simmer down and pucker up

David Bowie by Michel Haddi, 1993

Everybody knows Hillary’s a liar.  Everybody knows Hillary’s corrupt.  Everybody knows Hillary’s a criminal.  Everybody hates Hillary, and no one enthusiastically supports her; her voters are just afraid of Trump.

I’ve heard these things stated over and over throughout the primaries, without any sources to back them up.  Who needs sources?  We all know Hillary Clinton’s the worst, don’t we?  She wouldn’t have decades of scandals and all these hearings and investigations if she weren’t.  Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Well, except the smoke about Whitewater, because that seven year investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons.

And it turns out that six official investigations into Vince Foster’s suicide found nothing to suggest the Clintons had a hand in his death.  In fact, there’s no evidence pinning them to any of the dozens of deaths they’re said to have caused.

There’s always Benghazi, though.  Sure, the eighth investigation ended the way the first seven did, with no evidence of wrongdoing, but maybe another investigation will find the truth!

Okay, but what about her email server and the way she compromised national security and tried to cover it up?  FBI director James Comey even overstepped his authority when speaking about the investigation’s findings in order to publicly condemn her!  Except he also said that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case”, and later clarified before a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing that there was no evidence Clinton’s server had been hacked, that Clinton did not lie, and that she did not break the law.

Well, she still voted for the Iraq War when she was senator!  Which she freely admits was a mistake.  She and other senators believed that the Congressional Resolution they were voting for would authorize the president to use force only after “diplomatic or other peaceful means” had been exhausted.  She even said during the Senate debate on the resolution that attacking then and there could “set a precedent that could come back to haunt us.” 

Still, she won’t release the transcripts of those speeches she was paid for!  How dare she not give up her intellectual property created while she was a private citizen, never mind that one of the speeches is already freely available for viewing online.  Why can’t she be like Trump and Sanders and just refuse to release her tax returns instead?

But she’s a liar!  There’s a video of her lying for thirteen straight minutes!  True, it’s manipulatively edited and mostly just showing how her views, like anyone else’s, have evolved over time, and Politifact ranks her as the most honest candidate, and the former executive editor of The New York Times called her “fundamentally honest and trustworthy,” but well, everybody knows she’s a liar!

All right, so she’s never been convicted of any crime, and all the investigations into her alleged scandals keep coming up with nothing, and she won the Democratic primaries after consistently polling ahead of Sanders, but that’s only proof of her corruption.  She’s rigged the system so that she can get away with anything!  She just somehow hasn’t rigged it well enough to keep all this stuff out of the press.