Hillary Clinton, Front Runner

I was going to write a piece critical of Hillary Clinton, but just today we have received the word that the State Department has exonerated her in the case of her emails, which as you know were set up on a secured server in the basement of her family home (I’m guessing); she used this one account exclusively for all her phone conversations while she was Secretary of State, and, it is alleged, revealed top secret information while talking on this private email account on a server in her basement.   Those who make these allegations seem to forget that she, as State Department Secretary, was one of the top people involved in making decisions as to what was confidential and what was not.

So despite the fact that she didn’t divorce that lying cheat who got 8 blowjobs from a Congressional aide in the Oval Office and survived an impeachment designed to punish him for saying, “That depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is…”  She has been investigated, mainly by the Republican lower house, for the Benghazi attack that killed the US ambassador and two of his assistants, even though she had nothing to do with the ambassador’s foolish decision not to anticipate trouble on the anniversary of the 9/11 attack.  The ambassador should have been holed up in a blast-resistant building with the whole embassy security staff, but he wasn’t even in the capital where the biggest embassy was.  That wasn’t Hillary’s fault, I don’t think; the rest of the Benghazi allegations dry up when checked out with facts.

So what else is wrong with Hillary?  She is a 67-year old born in Chicago and has been married since 1975 to William Rodham Clinton, who served as President from January 1993 to January 2001.  The latter part of his second term was enlivened by an impeachment attempt that revealed Mr. Clinton’s association with a young volunteer on his staff, Monica Lewinsky.  The relationship included a series of blow jobs; Monica fellated William until he ejaculated, and she saved a blue dress which had been stained by his semen.  She confessed all her activities to a fellow White House staffer who was secretly planning to reveal all this information to the public at the right time.

Thus, the blue dress with the semen stain was recovered, analyzed, and found to have Bill’s DNA in the stain.  Some of Monica’s confessions to the spy were secretly recorded when they talked on the phone.  The release of all this explosive evidence of Bill’s infidelity to Hillary caused a media frenzy that failed when Mr. Clinton was cleared of the impeachment by a Democratic Senate and finished his term.  Immediately after he left office, he was operated for severe coronary artery stenosis.  The stress of office seems to have had a negative effect on his heart.

In any case, Hillary has gone through all this and stood by her president despite his serial infidelities; after his coronary artery bypass, he was forced to slow down considerably, so she was free to consider other options.  She ran in 2008 and was considered a very strong candidate; she was wise enough to bow out when it appeared that Obama’s political force was overwhelming, which it was, both in 2008 and 2012.  Obama rewarded her with a post as Secretary of State, which she resigned after he was re-elected.  She needed to work full-time on her own presidential campaign again.

No sooner had she made her intentions clear than the Republicans stole the attention of the television reporters by, first, entering some seventeen apparently serious candidates for the nomination fight; this move was especially exciting because Donald Trump was one of the seventeen, in fact the front runner by a wide margin ahead of Jeb Bush, the second.  He used the usual persona that he adopts at press conferences, insulting anyone who disagrees with him or asks difficult questions and even throwing out a correspondent from the hostile cable network LatinoAmerica (not its real name) for asking a question supposedly out of turn.  His popularity is astounding to most good people because he expresses open homophobia, xenophobia, sexism, and disregard for the rights of others.  Nonetheless, he showed 25% in the most authoritative pool, way ahead of Bush, at 13%.  He even has strong appeal among those who consider themselves highly religious, which makes no sense unless you acknowledge that there is a willing suspension of disbelief among his audience that allows them to think of him as fighting against established, monopolistic politicians who “don’t care what the people want” and ignore his personal behavior, which is not godly at all.

At any rate, Hillary can be blamed for many things.  She has been in politics for more than 30 years with her husband and he has done his share of bad things.  It should be more important that there are significant policy differences between the Democrats and the Republicans.  At the current time, the Republican Party is closely associated with the rich and would-be rich, white, anti-welfare constituency, while the Democrats have the African-American vote and are associated with more welfare-friendly policies; they also have managed to maneuver themselves into an apparently immigrant-friendly stance, especially when compared to the Republican aspirations, which appear to involve repealing the Constitutional provision that all persons born in the United States are citizens, contained in the Fourteenth Amendment.

By the way, Hillary is 67, which for a woman is not old at all; women usually live five to ten years longer than men.  Finally, the polls have consistently had her winning the presidential contest “if it were held today” for the last six months.  Currently, she is leading Jeb Bush by five percentage points. However, her lead has narrowed in recent months, possibly due to the consistent negative press about her use of a private email server; it will be interesting to see how many people are mollified by the State Department’s exoneration today.  It is also interesting that there has been virtually no news at all about her with the exception of stories about the emails.  She leads Trump by four percentage points, and here again her lead has narrowed, although the trend has stabilized with her four point lead intact.