Both candidates are terrible but Clinton's competence makes her dangerous - while Trump is a fool who will accomplish nothing

Yated by Jonathan Rosenblum

A case can be made for each of the candidates. It consists of three words: What’s the alternative? It is no exaggeration to describe Donald Trump as the most poorly prepared man to run for the White House, clueless about the nature of the office and lacking minimal knowledge of any of the issues he would face as president. He is too contemptuous of the office he seeks and the country he would lead to even attempt to remedy either of these failings.

For good measure, he is infantile, distracted from the issue at hand by any perceived slight, a whiny spoiled brat, and a man of low character who lies about his charitable giving (and almost everything else) and about whom a positive word dare not be said lest we convey to our children the idea that moral character does not matter.

And her? The rap sheet is too long to review. Never in the history of the Republic has any high office holder sought to monetize political power on the scale of she and her husband. Stealing the White House furniture when they left the White House and selling pardons in the last days of Bill’s presidency are the perfect metaphors that came before and after.

As president, Clinton’s chief constitutional duty would be faithfully executing the laws of the United States. How can she take an oath to do so, when she has consistently shown that she does not view those laws as applying to herself or her husband? Andrew McCarthy, chief prosecutor in the first World Trade Center bombing case, was not joking when he wrote that Hillary should be prosecuted under the federal racketeering statutes (RICO) for the manner in which she turned the State Department into an adjunct of the influence peddling operation of the Clinton Foundation.

The intertwined tentacles of the Clinton Foundation, Teneo Consulting, and the State Department bear all the markers of a criminal enterprise. Thanks to WikiLeaks and Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act requests, we now are privy to a raft of email requests for favors from Douglas Band of the Clinton Foundation to senior State Department aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin. Under special dispensation, Abedin was allowed to be simultaneously employed by Teneo Consulting, co-founded by Band, and the State Department. And Mills also took a job with the Clinton Foundation after leaving her job as senior counselor to Secretary of State Clinton.

Perhaps the most egregious State Department intervention on behalf of a major donor to the Clinton Foundation was that benefitting Frant Giustra. In 2005, Bill Clinton lobbied Kazakhstan’s ruling despot to grant uranium mining rights to Giustra’s mining company. Shortly thereafter, Giustra donated $31.3 million to the Foundation and pledged another $100 million.

When that same despot subsequently arrested the director of the state-controlled uranium agency, the State Department energy envoy pressed the Kazakhstan government to recognize the previously issued licenses to Giustra’s company. Subsequently, Russia’s state nuclear energy corporation sought to purchase control of Giustra’s company and thereby gain control of one-fifth of the known uranium reserves. That required approval from Hillary Clinton’s State Department. It was granted.

In 2011, Chelsea Clinton grew so concerned about the way the Clinton Foundation was being run that she commissioned an independent investigation by the law firm of Simpson, Thatcher and Bartlett, headed by Victoria Bjorklund, considered one of the leading national experts in the laws governing foundations and charities. The resulting report was scathing, and included a finding that many large donors expected “a quid quo pro” for their contributions, something that is bright-line illegal. The report further found that the Foundation consistently ignored all standard best practices for foundation good governance.

In a 12-page memorandum included in the report, Douglas Band described how his firm, Teneo Consulting, directed major corporate donors to the Clinton Foundation and otherwise benefitted what he dubbed “Bill Clinton Inc.” during the period Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state. Not only did the Foundation, which employees many long-time veterans of Clinton campaigns and provides luxury travel to Clinton Family members, gain multi-million dollar contributions, but former President Clinton was paid enormous speaking and other fees. One of those perks was an over $17 million dollar contract for serving as “honorary chairman” of a for-profit university. In the memo, Band boasted that he had worked out contracts with clients who donated to the Clinton Foundation that would personally pay the former president $66 million over the next decade.[...]

SO BOTH CANDIDATES are thoroughly unsuited to be president – like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each in his or her own way. I could respect someone who decides to vote for Hillary out of fear that Trump’s ignorance of foreign affairs and the vanity that makes it impossible to acknowledge that ignorance makes him too dangerous. And I could respect someone who chooses Trump because he will be more supportive of Israel, hopefully appoint better Supreme Court justices, might rely heavily on vice-president Mike Pence, and will not further advance the identity politics destroying America and make it impossible to address urgent problems – in short, because he is not Hillary. And I can respect someone who will not be complicit in either one becoming president and refuses to vote for one or another. [...]

Donald Trump, it must be admitted, exhibits a lot of worrisome authoritarian traits. He has advocated a loosening of American libel laws, speaks admiringly of “strong man” Putin, and seems to believe the president has unlimited powers.

His virtue, however, is that he would be incompetent in acting as president on those tendencies. He doesn’t know where the levers of anti-democratic power lie nor would he have access to them. And his own party would stifle his exercise of executive power at every turn.

Not so Hillary. She knows where the levers are and how to use them. That is the function of a modern Yale Law School education: Learn how to use power in ways that the cretins of the world cannot stop you, even if they happen to be the majority.[...]