Hillary & Donald

It’s an understatement to state that I’ve never been a fan of Bill or Hillary Clinton. They made it their mission to steer the Democratic Party and the American middle (same thing) to the right, and in this they were quite successful, to the detriment of the party and the country.

In 2017, Hillary founded a PAC called Onward Together, which, according to Wikipedia, raises funds “for progressive political groups including: Swing Left, Indivisible, Color of Change, Emerge America, and Run for Something.” In my 60-some years on the left, I’ve never heard of any of these groups, but if a Clinton is involved, that’s a guarantee that none of them are at all “progressive.”

Someone somewhere in the hierarchy of her PAC’s staff apparently has access to CGI that can approximate a sense of humor, though. Onward Together is now marketing a “But her emails” hat ($32), and that made me smile.

It did not, however, make me want to spend $32 + shipping for a damned hat, and I do not believe that Hillary Clinton has ever worn the hat. There’s a picture of her wearing it, but it’s gotta be Photoshopped.

* * *

As for Hillary’s one-time friend, Donald Trump, his indictment brings no great joy. It’s deeply frustrating that Trump — the man of 10,000 crimes and 1,000 treasons — now faces prosecution for the most trivial of his myriad misdeeds.

“It is hard to overstate the gravity of the criminal indictment issued against Donald Trump,” says the New York Times in a scolding editorial, but it’s overstated unanimously across all mass media. A multi-charge indictment that boils down to the mishandling and misappropriation of classified documents — well, whoop-de-doo.

The federal government classifies huge volumes of documents, claiming “national security” or whatnot — another library’s worth of documents no-one will ever see, every day. Charging Trump over his comical mishandling of classified materials is piffle, like going after Al Capone for failure to file 1040s on his earnings as a crime kingpin.

A government of the people, for the people, by the people, doesn’t need to keep secrets from the people.

There might be a very few exceptional exceptions, but nowhere near enough in all of US history to fill those boxes we’ve seen in the photos — boxes stacked atop boxes stacked atop boxes, in what’s apparently a carpeted bathroom at Mar-a-Lago.

Every trust we give the government is immediately or eventually betrayed, so allowing federal officials to keep huge swaths of secrets from Americans is idiocy. Bearing in mind the USA’s longstanding penchant for lies and cover-ups and crimes against humanity, the world would be a better place if 99.9% of state secrets were published unedited on Reddit.

Until his receives his inevitable “heal-the-nation” pardon, Trump must bear the anguish of headlines and editorials calling him a mishandler of classified documents? Give me a polite synonym for shitfuck.

It would be far more fair to see Trump mocked or prosecuted as the man who installed horrendously evil judges all across America (one is presiding over Trump’s case); who never divested his financial holdings, and during his term in office steered big bucks to his hotels; who ran his entire administration via cronyism, nepotism, and patronage; who abused his Presidential pardon powers to protect his buddies; who politicized the Justice Department and sabotaged the Post Office; who used his Presidency to bully-pulpit bullshit daily for four years; who sat on his ass while the Coronavirus killed its first 400,000 Americans; who tried to strong-arm Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky into producing faked evidence against Joe Biden; who obstructed and interfered in numerous investigations; who had the DHS separate children from their parents at the border; who did his damnedest to subvert the 2020 Presidential election, before and then after Election Day. And I’m probably forgetting lots of his high crimes and misdemeanors, because I wrote this paragraph in in about five minutes, with very little silence between keystrokes.

But no, Trump gets scolded for sneaking a bunch of souvenir “secret” documents to Florida.

(Hey, stop by itsdougholland.com and tell me I’m full of crap.)