Hillary Clinton: I Used to Love Her

[Vladimir Putin]

I wasn't crazy about her in 2008, but thought she was the lesser of two evils over Trump in 2016.

[trish]

This exceptional, talented, caring, generous and most qualified woman got a raw deal from the she left law school. Instead of making zillions of dollars by joining a major law firm, she chose a life of public service. Her first accomplishment was a project (for the Children's Defense Fund) getting two million unfortunate children into public schools who had handicaps that (previous to her intervention) made school attendance impossible. Being a politically accomplished woman in the seventies made her unpopular to conservatives who still thought a woman's place was in the home tending babies and fixing her husband's meals. Her work on trying to get all of us universal health care drew the fire anti-government conservatives who spent the government's money on one investigation after another, after another, after another. Nothing ever stuck. She was never guilty of anything other than being a successful woman who was also liberal. But in politics, it doesn't matter whether you're innocent or guilty - only the volume of lies they tell about you.

[Stavros]

I wasn't crazy about her in 2008, but thought she was the lesser of two evils over Trump in 2016.

Could you be more precise and tell us in what way are Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton evil?

[Vladimir Putin]

I didn't express myself well. I didn't mean to imply Hillary was evil. Just that I was disturbed over why she used a separate E-mail server while she was Secretary of State. I also was not fond of her support of past free trade deals that led to outsourcing of jobs.

She was clearly more qualified than Trump. I am very concerned that our country is going to be led by someone with psychological issues. We would not have any of that had she won.

[BostonBad]

Hillary wants to up our taxes even more. I know it sounds cool voting for her but who wants to keep getting poked in the ass each paycheck? Enough is enough.

[trish]

Hillary wants to up our taxes even more. I know it sounds cool voting for her but who wants to keep getting poked in the ass each paycheck? Enough is enough.

It depends on who you mean by "our". I'd love to get poked in the ass, 'cause that would mean I'd be a billionaire and raking in millions of dollars worth of profits and dividends. Right now, it's my employers who poke me in the ass. Sometimes enough isn't enough to make ends meet - so to speak.

[Stavros]

I didn't express myself well. I didn't mean to imply Hillary was evil. Just that I was disturbed over why she used a separate E-mail server while she was Secretary of State. I also was not fond of her support of past free trade deals that led to outsourcing of jobs.

She was clearly more qualified than Trump. I am very concerned that our country is going to be led by someone with psychological issues. We would not have any of that had she won.

Nothing personal, I was just expressing my irritation with the way in which people often used standard words and phrases without giving them much thought. It is easily done and I have done it myself, though I suspect most people today would struggle to define the word 'evil' which is religious in origin.
Or it could be that a word like 'bad' is no longer thought to have the weight of meaning that it actually conveys, as people search for more powerful words to describe people and situations they don't like. It would have been possible to describe Trump and Clinton as two disappointing candidates, or unappealing, or regrettable, even bad. But the need for spectacular words to fit the febrile mood of the times may reflect a view that standard words and phrases are now no longer enough, but does imply the reach of an ever-increasing vocabulary to accommodate rage and frustration.

[trish]

Given that 'evil' in this context is not to be taken literally, phrases like "the lesser of two evils" when applied to presidential candidates (which has been done so often it's more of a cliche than a meaningful claim) focus on the character of the candidates rather than their actions or policies.

Neither Hillary nor the policies she supports are evil, bad or anything of the sort. I would say I support most of her proposals and I have nothing but admiration for her personally. Yes, she's has made a few mistakes: she chose (like Colin Powell) to use a secure private server for her emails. BTW, the State Department's email server was hacked, hers never was; nevertheless the use of a private server was a political mistake that contributed significantly to putting Trump in the White House.

On the other hand I do think the secularized version of the word 'evil' does aptly apply to Trump, his character, his actions and his proposed goals for the nation. As to character he is a shallow, ignorant, narcissistic, bigoted, misogynistic, manipulative liar. As to his actions, he's groped women, broke contracts, refused to pay his contractors for services rendered, invented schemes to rip off old people's pensions and working families of their savings (and called it Trump University), he ran (runs) a charity that does little or no charitable work (unless you consider he and family charity cases). As to his goals for the nation, he wants to deport more immigrants than are here illegally, build a wall between us and Mexico and threaten them with crippling tariffs unless they pay for it, he wants a moratorium against all Muslims, he already put a leading white supremacist in the White House and he wants to make deals that will increase his empire of hotels and golf-courses ...oops...I mean he wants to make America Great Again.

This was not a choice between two evils. It was quite clearly a choice between good and bad. America was not thinking clearly, mesmerized by a cloud of obfuscation and buffoonery.

[Stavros]

On the other hand I do think the secularized version of the word 'evil' does aptly apply to Trump, his character, his actions and his proposed goals for the nation.

There is an irony here -on the one hand you refer to the 'secularized version of the word evil' which thereby strips it of its religious meaning as taking the side of the Devil against Almighty God, so that all of the values associated with God are reversed by association with the Devil; on the other hand so many Americans claim to both believe in God and to be Christian that the word Evil may retain its meaning for them, and may even reflect the way they viewed either candidate in the campaign. The problem is we cannot be sure, as the need to find the most loaded words to describe someone people do not like runs the risk of distorting their meaning and purpose, it may not be truth that no longer has meaning, but words, and that is just as dangerous a trend.

So I don't dispute the reasons you dislike Donald Trump, and understand why you defend Hillary Clinton -but I would hope the judgement of a politician is not just moral, or religious, but political. For that to work, one should query the character of the person seeking the Presidency and analze their policy proposals, rather than overload the debate with words which aim to express extreme forms of discontent yet constitute the very extremism unleashed in the language used in the campaign which people are now complaining about. Once it becomes normal to refer to opponents as liars and criminals it doesn't leave much room for reasoned debate about them.

As the Presidential campaign in the USA and EU referendum debate in the UK revealed, we are in danger of normalizing a narrative in politics that had previously been considered unacceptable because it was, and remains associated with people who do not support democracy or free speech, and who deliberately target people because of their religion, their ethnic origin and their sexual orientation as existential threats to 'the nation' or the integrity of the state in which they live. This creates a quite different set of propositions from the practice of good governance, and transforms -or seeks to transform- the public realm into a 'life and death struggle' in which the assumption is that government must act against these threats, or the future of the state is in peril. The reality is that day to politics must deal with less dramatic issues, and though they have short and long term consequences, policies ought not to be framed by the kind of prejudice which was exposed in the campaigns -in the USA and the UK- because democracy may be more fragile than we have assumed in a world where it remains the minority form of government.

And that is why words matter, because just as they can be used to offer a calm, sober and reasonable political programme on which to judge government they can also hurt, and not so much reflect divisions in society, as create them. And the greater those divisions become, the harder it becomes to govern. The assumption is that Trump will revert in office to becoming the standard pragmatist that the office tends to create -consider Reagan's second term- and that the UK will find an accommodation with the EU that is good for the country but does not satisfy the hardline 'Brexiteers'. The alternative is life in a political wilderness where nothing gets done and the people get mad, and I don't think any of us want that.

[trish]

Words do matter. With that I agree. But unfortunately for anyone who wishes to speak to future readers or even readers in another demographic, the meanings of words are in constant flux. “Decimate” used to mean to diminish your enemy’s number by one tenth; now it means to completely obliterate them. The average American (and I suspect the average Brit as well) has trouble reading Shakespeare (if they bother to do so anymore) because of the many linguistic shifts that have occurred between Elizabethan and modern times. Reading Chaucer is almost impossible.

You are right, when someone uses the phrase “the lesser of two evils”, we cannot be certain what they mean by ‘evil’, nor can we be certain what is meant by “so and so has been demonized.” For that matter, I’m never certain what the waiter means when I’m asked, “Would you like cream for your coffee.” We can only do our best, and in matters of importance we should curb our urge to exaggerate (although I do not think it’s an exaggeration to say Trump is a misogynist, a narcissist, a manipulative liar, or a cheat).

Words also matter, not only for the meanings they convey but for their emotional impact and shock value. Imagine the dissonance that reverberated throughout our collective brains when Trump announced he was never a Birther - that he was in fact the one who deliberately put an end to Birtherism! That whopper must’ve bought him several million hours of free air time. The fact that it was so obviously false and had such an ridiculous twist made it first class entertainment. To those ready to receive his message, it seemed deeper than it was: a metaphor for how Trump will simply sweep away all conventional restrictions and free us from liberal scorn and confirm us in our prejudices. Truth no longer matters; going viral is what counts. We no longer speak in sentences, we speak in memes.

How wonderfully dull it would be if we all said, “After considerable research and honest deliberation, I chose the candidate with the more promising policies and the better character for the job at hand.” At this point I so want to be living in that world. In that world I have a mouth; I can communicate. In this world, I’m all but mute.