The Bully Pulpit

For most of our existence, the bullies had no national voice. People who bullied others, did it in the privacy of school yards, in the privacy of corporations, in the seclusion of their own neighborhoods. Then  along came the internet where bullies could bully people anonymously, hiding behind their computer screen, saying whatever they want to whomever they want without being held accountable.  Bullies aren’t interested in having an intelligent debate. They are only interested in showing the world that they are the more powerful person; debasing others with name calling and shaming. They are only interested in tearing down others so they can feel more powerful.

Hillary Clinton has been bullied for more than 30 years. She has suffered indignities that most women could not and would not put up with and she has come out stronger for it. People say she is untrustworthy. These are people who can’t tell the difference between “guarded” and “untrustworthy”. These are people who don’t have all the facts about her and are making a judgement. When you look at her and her story with an open mind and an open heart, you realize that while she may have flaws like everyone else in the world, she has been blamed for things that either had nothing to do with her or were completely out of her control. Has she made some “mistakes” or done things that people consider mistakes? Sure. Hasn’t everyone? But the mistakes she has actually made are nowhere near what people accuse her of. And she is most certainly NOT a criminal nor should she be “locked up”. If you are going to lock her up for the things she has done, you would have to lock up a lot of people who have done a lot worse. Let’s look at some of the things she has been accused of.

Let’s start with the email scandal since that has been prominent in the news as of late. Hilary Clinton had a personal email server. The server was actually set up for Bill Clinton when he was president. Ok, so what does that mean? That means that the server was actually Bill Clinton’s originally. That he used this server before and after he was President. Did he use it for email? Probably. Were there classified documents on it from his use of it? Maybe. But here is the thing. I work for the government and I can tell you, that their email servers are no more secure than a server in the basement of the house of the former president. In fact, the server in the basement is probably more secure because it is not set up on a huge network with gapping security holes, with hundreds of thousands of people accessing it and accessing phishing scammers, and malware emails, compromising the security of all the hundreds of thousands of machines on the network. My agency had to replace almost 2,000 machines last year. Why? Because someone got an email with a file attached and clicked on it, unleashing a wide swath of infections on everyone in the public address book which was pretty much everyone in the agency. When others got the same email, they clicked on the link and the virus spread like wildfire. This would not happen on a private server that only one person was accessing. People don’t consider this when they look at Hilary Clinton’s email “situation”.

The other thing people don’t consider is that it was neither against any policy or rule at the state department at the time to use a private email server nor a private email address, which let’s be clear, Hilary Clinton is not in IT. She was using a private email ADDRESS which happened to be on a private server. It was better than using a private email address for example, a google email or Hotmail, or msn. These email addresses again, are private, but they are connected to a huge network with millions of people accessing that network. Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account was hacked, while she was running for VP! It’s easy for a person who doesn’t have extensive IT knowledge to think that she did something horribly wrong, particularly if you listen to FOX or any of the other people who try to compare her use of a private email address to Watergate. This comparison is totally and utterly ridiculous. In the Watergate scandal 69 people were indicted on charges of things ranging from perjury to burglary resulting in 48 people being either found guilty or pleading out, many of whom were Nixon’s top administration officials. A president resigned in disgrace after being found guilty of abuse of power before being impeached and was probably lucky that he did not go to jail. He probably would have ended up there had President Ford not pardoned him. To compare that to Hilary’s use of a private email address is ignorant. I lived through the Nixon scandal and I can tell you, it does not even compare.

Consider this, many people very high up in government STILL use private email addresses even though there has been a policy in place since after Hilary left the state department. Previous to that, almost every Secretary of state used a private email address/server from before Colin Powell all the way to John Kerry. See https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-07-20/homeland-security-leaders-bent-rules-on-private-e-mail to learn the facts.

Trump claims that Hilary Clinton deleted emails after receiving an FBI subpoena. This is factually incorrect for a number of reason. First of all, the subpoena did not come from the FBI, it came from the Benghazi Committee, a congressional committee convened to look into the Benghazi incident. There have been 7 Benghazi investigations led mostly by republicans in congress, NOT by any law enforcement branch. It is also factually incorrect that Hilary deleted the emails. In fact, an employee of the company that managed the server is the one who deleted them and he got the order to do so from Cheryl Mills, an aide to Hilary who oversaw the review of Secretary Clinton’s email archives to produce documents to the state department. Let’s look at the timeline

Feb. 1, 2013: Clinton serves her last day as secretary of state.

July 23, 2014: The State Department reaches an agreement with the Benghazi committee about producing records for its investigation into the 2012 attack on a U.S. embassy in the Libyan city.

Oct. 28, 2014: The State Department sends an official letter to Clinton’s staff requesting "emails related to their government work." Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, and aide Cheryl Mills oversaw the review of Clinton’s email archives to produce work-related documents to the department.

Dec. 5, 2014: Clinton’s team provides 55,000 pages of emails, or about 30,000 individual emails, to the State Department. Mills tells an employee at Platte River Networks, which managed the server, that Clinton does not need to retain any emails older than 60 days.

March 2, 2015: The New York Times breaks the story that Clinton used a personal email account while secretary of state.

March 4, 2015: The Benghazi committee issues a subpoena requiring Clinton to turn over all emails from her private server related to the incident in Libya.

Between March 25-31, 2015: The Platte River Networks employee has what he calls an "oh s---" moment, realizing he did not delete Clinton’s email archive, per Mills’ December 2014 request. The employee deletes the email archive using a software called BleachBit.

March 27, 2015: Clinton’s lawyers send a letter to the Benghazi committee saying that the State Department already has the relevant emails, as they were included in the Dec. 5, 2014, turnover.

Trump’s timeline is correct. The congressional subpoena came on March 4, 2015, and an employee deleted the emails sometime after March 25, 2015, three weeks later. However, the implication that Clinton deleted emails relevant to the subpoena in order to avoid scrutiny is flat wrong. The FBI’s investigation did find several thousand emails among those deleted that were work-related and should have been turned over to the State Department. However, FBI Director James Comey said in a July 2016 statement that the FBI investigation "found no evidence that any of the additional work-related emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them." Comey added in a later congressional hearing that the FBI learned no one on Clinton’s staff specifically asked the employee to delete the emails following the New York Times story and subpoena. Rather, the employee made that decision on his own. Clinton told the FBI that she was not involved in deciding whether individual emails should be sent to State Department, nor "did she instruct anyone to delete her emails to avoid complying with FOIA, State or FBI requests for information."

So, let’s look at Benghazi, which resulted in the email “scandal” to begin with. To understand how much time and money was spent on trying to find Hilary Clinton guilty of something, only in the end, to admit that the only reason they had all those hearings was to bring her down politically, see this: http://benghazicommittee.com/benghazi-by-the-numbers/

Trump likes to blame president Obama and Secretary Clinton for what happened in Benghazi when the truth is, Benghazi happened because congress declined provide the full funding for the embassy security funding that both President Obama and Secretary Clinton requested. This is a fact that has been simply ignored by the republicans in congress because acknowledging this fact would make the American people aware of just how much this congress has NOT done the job that they were put in office to do. They have fought every measure, including embassy security in order to make President Obama look incompetent. They can spend their time and the people’s tax dollars renaming public buildings but they can’t seem to find the time or the money to approve appropriate funding for something as important as securing our embassies around the world.  Then when it all goes pear shaped and people get killed, they try to pin it on the President and Hillary Clinton. 

This has been the most “do-nothing” congress in our nation’s history. They can’t even pass common sense gun legislation after 25 small children are killed in a school, or after 50 people are killed in a nightclub by a madman who should have never been able to buy a gun because he was on the no fly list. In 2016 they were in sessions 111 days. Yes, that’s right, 111 days. Let’s look at the numbers. There are 260 working days in a year. That’s 149 days our congress was not working for us, or to put it in terms of weeks, they had 29.8 weeks of vacation. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m lucky to get 3 weeks off in a year, let alone 29. And every single one of them is making a six figure salary paid for by the people of the United States. I would like to know, exactly what are we paying for again? After seeing those figures, if you don’t think it’s time to remove these do nothings, then you are not being very fiscally responsible. They are laughing at us. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/congress-supreme-court-budget-do-nothing-221057

I was and am a Bernie Sanders supporter. His presidency would have also been historical – The first Jewish President. But, we’re not ready for Bernie yet. And at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, there really is only two choices, one of which would be completely insane to choose considering all we know about Donald Trump. The poor blind people supporting him believe he is actually going to do something for them. He’s not. When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. And he has told us over and over in the last 15 months exactly who he is. And we have found out through the miracle of good research and reporting exactly who he is, where he came from, and what he has been doing for his 70 years on this earth and it certainly has NOT been doing ANYTHING for anyone else. Trump is, was and always has been about his brand, his fans, and his own opinion of himself. He is a bully and he encourages others to be bullies as well. He has given a voice to those bullies in our country who previously did not have a national voice. And there is a reason they had no voice. The majority of people in this country believe in the good. They believe in equal rights for everyone, they believe in religious freedom, they believe in personal responsibility and that every person in this country has a right to make their own healthcare decisions, they believe in every person’s right to a good education, they believe that laws should be fair and fairly applied to everyone. Donald Trump believes none of that. He has spent his life, cheating people out of money he owed them, bullying people with lawsuits or threats of lawsuits. He has used the laws in this country to take advantage of people. He has not EVER done something because it was the right thing to do, he has only done what would benefit himself in some way. This is a man who is a selfish bully, and becoming President would inflate his over exaggerated opinion of himself. He has a horrible disgusting dark view of our country and its people and believe me when I tell you, that will not change if he becomes president. He lives in a fact free bubble surrounded by people who cannot contain him because he doesn’t take their advice. Do you think that if he gets in office he will suddenly start listening to people? No, is the answer. He won’t. He calls Hillary a liar and “crooked”. The only thing I can say to that is “Hello Pot, this Kettle, I just wanted to let you know that you’re black!”. He is the most untruthful candidate that has ever run for office. 76% (yes this is an actual statistic backed up by research into statements he has made) of what he says are pants on fire, lies, or mostly false. On this same scale, Hilary rates 26% and no “pants on Fire” ratings for her, not one. Pants on Fire rating is reserved for the most egregious falsehoods. Donald Trump’s “pants on fire” rating is at almost 50%. So, 50% of the time Donald Trump is egregiously lying to the American people. Do you really think that will stop if he becomes president? I think not. In fact, I would go out on a limb here and say he would only just lie even more.

And crooked? Really? Seriously folks, I hardly think a private email address compares to someone who has ties to the Russian government and lies about it, cheats people out of money he owes them, scams people out of their life savings by promising them some kind of “education”, encourages people to “poll watch” when he knows full well the RNC is under a Consent Decree because his own brother-in-law lost a case in the 80’s where the RNC was convicted of interfering with elections and targeting minority neighborhoods trying to suppress their vote, denying housing to minority people so much that he was sued, not once, but twice by the justice department. He has been either the plaintiff or defendant in thousands of lawsuits, not tens, not hundreds…THOUSANDS. This is a man who fully admits to not paying taxes for almost twenty years, who won’t release his tax returns, while every other presidential candidate in US history has. He feel the rules don’t apply to him. Like he said himself, he is a star and he can do whatever he wants. Do you really think that attitude is going to change if he becomes President? That he will suddenly become humble, that he will suddenly apologize for all the bad things he has done to so many people, many of whom trusted him? Just ask Barbara Corcoran who saved Trump from bankruptcy, was expecting a thank you card and instead got a subpoena to appear in court because Trump was suing her so he didn’t have to pay her the 4 million dollars he owed her after selling a property she brokered for him for 92,000,000 dollars. He lost the case, and ended up sending her commission checks for more than two years till he paid it off. And this guy is supposed to be a “Billionaire”? He was so broke, he had to pay the money in installments. I mean seriously folks, you can’t believe anything this guy says.

And I mean come on, look at his comportment, the sniffing and face making, the orange face with the white eyes and the terrible comb over. He talks about women’s looks. I mean seriously, has he EVER looked in a mirror? This is a man who talked about his penis size in a presidential primary debate…on national television. This is who we want representing us to the world? I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t. I’ll take the lady in the pantsuit thank you.