When people tell me that it doesn’t matter whether they vote for Her Clintoness or the Trumpster because both are equally corrupt, I check my frustration and instead ask them a few questions. First: would you rather entrust your nation’s future to someone who raked in millions of dollars doing illegal favors for foreign governments while holding one of the highest offices in the land, or to someone who calls Rosie O’Donnell a pig?
Then – who is more qualified: the Democratic nominee who knowingly endangers America’s security by using an illegal basement server to hide her guilty trail of Benghazi and Clinton Foundation emails, versus the presumptive Republican nominee who has filed two or three legal bankruptcies in nearly a half century of largely successful business dealings?
Also: would you choose as commander in chief a woman who coldly lies to the grieving parents of four dead Americans as their coffins are unloaded behind her or a guy who ridicules his rivals on a debate stage?
And you must choose one, because one will be the president of the United States, the most powerful person on the planet. You may notice something about the examples here and many others I could cite. They illustrate a certain hierarchy of the horrible, and that is this: Hillary Clinton has committed crimes against the very nation she pretends to serve. Donald Trump’s “crimes” are mostly boorish infringements of good taste or taking savvy advantage of existing law.
Hillary’s crimes are international in scope and staggering in personal enrichment, such as when she and Bill helped Russia obtain 20% of U.S. uranium in a convoluted scheme exposed last year by the New York Times that put millions in the Clintons’ pockets. Trump’s infractions are almost embarrassingly small ball in comparison.
Donald Trump is a blurter; he spontaneously blurts things that are sometimes reckless and ill-advised. There is nothing spontaneous about Hillary Clinton. She is a calculating manipulator, always relentlessly on the hunt for ways to enrich herself and gather more power, our nation’s interests be damned.
Of course we cringe when The Donald makes fun of someone with a disability. But is that really in the same league as when Secretary of State Clinton allows four Americans to die in Benghazi or puts CIA lives at risk via her unsecured emails, as former CIA covert operator Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX) angrily pointed out during the questioning of FBI Director Comey?
Never Trumpers never cease their caterwauling about Donald Trump’s so very distasteful habit of buying favor with campaign contributions to Democrats as well as Republicans, and his vacillating allegiances between the Democratic and Republican parties. But in the arena of influence peddling Hillary Clinton is the unchallenged champ.
A May 26, 2015 report in the International Business Times (IBT) chronicles how dozens of corporations and foreign governments gave between $54 million and $141 million to the Clinton Foundation as well as “hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to the Clinton family, according to foundation and State Department records.” At the same time coincidentally Secretary of State Clinton approved $165 billion of weapons sales to those very same countries. Imagine that. Notes the article ironically, “The Clinton Foundation publishes only a rough range of individual contributors’ donations, making a more precise accounting impossible.”
The best part is that at the same time Clinton approved billions in new American-made muscle and advanced military power to these governments – among them Algeria, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait – her State Department roundly criticized the human rights abuses of their totalitarian governments. Maybe she thought giving these oppressive governments more firepower would make any upcoming freedom demonstrations by their oppressed people more peaceful. Or that it would help Israel feel more secure to know that thanks to Hillary, its unneighborly neighbors have billions in new American weapons to use against it.
The same IBT article quotes Lawrence Lessig, director of Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, who notes that Clinton’s willingness to allow those with business before the State Department to finance her foundation (which reportedly gives about 10% of its income to actually helping people other than the Clintons) heightens concerns about how she would manage such relationships as president.
Not really; her past dealings just solidify the certainty that every day Clinton is in the White House she will be teaching a master class on pay-to-play. Hillary Clinton as secretary of state sold out our nation for personal enrichment and now she and her husband are personally worth about 150 million, not counting their “foundation.” Immediately after becoming secretary of state and signing an official document promising to faithfully protect our nation’s most sensitive secrets, she put them on an unsecured illegal server for all the world to hack, which they likely did according to Director Comey and others.
The order of magnitude that elevates Hillary’s crimes stratospherically above anything Donald Trump could even contemplate should convince even the most ardent anti-Trumpers to support The Donald, weird hair and all. Look at the facts. You talk about the sacred principles that guide your decision-making, and you insist one of them is love of country. If you love your country, you must now join the Donald Trump camp. Welcome to Realville. It’s time for reason to overrule your emotion. Or you must accept responsibility for the coming ruination of our America at the ruthless claws of a soulless tyrant.
Joy Overbeck is a Colorado journalist and author who writes for Townhall.com, The Daily Caller, The Washington Times, American Thinker, BarbWire and elsewhere. More columns: https://www.facebook.com/