Not Sure About Hillary Clinton – It Is Time to Get Sure

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Dr. Errington Thompson is a critical care trauma surgeon, author, and talk show host. Listen to the Errington Thompson Show, available through Podcast and download at: www.whereistheoutrage.net
by Errington C. Thompson, MD –

If I have heard it once, I have heard it a thousand times.

I have seen progressives who are waffling, uncertain, confused or otherwise straddling the fence regarding Hillary Clinton. Okay, let us clear up all of this confusion.

Start with the basics

Hillary Rodham Clinton was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1947. She was smart. She was a National Merit Scholar who was admitted to Wellesley College outside of Boston. After Martin Luther King’s assassination, Hillary worked with black students on campus to recruit more black faculty and more students. She was also the first student in the history of the school invited—and chosen by her peers—to be a speaker at graduation.

After college, she went to Yale law school. She got a grant in 1970 where she was assigned to Walter Mondale’s subcommittee on Migratory Labor. This was an incredibly important committee which produced an eye-opening report on the deplorable working conditions of migrant workers.

Following her graduation from Yale law school in 1973, she began postgraduate study on children and medicine. This led to Hillary working for the Children’s Defense Fund in New Bedford, Massachusetts. She gathered information about the lack of schooling for children with disabilities, and her work helped pass legislation that required the state to provide quality education for students with disabilities. This is the résumé of a true progressive.

Scandals and Investigations

Whitewater was really the first time that most of us began to pay attention to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Whitewater was the name of a simple investment property in Arkansas’s Ozark Mountains. The Clintons and their friends Jim and Susan McDougal bought 230 acres of land on the south bank of the White River in 1978. The plan was simple: Buy some picturesque land, advertise it, and folks from the big cities would come and build vacation homes.

Unfortunately, their timing was bad. Interest rates began to climb, and “stagflation” set in. Nobody was buying, and the land was eventually sold. At a loss. Like a lot of Americans, the Clintons took a bath, losing somewhere between $30,000 and $60,000. The McDougals lost even more. That was it.

But fifteen years later, when Bill Clinton was president and the Republicans were desperate to bring him down before he could win a second term, they held investigations on top of investigations. Both the House and Senate, which the Republicans won in 1994, held separate investigations, and Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr kept investigating the couple until he resigned in 1997, nearly 20 years after the money-losing land deal.

The conclusion of Starr’s successor as independent counsel was that the evidence was “insufficient to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that either President or Mrs. Clinton knowingly participated in a criminal conduct.” By then, of course, the investigation had moved on to whether Bill Clinton had extramarital affairs, whether he used Arkansas taxpayer money to cover them up, whether Mrs. Clinton had had her old friend Vince Foster murdered, and anything and everything else under the sun they could come up with.

None of these had anything to do with an “impeachable offense” under the Constitution; the hook Starr, and his successor, hung their investigation on was the possibility—never proved—that President Clinton had lied under oath about his involvement in the land deal, and what Hillary’s role had been as an attorney for a Little Rock bank.

Whitewater was only the beginning of the smearing of Hillary Clinton’s name.

More on Hillary the person

Hillary Clinton has a long history of advocating for the poor, the disadvantaged and children. She helped cofound the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families back in 1977. While Bill Clinton was governor, he appointed Hillary to chair the Rural Health Advocacy Committee, on which she learned a lot about healthcare and our healthcare system. As First Lady, even after her national healthcare proposal was shot down by Congress (and “Harry and Louise”), she convinced the Republican Congress to create the CHIP program to provide affordable health insurance to families with young children.

Because of her position as a lawyer and first lady of Arkansas, she also sat on a number of boards of corporations headquartered in the state, including TCBY and Walmart.

Back to the “scandals” and investigations

There was Travelgate. Several people in the White House travel office were fired in 1993. The question is/was whether the firings were politically motivated. Once again, there was a thorough investigation. The General Accounting Office, the House of Representatives, as well as Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel, all investigated and no charges were ever filed. As with almost all of these investigations there is one prosecutor who claims that Hillary Clinton said something that was factually false—basically a he-said, she-said assertion—but none of them ever found a reason to prosecute.

Some folks say, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” However, and sadly, in modern-day politics, where there is smoke, there is a well-financed smoke machine. In the ’90s, the smoke machine was just getting started. Now, 20 years later, the smoke machine is working 24/7, in the form of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Breitbart, and the other right-wingers.

Benghazi. Benghazi is now used as an applause line for conservatives, when in fact Secretary Clinton had done nothing wrong and, as a matter fact, did everything in her power to try to intervene and stop the massacre of Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans.

Emails. I am sorry, I really do not have the strength to talk about Hillary Clinton and her emails. The subject has been dissected, investigated, discussed, argued, and scrutinized over the last several years. Ad nauseam.

The bottom line is that while Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton kept a private server in her home for email correspondence. Bear in mind that at the time she became Secretary of State this was not against the law; in fact, she was advised by her immediate predecessor Colin Powell, the Republican Secretary of State under President Bush, to use private email whenever possible.

(Republicans do not like this. They would prefer that you use government servers because Republicans believe that government does a better job of handling sophisticated data than the private sector… Wait a minute?)

What happened with Hillary’s private server in those four years, while the State Department, Social Security Administration, and government military installations were hacked? Nothing. The Clinton server was not hacked. No secure information was obtained by foreign sources.

So why is it a big deal? Because this is a nuanced story, one that Americans will kind of, sort of, follow but without understanding the details. If it can make Hillary Clinton look incompetent, despite all the evidence pointing the other way, the smoke machine will use it.

The bottom line

Hillary Clinton is a smart, strong progressive with deep roots in activism. She is an advocate for the poor. She has a deep appreciation for children, their healthcare and their education. She embraces diversity. She is a champion of women’s issues. She understands the complexity of this world we live in.

Hillary Clinton is the most qualified presidential candidate in history. The only way that Hillary will lose this election is if we sit back and wait for the perfect candidate to come along. I will not sit back and let this become the land of Trump. Not on my watch.