One aspect of Hillary Clinton that has gone largely undiscussed through this election cycle is that she has a vicious, searing hatred for the military. If Donald Trump knew what he was doing, this would be low-hanging fruit for an attack.
Here are seven instances that reveal Clinton’s hatred for the military.
1. Benghazi. As the Daily Wire has previously explained, four brave Americans died on the night of the terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, two of whom were Navy SEALs. And yet, Clinton did nothing to help them out and has lied repeatedly as to what occurred on that night. Only someone with contempt for the military would act in such a manner.
To continue on the Benghazi theme…
2. A Marine was forcibly removed when he questioned Bill Clinton about his wife’s role in Benghazi. When Bill Clinton was stumping for his wife at South Carolina in February, a man identifying himself as a Marine sergeant said to Clinton, “Four (Americans) were killed and your wife is trying to cover it up.” He later lamented that “the fact that she is not in prison now is mind-blowing.”
The Marine was subsequently booed by the audience and was removed from the event by police officers. Clinton simply said in response: “I heard you. You listen to me.” The former president then accused the Marine of being “poisoned by lies.”
This is harrowing treatment of a Marine, and Clinton himself didn’t have a problem with it. His wife never spoke out against how the Marine was treated, which speaks volumes about the Clintons’ respect for the military.
3. Behind the scenes, Hillary has been incredibly disrespectful toward members of the military. According to Ronald Kessler:
“Hillary was very rude to agents, and she didn’t appear to like law enforcement or the military,” former Secret Service agent Lloyd Bulman recalls. “She wouldn’t go over and meet military people or police officers, as most protectees do. She was just really rude to almost everybody. She’d act like she didn’t want you around, like you were beneath her.”
“Hillary didn’t like the military aides wearing their uniforms around the White House,” one former agent remembers. “She asked if they would wear business suits instead. The uniform’s a sign of pride, and they’re proud to wear their uniform. I know that the military was actually really offended by it.”
It takes a special kind of hatred and narcissism to request military members to “wear business suits” over their uniforms.
4. Hillary chastised Marines for urinating on the bodies of terrorists. In 2012, a video emerged of Marines peeing on dead Taliban fighters. This apparently irked Clinton immensely, as she called it “deplorable behavior”–a word that she seems to like.
“It is absolutely inconsistent with American values, with the standards of behavior that we expect from out military personal,” said Clinton.
Former Lt. Colonel Allen West had the perfect response to Clinton and others condemning the Marines actions; he wrote in an email to The Weekly Standard that these same people did not have that same “self-righteous indignation when our Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu. Neither do I recall media outrage and condemnation of our Blackwater security contractors being killed, their bodies burned, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah.”
West did admit that the Marines involved should face “maximum punishment” that would involve a “letter of reprimand” and an apology “to God, Country, and Corps videotaped and conclude by singing the full US Marine Corps Hymn without a teleprompter.”
“As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell,” West concluded.
One of the Marines, Rob Richards, left the military a year later as a result of the incident and his life went downhill from there, as he passed away from a drug overdose in 2015.
5. Hillary has shrugged off the Department of Veteran Affairs scandal. Back in October 2015, Clinton said the following on MSNBC:
“I don’t understand why we have such a problem, because there have been a number of surveys of veterans, and, overall, veterans who do get treated are satisfied with their treatment,” Clinton said.
While she admitted that there were some problems with the VA, Clinton thought that there were some reforms put in place that will solve the problem. Clinton criticized Republicans for supposedly sabotaging the VA with a lack of funding.
“They try to create a downward spiral, don’t fund it to the extent that it needs to be funded, because we want it to fail, so then we can argue for privatization,” Clinton said. “They still want to privatize Medicare. they still want to do away with Social Security, and these are fights we’ve been having for 70, 80 years now. so we cannot grow weary in the face of these ideological assaults on basic fundamental services, whether it’s the VA, Medicare, Social Security, but we have to be more creative about trying to fix the problems that are the legitimate concerns so that we can try to stymie the Republican assault.”
This is completely inaccurate, as The Daily Wire reported at the time:
The VA Inspector General’s report concluded that as many as 307,000 veterans may have died as a result of the system, and that it took 160 days on average to be approved for healthcare. An appeal claim could take as long as four years to process.
Despite changes in leadership at the VA, the problem has only gotten worse. Only three VA employees were fired, wait times have increased by 50 percent, bonuses paid to VA personnel have actually increased and almost 900,000 veterans are still waiting to have their claims processed.
As the VA IG report says, the problems in the VA are “systemic.” It is not due to a lack of funding in the VA, as the budget for the VA almost tripled between 2000-2012. The system needs to be changed.
The suffering of numerous veterans under the VA’s corrupt, bureaucratic quagmire doesn’t seem to bother Clinton, who seems more interested in using the VA as a political bludgeon against Republicans instead.
6. More than likely, Hillary will continue President Barack Obama’s downsizing of the military. At a New Hampshire campaign event in September 2015, Clinton proposed a commission to review defense spending, stating: “I think we are overdue for a very thorough debate in our country about what we need, and how we are going to pay for it. Very often, leadership of the Defense Department wants to eliminate certain spending, or wants to change it, and they’re stopped by the Congress.”
Recently, Clinton has called for removing the sequester’s military cuts, but only if it was offset by other unspecified cuts in the Pentagon, meaning she won’t do anything to help rebuild the military. In fact, she has stated that everything is all fine and dandy with the military.
“Very often, leadership of the Defense Department wants to eliminate certain spending, or wants to change it, and they’re stopped by the Congress.”
Hillary Clinton
In actuality, Obama has driven the Marines to their “breaking point” due to his cuts to the military, as this heart-wrenching report explains. And Clinton could possibly make it worse if she follows through on adopting a commission that calls for further defense cuts.
7. Military members and veterans overwhelmingly support Trump. A poll conducted by NBC News/Survey Monkey, military members and veterans supported Trump by a margin of 55 percent to 36 percent. Would Clinton consider them as part of the “basket of deplorables”?