I'm about to go off on Donald Trump. Yes, some of you might hate me. I'll live with it.

 So I wrote this on facebook the other day:

I'm getting really tired of Mr. Trump, the inveterate liar, third rate carny con man, and general idiot. I'm tired of his blowing hot air out of his mouth in one direction and then, in the same day, claiming he didn't say what he said. I'm tired of his lies about Hillary Clinton. During her time in the public eye, her positives--and there are lots of them--include working as a US Senator from New York to get help for the First Responders after the World Trade Center horror. And she has continued to work hard for that. She worked very hard for equal pay for equal work for women. She worked for health care for all as First Lady of the US--which is the real reason people don't like her politics, she showed too many lazy dems and dumb repubs up--and that nearly cost her husband his second term and certainly brought 25 years of animus on her. And then, with the Clinton Foundation she's saved countless lives and made countless others livable by getting medicine and water and farming equipment and a host of other necessities to them. Oh, and she and Bill pay about 1/3 of their income into federal income tax: $9.6 million following their best year on the speakers' circuit; $3.4 million last year. Nothing Mr. Trump has done for the public good--including his modest donations to good causes in the distant past--comes close.
Oh, and if you are going to come back with unfact-checked nonsense about the Clinton Foundation--which has an "A" rating from Charity Watch, a non-partisan charity watchdog--please do your research before commenting.

One of the people reading it reacted badly because I insulted his intelligence. I was wrong. He also blasted Hillary Clinton in a long response. Here's what I wrote in my reply:

Dear X: I was strident. I apologize for being rude. BUTTTT, I think you are way, way off base with Hillary. She's spent her adult life working for women, children, underprivilidged people. In the time after she was First Lady, and after she was Secretary of State before becoming a presidential candidate, she was one of the top tier speakers on the speaker circuit. There are tens of thousands of people on various speaker circuits. Some get $300 a talk, some get $1 million plus. She was in the $225,000 range evidently, according to her tax records. Who would pay that? I don't know. Not me, but I don't live in that rare air up there. People who need a tax write off, I suppose. And she gave a lot of that money to the Clinton Foundation[s], which is a monstrously great foundation and from which no one in her family ever took a dime. Now you tell me that Trump is a "maverick populist" and I say, "no dice." He's a criminal through and through. He lies incessantly and often denies his lies on the same day he makes them. He's backed by every white supremecist group in the USA, he's backed by the anti-women, anti-choice, anti-life-after-birth crowd. He's cheered on by those he describes as "uneducated". He accepted a present of a Purple Heart medal from a man who had been wounded in war, held it up and said, "I always wanted one of these." yet did not protest the Vietnam War, simply got out on "bone spurs" and has recently declared that avoiding Venereal Disease was his Vietnam. Along with saying that going to military high school was pretty much the same as being in the military. With that in mind, he says he'd "bomb the shit out of Isis", would "carpet bomb the Middle East," and wants to know why we have nuclear weapons if we can't use them. He claims he was against the Iraq war when he's on video being for it. He claims he didn't want to see Gaddafi removed from his position, when he's on video calling for him to be summarily killed by a "strategical strike". This is a man you want to have nuclear codes? He's a pathological liar, a man who works with the mob in New York and New Jersey, a man who dumps his wives at the drop of a hat and now professes a Christian faith to appeal to the alt.right crazy right-wing Christian voters. This is a man who has never, ever done a decent thing for another human being without touting it endlessly. This is a man who just today patted himself on the back for calling last night's bomb in New York a bomb. He relishes idiocy. He has reporters arrested and then touts free speech. He incites violence and then hides like a baby when someone jumps on his stage. He calls HIllary out for her Secret Service body guards when he not only has Secret Service body guards but his own guards as well. This is a man who has cheated, lied, stolen money from enough people that more than 1,300 have sued him over it. This is a man who has paid cash money to two attorney generals who were considering taking Trump University to court for fraud--and who, after they received his contributions to their campaigns, decided not to. This is a man who says he contributes to political campaigns because he knows that when he calls in a favor his phone calls will be taken by them. This is a guy who claims he'll bring manufacturing jobs back to the US while making everything he sells overseas. This is a man who insisted that Mitt Romney could not be president if he did not release his tax returns and now will not release his own, after swearing on television that he would. This is a man who has a family foundation that buys gifts for himself. This is a man who suggests his opponent might be stopped by "second amendment, people". This is a man who, in the past, has paid no federal income taxes, yet wants more tax breaks for people in his tax bracket. This is a man who refused to rent his apartments to black people--and was caught by the US Department of Justice doing just that and had to settle to avoid a criminal record--who claims he is loved by the African American community. This is a man who decries illegal aliens and then hires them to work for him. This is the man you want for president? I understand, Haydon, that you are an Australian and so might not know all of this. But everyone in the USA knows all of this and much, much more about this man. So no, the choice of a person who ain't perfect but has given her life to helping the public sector, versus this man, this small, small human being whom we all hope someday will do something for someone other than himself...well, that's not a choice. He's a joke who never meant to get here, got here, is stuck being here, is trying desperately to get out of being here, and he should be shown the door. 

Peter Gorman Haydon: Now for Hillary: Never met a war she didn't like, eh? Hmmm....after 9/11, President Bush and insane Dick Cheney went all out on Saddam Hussein as terrorist protectors. Everyone who know anything knew that Hussain, crazy as he was, was keeping the entire Middle East stable. He kept them stable because he was crazy enough to attack anyone and win. But we also knew that he especially hated the Saudis, and if Osama Bin Laden had touched foot on his soil he'd have been vaporized. Nonetheless, Bush/Cheney insisted he was part of the Bin Laden protectorate and chose to go to war there. A vote was taken in the US Senate. It was NOT a vote to go to war. It was a vote authorizing the US President to go to war PROVIDED HE COULD PROVE that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Yes, Hillary voted to give the president, President Bush, that power. But Bush then ignored the glaring truth that Hussein had no weapons of destruction, outed a CIA agent because her husband had proved there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and then invaded. That destabilized the Mideast. On top of that, Hussein's Royal Guard and much of his military were disbanded and sent home--without money but with all the weapons fo war they could carry. That's ISiS backbone and Hillary had nothing to do with it .The Spring was going to happen no matter what the US did. So we did out best to outfit the freedom fighters so that they'd have a chance. It has not worked out so well. ISIS has had an odd mesmerizing effect on a lot of disillusioned kids in the US, Europe and the Mideast. I don't think Hillary or anyone could have anticipated the draw of cutting people's heads off on TV would have on the gullible and hopeless. Should we have left Gadaffi in power? Should we have not tried to take down Assad? No. These were monsters, killing their own. As was Hussein, with the Kurds. But we didn't go after Hussein for the Kurd massacres, did we? No. We went after him on the false pretense--the absolute lie--that he harborded terrorists and had weapons of mass destruction.

Hillary's work as Sec of State will be evaluated properly in 20 years. It will ask the question: Did her work to bring Iran to the table prevent them from obtaining and using nuclear weapons or not. That's going to be a huge question for a while. Right now, that looks like some of her best work: Bringing Iran to the table, kicking and screaming. As president, I don't think she'll enter a single war. I only have my belief systems on that. But looking at her 40 year record, from blemishes to cool shit, and her cool shit so far outweighs her blemishes that it's a non-topic. You brought up, Haydon, that things were rigged against Berni. Not true. In all those thousands and thousands of emails there were 7 or 9 that suggested things to undermine Berni, none of which were acted upon. The superdelegates have been in place for years and years: They were not put there to stymie Berni, as he knows. Now I did not want to spend all this time on this issue, Haydon, but you pushed me with your rant. I hope you suffered as much reading this as I did reading your rant.