I can understand people believing that he Clinton’s committed plenty of crimes (including Bill Clinton being involved in Epstein’s crimes). I find it hard to understand thinking that the Clinton’s are still powerful . They are political has-beens and non-billionaires. They are rich and important people who can live a life that most Americans can only dream of, but they aren’t the center of the universe.
Exactly. The Clintons are far from great people, but they’re a far cry from the SPECTRE-seque villains that some would paint them as.
Bill Clinton is pretty a pretty unambiguous pig–well, sex monster, I mean, consent or not, the Monica Lewinsky situation was bad. If you are a college intern and the leader of pretty much any country comes onto you, the consent given is going to be influenced by the power they hold. He’s not a “good guy,” he’s just a lot more savvy and charming than Trump. He’s probably done things that are just as bad as what Trump has done, and I have no love of the man. With that said, while he should have gotten in trouble for what he did in the 90’s, the impeachment proceedings against him weren’t motivated by the stated reasons at all. For one, it was a “moral” question rather than a legal one, and two the real motivation was that the Republican-controlled Congress was furious about losing HWB’s second term to Clinton. They had expected complete hegemony, and they ended up cut off at the knees because Ross Perot came along and split their vote.
They had been working on establishing the bottom-up power scheme they wield now since Nixon, but they used the furor over Clinton to help push local level elections toward Republican candidates and redistrict areas such that it became almost impossible to lose a district once they gained control of it. Clinton should have faced consequences for what he did, but not for the reasons given. He should have faced consequences for using his power and influence for sexual favors, not because it’s morally wrong for two people to have sex, or because marital infidelity is (or should) somehow be illegal. That angle was taken to tug at heart strings, not to get actual justice.
Hillary Clinton is much less objectionable to me than Bill Clinton in that regard, but she is still betrothed to a lot of political and economic policies that are repellent to me, and I think she is more concerned about winning than she is about the things she claims to care about. Would she have been a better president than Trump? Yes. GW Bush was a better president than Trump and he was a goddamned unmitigated disaster. Trump is the US Putin, only Putin is savvy and cunning, whereas Trump is very little more than a hapless blowhard who gets his way by screaming until people stop challenging him.
The Clintons have money, and they have some influence, but if they had the kind of broad and deep reach that the Trump camp would have us believe, then Trump wouldn’t have won the election. Plain and simple. Trump isn’t even all that wealthy as far as it goes, at least not in terms of fungible assets. He has property, but he can’t exactly sell Trump Tower off tomorrow to turn it into cash and he’s at the mercy of needing people to want to lease from him to make money from it. Add to that the fact that he’s dragged his own brand through the mud (that’s where most of his money was coming from, people paying him to slap his name on things to associate them with luxury and wealth, and his behavior has president has turned a lot of people off from that) and the guy isn’t nearly as wealthy as he’d have people believe.
What Trump does have is an army of goons, racists, and shills. He has people who are so blindly committed to the “you can’t trust Democrats” ideology that they will betray even their own supposed religious principles in order to service this cause. What’s very scary about this is he panders especially to fascist ideals, and the fascists and white supremacists have been making a concerted effort to take over law enforcement and the prison system for decades. That’s not a rumor, it’s a stated long-term goal. I was involved in forum raiding these pricks 15 years ago, the things they said they’d do, they’ve done. Even if Trump doesn’t directly call upon a specific individual to do an evil thing, all he needs to do is gesture that he wants it, and some people sympathetic to him will make it happen.
The Clintons can, at best, get some people to stand outside and wave some signs. They don’t have an army of “independent actors” who are carefully listening for dog whistle instructions, but Trump does. Trump also has a bad habit of, immediately after doing a bad thing, immediately placing preemptive blame on someone else for it. Nobody was saying he did it, and as far as I can tell the media as a whole isn’t suggesting he did, but even if he didn’t call someone up and say “make it happen” the guy was definitely involved in some indirect capacity–I mean, if nothing else, Epstein may have been a goddamned coward who was afraid to spend the remainder of his days in prison but there’s also every reason to suspect that he’d be terrified of what Trump’s goons who are well represented in law enforcement and the prison system would do to him if Epstein’s documentation resulted in actionable charges, or even embarrassing revelations about the guy. That’s the thing with a radicalized mob, it doesn’t take much provocation to make them turn violent. Trump might be incompetent at virtually everything, but he has definitely figured out how to access and manipulate that.
