VAL 2016 | Det känns nästan som ett helgerån att rada upp alla argument som talar mot Hillary Clinton som USA:s nästa president.
Men det kan behövas lite mer fokus på Hillary Clinton med tanke på att republikanernas freakshow verkar suga upp allt syret i bevakningen kring partiernas interna kamp om vem som skall bli deras presidentkandidat.
“And those of us who would sooner leap into an active, bubbling volcano than vote for Mr Trump will have to try to convince ourselves that really, she’s not that bad. Is she?”, skriver Christopher Buckley.
Well…även om allt kan se normalt ut i jämförelse med Donald Trump finns det trots alla en hel det att säga om Hillary.
Christopher Buckley, tidigare talskrivare åt George H. W. Bush, har skrivit en lång rad roliga böcker med politiska teman (t.ex. The White House Mess och They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?) som gör honom lämplig att ta sig an Hillary.
Hon har vid det här laget hunnit bli USA:s längsta politiska följetong. Och med så många år på den politiska scenen har hon också hunnit samla på sig en hel del ”bagage”.
Only last summer, her goose seemed all but cooked. Every day she offered another Hillary-ous explanation for why as Secretary of State she required two Blackberries linked to unclassified servers. Eventually this babbling brook of prevarication became so tedious that even her Marxist challenger, Comrade Bernie Sanders of the Vermont Soviet, was moved to thump the debate podium and proclaim: ‘I’m sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!’ (He has since backtracked, declaring himself now deeply interested in her damn emails.)
[…]
The presumptive next president of the United States is viewed as ‘honest’ and ‘trustworthy’ by less than 40 per cent of the electorate. Call us naive, but some Americans stubbornly cling to the notion that our leaders shouldn’t always look as though they’re thinking: ‘Which lie did I tell?’ Nor do we like to be played for fools, although this may seem a questionable assertion in the era of Trump Ascendant. Still, when someone who wades hip-deep in Wall Street money — $3 million in speeches, $17 million in campaign contributions — tells us that she will have no truck with the evil barons of finance, it’s hard to keep a straight face.
But never mind us — how does she manage? When you and your husband have banked $125 million in speaking fees from the odious malefactors of wealth, and you insist that you feel the pain of the middle class. How do you maintain the deadpan after you’ve cashed $300,000 for a half-hour speech at a state university — which fee comes from student dues — and then declaim against crippling student loans?
Small lies are often more revealing, especially when there was no need for them. Claiming, say, that you were named after Sir Edmund Hillary when you were born six years before he became a household name; or that you sought to enlist in the US Marines after years of protesting against the Vietnam War, graduating from Yale Law School and working on the campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern; or that you dodged sniper fire on the tarmac in Bosnia, when TV footage shows you strolling across it, smiling.
And what — hello? — about that tweet last September about how ‘Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.’ Does that include the women who say they were groped by your husband, and the one who says she was raped? Pace Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman: ‘Every word she [says] is a lie, including “and” and “the”.’
[…]
Mrs Clinton’s flip-flop closet has reached Imelda Marcos levels. There’s the Iraq War vote flip-flop; the gay marriage flip-flop; the Keystone Pipeline flip-flop; the legalising marijuana flip-flop; and most recently, the Trans-Pacific Partnership flip-flop.
[…]
When the latest version of Hillary was rolled out like a new product by her campaign apparatus, she was rebranded as a doting granny. What’s more ‘likeable’ than a granny? Unfortunately for her, the meme didn’t stick. But then it’s hard to look like a cooing old sweetie when you’re swatting away snarling congressmen on Benghazi and explaining that you’re suddenly against a trade treaty you promoted for years. None of this does much for the likeability or honesty factor.
Bild: Henry Payne. Fler teckningar på hans hemsida.
the Campaign Dossier 
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