Under normal circumstances, a Republican wouldn’t feel compelled to explain why he wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton. But 2016 is a year like no other. And in this year like no other, it has become an article of faith among supporters of Donald Trump that a refusal to vote for their man is a vote for Hillary Clinton. This is utter nonsense. Such logic implies that Trump is entitled to our vote without earning it. While it is true that some Republicans who object to Trump will vote for Hillary, I will not be among them.
Last week, when I wrote my 10 reasons why I would never vote for Donald Trump during the Republican National Convention, I promised I would also list my 10 reasons why I could never vote for Hillary Clinton during the Democratic National Convention. Well, promises made, promises kept.
Hillary Clinton’s conduct in setting up a private e-mail server which transmitted top secret information and the FBI declining to recommend criminal charges demonstrates that she is above the law. Worse, Hillary acts like there is one law for her and her family and one law for everyone else. Oh, she takes “full responsibility” for her e-mails while saying other Secretaries of State have done the same. So when Hillary takes full responsibility for something, she is really taking no responsibility at all. This is a very dangerous quality for someone who seeks the office of President of the United States to possess.
Any government official who feels the need to ask, “At this point what does difference does it make?” where it concerns the deaths of four Americans including our Ambassador to Libya is unfit to be President of the United States. Mind you she asked this question after publicly blaming an internet video for the attack on the consulate, an attack that just happened to occur on the 11th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Of course, her e-mail correspondence with daughter Chelsea on the attack indicated it was carried out by an “al Qaeda like group.” Again, Hillary takes full responsibility, but as she told Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes, “It was not my ball to carry.” We’ve come a long way from “The Buck stops here” to “It was not my ball to carry.” In this case, a long way isn’t a good way.
Is Donald Trump correct to say that Hillary Clinton turned the State Department into her family’s personal hedge fund by using the Clinton Foundation to sell access to foreign governments, many of which have dubious human rights records? Well, Trump ought to know. He helped fund the Clinton Foundation. At the very minimum, there is the appearance of impropriety. At worst, there’s enough corruption to put the UN to shame.
Hillary Clinton has got Russia wrong from the moment she gave Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov a red button that was supposed to say reset in Russian. But instead of saying ‘perezagruzka’ it read ‘peregruzka,’ which means overcharged. It is nevertheless somehow fitting. Hillary may be the only person who actually believes the Russian reset worked. She claimed this because it brought the Russians around on sanctions against Iran. Well, where are those sanctions now? Also the people of Ukraine and Crimea might disagree with that assessment. Oh, things have been reset all right when a 3-Star Russian general can walk into the U.S. Embassy in Iraq and tell our military to get the hell of the sky.
Let’s put it another way. How well has the Russian reset worked if Hillary’s surrogates are blaming Russia for the leak of the DNC e-mails in order to help Trump?
If there’s a position, Hillary Clinton has held it. She’s been for the War in Iraq and she has been against it. She has been against gay marriage and she has been for it. She was pro-Israel, then anti-Israel, and now she’s pro-Israel again. She was for TPP and then along came Bernie Sanders and now she’s against it. Ditto for the Keystone Pipeline. Hillary has wrapped herself in the Second Amendment and has praised Australia’s gun confiscation program. Now Hillary Clinton isn’t the first politician to flip-flop and she won’t be the last, but she has turned flip-flopping into her default position. Combine this with her propensity for lying, there’s no reason anyone should believe a word that traverses her lips.
During a Democrat Town Hall meeting last March, Hillary said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
This did not amuse Bo Copley, a laid off coal miner from West Virginia, who had the rare opportunity to publicly take her to task during a round table discussion in early May. Fighting back tears, Copley asked, “I just want to know how you can say you’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of, out of jobs, and then come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend, because those people out there don’t see you as a friend.”
Hillary’s response was typically self-serving. She told Copley:
I don’t know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context from what I meant, because I’ve been talking about helping coal country for a very long time. And it was a misstatement, because what I was saying is that the way things are going now, we will continue to lose jobs.
Well, when people hear someone use the word “we’re,” that means Hillary intends to actively put coal miners out of business. Coal miners don’t need her kind of help. Hillary’s contempt for working people is plain to see as is her eagerness to insult people’s intelligence.
In February 2011, while appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation then hosted by Bob Schieffer, she incredulously claimed that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was “a reformer.” As soon as she made that claim, Schieffer reminded her that his father had killed tens of thousands of people. Hillary countered the younger Assad was “a different leader.” An estimated 400,000 people have died during the Syrian Civil War. Some difference.
Hillary’s treatment of Assad contrasts with that of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In July 2014, she boasted in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that she was the Obama Administration’s designated yeller. Most of this yelling came over the question of settlements. It’s too bad she couldn’t have the Administration’s designated yeller at Assad (or for that matter the Iranian Mullahs) for murdering their own people. Put the pressure where it belongs.
In her 60 Minutes interview alongside Tim Kaine, she boasted about her success in working with Republicans. Yet last October when Anderson Cooper asked which enemy she was proudest of making, she listed Republicans and the NRA (along with the drug and health insurance companies) alongside Iran. Say what you will about Republicans, the NRA or the drug/health insurance companies, but I don’t recall any of them chanting “Death to America!!!”
During her first White House bid in 2008, Hillary told a tall tale about being under sniper file with daughter Chelsea in Bosnia in 1996. Although she was criticized for it at the time, it didn’t force her to withdraw from the race. Let’s remember that it was only last year that Brian Williams was suspended for six months and lost his position as NBC news anchor because of his false claim that he had been under sniper fire while in Iraq in 2003. As I asked at the time, “If Williams can no longer be the face of NBC, then can Hillary no longer be the face of the Democratic Party?”
As much as I loathe the prospect of Donald Trump being elected President, I take no comfort in Hillary being sworn into by Justice Roberts next January either. It is for these 10 reasons (among many others) that I shall not cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton in November.
