Disclaimer 1: This is my personal opinion.
Disclaimer 2: I would feel this way even if I didn't support another candidate.
I liked Hillary Clinton when Bill was running for President in '91-'92. She was smart, she had guts, and as the rumors of Bill's womanizing came out she held her head high. I respected her for that, figuring it must have been so painful to have your intimate life put under such a nasty microscope.
As time passed my liking turned to dislike and distrust. It started when she worked on Universal Health Care, in secret and with apparent disdain for the opinions of others outside the Clinton circle.
Many other events colored my opinion of Hillary Clinton, events you are all aware of, such as the Travel Office debacle, the futures trading that reaped her a huge amount of money...
And now she is running for President. It's labelled "inevitable". I don't like inevitability when it comes to presidential candidates.
There is an interesting essay in The Alternet that discusses the Clintons' hypocrisy and power lust.
The misery sweeping across the American landscape may have begun with Ronald Reagan, but it was accelerated and codified by Bill Clinton. He sold out the poor and the working class. And Clinton did it deliberately to feed the pathological hunger he and his wife have for political power. It was the Clintons who led the Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough.
The Clintons argued that the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of votes or power, as a political ally. Workers would vote Democratic anyway. They had no choice. It was better, the Clintons argued, to take corporate money and use government to service the needs of the corporations. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party, under Clinton’s leadership, had virtual fund-raising parity with the Republicans. In political terms, it was a success. In moral terms, it was a betrayal.
The appreciative oligarchs and corporate class have made Bill rich. He is fond of boasting in public about how wealthy he has become. Hillary raised $26 million in the first quarter of the year, almost three times as much as any politician previously raised at that point in a presidential election.
We face the prospect of having two families govern the country for 16 years. The system is rigged. Our democracy is a consumer fraud. The government has given up any pretence of serving the interests of citizens. The corporations rule. And for all Clinton’s charm and talent for self-promotion, he is largely to blame.
Furthermore, the media manipulation by the Clinton campaign gives me chills. durham furnace linked this story from Politico in a previous diary and everyone should read the article.
Early this summer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president learned that the men’s magazine GQ was working on a story the campaign was sure to hate: an account of infighting in Hillaryland.
So Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists and offered GQ a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity coverboy Bill Clinton.
Despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands, which had been delivered by Bill Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, several sources familiar with the conversations said.
GQ writer George Saunders traveled with Clinton to Africa in July, and Clinton is slated to appear on the cover of GQ’s December issue, in which it traditionally names a "Man of the Year," according magazine industry sources.
And the offending article by Atlantic Monthly staff writer Josh Green got the spike.
"I don’t really get into the inner workings of the magazine, but I can tell you that yes, we did kill a Hillary piece. We kill pieces all the time for a variety of reasons," Nelson said in an e-mail to Politico.
He did not respond to follow-up questions. A Clinton campaign spokesman declined to comment.
I'm not real keen on Bush advising Hillary either. But, I guess inevitability means continuing the Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton dynastic hold over our country.
She has guts, I'll give her that.
But, I don't trust Hillary Clinton to be my President.
Disclaimer 3: The Clintons were not convicted of wrong doing in the above mentioned events.