The Lesser Despicable Me

So now we are in the mean season of presidential politics. Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Tea Party, Sanderites, whatever your leaning may be, we are in it drowning under the rhetoric of old guard jingoism for the Democrats and outright fear mongering from a candidate that has no bounds and has a gift for letting his foot land in his mouth on way too many occasions. So, who would you choose, these lesser of two evils?

Hillary Clinton has been around for decades. She's like that infection that just won't go away. You'd think that when her husband, Bill, was president for eight years that she would fold up the tent and call it a day. Prior to that, she was a governor's wife. Being First Lady had it's moments but she had bigger ambitions. She just didn't want to bake the cookies or plant the flowers, she wanted to make policies. And try as she might, she did just that but was met with fierce opposition. After all, she wasn't voted into office to make policy, her husband was. Was she overstepping her boundaries? For a lot of people in the Washington beltway, she was doing just that. She wasn't making any friends real fast. But that was the pattern before the ascended to the White House. Bill and Hillary Clinton has always been surrounded with innuendos and speculation about their business and personal dealings. There was always the constant rumors about Bill's roving eyes and hands and mouth and other bodily parts. Women came forth to pronounce Bill's attempts at forcing sex on them or just plain out having a sexual relationship with the man. Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers are the most noteworthy of the women who came forth in the beginning against him for sexual harassment and for having an affair respectively. And when the youthful Monica Lewinsky was outed as the White House intern who obliged Bill Clinton with oral favors, you'd think that this would be the thing that would derail them but it didn't.

Hillary Clinton was on the defensive. None of this was true. Even Bill Clinton infamously said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” in a finger pointing speech to the public. As lies would go, that's right next to Richard Nixon's “I'm not a crook”. But Hillary took the prize by going on national television to decry a “vast right wing conspiracy.” But in the end, the truth and DNA evidence by way of a semen stained dress, bore out. You would think after all of Bill's questionable behavior and this huge stain on the Oval Office that she would have walked away, but she didn't. No one could figure out why she stayed?

But you have to go back to the Whitewater episode and that first round of behavior. Whitewater was a real estate deal that went wrong for a lot of people. Bill and Hillary were players in the game who became insulated with, some would feel, the help of Jim and Susan McDougal, owner of the Madison Guaranty Saving and Loan, that conducted the transaction for the Whitewater land deal. Bill and Hillary and Jim and Susan were thick together and were from the old school were loyalty is rewarded. Jim and Susan took the fall for Whitewater. Bill and Hillary enjoyed the perks of the White House. Susan served time. Bill pardoned her.

For those who still remember that time, one of the things that stood out during that time was the sit down interview Hillary did with a news outlet and this is where her pure arrogance and white privilege shown true. When asked of her practice as an attorney during the Whitewater era, somewhere in that response was “would of, could of, should of” in such a cavalier, I don't give a rat's ass way of saying you have nothing on me and I am untouchable. It was the equivalent of “fuck you, fuck your horse you rode in on”. And it was strange that her law firm's billing records mysteriously shows up in a White House room and nobody has a clue as to how they got there. After all, this is the White House, the most secure office on the planet where everything and everyone is monitored and yet, law firm billing records show up out of nowhere. And you wonder why she has bad poll numbers when it comes to trust. Sixty-eight percent of the people find her untrustworthy. The Clinton administration gave us Whitewater, Travel-gate, haircut-gate, renting out the Lincoln bedroom for big campaign donors and Monica Lewinsky. That's enough for three presidents.

So they move out and on from the White House. They create a foundation, Hillary decides to be a carpetbagger New Yorker and runs for the Senate and wins. The Clinton raked in the dough with speaking fees and donations. She then wants to run for president the first time out and assumes the position that she is entitled to this ascension to the throne. But wait, some upstart wants to horn in on her rise to the top. That upstart is junior senator Barack Obama. She dismisses him from the start but wait, there are rumblings on the way to the throne. It seems that Obama has legs in this fight. He challenge her and Bill. How dare he get in the way of Hillary. Word gets back to Obama that he should wait his turn, it's Hillary's time in the sun. Bill I going off on a tangent. But we've seen Bill's tyrannical behavior before. We get a glimpse of his tirade when he first ran for office. And we see it again we he is combative with the late ABC News journalist, Peter Jennings, when Peter confronts him on the issues of his administration and the scandals. It is interesting to see that being contrite wasn't Bill's approach when he was caught in the scandal and accepting responsibility for it rather than standing fast on your ground and maneuvering around the words as if your were avoiding land mines. Who can forget when Bill Clinton, in his deposition said, “It depends upon what the meaning of 's' is”. That was the moment the general public witness the ultimate hubris of who this man was in all of his spectacular glory.

When she ran for president the first time, she tried to make herself a sympathetic victim of the old boys network. She made the claim that she was under sniper fire while in Bosnia was untrue. Brian Williams made some similar statement that got him booted from the anchor chair at NBC News. But Hillary is a crafty politician. She schemes, she plots, she has allies laying in the wings waiting to do her bidding. She knows how the machine works. If you need her to cry, she cries. Boom, a bump in the polls. She is human, she is caring. But is she likable. During that time, Obama made the statement to her that she's “likable enough”. What that meant spoke to her coldness to things. She will go along with what is popular but not what is right. She went along with the Iraq war and could not envision it down the road of what the consequences would lead to. She now calls that decision a mistake. She's had a lot of those in her career, “mistakes”.

She loses out to Obama for the presidency. He hires her own as Secretary of State. She still hasn't left the public eye at all. You can see the wheels turning in her eyes as she takes that position with ulterior motives at play. In some aspect, she reminds you of Livia, Augustus Caesar's plotting and scheming wife from I, Claudius. Every move is calculating, every move is deadly, she strikes like a snake but you don't see it coming, it's stealthy. The only thing she is doing is allowing Donald Trump to play right into her hands. He is letting his mouth derail any chance of a determinable challenge to the presidency. Clinton's latest mistake has been the email server scandal. While Hillary is steady grinning like the Cheshire Cat, Donald is imploding on his own narcissism.

Donald's run for the office was looked upon as a joke. After all, thus guy had made promises in the past that he would jump in a take a run for the office. And as the primaries rolled along and he kept, as Charlie Sheen would say, winning, he would become the presumptive challenger removing the likes of seasoned politicians like Jeb Bush. Along the way, he made enemies from all corners. He had enemies on the left, enemies on the right and enemies in between. He's alienated Muslims by wanting to bar them from entering the country because of the spate of terrorist acts and he wants to build a wall along the Mexican-Texas-California border to keep the illegal immigrants out and it doesn't improve the situation that he called many of them rapist and murderers. Maybe he was referring to the case of Rafael Resendez-Ramirez aka Angel Maturino Reséndiz, Rafael Resendez-Ramirez aka Angel Maturino Reséndiz, otherwise known as the Railroad Killer. He killed at least 15 people and sexually assaulted many of the female victims. But that doesn't make every Mexican national a murderer or rapist just like not every billionaire is a major league asshole with a god complex.

Donald has been in business for all of his adult life. He treats people in a business like manner. He treats deals in the same way. He knows how to work the system and he knows when to file for bankruptcy when it fits his agenda. Running a business, however, is not the same as running a government. The politicians he offended, should he win the office, are the same he needs to work with in order to get anything accomplished. It's the necessary evil that's been in play long before Donald was a gleam in his father 's eye. The art of the deal in politics will not be some 384 page manifesto of glad handing your opponent from across the aisle. It's more like The Godfather, you make an offer that your opponent can't refuse. With business, as in politics, everything is The Godfather, leave the gun, take the cannoli.

Donald must love the taste of his feet. He keeps it in there all the time. But is he the better candidate when comparing the two? I've stopped listening to both candidates. Whenever any of them show up on the screen, I hit the mute button. I don't want to hear them speak. All of it is contentious rhetoric. Nobody is saying anything that needs to be said. It's just a snipe hunt of the lowest form. Of bullying and grandstanding. Hillary refuses to go away. She's been in our faces for over twenty years. We've seen her aged from a smart dress wearing, long flowing hair woman to a mom haircut, pants suit wearing, androgynous being with heavy bags under her eyes who needs to stop grinning at everyone with those teeth. Donald has turned out to be a disappointment. I don;t see him turning it around anytime soon. The likelihood of either one of them becoming president is a nightmare. Was there anyone else who could have ran for the Democratic party without Hillary's machine corrupting the system? Bernie Sander's sure felt that one after it was disclosed that his own party conspired to keep him alienated from reaching the influence of party leaders. It's no telling what more we will find out with the additional Wiki leaks coming from the breach of the DNC computers? Hillary and Bill have learned not to leave fingerprints behind from their past dealings. With the exception of one infamous stain, maybe there might be another.