We all see the headlines, depending on the source of our news:
Matt Oswalt Verified account (@MattOswaltVA)
MSNBC: Jeffrey Epstein, friend of Donald Trump, has been arrested for sex trafficking of minors
FOX: Jeffrey Epstein, friend of Bill Clinton, has been arrested for sex trafficking of
minors
CNN: History of Comedy Part 6: Vines!
USA Today lists them both:
Jeffrey Epstein, a onetime associate of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, is in legal trouble: Here's what we know
I have a friends who are already distancing themselves from the Clintons as if they had a contagious disease. One posted on Facebook,
Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have never been two of my “faves”.
One of her friends came to the Clintons’ defense:
The Clinton Foundation is recognized as being one of the most transparent and generous in the world. No matter what people say about the Clintons, they are saints compared to the asshole who's in the WH now!
To which the original poster wrote, “foundations are tax ploys for the wealthy. They don’t necessarily go to character.”
Okay. This has to stop.
I have no idea how involved Bill was with Epstein, what he did, and what he didn’t. If he’s guilty, so be it. If not, great. But this conflation of Bill with the guy currently in the Oval office has to stop.
I replied with the following:
As an accountant, we have to parse this right now
There are foundations taht fund programs that do enormous good. And there are fraudulent foundations like Trump set up. Do NOT throw ALL Foundations under the bus just because the Clintons have one.
Second, bad people do good things, and good people do horrible things. Which one, for example, was Oscar Schindler?
Was Schindler a bad person who did some great things, or a great person who did some bad things? The answer is neither. He was a flowed man who saved some lives. Thousands of them.
Clinton, too. He did some very good things, and he did some pretty awful things.
You can compare him to Trump if you want, the way you can compare Tommy and Hank Aaron. Both Aarons had the same parents. They both played baseball professionally, at the highest level. They both wore the uniform of the Atlanta Brave. They both shared a team, a locker room, a clubhouse, and a dugout. They both got paychecks from that same team.
But their performance was both qualitatively and quantitatively different — exponentially.
Trump and Clinton, too, are not the same. No matter how you feel about Clinton, no matter what he has done — perhaps even criminally (time will tell) the two are exponentially different.
Clinton exhibits empathy, and Trump does not know what that word means.
People I know, and others, all say the same thing when they describe talking one-on-one with Bill: they felt like they were the most important person in the world. People who have the misfortune of speaking one-on-one with Trump, know that he thinks that he is the most important person in the world.
Clinton, whether we agreed with him or not, made Presidential decisions to try to improve the world, though many of his decisions proved to be wrong. Trump, on the other hand, makes Presidential decisions in spite, intended to hurt his enemies.
They may both have occupied the office of President. They may have the same friends. They may even have committed similar crimes against women (we shall see — innocent before proven guilty and all that). But they are qualitatively different people, and exponentially at that.
And this is our challenge. They both associated with Jeffrey Epstein. But they are and were not the same President, nor are they even the same morally, regardless of what they may be accused of, or even guilty of. We need to parse this out. We have to remember the qualitative differences that separate them — exponentially.
Even if it turns out that they are not just guilty of association — even if it turns out that they both are guilty of the same thing — they are different from each other. They are both responsible for their actions, and they are both exponentially, qualitatively, different.