Seth Myers explains things to Bernie or Bust die-hards

NBC Late Night host Seth Myers explains an important part of the nature of reality to a segment of Democrats:


Link: https://youtu.be/HvV2JY8kbgI

Lately I find I often feel like grabbing certain segment of the populace by the scruff of the neck and politely inquiring, “What the hell is wrong with you people??”

Bernie Sanders fans and people in general have valid reasons for disliking Hillary Clinton. True, some attacks on her are wildly false (see Snopes for plenty of examples), such as the assertion that she or someone in the Obama administration issued a “stand down” order to stop U.S. forces from rescuing Americans in Benghazi. That particular rumor was debunked by a whole series of Congressional investigations, most of them conducted by Republicans.

But a lot of other attacks on her are valid. She’s shown some pretty bad judgment, the prime example being her use of a private email server for official business then having her own staff as opposed to a neutral party expunge personal emails. True, until John Kerry no U.S. secretary of state restricted official communications to government email accounts, and the evidence is that no secrets of any importance were divulged. But when I was doing work for a large enterprise I was careful to use their secure email system for work purposes and keep it separate from my personal email, and she should have been smart enough to do the same. But there’s no evidence what she did compromised any actual secrets, and despite calls to “lock her up,” no one has ever been criminally prosecuted for doing what she did.

She’s also a tireless self-promoter. She’s delivered ridiculously expensive speeches to some pretty sleazy Wall Street organizations and refused to reveal what she said. She’s been caught in a number of self-serving lies, and by various accounts she’s a pretty unpleasant person to work for. She’s lied about a lot of things (a common habit of politicians, but that’s no excuse).

So I understand why a lot of people, including Bernie supporters, would dislike her. I can even understand why some people find her voice annoying, though it’s hard for me to see that as a major consideration in selecting a president. (Some people apparently disliked Abraham Lincoln’s voice.)

But for God’s sake, people, everything wrong with Hillary is also wrong with Donald Trump, only vastly worse. He has a history of stiffing contractors and using bankruptcy to get out of paying his debts. No U.S. bank will do business with him. He didn’t just lend his name to “Trump University” — an outright scam designed to peddle yugely overpriced get-rich-with-real-estate courses to people in and approaching retirement in need of more income — he actively helped design the marketing materials, though not the courses that were supposedly based on his business secrets. He pays lip service to the Constitution but advocates a long list of things that plainly violate it. He praises some of the world’s worst dictators for their supposed “leadership.” He casually talks about breaking treaties (including the highly important North Atlantic Treaty) and advocates the spread of nuclear weapons, even to governments with links to terrorism. As people across the entire political spectrum have pointed out, he lies not just on occasion but constantly. In fact, his campaign is largely based on a string of lies about today’s United States, lies about everything from taxation to immigration to the strength of our military.

A few years ago a friend of mine told me that the problem with voting for the lesser of two evils is that you still end up with evil. I told him he was right, but unfortunately in the real world not voting for the lesser of two evils doesn’t change that, it just makes it a bit more likely that you’ll end up with the greater evil.

If you don’t think Donald Trump is by far a greater evil than Hillary Clinton you’re not really paying attention.

(Updated 2016 July 31 to fix some typos, add a few points, and the like.)



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