Hugh Mackenzie
Huntsville Doppler
President Trump?
Three days from now it is quite possible that Donald Trump will be President-elect of the United States. It does not appear to be probable but the race has become much tighter and stranger things have happened. Last minute polls are showing Hillary Clinton three points ahead but this lead is barely outside the margin of error. The Electoral College vote seems much safer for Clinton, but that too can change with a relatively small number of votes in just the right places.
Despite what is now widely acknowledged as a nail biting race, my own view is that it will not be that close. And it could be a surprise. One just needs to remember Brexit and the way that referendum turned out, to the great surprise of pollsters and pundits. And so, my problem is, while I suspect there will be a clear winner, I am not all that certain as to who it will be.
Elections in general are a blood sport, but this election in the United States is turning out to be closer to a nuclear bomb. It is hard to believe that Americans would elect a President who, appears to me to have demonstrated that he loves only himself and that he is a narcissist, a racist, a bigot and a bully, with a limited attention span, an extremely short fuse and a penchant to get even. And yet, here he is, on the eve of the election, far closer to the big prize than most people had ever thought possible.
There are reasons for this of course, not the least of which is the utter contempt in which many Americans hold the dysfunctional political process in their country and anyone who has been involved in it, including of course, the Clintons. That is the catalyst, but there are more nefarious reasons.
Last July, James Comey, Director of the FBI, announced that their investigation into Hilary Clinton’s e-mails had produced no evidence of criminal wrong doing. He didn’t stop there however. He went on to call her behaviour careless and grossly negligent. That is not the job of the FBI, even if there was some truth in the allegations. It was a direct intervention in the Presidential election campaign. The role of the FBI is to investigate potential criminal activity and if warranted, to press charges. That’s it. Period. The courts convict. Not the FBI.
By straying outside that parameter, Comey, a card-holding Republican and a financial contributor to that Party, managed to tarnish Clinton, even while admitting that there were no grounds for criminal charges. By castigating her behaviour, without any finding by a Court, he triggered the narrowing of the gap in the election campaign that Clinton had over Trump at the time.
Now the plot thickens. This past week, Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of New York and a Trump insider, stated on national television that there was a “major surprise coming”. Sure enough, two days later and ten days before the election, the FBI strikes again, this time with news of a further investigation of Hillary’s e-mails, found on the laptop of the estranged husband of one of her senior aides. It begs the question, coincidence or insider knowledge? And then, like icing on the cake, a few days later out comes more information from the FBI, this time about the Pardon then President Bill Clinton granted to a questionable character decades ago. One would suspect that the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover had returned to the FBI!
Director Comey’s letter to Congress stating that he had restarted the Criminal investigation into Clinton was at best a mistake. He was strongly advised by the Justice Department not to do so this close to an election and in fact there is protocol in place discouraging this. He made no allegations and produced no evidence. But he said enough. Clinton was once again under criminal investigation and once again the polls tightened.
Thus, we are heading into an election in the United States that many now believe is too close to call. For months Donald Trump and his surrogates have been crying that the election is rigged. Maybe he is right, but the real question now is who is doing the rigging? And because of this, while the election on Tuesday night may indeed be anticlimactic, there will inevitably be much more to come. All we can do is buckle up and await the aftermath.
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If Mr. Comey had not come out with the announcements of Hillary Clinton’s emails, and if it was discovered later that the FBI knew about it and did nothing because of the proximity of the elections, what would be hitting the fan would not be nice. The FBI did their job!!
Have to agree with Frances Botham here on her assessment of Hillary Clinton – she had ample opportunities to remedy numerous concerns while she was in office, and did little else but verbalize a lot (for a fee, all talk, no action) – no solutions, just megabucks going into both her own and her foundation’s bank accounts. I also find it difficult to believe that a person that high up in government would be unable to identify potentially classified documents, and then forward them??? Not too bright…..
The voters of the US have spoken and Donald Trump is the result of their voices. It will be very interesting to see the steps he takes to fill this office. Personally, I am hoping to see a lot of positive changes made for veterans, but time will tell and the first few months should be interesting, to say the least, There are a lot of checks and balances in the US government to keep him on the straight and narrow, so let’s get out of panic mode at this point and observe. People change as their station in life does – let’s hope he does as well!
Isn’t it odd how some people react to an election. All the warning bells went off for me when Obama and his wife began vehemently campaigning for Clinton. Never in the history of the U.S. has this occurred, with the outgoing president campaigning for a candidate in this manner. It destroys the decorum he has established. And the Obama’s appear in a frantic mode. This smells of big coverup to me. One could justify his rationale in numerous lame ways, but the fact is obvious that there must be something very rotten in Rome.
Further the pro-woman for president zealots should take their blinders off. She says she’s going to “fix” Obamacare! Why didn’t she work with Obama to do just that while she was in office? And what about the fiasco in the middle east? She is suddenly going to remedy that too! If she keeps going in her same direction there, we could be facing another world war sooner than we think. And what about the industries and jobs swallowed up by China and other countries? One could write pages on the dysfunctinal aspect of the U.S. Government. If anyone can say it has been great, I feel sorry for you.
Trump may not be the ideal answer, but he’s also not any worse. And maybe it would be a good thing to sweep some of those “entrenched old boys” out of there and let the new broom make the dust fly.
FBI Director Comey just came out – a scant 2 days before the election – saying that Hillary Clinton should face no charges over her handling of classified information.
While now may not be the time to investigate Mr. Comey, once the dust has settled on this election, someone needs to ask why Mr. Comey raised the ugly (and false) specter of wrongdoing before his agency had even read the emails. Originally, he said it would take weeks to go through them all but what do you know? – it took barely a few days to determine that they were not significant.
On a positive note, the American people should be able to see clearly that extremist elements in FBI need to be removed. I hope the next President – Hillary Clinton – will see to that early in her first term.