As a forward, I am a Bernie supporter, am African-American, a life member of the DAV (symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome — Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm) , and worked in I/T for almost three decades. I have voted for every Democrat in every national election since Walter Mondale in 1984.
I am a husband and father of two daughters, who I believe as girls and as women have earned every right to see a qualified woman elected as POTUS. Unfortunately, the woman my wife and I will be voting for as POTUS will not be Hillary Clinton. It will be Dr. Jill Stein if she is the Green Party nominee.
It wasn’t a decision I made in 2016. It was a decision I made in June 2008, at the end of the California primary, when Hillary, knowing that the math did not ensure her nomination, stated (paraphrasing) that she still had a path to the Democratic nomination because “didn’t Bobby Kennedy get assassinated”?
Anyone who brings up a scenario of assassination as a means to an end is not someone I would vote for in a million years, which as an African-American, makes me even more ashamed and depressed that fellow AAs would line up to vote for her as if seeing the only oasis in a desert. The funny thing about an oases in a desert, is that many of them wind up being mirages.
The e-mail system scandal may not be a big deal for the vast majority of democrats, but as someone who has been in I/T as long as I have, it is a big deal. The move by her and her IT Security Manager at the State Department to put national security info and personal info on her Blackberry is a serious violation of national security. It is Cyber-Security 101. Full stop.
Just as you would not allow the same person in an accounting firm to handle both the money and the bookkeeping, you should never allow personal and sensitive national security data to go through the same device. If it gets hacked, you’re personally and professionally screwed. Don’t even get me start about the server set up to circumvent FOIA requests.
As a rank and file I/T professional, if I had committed such as reckless crime (yes, it is a crime), I would have been looking at the ass end of a jail sentence in federal prison. But I guess it’s OK if you’re a Clinton.
Voting for the Iraq War? We’re still living with the fallout. Over 4,600 of our brave men and women paid the ultimate price (along with 30K wounded, maimed, and suffering from PTSD for multiple tours of combat that the human psyche is not designed to endure) because Ms. Clinton chose the lies and deceptions of a sociopath misfit in “Dubyah” over the will of her own voting base. As Dr. Phil would say, “How’s that working for you?”
The Clinton’s have had a stranglehold on the Democratic party for 25 years, and the party is now starved for oxygen. I admit both Bill and Hillary have been unfairly maligned at times, but they’ve also been their own worst enemies. To use a boxing metaphor, they’re like punch-drunk fighters who don’t know when to get out of the ring, because they don’t know how to handle not being applauded and not being deferred to.
Her speeches on Wall Street? Nothing says representing the common working man like being paid $225,000 for a 30 minute speech.
In the end, both my wife talked about this and have made the decision not to vote for Hillary Clinton this November. Our daughters and our nation deserve better.