Ali, Trump and Clinton: the greatest, the baddest and the saddest (Part Two)
He who leads by impulse feasts his people on calamity
There is something terribly wrong when the two remaining candidates
for the American presidency, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, are the
moral inadequacies now before the electorate. Neither one of them seeks
anything beyond self-aggrandizement. They would rather expend the
greatness of an entire nation in order to satiate their appetites.
Searching for noble principle in either of them is as futile as hunting
for a snowflake in an active blast furnace. Basic goodness has melted
from them long ago.
That either of them is poised to become president jeopardizes America
more than any threat from ISIL or other foreign enemy. Their media
hirelings will proclaim the coming election is a battle for America’s
soul, its very future. That is a lie. Should these two be the only
choice on the menu, then America has no choice. The battle has been
waged and it has been lost. If either Trump or Clinton come to reside in
the White House, America would be reduced and the world made a more
dangerous place because of it. Decay of the national purpose and
institutions of governance would be the order of the day. The place they
would take America is not the place those who fought and died for
America had in mind when they made their sacrifices.
Trump would send the nation cascading to Hell, boasting all would be
fine because he had enough money to make a deal with the devil to sell
ice to all the inhabitants below and build a golf course/water resort
for the wealthiest among them. Clinton would whisper all would be fine
because an old friend was assigned to tending Hell’s backdoor. That
friend owed her a favor and would allow her to secret in air
conditioners. Distinct styles and different routes leading to the
destination: calamity then ruination.
The most obvious deficiency is Mr. Trump’s although both contenders
are equally dangerous but in different ways and means. This flailing man
is a walking sarcophagus of prejudices and biases that refuse to die.
His campaign thrives on the fears and hatreds that till the souls of the
mean and petty. He has said evil things about almost every minority,
all faiths but the one he claims, and about women. If the mouth speaks
from the abundance of the heart, then hatred perhaps is one thing Trump
loves more than money.
The man has shown himself to be grossly ignorant of the most basic
tenets of both foreign and domestic policy. He claims that his expertise
as a businessman well suits him to rebuild the economy. This is his
most solid claim to office; yet, if it is anything, it is but spittle
and mud. Just because a man is expert at fashioning hubcaps does not
mean he knows how to design an engine or even drive the car. Trump’s
prowess as a real estate dealmaker does not automatically make him adept
in macroeconomic policy. Thus far, much of what he has proffered as
economic policy has been effluent.
Trump is an untalented hurdy-gurdy man too much in love with the
ramshackle noises he makes. He hears a symphony. Most reasonable ears
hear the sound of falling rocks. He is the public affirmation of the
caution that vast wealth can be as much a debilitation as an attribute.
If America wants to be great again, an essential task must be the
construction of an insuperable wall between Trump and the White House.
Clinton’s situation is more nuanced but also parlous. Superficially,
she appears to be the right answer for the moment. Yet, the only real
difference between her and Trump is one of veneer.
While he is brash and abrasive, she has a polished appearance and
speaks with a professional restraint. Yet, her deeds reveal an impetuous
streak and a heart as disdainful of democratic practice as Trump’s.
The danger Trump poses is clear and bulbous. He relishes showing us
he is an epic collision in the making. Both believe themselves more than
us mere mortals. As such, both would undermine American democracy more
than perfect it. Both might bring the world to the cliff’s edge, to
leave it hanging on a razor-thin balance.
Clinton’s words profess compassion. Her long resume pretends
competence. Her deeds are the problem. Her accomplishments are more
hollow than she would rather they be. This relegates her to argue the
mere holding of office is sufficient accomplishment regardless of what
occurred while there.
Because she has been around so long and has held many posts, we have
been induced to believe her and believe in her. Yet, to believe in her
is to believe she is what she is not. Secretary of State was the last
major office she held. She turned the State Department into a place of
erroneous policy as in Libya, Syrian and Ukraine. She treated the august
department as her personal fiefdom. She proved to be a sly manager who
mishandled sensitive public resources as if they were her own and
treated the public trust as if nonexistent.
While Trump is a daylight assault with an axe, Clinton is a nocturnal
bacillus whose attack comes subtly from within while our defenses are
down and slumbering.
Hillary Clinton’s run for office has now become a moral dilemma for
her allies. One cannot back her yet support good governance and the rule
of law at the same time. In clinching the Democratic Party nomination,
Clinton has achieved two firsts. She is the first woman to clinch the
nomination of one of the two major parties. That a woman has done so is
long overdue. That it is Clinton will be recorded as one of America’s
bittersweet occurrences. It is to bestow a true honor on one of the most
counterfeit personalities of this or any era.
She is also the first presidential candidate of any major party to
enter the election race under criminal investigation for serious
breaches of national security. As to which ‘’first’’ will history lay
her greater remembrance looms as an open question.
For those unversed in diplomacy and national security matters, the
storm about her use of a private email account and server seems
unintelligible or petty. For those knowledgeable about American national
security matters, what she did is of utmost seriousness; it was
criminal in nature and should disqualify her for office. It reveals a
frightening disdain for the rule of law and the intelligence of the
people, both warning signs that democratic good governance may not be
Clinton’s strong suit. I consider myself in this latter group.
This is important to all. If she can be so callous regarding the
nation and the constitution she professes to love, grave dangers lurk
for those nations that win her ire. Remember Clinton publicly joked
about how Qaddafi was tortured and killed as if sodomizing then
illegally executing an opposing leader is the stuff of jokes instead of
the crime that it was. Such dark levity is unbefitting a world leader.
In Libya, she pushed the Obama Administration to work in concert with
regional terrorists to upend a secular leader who had long ago ceased
being a threat to any measurable American interests. She championed this
avenue more as a function of pique than of sage policy. After
witnessing and joking about the destruction she, Clinton turned her back
and left that nation to rot and ruin. If indicative of her purported
competence, then we are in palpable trouble for the Libyan caper is a
picture book example of foreign policy by guttural impulse.
Clinton has never encountered a war she did not like yet she has
proven to be a truant housekeeper after the damage has been wrought. She
has thirsted for every American war in the past twenty years. If she
had her way, what happened in Libya would have repeated itself in Syria.
Judging by her published emails, she pines for an excuse to war against
Iran. Russian and American military might would be in nose-to-nose
proximity on the steppes of the Ukraine due to her lack of geopolitical
prudence and blind arrogance. A Clinton presidency is like to cart the
world closer to a major war of untold consequence.
Because of the leadership and personality flaws the scandal reveals,
perhaps a bit of explanation about the national security and legal
implications underlying her email scandal may help the reader understand
the gravity of Clinton’s derelictions. For this is not an artificial
fuzz over the sloppy handling of inconsequential emails such as what
friends exchange between themselves. This concerns the wanton and
perhaps willful misuse of emails that contained some the nation’s most
closely guarded national security considerations.
As Secretary of State, her official communications belong to the
people and to the United States government, not to her. They were meant
to be restricted to encrypted official channels for archival purposes
and, more importantly, to safeguard information from foreign snooping.
The use of a private server trashed both goals.
Clinton acted as if her want to control access to her official
communications was of greater weight than the true ownership rights and
national security concerns of the government that employed her. She
acted as if the government was her agent and servant instead of the
other way around. In treating sensitive government documents and work
product as belonging exclusively to her, she behaved imperiously, like
spoiled royalty doing the nation a favor rather than a citizen grateful
for the privilege to serve her country. The lack of character which she
has exhibited in the matter is revealed in a quick examination of the
claims she has made to dance around her culpability.
Claim 1: The State Department approved the private setup.
This claim has proven bogus. In an official report, the Department
claimed it never was asked to approve the private server and if so would
not have done so. Clinton lied.
Claim 2: Her private arrangement was consistent with those of her predecessors.
The only other Secretary to use a private email account was Colin
Powell. However, he never contemplated a private server and did not
exclusively use the private email account for official business. He also
had the imprimatur of the Department for his limited use of private
email. His rather limited official use of that account came during a
completely different era regarding the use of emails for government
business. At that time, the Department did not have an unclassified
email system as during Clinton’s tenure. Again, she lied.
Claim 3: The private server and account were done merely for
convenience purposes.She did not want to have to constantly flip between
a government and a private system. This does not wash. If she
did not want to operate two systems, the wisest route would have been
to opt for the government device solely.
For instance, she was prohibited from using her private device in her
office because that office was considered highly classified space.
Whenever she wanted to deal with emails during office hours, she had to
leave her office suite. Thus, we are left with the incongruous sight of
the Secretary walking about the building, followed by security and other
officers, as she went to another room or floor to treat emails. This
might have happened several times a day. This does not seem convenient.
It does not even make sense. A government devise usable in the comfort
of her office and at home would have been inherently easier and wiser.
Her staff even refused Department attempts to give her a
government-issued secured device because they wanted to maintain
Clinton’s privacy. The position is as indefensible as it is corrupt. She
has no privacy right to hide official communications from the very
government that employed her to handle those communications.
Even if she opted for the private route, convenience would have
pointed to only the creation of a private account. Setting up a private
server in her residence is actually significant extra work. There is
only one plausible reason to resort to a private server: to control
access to the material, in effect obscuring from government what
belonged only to it. On this point, either she lied or her judgment is
so obtuse that she should not be trusted again with high public office.
Claim 4: The server was secure because armed Secret Service men guarded the residence.
Having an armed guard standing on the porch might prevent a physical
assault against the location. Yet, it is beyond explanation how a gun at
the front door deters a computer hacker who can accomplish his theft
from the other side of the planet. A gun at the porch was no more a
defense to hacking the infernal machine than putting an oar in the car
helps a person drive cross a bridge over a wide river.
Sadly, her personal server was extremely vulnerable. Her network
lacked encryption. For a brief period, it lacked even the firewall and
other lower-level security features employed by medium and small private
businesses that do not handle sensitive documents. Establishing her
server in order to avoid government retention of her records seemed to
be her sole concern. Her obligation to safeguard important information
was treated as a damnable nuisance. Again, she has lied or exposed
herself as a supreme dunce.
Claim 5: No wrong was committed because no document was marked classified.
This is as disingenuous as an argument can get. When she became
Secretary she underwent training about classified information. She
signed a formal oath that classified information could be marked or
unmarked and that the mishandling of such is a criminal violation. She
went into the job with eyes open. She cannot now profess a dumb
blindness.
What makes information classified are not the markings but the
content. Documents are not classified just because they are marked so.
They are marked so because they are classified. The classification
arises from their substance. The markers just acknowledge what already
exists.
Over 1000 emails she returned have been found to be classified.
Refuting her claim that the documents were “retroactively classified,”
there is no reasonable explanation that can be offered how such
documents would be classified now but were not when initially
transmitted. Sensitivity of a message generally moves in inverse
relationship to the passage of time. The older the message, the less
sensitive. For her to argue the emails were not then classified but now
are lacks credence. She knows better than to make this argument but she
makes it anyway.
Claim 6: She is innocent because she bore no criminal intent.
Neither fact nor law gives her succor. Under the several applicable
criminal statutes, she can be held feloniously liable for the wrongful
and willful transmission of classified material or for being grossly
negligent in the handling and storage of the same. There is ample intent
of willful violations. Roughly 20 emails have a classification of top
secret or higher and over 60 as secret. Unless all of these 20 documents
fit into a mitigating narrow exception that grave emergency dictated
the use of the unclassified system, then at least two people committed a
crime, the sender and serial receiver thereof, the latter being
Clinton.
The sender would have to deliberately transfer information from a
secured device to put on Clinton’s unsecured private network. Such a
deliberate trespass has almost no defense and is clearly punishable.
Clinton would have known this criminal process was being done for her
benefit if not at her explicit behest. She condoned the misdeed over the
course of her tenure. This is an intentional breach of national
security, a felony. The penalty for this is a fine or up to 10 years
imprisonment for each violation.
She also kept these emails on her unsecure private server for several
years. By any objective legal measure, this would have to constitute
the grossly negligent storage of classified material. To compound this,
she placed the material on an unsecure thumb drive which is another
violation. She then gave the server and thumb drive to her attorney who
lacked any security clearance. This comprises another set of
violations. Worse, it seems that she also used two companies to monitor
her server. These companies had no clearance, another set of
violations. One of the companies made back-up copies of the emails and
stored them in an unsecured location, two more sets of violations. Keep
in mind that every email, ranging from the 20 top secret to the over
1000 classified, is a distinct violation that carries a potential prison
term of 10 years. You can figure the potential maximum time behind
bars. My calculator does not count that high.
If America seeks to continue to portray itself before the world as
the land of the rule of law, then it must apply the law fairly and
equally even against its most favored and privileged citizens. The
Clinton national security scandal will test the legal system in an open
and blatant way. If she is allowed to walk, penalty free from her
misconduct, then you should realize that the American legal system is an
object of barter and that justice is considered a rare but not a
valuable commodity. Already the major media outlets have been found out.
They downplay the scandal because they work for the same big money,
vast military establishment that brings us the Clintons. If Clinton is
called to answer for what she has done, perhaps just perhaps the United
States would have taken an important step in reasserting the destiny its
noble documents and republican doctrines claim for the nation. Next
week, we explore how all of this may undermine President Obama’s legacy
if he fails to exercise judgment.
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