So, did anyone else here watch Colin Powell's presentation to the UN before the Iraq invasion back when it happened? As a clueless American, that presentation was very impressive. I didn't know anything about what Powell was talking about, of course. He sounded quite certain of the truth of what he was saying, although the UN was unmoved. I think a lot of us were angry that they were refusing to see the obvious intel but in restrospect, it was more that we weren't seeing clearly ourselves - we were still outraged over 9/11, and we were told that Saddam was sponsoring Al Qaida terrorists and developing WMD, and we had appeared to have completely routed the Taliban, so it's no surprise most of America was in favor of invading at the time. Colin Powell seemed like a good, honest, trustworthy person, right up until the Bush Administration stopped talking about WMD and started retroactively changing why we invaded. (And when they found degraded chemical weapons from before the Gulf War, hid it until they were out of office and couldn't anymore)
At some point post-invasion, during the insurgency, I read H. Norman Schwartzkopf's autobiography, where he predicted what would have happened if we had invaded and knocked off Saddam during the first Gulf War. His prediction was remarkably similar to what was happening then with the insurgency. It made me wonder why Rumsfeld was so certain of success, especially when this prediction was over a decade old and so accurate. Surely he had people who could have seen the same thing coming?
Anyways, I haven't voted for a Republican since, although I still pay attention to what they're saying, because it seems important.
I don't particularly like Hillary Clinton either, but attacking her for her email server is the dumbest thing ever. So she chose to not use the incredibly slow and insecure state department email system, and instead used a private email server, and at some point started paying a company to host it and keep it well-secured. There's no way it could be less secure than the state department's. Hell, the smart thing to do would have been to move everyone to accounts like that. That company (and I'm sure others) actually knows what it's doing, and has to be accountable to its customers. I bet it'd be cheaper than the state department's system, too. (Of course, there are plenty of tech companies for whom security isn't important, because they think "security doesn't sell.")