Face it: Hillary Clinton is Terrible
A Trump presidency would be a disaster.
Obviously.
But I am disturbed by how many people I talk to on the left (where I am) who simply do not understand how awful Hillary Clinton would be, nor how much destruction she has brought upon the world even with far less power than she would have as president of the United States.
What’s wrong with Hillary? Everything.
Respect for the law: Hillary Clinton asked one of her staffers to break the law by asking him to send her classified information in an insecure way as seen in this email she sent. (More info and context can bo found here.)
Influences: Hillary admires, respects, and takes policy advice from Henry Kissinger. You should know that “carpet-bombing Cambodia, supporting Pakistan’s genocide in Bangladesh, greenlighting the Argentinian dictatorship’s murderous crackdown on dissidents — all of those were Kissinger initiatives, all pushed in the name of pursuing American national interests and fighting communism”.
This interventionist thinking and influence is displayed prominently in Hillary’s actions.
On intervention: When it came to deciding whether or not to intervene in Libya, Hillary pushed harder than anyone else in the Obama administration to do so. The result? Libya is now “a failed state and a terrorist haven”, and that much of this is Hillary’s fault, as this New York Times piece persuasively argues.
Weapons for terrorist-funders: While secretary of state, Hillary Clinton made sending Saudi Arabia weapons a top priority when she was in office, and once she delivered them, ”…both the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Boeing made donations to the Clinton Foundation”. That’s right – the Clintons get kick-backs from giving weapons to the people who probably fund more terrorism than anyone else in the world.
On deportations: In a statement criticizing Trump, Obama said we shouldn’t undergo mass deportations “because that’s not who we are”. But Obama has deported over 2 million Mexicans, and by the time he leaves office, Barack Obama will have deported more people than any other president in US history (though he’s slowed down in the last couple years) – and Hillary backed him until very recently.
On Intellectual Property and “Trade”: The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, may be the world piece of legislation I have ever seen. It would “allow foreign corporations to sue countries for laws or regulations that promote the public interest”, “restrict the ability of Congress to engage in domestic law” (thereby giving up national soveignty to unaccountable corporations), “create new threats for journalists and whistleblowers” with vague language (no pun intended!), and much more.
Hillary Clinton strongly supported the TPP, calling it the “gold standard” for trade deals, and as of the beginning of this election cycle, no longer supports it.
New ways to kill: Hillary Clinton is perhaps the most hawkish Democrat in the country for all of the above reasons, and more. I believe that she will continue and further escalate Obama’s policies of murdering Muslims with drone strikes in the Middle East; 90% of those killed by drones are not those targeted, and even the targets are just suspects – suspects being assassinated without a trial, and no evidence publically disclosed. (More on US assassination/drone policy and its human toll.)
Here’s a video of Hillary Clinton lying (in various contexts) for 13 minutes straight.
Is Hillary really the solution?
If Trump becomes president, I predict that he will create an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant atmosphere in the US. But by putting “America First” and using the military less, which is one of the things Trump has most consistently (read: least inconsistently) harped on, I also predict that he would kill fewer people overseas than “Killery”, as some people call her.
The idea that all of us Americans now face a moral imperative to vote for Hillary Clinton to avoid a Trump presidency is very far from clear. As (excellent) Green Party candidate Jill Stein puts it: “what we fear from Donald Trump, we have already seen from Hillary Clinton”.
But hey, they’re both liars who will say anything to get elected, and we decide who to elect based on what they claim they will do if elected, where we have no recourse whatsoever if they decide to do the exact opposite of what they’ve been elected/hired for (which I think should change), so how are we to know if either of them will do any of the things they say?
Just don’t tell me that supporting a violent, corporatist militarist – Hillary Clinton – is the ethical choice.
Frankly, I think that anyone voting for either of these monsters is both morally bankrupt and personally, actively harming the country by giving power to the people who are most likely to abuse it.