"They're both awful"? Clinton vs. Trump

[steuard]

I've seen lots of people talk about this year's Presidential candidates in terms of equivalency: "They're both so awful this year," or "Why do we have two people who ought to be disqualified this time?" I doubt anyone's going to change my mind at this point, but I always really want to understand viewpoints that differ from my own. And yet when I

Comments

[kuddliphish]

I think not accepting false/unprovable beliefs about her is going to be a big hindrance to understanding people who absolutely hate her. There is a segment of the population that believes she's in bed with the mafia and has is literally guilty of murder, but somehow too powerful to catch/prosecute. I don't know, but I think that's where a lot of the "she's just as bad if not worse" stuff comes from.

[steuard]

This may be the essence of it right here. Though honestly, if she's so powerful that even multiple years-long investigations with the full power of Congress behind them can't produce solid evidence of her crimes, that's pretty impressive: maybe she's the hero we deserve.

[jon_leonard]

To start with, I don't plan on voting for either of them, and as a resident of California I can vote third party with a clear conscience: If, somehow, opinion shifts so that California is in play for the electoral college, then the rest of the country has already made California irrelevant

[steuard]

The cattle futures thing is new to me (or rather, old: I'm not sure that I was paying enough attention to the details when it came out before I went to college). You're right that it looks suspicious. It's certainly possible that she just didn't recognize the risks she was running and got unreasonably lucky, but the bribery scheme also seems plausible. It seems like a very valid point of concern, and America's comparatively non-corrupt government is an essential asset of ours. That said, I'm not sure that it ranks up there with "risk of destabilizing the world economy" or "bringing white nationalism back into the mainstream" as a deal breaker for me. (If nothing else, this issue long predated Bill's time as President: it wouldn't be dragging the office into the mud in any new ways

[jon_leonard]

The cattle futures thing isn't the only example, but it's clearer in terms of means, motive and opportunity. If, hypothetically, she'd accepted a suitcase full of cash, there'd be less evidence. But for more recent examples, consider how people with business before her in the State department paid her husband substantial sums for speeches, and/or donated large amounts to their charity. Even more recently, her husband had a private conversation with a high official in the justice department who had the unenviable task of deciding whether or not to charge her with a crime

[steuard]

My thoughts on a lot of the "history of corruption" stuff are complicated. I agree that there are more incidents of "insufficient separation" than I'd like to see. But I also expect that over a decades-spanning political career, it would be hard for almost anyone not to accumulate some number of events that might look bad in that way, even if they were reasonably careful. One way to frame that might be this: how different would "Jane Doe's" history look from Clinton's if you assume that Jane didn't ever intentionally engage in corruption during her high-level political career but had political opponents trying their hardest to make it look like she did for 30 years straight? (I don't have a solid answer for that question

[ukelele]

Didn't bake cookies.

(I'm not even kidding, though I am employing synecdoche.)

[robbbbbb]

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

[steuard]

I am literally asking for help seeing right here.

[robbbbbb]

Okay, then. Anything you can name that's bad about Trump I can counter with something that's bad about Hillary and roughly equivalent in both magnitude and style

[steuard]

Thank you for this. As you probably expect, I'm not particularly convinced, but I very much appreciate you taking the time to help me see another point of view