I'm with her, sort-of

Feh.

I am not a fan of Hillary Clinton.  She seems to me a good if misguided person.  She's a tad messianic for my taste, and she seems to worry more about victims than anyone else.  Compassion is good, but it's a luxury, and it ought not to be the organizing principle of our politics.  Also, like her husband, she is content to be accurate when truthful would be more to the point.  For example, one can be for a bill (with some minor amendments) or against that same bill (as it currently stands).  Leave out the parenthetical, and you are always telling "the truth" by Clintonian standards.  And so we have Hillary on TPP.  But, hey, that's politics, right?

The "trustworthiness" thing doesn't much bother me.  One of the great ironies of this election is that the people who oppose Hillary claim not to believe a word she says, but oppose her because they know she will do what she says she will do.  Do they doubt she will, as promised, appoint Justices to the Supreme Court who they think will shred the Constitution?  Hell, no.  They are sure she will do exactly that.  But they don't trust her in some unspecified respect, and that's the argument they want to make.  Only in America.

This election boils down to one simple question, first asked by Harry Callahan: Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do you?  Because, if we elect Trump President, we will have to get very lucky.  I expect that I would like his Supreme Court more than hers.  I might like his tax plan more than hers, too.  His focus on jobs and defense appeals to me more than her obsession with weeding out every last vestige of unfairness in this worst of all possible worlds.

In other words, I wish there were a Republican running for the office.  Not any Republican - many of the guys Trump beat were mental and/or moral midgets.  But maybe if the GOP had run JEB or Kasich, we would have a choice.  But they didn't, and so we don't, and I, myself, don't feel lucky enough to put a narcissistic twelve-year-old in the White House.  The Trump Doctrine - "He started it" - lacks, shall we say, a certain nuance that our foreign policy needs.  "Yo' mama" is not a bargaining position on the world stage.

The sex-talk on the bus is bad, but it confirms things we already know about the man, most notably that his reason for seeking power is to abuse it.  Why go to all the trouble of becoming famous if it won't get you laid?  Listen to him tell Howard Stern what he "gets away with," or Billy Bush what "they let you do."  It's all of a piece: the opportunity to ignore the rules.  Another irony there, as the knock on the Clintons is that they don't think the rules apply to them.  The Clintons think so because they are better than us; Trump thinks so because he's "a star."  Different brands of American exceptionalism.

And then there's the Russian hacks.  These have the moral status of Dr. Mengele's experiments.  It is unethical to pay them any attention.  Our ethics-free "journalists" say the contents are newsworthy - an argument that could be made for Dr. M's findings, too - but reporters are hardly arbiters of what's in the best interests of the country.

The issue is not legality.  I understand that publishing stolen documents is an essential function of a watchful media.  But the Podesta hacks are not just "stolen."  They are stolen by our geopolitical enemy and are being dribbled out by that enemy (or its co-conspirators at the "apolitical" Wikileaks) in order to do us harm.  Anyone, including any journalist, who recklessly does anything to make the Russians glad they hacked Podesta's emails is a traitor to the United States.  There are good reasons why such treachery cannot be criminalized, but there is no reason why it cannot be condemned in the strongest terms.  Shame on them, every last fucking one of them.

The self-styled conservative patriots on the right should be the first to take this position.  Maybe next time, when it's their secrets being stolen.  Because make no mistakes about it: only Putin's personal animus toward HRC and anticipation of an amateur fan-boy in the White House makes the Dems' stuff attractive to him.  When and if sanity returns to the USA, the GOP will again be the party of hawks, and it will then become the target of hacks.  Then will the right wing rise up against "the media" for giving the Russians just what they want.  One can only imagine what the Democrats will do then, i.e., when they stop laughing.

Did I mention "Feh"?