhaps not vital. That is, by concentrating on those issues we risk being distracted the ones that are. Because they are important, though, I plan to write about them over the next couple of weeks. #1 is more problematic and shows perhaps most clearly of the three one of the basic problems with Clinton: her almost pathological bent toward secrecy, which often causes her more problems than the original misconduct. (Shades of Richard Nixon and Watergate.) So I said earlier in this blog about the whole Saul Alinsky red herring that she created the perception that there was something to hide in her senior thesis on the community organizer/agitator by barring access to it during her time as First Lady. The denial seems to have had something to do with critical comments in the thesis about then-powerful-Senator Patrick Moynihan. (I have to confess that I haven’t waded through the whole thing; here the link again if you want to do so.) But Moynihan was a tough bird; I don’t think he’d have been very bothered by it. Clinton shot herself in the foot (an expression my son hates) to no good purpose by her secrecy. And the hidden-away thesis is but one minor example of many. Indeed, it was her desire to keep the details secret of what has come to be known as the Whitewater scandal that eventually led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Sad but true.
Here’s a very long but also very revealing article from the Washington Post about this whole secrecy thing. It is well worth your time as it paints what seems to be a very clear, accurate picture of the woman who is almost certainly going to be our next President:
“How Hillary Clinton Helped Create What She Later Called ‘The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy’” from The Washington Post, 9/3/2016. As I’ve said before, the WP publishes a wide range of opinions and commentary, so don’t dismiss it out of hand because you think of it as a branch of the so-called “mainstream media.” If you’re not a subscriber to this newspaper you have a limited number of free articles you can access per month; this one is well worth using up one of your credits.
Since I don’t want to over-post and therefore keep my readers from being able to keep up (of course I’m sure that reading this blog forms an integral part of life), I will wait until tomorrow to put up anther article on the e-mail controversy, this time from the estimable National Review, one of the many conservative news outlets that has refused to endorse Donald Trump while at the same time being roundly critical of Hillary Clinton. My kind of people!