We all know that the political ploy most effective in its working is the personal attack. It’s most effective because unlike policy attacks it is almost impossible to prove or more important disprove and even if you can, some of the accusation always manages to stick. The Republicans have been doing this to Hillary Clinton ever since she first appeared on the Governor of Arkansas’ arm. Their attacks go back to such farcical idiocy as the Whitewater Scandal for which there was no factual basis and have continued on through the more current and even more farcical Benghazi accusations and the slightly more reality based email noise. Whatever you may believe of them, it is crystal clear to any fair minded individual that there was nothing at all to the Benghazi falsifications and not a hell of a lot more to the email scandal than what she admitted and apologized for. To this day there is not one single shred of evidence that any of Hillary’s emails have been in any way helpful to any outside power. That, after all is the bottom line.
Now however, the GOP sleaze have come up with a new scandal with which to bait their fetid breath. I call them sleaze because this phony scandal, if it gets legs, will hurt, not just the Clinton’s but millions of suffering people all over the world who depend on the alms of the Clinton Initiative to ease their suffering and help with the cures of horrible diseases that up until Bill & Hillary started this massive charity, had gone untreated.
Watched the orange fascist on the tube last night bellowing about how the Clinton’s had gotten rich by raising money for the foundation. It’s impossible to believe that Fact Check found only 59% of his statements to be lies.
So just to balance the table let’s look at a couple of real facts about the Clinton Initiative. The Clinton’s have not taken one cent from it. In fact they have donated millions to it. The Initiative not only creates medical programs that reach out to millions of sufferers but it also supports a myriad of smaller charities that do not have the fund raising machine that is driven by Bill Clinton’s personality.
That machine has enabled the Initiative to provide HIV drugs to millions too poor to buy them; saved millions more from Onchocerciasis, or African River Blindness, a debilitating eye disease that is virulent throughout Africa and, as an additional fillip, practically cured malaria on that continent.
But that means nothing to Trump and his scurvy clan. He screams and is all bent out of shape about foreign governments or just super rich people giving millions to the charity and thereby currying favor with our State Department. Is this true? Is this man who has lived his life and run his business on the self admitted principle of give to everyone and get the favor you need, really having a moral crisis over mythical favors being given out by a 5 star charity? Of course not! What is boiling Trump’s egg is that he is losing, getting his brains beaten out, not just by anyone, by a woman. This clown who has pounded the drum for winning above all else is LOSING and it’s killing him. And because of that he is willing to flush all the good being done for millions of people down the drain just to grab a few more points in the voting polls.
But it won’t work! It can’t work! That charity has done more in its short life than almost any other in the history of charitable giving. Who cares where the money comes from? The problem with Trump and his GOP henchmen is that they are not able to delineate between personal money the Clinton’s make for speaking fees and the money that is given to their charity. This is not rocket science and in this case it’s not that they are too dumb to figure out the difference. It’s that they don’t want to see the difference. Because if they do they will have to face two facts that they don’t want to even consider. One is that the Clinton’s, even at Right Wing affairs, are worth more as speakers then any of them and the other is that their whole case against this monumental Clinton developed charity is pure unadulterated bullshit. We should be lauding the Clinton’s for the work they have done through the Initiative. When Trump does that much good we will laud him. Unfortunately here’s little chance he will ever do that much for anyone but himself.
But before we give this up to the GOP panderers, let’s take a look at the one complaint that the petty pundits have come up with to attack the Initiative. This morning the Right Wing pundits like Joe Scarborough were banging on mythical doors, trying to establish a quid pro quo for the monstrous gifts that have flowed into the Initiative, gifts that ranged from $100,000 to $1,000,000 or more. They made a lot of noise, they rolled out a heap of insinuations, but not one of them came up with a plausible situation where any of the donors had gotten anything solid for their donation.
So the King of some tiny, unforgivably oil rich spot on the map wants to meet someone who can possibly finish a deal that will benefit himself or his country. So what? That is how 99% of serious charitable giving is accomplished. Maybe this potentate works something out in the long run and maybe he doesn’t but in the meantime his million bucks buys a hell of a lot of HIV vaccine for a hell of a lot of people that wouldn’t have it if it weren’t for the Clinton Initiative and the introduction. That, if you aren’t some scum sucking Trump degenerate, is the bottom line.
People give money to curry favor. Absolutely! Just like Donald Trump does when he freely admits he greases politicians to get permits and violation free inspections? What mushroom have these people been living under that this is a surprise? This is the way business is done all over the world and until someone can truthfully point to a single instance where some person or foreign government has specifically benefitted from one of their contributions to the Clinton Initiative, the whole accusation is nothing but a Trump wet dream.
The problem, if there were one, would not be about getting an introduction or an invitation. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s how most charitable giving gets got. This is about getting awarded a contract that wasn’t earned or a job that the contributor wasn’t qualified to get. Until that is proven, not alluded to, as in “I’ve heard”, or “somebody said,” which are the orange liar’s favorite substitutes for facts, there is simply nothing to talk about and anyone, especially any reporter who picks up the thread of this fantasy should be shunned by all the members of his community.
There is too much at stake here, too much at risk for the millions that the Clinton Initiative has already helped and the tens of millions that it will help in the future for it to be short circuited by this immoral, degenerate, ploy instituted by valueless flunkies of a man who by his own admission has no moral fiber, no values and less care for those suffering around the world. Trump wants to win at any cost and he is willing to dismiss the lives of millions in pursuit of a couple of poll points in a race in which he is already a monumental loser.