There are plenty of good reasons to vote for Hillary
By Martin Dyckman • Guest Columnist
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both have their liabilities, but his are so much more numerous and serious than hers that the race should not be nearly as close as it seems to be.
If you’re for Trump because you agree with what you think he stands for, or if you just can’t bear to vote for any Democrat, or if you simply admire his chutzpah, or if you sympathize with his bigotry, so be it.
More likely, though, you are simply one of those people “who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.”
Those words are in quotes because it was Hillary Clinton who spoke them — in the same speech in which she made that ill-chosen reference to half of Trump’s people as deplorable.
The media largely ignored the second part, however. I’m beginning to think that it’s part of the conspiracy against her.
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The point is that Clinton sincerely feels your pain. Trump merely pretends to. He hasn’t proposed the slightest remedy for the political system’s tilt to wealthy and powerful people like those who would stiff you $600 for a lifesaving drug.
To reclaim our government, we need to counter the power of their money. Clinton speaks to that by vowing to rid the country of the curse of Citizens United. Trump never mentions that.
Clinton is capable, qualified, intelligent and experienced.
Trump is the most morally unfit, unprepared and untrustworthy candidate ever to seek the presidency. He’s made a life’s work out of ripping off people with ventures such as his misnamed “university.” He is exuberantly ignorant of everything a president should know. He’s a narcissistic bully whose expressed admiration for tyrants like Vladimir Putin is fair warning of how a President Trump would abuse power.
And yet the race is competitive.
So if you’re thinking of voting for Trump simply because you don’t like or trust Clinton, please do yourself, your children and your country a favor. Ask yourself why.
The emails and the Benghazi “witch hunt,” as Colin Powell called it, have been blown hugely out of proportion. Neither disqualifies her or remotely justifies electing someone as deplorable as Trump.
Is it because she isn’t charismatic like Barack Obama or a charmer like Ronald Reagan? This isn’t about first place on a reality show. The presidency is deadly serious business. The “likeability” issue reeks of misogyny.
“I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why – I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.”
— nursery rhyme
Or is it simply because she’s your Dr. Fell? You don’t like her, but you don’t know why?
Here’s why. The right wing has in fact been persecuting her for more than 25 years, never distinguishing between valid criticism and slander. They detest her because she might actually get good things done. The relentless drumbeat has taken such a toll that many people think Trump is more truthful even though the fact-checkers find more than half of his campaign statements to be false or outright lies and more than half of hers to be true or mostly true.
The Citizens United decision, a trophy of the right wing conspiracy, was about her.
As the case went to the court, the question was only whether a professional propaganda shop named Citizens United could legally distribute a video attacking Clinton during her 2008 presidential race. Chief Justice John Roberts turned that into a pretext for giving corporations a blank check to corrupt our country.
Trump’s new deputy campaign manager, David Bossie, comes to his campaign straight from Citizens United.
According to Yahoo.com/news, Trump’s questionably charitable foundation gave $100,000 two years ago to Bossie’s Citizens United Foundation, which that same year filed a groundless lawsuit against the New York attorney general who’s pursuing Trump’s phony “university.”
Citizens United says the lawsuit was to try to stop the official from getting at donor information and had nothing to do with the Trump dispute. So they say.
It would be poetic justice if Hillary Clinton became the president whose Supreme Court appointees overturned the Citizens United decision.
And that’s more than reason enough to vote for her.
(A version of this article first appeared as a ContextFlorida column on the FloridaPolitics website. Martin Dyckman, a retired journalist, can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
