Okay, let me tell you a story about Hillary Clinton.  She first made national headlines when she was something like 22 and the student graduation speaker at Wellesley College.  Now Wellesley is the most famous women’s college in the United States and at the time when women were not admitted to most of the Ivy League it was considered one of the top schools in the country for a woman to attend.  She used her platform to eviscerate the sitting Senator of Massachusetts, a Republican, for his support of the Vietnam War.  To his face because he was on the stage with her.

She was identified as a future leader of the Democratic Party from when she was in her early twenties.  After law school at one of the top law schools in the country she was hired as a staff worker on the Watergate Commission.  Now everyone in American politics in 1973 knew that the young people who worked on the investigation of Richard Nixon’s criminal activity were the future leaders of the Democratic Party.  

And from that moment, in her twenties, the American right decided to try and destroy her.  As an aside the right has spread unfounded rumors that she was fired from the Watergate Commission, the man who claims to have done it never had the authority to fire her and she worked on the commission until it closed down only leaving when all the staff at her level left, but facts have never gotten in the way of a good demonization of this woman.

She was one of the leading advocates for abused children and legal aid for poor people in the country in the late 1970s and 1980s when she was living in Arkansas and the narrative about her then was that she was the demon feminist who was masterminding letting children “divorce” their parents.  Because apparently there is never a circumstance in the minds of those on the right that a child might need to be emancipated from their parents or that children’s rights might be independent of those with the most power to control and abuse them.

When her husband was running for president she was attacked for her looks (and for the looks of her at the time twelve year old daughter).  Her career as a lawyer and as a law professor was used against her and the reason we have a “first ladies cookie recipe contest” every presidential campaign is because she had the audacity to say she was busy having a career and not baking cookies.  By the way this humiliating exercise is one she won both times when her husband was running and the magazine didn’t think that perhaps when she was running for president this little 24 year old personal attack exercise against her should be retired when she was making history.  Bill submitted the same recipe she won with in the 1990s.

And then the investigations started immediately.  

• She lost several hundred thousand dollars in an investment scheme and she was accused of insider trading.
  
• A personal friend committed suicide and she was accused both of having an affair with him and of killing him.
• She was routinely accused of sleeping with … basically any female friend of hers.  Because making someone a scary lesbian wasn’t yet out of fashion in the mid 1990s.
• She was attacked for trying to keep her family together as she was humiliated daily on national television.
• And she was attacked for being mad at her husband as she was humiliated daily on national television.
• They even attacked her cat because proper presidential families have dogs and it was clearly her witchcraft familiar.

The Republicans in congress have been launching fishing expeditions against this woman for the last 22 years and that’s not even counting the smear attacks that started in the late 1960s.  Today the Republicans in the House have spent more time and money investigating the attack on the embassy in Benghazi when she was secretary of state then was spent investigating the attacks on 9/11.  Ignoring that attacks on American embassies have occurred under every presidential administration for the last six decades and there were far more of them under George W Bush and for more people died in them under Ronald Reagan.

Oh.  And she was mocked in the late 1990s for daring to say there was a vast right wing conspiracy against her and her husband.  Because a woman should never acknowledge … you know… a provable fact.

So of course the average American voter has trouble distinguishing the truly horrific facts about Trump from the noise about Clinton.  We’ve been fed a steady diet of it for 45 fucking years with the express purpose of making sure this woman was never president of the United States.

The fact that she is going to be anyway isn’t a condemnation of my country.  It’s evidence of how strong and smart and resilient Hillary Clinton is.