Sympathy for the [Hillary] Devil

Image courtesy C-Span.org via Wikimedia Commons

The 2016 presidential campaign has already led me to one decision that cuts deeply across my political grain. If the election was today, I'd vote for Hillary Clinton. I think she's an awful choice, but when the alternative is a mealy-mouthed, shit-talking salesman, she's the least awful choice.

But I can at least hold on to my dislike for all things Clinton, right? I can still nurture the distrust I've developed for that family ever since the last time I voted for one of them, which was for Bill's second term as the governor of Arkansas, can't I?

Apparently not.

There are two issues here. One is Hillary Clinton's behavior. One is the Republican/Tea Party's use of government power to perpetually investigate her. The latest incarnation of this GOP-approved government program is investigating whether Hillary lied during an investigation that went on while she was being investigated for the stuff the GOP has been investigating her about.

Aggressive pursuit of wrongdoing, especially of politicians, is probably a good thing, but there has to be a limit. I don't care if the subject really is a criminal, if you can't bring any charges that stick, even after years of trying, then pushing for even more cycles of investigation makes you the bad guy.

It makes you the bad guy because either your accusations are wrong or you're incompetent, yet you're continuing to waste government time and money with the same failed promise that this time your accusations will really pan out. You're abusing the power of government for ignoble political purposes.

That's what the GOP is doing right now, and it's what driving me to something that even a few months ago would have been ten times as inconceivable as me voting for Hillary, which is feeling sympathetic. It's not that I approve of her behavior. All by itself, her handling of government communications and the fact that she skated by any formal charges based on prosecutorial discretion rather than hard innocence is a pretty good example of a lot of what's wrong with American government today.

But what the GOP/TP is doing is even worse. Clinton's a pretty typical politician committing typical politician misdeeds. The GOP/TP, by continually making accusations that it can never prove, is warping American government into a tool with the specific purpose of bearing false witness, and that's not typical.

Remember too that Hillary probably wouldn't be an issue if the GOP/TP had nominated a decent man as its presidential candidate. The party has no room to criticize anyone about anything until it gets its own house in order.

So that's what driving me, against all my instincts, to feel sympathetic toward Clinton these days. It's not that she's a pure angel who sings rainbows and poops angels. It's that she's the target of the GOP/TP's attempt to replace the American principle of "innocent until proven guilty" to the third-world-shithole principle of "presumed guilty until we can find some charges that stick". She's the target of a dangerous and anti-American agenda.