The Hillary Emails Smear-job Has Delivered Everything But Truth
As the greatest smear-campaign in American history sneaks into its 4th year, you can’t help but be impressed at the scumsucker dream team assembled to see it through. Never before has a single person been the target of a 23+million dollar congressional witch hunt, a right-wing news (propaganda) website whose editor works for her political opponent, a rapist who’s become a hero by disclosing classified information and sharing private citizen data (in both cases jeopardizing credit, lives, the future of the world), and the Russian intelligence community. And despite all the claims that this closet-skeleton-unearther HOF has been merely seeking the truth, the truth is actually quite the opposite. That is, this consortium has been assembled seemingly to bend the truth about one candidate while obscuring her shady counter. The battle over the Hillary emails will go down as one of the greatest acts of misdirection since Houdini.
The Hypocrisy of the Hillary Emails Debacle
As I wrote in a previous article, American partisan politics are being split by hideous hypocrisy propped up by a world wide web where you can find any article to back up your beliefs. Never mind the fact that these articles often aren’t very well vetted, that many of them amount mostly to bluster and that we’ve come to confuse memes for facts. While we claim to be in the information era, it seems more often than not that people are looking for material that supports their currently-held understandings and beliefs instead of pursuing ones that challenge them, as a real searcher of knowledge would.
But the real hypocrisy seems to be in the world of truth and transparency. Namely, who’s hiding something vs. who has shown us everything, who are the good guys vs. who are the criminals, and what is an abuse of power vs. what’s a just cause in service to mankind.
We’ll start with that great noble exposer, the hero of the common man who’s been hiding in an Ecuadorian Embassy to escape a rape charge, the GOP’s best friend Julian Assange.
Assange: The Rapist With An Agenda A Cause
A few years ago Julian Assange became a hero of conspiracy freaks everywhere for founding WikiLeaks and dumping a trove of secret US government info all over the Internet. The biggest revelation was the fact that Hillary Clinton had our people spy on Ban Ki Moon, head of the UN. Most of this was traced to Chelsea (FKA Bradley) Manning, a turncoat US military rat. Overnight Assange had a career as a revealer of state secrets. Which in theory is admirable if we hold to the anarcho-socialist idea that a government should fear its people, not the other way around. Or if we had no intelligence or diplomatic agents putting their lives at risk to help America stay one step ahead of international hostiles.
Because Assange didn’t just release secret cables about spying at the UN or internal turpitude over the Iraq war. He released names of diplomats and spies and military strategies and positions. He then claimed he didn’t want to hurt people, no, of course not, he’s not the weasel taking your dirty underwear out of the trash and charging people a nickle to see the coffee stains, no, he’s a noble hero, so he released the reports again but in redacted form through major media. For all the people who were shocked at secret bombing runs on US enemies and that we’d spy on our allies and were later incensed by Snowden’s NSA spying bombshell (wait, the US government keeps secrets from us and spies on people? The heck you say!), Assange was lady liberty flashing her light on sinister leaders in trenchcoats. And of course on Secretary of State HRC.
Assange was marked for extradition to the US from that point, of course. His outrage at what he claimed was an effort by the world’s letter-wearing jock picking on a simple teller of truth was a nice act to cover up the fact that he launched this big leak around the time he was accused of rape by two Swedish women (the timing’s REALLY interesting if anybody wanted to hold him to the same standards of justice and truth he claims form the cornerstone of his great calling as exposer) so he did what any hero does — he sought refuge in a foreign consulate in London. He’s been living in the Ecuadorian Embassy there ever since. Of course WikiLeaks was falling out of style following Snowden’s big bombshell. Assange was the protagonist of a Benedict Cumberbatch movie nobody saw and TMZ was rolling out more hard-hitting secrets that Wikileaks. Then came the DNC emails reveal, one of the the biggest broadsides launched by the GOP in the pro-Trump/anti-Hillary campaign of 2016.
The emails showed that the DNC had wanted Hillary to be the nominee and pushed that hard through their political and media contacts (as if, again, that was a surprise? Hillary’s grandkid has been a Democrat longer than Bernie so…).
Never mind the fact that the GOP was touting the noble virtues of a man who had previously compromised national security while claiming that Hillary’s use of a private email server compromised national security (and it should be added that despite his role as great revealer of secrets and hacker wet dream outlet he never got any of the Hillary emails)(it took over 23 million dollars of taxpayer dollars to get those and who knows how much more time and money and strings to paint them as significant to our democracy) .
Now Assange has declared he has other campaign secrets to unveil soon that’ll hit Hillary hard if they “catch fire,” which no doubt they will given the anti-Hillary propaganda machine that used to be known as the Republican party. Many of the people who formerly claimed Russia our nation’s top enemy seem all too happy to accept revelations delivered by Russian government hackers to a Swedish rapist living in an Ecuadorian Embassy in London (Brexit 2K16!). And both sides are basking in the “gotchas,” leading Hill to be called the most crooked politician of all time (apparently nobody has ever heard of Dick Nixon, or Ollie North-Ronald Reagan-George H.W. Bush, or Dick “I hired my own company to build substandard buildings for the fake war I made the puppet start” Cheney).
Again, I would expect that from the party that a few years ago said Hillary was unbeatable. But all the supposed liberals swallowing Assange’s loads and jumping on the “crooked Hillary” bandwagon have ignored the fact that their bright light of transparency has ruined the lives of normal people with such “noble” acts as outing a Saudi man as gay (a crime punishable by death in Saudia Arabia), publishing the names of rape victims, and vomiting Social Security numbers, CC info, medical files and everything else that both conservatives and liberals would see as grounds for stringing up a man by his neck in the public arena were they not so committed to their dislike of Hillary (a dislike that may be more deep-seated in the commitment to the power of the penis than anything else). Apparently privacy is no longer a concern for the very people who once claimed hacking of private information destroyed freedom. Which can be confusing as those same people with no regard for privacy or confidentiality are the ones accusing a woman of jeopardizing lives by sending sensitive info to her own email in an offsite server.
What’s Assange’s angle here with the Trumplove? Perhaps he thinks his path to freedom from exile in a British embassy that smells of chiles and arroz con pollo 24-7 is found by helping a man who’s also been accused of rape, by his ex-wife no less? Maybe Assange knows Hillary will want to extradite him for his spycraft 6 years ago?
But maybe it doesn’t matter at exactly this moment because we’ve moved on from the DNC emails. This week’s headline is the new 15 thousand emails Hillary previously said were lost and what was found in them. They weren’t discovered by Swedish rapists trying to escape a rap or by Russian hackers trying to elect a playboy their Oligarch would be able to outwit at a political roundtable. They were uncovered by the most unprecedented and egregious abuse of public money ever used to assasinate a political opponent.
The Biggest Taxpayer-funded Partisan Smear Campaign Ever
The Republican party is incapable of competing at that level” — Newt Gingrich re: the prospect of a Hillary 2016 candidacy, during a 2012 appearance on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”
Ahh, but that’s the key. They couldn’t compete with her at her great heights and with her incomparable qualifications. They had to knock her down a few pegs. The great pedestal-puncher delivered by God just as Newt uttered these words? Benghazi.
US temporary consulates in dangerous territories have been getting overrun for decades. Hell, under Bush there were 39 attacks on embassies or consulates and 20 of them resulted in at least 1 death. Condoleezza Rice wasn’t dragged through the mud for 4 years. So it’s pretty unprecedented that Congress has launched several investigations of Hillary after just one such attack. Maybe it was trying to get to the bottom of things. But that should only take 1 congressional investigation. Up until the publication of Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi report, the minimum cost to taxpayers was $23 million dollars.
Everybody knows about Kevin McCarthy’s admission that the Benghazi investigation was an effective tool in hurting Hillary at the polls. And unfortunately for the investigators left after McCarthy was kicked out of the club for truthiness, Gowdy’s final report found no real fault with Hillary’s handling of the incident except that she did her job and followed orders from above (while the report showed the DOD, unfortunately, did the opposite, delaying deployment long after intervention was called for). It did find one thing for their thousands of man-hours and unlimited congressional resources, though — that she used a private server to conduct State Department business.
Again, using a private email for a top official wasn’t anything new, nor was it explicitly illegal. And so they started combing through those emails. After the FBI said she never acted illegally the Republicans, growing desperate, spun it as FBI’s Comey kowtowing to his boss and so they kept spending resources to get to the bottom of it. Nobody had found anything that justified 4 years and tens of millions of dollar, nor that would land Hillary in jail, the Republicans’ best chance of ensuring they could slide into the White House without changing their rotting foundation. They had to spin it right so they could keep digging. I mean, what else would they do? They hadn’t done much governing in half a decade and weren’t going to start now (side note: clean out the lazy House). And finally they found it: emails that showed Hillary took special meetings with people who contributed to the Clinton Foundation. This is also not illegal unless she took any illegal actions for these people and nothing has shown that. She can take meetings with whomever she decides to (and most top level pols have spent their careers cultivating relationships with the rich and powerful and in turn will pick up the phone when they call; does this really surprise you?) and Bill’s association with his legacy foundation (an org which, as an aside, has done seemingly innumerable good things (literally a world of good), especially when put up against the Donald’s piddly little tax write-off) was explicitly condoned by all powers that be.
However, the hue and cry still goes out that she’s corrupt. That she’s hiding something despite the fact that literally everything she’s done over the last 5 years — all her emails, her taxes, her every appointment, her every dealing as Secretary of State — has been laid bare. This has been a study in the inner workings of American politics, the give and take of assuaging the people while keeping the state running, a basic tit for tat every Poli-Sci major learns about at some point in year 3. And despite the egregious abuse of power and resources by supposed public servants undertaken to take down their adversary, she’s labeled as the person abusing her position as public servant? That’s hypocrisy at its finest and unfortunately the American people are eating it up.
They call for more. More revelations. There are so many near-misses here, so many regular government happenings (take e-mail deletion, a favorite of Dick Cheney) that nobody knew about that people are calling for more. One of the greatest intelligence collabs in political history has been aimed at Hillary Clinton and provided plenty nothings that can be spun into questionable offenses but no smoking guns.
Depressingly few people have called into question this great consortium of Breitbart News (an “alt-right” publication specializing in catering to a certain pale, retrogressive priapic population but posing as a real media outlet despite the fact that its head just happens to be running a candidate’s campaign), the United States Congress, Russian intelligence and of course Julian Assange. Believing the exposition of the Hillary emails has all been a patriotic mission to show the crookedness of the possible first female president of the United States is like believing “Keeping Up With The Kardashians” is shot without writers or stagecraft.
But it also begs the question: Why are people claiming a woman who’s been vetted by arguably the biggest muckraking endeavor in history has something to hide without calling out the fact that the Donald has remained more closed-lipped about himself than any politician in the modern era?
Trump: The Great Hypocrite
The worse type of liar is the hypocrite, a man or woman who not only lies to people but whose central lies consist of holding somebody else to a standard they don’t pass themselves.
Hillary Clinton has been stripped bare and eviscerated, her guts hung out in the sun to dry for easy analysis. Meanwhile there has been nothing from Donald Trump’s side even approaching transparency. All the people screaming Hillary’s hiding some great crime and is a liar because of it don’t seem to find any reason to demand the same transparency of their candidate.
In some ways it’s why he’s the only candidate who could run against HRC: Anybody that impugns Trump’s endless trove of questionable and unscrupulous business deals, from refusing to pay vendors to cheering for the Great Recession, can be met with “He’s just a good businessman and that’s what they do,” as if there is no such thing as business ethics (Eric would’ve done so much better at Trump than Madison Hotels). If you say that Hillary’s just a good politician, they say “No, she’s a public servant” (do you think Trump will make a good servant?). Meanwhile, it’s unscrupulous businesspeople who sent manufacturing jobs overseas to places where people will still work for 20 cents an hour 20 hours a day without paid vacation or health insurance and who pad executive bonuses while leaving lower-level pay stagnant and who took advantage of the American dream of homeownership to line their own pockets. I have no idea how the myth that we should implicitly trust execs gained so much traction but it was likely funded by those very executives who see the average American as just barely smarter than a well-trained chimp.
Along those lines, everybody asking to see the inside of Hillary’s ribcage refuses to demand to see Trump’s taxes (had a guy the other day say, “It’s because he uses every trick in the book to refuse paying taxes, which is just good business but, you know, would look bad.” Like tax evasion).
How about we ask him to explain the discriminatory or other fractious policies that led his organization to 13 different undisclosed settlements with employees? Or explain that settlement on the criminal case. Or did he really mean that 2nd Amendmenters should shoot Hillary? Or does he want the Russians to hack an American politician?
Where are the people asking him why he claims to want to bring jobs to America when his products are made abroad? Or even to see his exact plans on taxes? Or how to build a wall that is impermeable (the Chinese probably would be interested in that one too, theirs having fallen to the savages centuries ago)?
In the end, the biggest cancer on this great democratic republic is the half-truth, or downright lie, presented as truth. And the greatest lie right now is the one presented by the right, in which the most-picked-and-prodded political candidate ever is labeled as a corrupt liar while the man who’s revealed exactly zero about his agenda, his personal life or his dealings is considered a bastion of truth.
The Hillary emails have shown nothing except that Hillary is great at building relationships with the right people and has the backing of the most influential and most powerful in the world. People have said that the emails infer wrongdoing, that we shouldn’t think since there’s no smoking gun that she didn’t break the law. But what they seem to ignore is the fact that possibly the greatest international intelligence collaboration aimed at one person since the hunt for Osama Bin Laden hasn’t found any smoking gun so likely one doesn’t exist.
What’s really disconcerting, though, is the fact that they ask her to strip nude in front of an X-Ray machine and still accuse her of hiding something while their fuhrer sits under lead blankets with a black trenchcoat pulled from his wingtips up over his face and refuses to even give a peek past the lapels. Yet they somehow give him a pass.
This misdirection magic trick is just the right’s newest attack on truth. And the most frightening fact is that seemingly nobody cares that they’re being conned into accepting as true an exact mirror image of reality.
