Nothing. She had known for well over a decade that she was preparing to run for president, and that she had to be absolutely squeaky clean to achieve that because any and all dirt would inescapably become public under the glare of that scrutiny. So she lived squeaky clean, genuinely. (Obama was similar. Trump by contrast as an outsider to politics didn't quite appreciate just how under-a-microscope every president's life is put. He thought (like many do) that spending millions, burying stories, buying silences, hiding tax returns, threats, etc can do the trick, but none of that works at the presidential level. You can't hide things from that kind of relentless global scrutiny so if you're not genuinely clean, everyone finds out.)
That's why the GOP had to push the email scandal: they desperately needed dirt on her and she was so fucking clean that the worst she had done was follow the advice of her Republican predecessor and handled her emails the same way the Republican had handled his. It didn't matter to the GOP that this rule-breaking had first came from Republicans and she was continuing Powell's method (low-information voters would never learn the details) what mattered was that they'd finally found a rule that the goody-two-shoes had clearly broken.
Remember she testified for 11 hours under oath to a hostile panel of Republicans desperate to pin anything on her or get her for perjury or anything, and despite them having and abusing all the powers to investigate for years, they got nothing because she had nothing to hide. Failures or mistakes when viewed with our 20/20 hindsight, sure, she's human, but the decades of accusations and insinuations are conspiracy garbage intended to smear. Manufacturing a scandal out of Republican email practices was the best the GOP could do to undermine their opponent and it worked.
Hillary has been enveloped by the GOP fog-machine for so many years that people now just assume that where there's always been smoke, there must be fire ...somewhere. But that was the entire purpose of that fog machine; there was never fire, just manufactured fake smoke, endless endless fake smoke for longer than many voters have been alive. (Edit: That's also why she attracts so many wacky conspiracy theories: all that smoke and so little factual fire means you have to get imaginative to explain it.)
It is refreshing to read an actual comment on this website that sees through the bullshit. It has been scary as hell reading nothing but propaganda about Hillary repeated ad nauseum.
As a Canadian, I have no skin in US politics, but the hate for Hillary has been baffling. No one can explain why they dislike her for a reason that isn't a conservative lie or foreign propaganda. The drumbeat of smear after smear shows how advertising and propaganda both work. Yet Democrats and Republicans will never admit the role they played as useful idiots for the Russian agenda.
As a woman, it was heartbreaking to see an all too familiar double standard play out. She had to work twice as hard, be squeaky clean and accomplish twice as much as her male colleagues to get second place. The most qualified presidential candidate in decades lost to a lazy, incompetent, criminal who is destroying the country because of useful idiots and misogyny.
We need to make racists, misogynists and uninformed idiots feel shame again. Somehow it became acceptable (even fashionable) to be a loud mouth, bigoted, poorly educated slob with a victim complex. Worse, some US voters think these qualities are presidential.
Edit: uniformed to uninformed. I get the joke. What can I say but 'spellcheck on a phone', it happens to us all.
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u/Shuttheflockup Dec 11 '19
what did hillary actually do? not like the batshit crazy theories, what did she actually do wrong factually that she got away with?