National Affairs by Claire Hoy — Trump a liar? Hillary’s far worse

July 28, 2016 · 0 Comments

Donald Trump lies a lot.
But not, dare we say, as much as Hillary Clinton. And his lies, mostly stemming from his overwhelming ego, aren’t even in the same league as Clinton’s.
While he natters on about his claimed accomplishments, and seems to change his position on issues easily, Clinton lied about things of consequence, things that have harmed her country both at home and abroad.
She said, for example, her private email server never dealt with any confidential material. As the seemingly endless FBI investigation has shown, that was a huge lie. She claimed that the Benghazi raid, which cost the lives of American diplomats and military personnel, was caused by an anti-Islamic video. That too is a monstrous lie.
There’s more, but you get the idea.
Yet — yet — the difference between Trump’s lies and Clinton’s lies, or so it would seem, is that the bulk of the media is outraged by Trump’s untruthfulness while at the same time essentially giving Clinton a pass for her far more serious transgressions.
This is not a huge surprise for anybody who has paid any attention to the overwhelming liberal bias in the media — and among the academic elites.
But Trump’s triumph in the Republican nomination battle — over the strenuous efforts of the party hierarchy — is yet another example of the extraordinary disconnect between the elite and the general public.
This is true not only in the U.S. — where, in my view, voters are faced with two unpleasant choices for president — but in Canada as well. And further afield, too.
People have made the comparison between Trump’s unlikely success and the success of the late Toronto mayor Rob Ford and the anti-European Union crowd in Britain who, despite dire predictions of doom and gloom from the Establishment, managed to win the Brexit vote.
This is not a new phenomena, where the self-professed “experts” look down their long noses at the “rubes” and scoff from their positions of superiority, only to lose in the end.
You’ll recall perhaps that back in Brian Mulroney’s day, when the Meech Lake Accord was put to a vote, the same ego-maniacs who constitute the elite of that day were absolutely convinced that the plebes would not dare to reject a proposal which had been hammered out by the politicians of the day and their high-priced help, behind closed doors.
Well, we all know how that turned out, and despite predictions from Meech Lake supporters that Canada would collapse if the vote went against them, we seem to have survived relatively intact.
I would posit that the same thing will be true of Trump, should he ultimately defeat Clinton — one of the few Americans who has as many negatives as Trump does — and take over from the shockingly ineffective Barack Obama.
Last week, when Trump formally became the candidate at the Republican National Convention, the main headline in the Toronto Star — which has never seen a Conservative it couldn’t malign — was that now is the time to be “afraid.”
Afraid of what, pray tell?
Trump, we are constantly told, is a buffoon, a bigot, a racist, and heaven knows what else. An argument can be made that he is none of these things, but there you have it. The media story is set and woe be to anyone who strays from that line and suggests that, for all his faults — and, like every human being, he has plenty — he is still a better person than Hillary Clinton and her appendage Bill, both of whom have brazenly used their political offices to reap untold personal benefits upon themselves.
Trump, whatever you think of him, is clearly a successful businessman, so he most know something. While he certainly does rant about the immigration of Hispanics and Islamists, his target is illegals. I think his idea of a bigger wall is stupid. A waste of money and energy. But on the other hand, Clinton and her cohorts in both the Republican and Democratic Party sat around for years doing nothing while some 12 million illegals — 12 million — flooded into the country.
In Saturday’s National Post, Megan McArdle of Bloomberg News — certainly no friend of anything Trump — wrote that a U.S. with Trump as president would be “a nation paralyzed and backsliding. That truly is a dark and hopeless vision for America.”
Au contraire. Paralyzed and backsliding are perfect descriptors for what Obama has done to America, and what Clinton would continue.
“Making America Great Again” may be a hokey slogan, but it’s one which, much to the chagrin of the usual suspects, seems to be resonating.
Who would’ve thunk it? hoy