Clinton vs Trump: Double Standards

Next time an acquaintance of your casually states that Hillary Clinton was a lying dishonest crooked politician, show them this table.

It was created by Robert Mann using Politifact data. They are an independent fact-checking organization.

Do you see where she stands? At the bottom of the dishonesty scale.

Do you see where The Donald stands? He is the liar-in-chief with inflammable trousers.

Next time an acquaintance of your tells you that Clinton's use of email servers was a terrible thing, don't bother linking them to my Clinton post to refute the argument.

Instead ask them what the Trump White House is doing about hiding and destroying paperwork behind executive orders and National Security Council (NSC) decisions.

They will be surprised because the corporate media did not have much interest in the issue.

When the Orange Man gave the white nationalist Steve Bannon a permanent seat at the NSC's principals committee (while removing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of national intelligence, and the secretary of energy) he immediately moved to eliminate paper trails and remove National Security Council staff from the decision making process.

Under previous administrations, if someone thought another person or directorate had a stake in the issue at hand or expertise in a subject area, he or she was free to share the papers as long as the recipient had proper clearance.

With that standard in mind, when some officials saw Trump’s draft executive orders, they felt they had broad impact and shared them more widely for staffing and comments.

That did not sit well with Bannon or his staff, according to the official. More stringent guidelines for handling and routing were then instituted, and the National Security Council staff was largely cut out of the process.

Apparently, the NSC staff no longer produce the text of the decisions nor do they write Summary of Conclusions (SOC) to preserve the main points leading to decisions.

During the first week of the Trump administration, there were no SOCs, the intelligence official said. In fact, according to him, there is surprisingly very little paper being generated, and whatever paper there is, the NSC staff is not privy to it. He sees this as a deterioration of transparency and accountability.

In case you are wondering whether Steve Bannon's power grab and his central role in national security decision making and his efforts to remove all transparency and accountability let me note the following points.

This is a man who once claimed to be a Leninist:

“Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

This is a man who predicted a war with China within a decade.

 “We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years, aren’t we?” he said in March 2016. “There’s no doubt about that. They’re taking their sandbars and making basically stationary aircraft carriers and putting missiles on those. They come here to the United States in front of our face — and you understand how important face is — and say it’s an ancient territorial sea.”

This is a man who foresaw a war in the Middle East within the context of the"clash of civilizations."

 “To be brutally frank, I mean Christianity is dying in Europe, and Islam is on the rise,” he said in an interview in January 2016 with a Breitbart reporter.

In November 2015, Bannon told his listeners it was time to have an “adult conversation” about national security.

“Some of these situations may get a little unpleasant,” Bannon said. “But you know what, we’re in a war. We’re clearly going into, I think, a major shooting war in the Middle East again.”

This is also the guy who "is running a cabal, almost like a shadow NSC,”according to a NSC staffer. Besides taking over NSC decisions, he is removing all records leading up to them.

And the corporate media that produced over half a million articles on Hillary Clinton's perfectly legal email server is once again largely silent.

Destroying Clinton was a vile and sexist act that made the Washington establishment and the corporate media giddy for unfathomable reasons.

I wonder how they will feel when the faux-Leninist, white supremacist President Bannon destroys them and start a new war with China.

My guess is that they will blame her for not winning the elections.
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UPDATE

This is from the Associated Press

At least three top national security officials — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and Rex Tillerson, who is awaiting confirmation to lead the State Department — have told associates they were not aware of details of the directive until around the time Trump signed it. Leading intelligence officials were also left largely in the dark, according to U.S. officials.

But obviously President Bannon knew about it and that's all that matters.

Feel free to yell, "but her email servers..."