rage rant (another drumpfy apologist sparked this)
(from a friend of a friend in NM, with her full permission)
I just spent the last twenty minutes rage-vomiting in response to a Trump-apologia comment ("They're equally bad/emailghazi!/he has flaws but Hillary's a liar"
on a friend's post about hearting Bernie but totally voting for Hillary in November. Pasting it here for anyone's use.
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I'm sorry, I must have missed when Hillary suggested building a border wall with Mexico. Can you provide me a link to that? Or to the time she suggested deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants? That must've been around the same time she advocated "punishment" for women who've had abortions, right? Which was at the same press conference where she said we should ban Muslims from entering the US?
I also definitely missed when Hillary embraced the white supremacist movement and incited violence against protesters, primarily POC, at her campaign rallies. Do you have a video clip of when that happened? That time she selected one of the most virulent anti-LGBT bigots in the nation as her VP candidate also went right under my radar. She sure fooled me! To think I was swayed when Edie Windsor and Jim Obergefell both endorsed her! That'll teach me to listen to actual LGBT people who personally bore the standard for marriage equality instead of regurgitated right-wing talking points developed by Karl Rove.
Have some of her political positions changed over the years, along with the rest of the country's? Hell yes. Even Bernie Sanders signed off on a "let's celebrate one man/one woman marriage" declaration at one point. Why is there outrage that her positions have evolved FOR THE BETTER - an evolution visibly related to her practice of reaching out to marginalized people and listening to their concerns and the realities of their everyday lives?
The casual equation of Hillary Clinton's astonishing record of public service championing children, women, people with disabilities, and a slew of other marginalized groups, with Donald Trump's vile, hateful demagoguery is so factually wrong that it crosses into morally reprehensible.
Last: your description of the FBI's exoneration of Hillary Clinton is like a bad Engrish translation. Comey did not say that "people have gone to jail for less," he said that the facts did not support criminal charges while also pointing out that some people have been sanctioned *administratively*, which refers to a separate set of civil rules and regulations that is outside the FBI's jurisdiction. That is why once the FBI investigation concluded, the State Department finished its own evaluation of whether non-criminal rules had been violated. (Spoiler: they hadn't, because the law didn't prohibit bringing your own server until after Clinton left office.)
Comey also said, repeatedly, that Clinton was truthful with the FBI. You can bet that if there had been a whiff of lying, this investigation, backed by the full power of Congress and given unlimited funding, would've fucking found it. And yet - for the umpteenth time, her political enemies came up empty-handed. They've come up empty-handed every single time they've gone after her since 1992. How lucky for them that so many people have been primed for so long to hate Hillary Clinton that those people don't even bother to learn the actual outcome of the latest witch-hunt - it's just taken as read that she's guilty liar in spite of the fact that that claim has never, ever been borne out by actual proof.
In contrast, Trump is literally the worst liar to ever achieve his political stature. He is profoundly dishonest and corrupt, as is illustrated by his grotesque business history and the recent revelations of his financial dependence on Russian creditors and his other ties to Putin. The Pulitzer-prize winning Politifact rates him as lying around 90% of the time. NINETY PERCENT.
NINETY.
PERCENT.
LIES.
"Trump has his flaws," you admit. Can we unpack that a little bit? Here are some of the things you are eliding into the innocuous word "flaws":
- he has child rape charges currently pending against him, along with sexual assault charges brought by another adult woman, and a history of other allegations of rape by at least two more women;
- he just invited the Russians to hack the State Department, which is ACTUAL TREASON;
- he is the embodiment of a dangerous personality disorder;
- he has been sued for failing to meet his business obligations - i.e. to pay people what he owes them - literally thousands of times;
- he has embraced the white supremacist movement, including having the RNC include tweets from white supremacist accounts in their curated convention Twitter feed;
- he has spent the past year inciting racist and xenophobic violence at every public appearance he has made;
- he is a profoundly incompetent and corrupt businessman with financial ties to Russian creditors, which would preclude him from getting a security clearance if the Presidency wasn't exempt from that process.
"Flaws."
Tell me again about how the hatred for Hillary Clinton has nothing whatsoever to do with our culture's sick misogynist messages about women lying, or our squeamishness with women holding power, or the mind-boggling double standard always and forever on display when it comes to how men and women are judged, when someone as cartoonishly evil as a treasonous child-raping con artist who can't even get a loan from an American bank is considered a credible alternative to the most qualified individual to ever seek the Presidency.