Dear Hillary: What your husband can’t tell you

Dear Hillary,

People don’t like you: “Clinton is the only candidate who is about as well-known as Trump, and while she is more well-liked than the developer, her favorability rating is net negative among registered voters nationally: 49% have an unfavorable view while 44% have a positive impression.”[1]

So when your ‘advisors’ point to your and your husband’s record of surviving scandal,[2] they’re forgetting something. People don’t like you.

They did like Bill. It was a mistake, but we—I’m guilty of this, too—liked him. So when Republicans spent all those years and all that money investigating an obscure real estate deal and came up with a blow job,[3] he really wasn’t hurt all that much. Because people liked him. And because they recognized a fishing expedition gone really, really far off track when they saw it.

But they don’t like you. Sorry to make this sound like some stupid high school popularity thing, but really, U.S. elections have descended to a level far worse. Now, it’s about which rich people like you. Or, so you seem to think, especially given how you backpedal after daring to say the meekest populist thing.[4] The trouble with this idea is that there are a few people out there who are righteously offended by corruption.[5] And our—I’m definitely on board with this one—suspicions are only reinforced by scandal. So you’re likely to come up short on votes.

Take, for example, this silly nonsense about how you didn’t use your personal email account for classified information. As Jonathan Turley—oh, yes, I know, he’s not on your Friends of Bill list—puts it,

virtually anything coming out of the office of the Secretary of State would be considered classified as a matter of course. I have had a TS/SCI clearance since Reagan due to my national security work and have lived under the restrictions imposed on email and other systems. The defense is that this material was not technically classified at the time that it was sent. Thus it was not “classified” information. The problem is that it was not reviewed and classified because it was kept out of the State Department system. Moreover, most high-level communications are treated as classified and only individually marked as classified when there is a request for disclosure. You do not generate material as the Secretary of State and assume that it is unclassified. You are supposed to assume and treat it as presumptively classified. Otherwise, there would be massive exposure of classified material and willful blindness as to the implications of the actions of persons disregarding precautions.[6]

Do you know what that makes you? A liar. Yes, that’s right. A liar.

Of course, the fact you deleted a bunch of those emails before turning them over to the State Department doesn’t help either.[7] Not only are you a liar, but you’re covering up.

Now, you might get away with all that if people liked you. But they don’t. So even if you somehow survive this scandal and who knows how many scandals yet to come—because you can’t seem to keep your nose clean—and your coronation march to the Democratic nomination in 2016 is consummated, you will almost certainly lose in the general election, even against an almost certain-to-be appalling opponent.

And then we’ll wind up with that horror of horrors, yet another conservative in the White House, as if you all weren’t all neoconservatives yourselves.[8] So if you and all your mainstream Democratic Party friends were actually sincere with all your scare talk intended to get progressives to vote for you because the other guy is worse, you’d bow out now.

But of course, you won’t. Because you’re entitled. And that’s more important than the prospect that we’ll get yet another conservative, that is, horror of horrors, another conservative from that other party elected to the presidency.

  1. [1]Jennifer Agiesta, “CNN/ORC poll: GOP voters want more Trump,” July 26, 2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/26/politics/cnn-poll-presidential-race/index.html
  2. [2]Matt Latimer, “Scandals Only Make the Clintons Stronger,” Politico, June 7, 2015, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/scandals-clintons-stronger-2016-foundation-president-118683.html
  3. [3]Douglas O. Linder, “The Impeachment Trial of President William Clinton,” University of Missouri, Kansas City, 2005, http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/clinton/clintontrialaccount.html; Rutgers University, “The Impeachment of President Clinton,” n.d. http://www.eagleton.rutgers.edu/research/americanhistory/ap_clintonimpeach.php
  4. [4]Nicholas Confessore and Amy Chozick, “Wall Street Offers Clinton a Thorny Embrace,” New York Times, July 7, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/us/08wallst.html; Noam Scheiber, “Hillary Clinton’s Inequality Rhetoric Is Weak: No, we’re not ‘all in this mess together’,” New Republic, July 9, 2014, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118632/hillary-clintons-inequality-rhetoric-insulting; Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Hillary Clinton’s Comment on Jobs Raises Eyebrows on Wall St.,” New York Times, October 27, 2014, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/hillary-clintons-comment-about-corporations-and-job-creation-raises-wall-st-s-eyebrows/; Josh Voorhees, “Why Hillary Clinton Has Moved So Far and So Fast to the Left,” Slate, June 8, 2015, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/06/08/hillary_clinton_runs_left_why_the_democratic_frontrunner_is_embracing_the.html
  5. [5]Bill Curry, “This is why Hillary’s losing: The issue Jeb Bush and Donald Trump understand, which may keep Clinton from the White House,” Salon, July 26, 2015, http://www.salon.com/2015/07/26/this_is_why_hillarys_losing_the_issue_jeb_bush_and_donald_trump_understand_which_may_keep_clinton_from_the_white_house/
  6. [6]Jonathan Turley, “Clinton: ‘Pretty Clear’ No Emails Were Classified Despite Contrary Findings Of Inspector General,” July 26, 2015, http://jonathanturley.org/2015/07/26/clinton-pretty-clear-no-emails-were-classified-despite-contrary-findings-of-inspector-general/
  7. [7]Margaret Sullivan, “A Clinton Story Fraught With Inaccuracies: How It Happened and What Next?” New York Times, July 27, 2015, http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/a-clinton-story-fraught-with-inaccuracies-how-it-happened-and-what-next/; Jonathan Turley, “Clinton: ‘Pretty Clear’ No Emails Were Classified Despite Contrary Findings Of Inspector General,” July 26, 2015, http://jonathanturley.org/2015/07/26/clinton-pretty-clear-no-emails-were-classified-despite-contrary-findings-of-inspector-general/
  8. [8]David Benfell, “Oy Vey: Paleoconservatives, Neoconservatives, and Alleged Anti-Semitism,” April 1, 2014, https://parts-unknown.org/wp/2014/04/01/oy-vey-paleoconservatives-neoconservatives-and-alleged-anti-semitism/; David Benfell, “We are all neoconservatives now,” May 23, 2014, https://parts-unknown.org/drupal7/journal/2014/05/23/we-are-all-neoconservatives-now; Ray McGovern, “Why President Obama’s War on Terror Speech Was Full of Half-Truths and Deception,” Alternet, May 31, 2013, http://www.alternet.org/world/president-obamas-terrorism-speech-was-deceptive; Norman Pollack, “Obama’s Militarism-Imperialism Lite,” Counterpunch, May 27, 2013, http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/27/obamas-militarism-imperialism-lite/

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