COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET

I like Hillary Clinton.

There, I said it.

I have always liked her. I believe she wants to do good things for people and for the country. I don’t know her personally but I believe that someone who worked as hard as she did for healthcare and family issues wants to help people.

No longer will I feel shamed by liberal friends who blame her and Bill for all our problems; nor by conservative friends who believe she is dishonesty and corruption personified. I am ready to welcome her into my ‘house’, my temple; the dome under my hat.

I think Hillary gets a bad rap; that many people truly dislike her for no material reason; that many people are out to get her; that many people tend to believe everything negative about her based on innuendo and circumstantial evidence. Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want.

I like Bill Clinton too. He’s smart and articulate. I think he was a pretty good president though things didn’t always work out as well as they looked at the time, but no one bats a hundred percent. His era was relatively good for our peace and prosperity. It was the seceding Bush II years that brought it all to ruin.

Hillary haters, if you are still reading this, don’t expect a ten thousand word refutation of every charge thrown against the Clintons. I’m not qualified to do that, and if I was, and even if I wrote as well as Carl Bernstein, you still wouldn’t believe it. People who dislike Bill and Hillary Clinton believe what they want to believe. That’s what I believe.

Now it is true that Bill had some transgressions with women. He broke his wedding vow to be faithful and lied about it when he got caught, as most men caught in a sex thing generally do. But is this any worse than other adulterous men who screw around and subsequently get divorced and remarried? Say for example Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump who each did it twice? It certainly isn’t as bad as convicted pedophile Dennis Hastert who, like Gingrich, was one of the men who supported Clinton’s impeachment and sanctimoniously fed off his philandering.

Most Clinton detractors can come up with a long list of things they hated about his presidency. Yet if they keep an open mind and look at this list of accomplishments, I would bet there are things they liked. For example, Conservatives might approve of the budget surplus and paying down the Debt. Liberals might approve of the Brady Bill and Assault Weapons Ban. For those who complain that he moved too far to the right, remember that in the 1994 midterms, Republicans gained 54 seats in the House and 8 seats in the Senate to have total control of Congress. Their Contract for America was a prototype for proposing simplistic solutions to complex problems. When they couldn’t get their way, they whined, stamped their feet, and shut down the government. Sound familiar? To get anything done required compromise and Bill wanted to get things done.

As for Hillary, before there was ObamaCare there was HillaryCare in 1993, and it was hated by Republicans at least as much. She was vilified for having the gall as a woman to influence public policy, trying to help people. According to Politifact, “Clinton was key to creating the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides coverage for 8 million children.”

White males in power couldn’t stand that a woman was smart, powerful and assertive. They resented and hated her. And the press hated her.  And they persecuted her. She has been beat up and endlessly bullied by her opponents and the media, particularly by the NY Times and Maureen Dowd. According to MediaMatters:

“Dowd has a decades-long history of attacking Clinton, often invoking bizarre comparisons in her criticism. According to a recent Media Matters analysis of Dowd’s columns on Clinton dating back to 1993, 75 percent of 212 columns that made significant mention of Clinton were negative.”

It all reinforced a narrative: Hillary was dishonest and untrustworthy and inauthentic, whatever that means.

If you want to hate me for pointing this out or think I’m a dupe, fine.

 

POLICY

This article in the New Yorker makes a case that Hillary is more hawkish than President Obama and would more likely pursue a military option. In the past she has advocated for more aggressive military action, particularly in the Middle East.

I believe that the US has a role to play in the world, not as rogue Cops of the World, but more as facilitators of peace, especially in conjunction with international alliances such as the UN and NATO. It’s often a moral thing to do and a stable peaceful world is good for business, for the most part. Bill intervened in the Balkans and regretted not doing more in Rwanda.

Yet we need to stop advocating and actively working for regime change in other countries. It rarely works out the way we want and more often than not results in a failed state or one with a more repressive society. How would we like it if a foreign country advocated the overthrow of our government and gave weapons to groups in our country working to accomplish that goal? I think we’d be pretty pissed.

We just have to accept that in some places, especially in the Middle East, some people are going to hate us no matter what we do. I favor being less aggressive and less interventionist than Hillary is purported to be.

If you’re still interested, Wikipedia has an extensive synopsis of the Political Positions of Hillary Clinton, domestic and foreign.

I certainly don’t agree with Hillary on every issue; I don’t agree with anyone on every issue, including myself, if you know what I mean (I sometimes change my mind). But her domestic policy agenda is one that I overwhelmingly favor.

Wikipedia has a corresponding synopsis of the Political Positions of Donald Trump. Most of them seem contradictory, illegal, immoral, incoherent or just plain anathema to what I believe in. I challenge any of my friends and acquaintances to spend five minutes reading through this and still think he is reasonable alternative to Hillary Clinton.

 

Crooked, corrupt Hillary.

This is what all the upstanding political moralists and purists speak about with disdain. They are incredulous that anyone could like, approve of, or vote for someone as corrupt as Hillary Clinton. What a bullying narrative!

Whatever the Clintons have done wrong, the excesses of their accusers has had a backlash. The vitriol of the accusations, the redundant and expensive investigations, the tenuous and circumstantial evidence, and the whirlwind of spin does more to create a reasonable doubt than a certainty for conviction.

From Whitewater to Benghazi to the email server, it’s like an arcade game throwing darts at balloons, trying to find evidence of scandal to win a prize; often by people who make the most outrageous excuses of behavior by those on the other side of the aisle.

If you want to talk basic corruption, taking money for influence and the appearance of impropriety, I maintain that the corruption is systemic in American politics. When it is necessary for candidates to raise vast sums of money to seek office or reelection, when special interest groups can donate enormous amounts of money to candidates, when the use of PACs and Super PACS show that there really are no more rules, the problem of corruption is bigger than any one candidate. (Bernie Sanders demonstrated it doesn’t have to be that way, but he is the exception.)

For all the money that the Clintons have taken in over the past decade, and it’s been quite a bit, no one has ever proved that there has ever been a quid pro quo, a payment for a particular deed. And that is the standard for corruption in our present system.

Has she told lies? Yeah, but I’m not completely without that sin and won’t cast the first stone. Every politician tells lies or spins the truth. She’s just a little clumsy about it and happened to tell a few obvious or stupid ones.

Do I trust her? More than some, less than others.

 

Admitting to liking Hillary Clinton has become as embarrassing as admitting to liking a bad movie or TV show. Confessions: yeah, I liked Showgirls; yeah, I watched Petticoat Junction. Yeah, I even liked eating bologna sandwiches on white bread!

Overall, I believe Hillary Clinton has many of the same policy prescriptions as I do and I believe she will try to implement them in a pragmatic, incremental way. Unfortunately she will be obstructed every inch of that way by Republicans, just like President Obama was: filibusters in the Senate, control in the House. Little will be accomplished but a great deal of deconstruction will be prevented.

For now, I’ll say it again: I like Hillary Clinton for President and I shudder at the alternative. I’m out of the closet on this and expecting to take a few lumps.

 

:>Howard Flantzer