Miranda Devine: Clinton doesn’t deserve to win

JUST when the FBI is finally catching up with her dodgy dealings, the Clinton machine has launched its final misogyny blitzkrieg, writes Miranda Devine.

HILLARY Clinton’s last desperate stand is reminiscent of Julia Gillard’s phony feminist protection racket. Just when the FBI is finally catching up with her dodgy dealings, the Clinton machine has launched its final misogyny blitzkrieg.

But being a woman does not automatically confer sainthood. Having the right chromosomes does not excuse poor character.

The Clintonistas cry victim, yet their sexism knows no bounds. From his bouffant to his fake tan and the size of his hands, it is Trump’s masculinity which has been mercilessly pilloried. He has been called fat, old and ugly.

Miranda Devine.

A nude statue depicting him with a micro penis has been the butt of jokes around the world.

But men are just supposed to cop it. Like Tony Abbott against Gillard, Trump is supposed to fight with both hands behind his back while she belts away with impunity.

Except he doesn’t. He gives as good as he gets, which is the key to his success. He may be a “short fingered vulgarian”, but only a barbarian could have defied the politically correct establishment like he has.

He owes nothing to anyone, in distinct contrast to Clinton, who owes hundreds of millions of dollars to such women-­affirming entities as Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Trump has his problems, but compared to Clinton, he is a paragon of virtue. Far from being a female role model, Clinton is an embarrassment to the fairer sex, and only ­cements sexist assumptions of powerful women as devious sociopaths.

Her frightening lack of empathy was obvious when Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was murdered live on camera in 2011. We watched on CNN as he was dragged out of a truck, half dead, bloodied, staggering, surrounded by men toting guns and yelling “Allah Akbar”.

We saw him sodomised with a knife. We saw him beg for mercy. No normal person could have watched without feeling traumatised.

Clintonistas cry victim, yet their sexism knows no bounds.

No one except Hillary Clinton, who would have seen it all via the American drone operation reported to have attacked Gaddafi’s convoy. “We came, we saw, he died,” she boasted afterwards, laughing insanely.

A recent 13,000-word investigation by the New York Times into Gaddafi’s death found Clinton was to blame for the Obama administration’s worst foreign policy fiasco.

Libya is a now a failed state, overrun by ISIS, contributing to the worst refugee crisis in a century.

As secretary of state, Clinton was the equivalent of our foreign minister. WikiLeaks and other emails show she ­relied on the flawed foreign policy advice of her left-wing journalist friend Sidney Blumenthal. In one email he proposes the overthrow of Gaddafi to expedite regime change in Syria. “It would give the Syrian regime something to really think about.”

A State Department email in Clinton’s email ­archives says: “The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of ­Bashar Assad … The resulting regime in Syria will see the US as a friend, not an enemy.” That turned out well.

In the sordid saga of the US election, with its Wieners and pussy groping, its dirty money and influence peddling, the one person who emerges with integrity, like the hero from central casting, is James Comey, the FBI director.

Comey has been under ­attack since he announced the FBI had reopened its investigations into Clinton, after finding classified emails on the computer of Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of her closest aide Huma Abedin. It took courage and fortitude to defy the Clinton machine.

But, above all, it took judgment. The mark of a great leader is judgment, and a collective lack of judgment is what the political class suffers from today as the narcissistic baby-boomer generation has moved into power.

In a speech this year to law students at the Catholic University of America in Washington, Comey, 55, described that rare quality.

“Intelligence is the ability to solve a riddle, to master an equation, to nail a set of facts. Judgment is very different. (It is) the ability to orbit that ­answer, that set of facts, and see it as it might be seen through the eyes of others.”

To cultivate judgment he had two pieces of advice: first, sleep. “Sleeping is not a moral failure … It’s actually the neurochemical process of judgment … While you sleep your brain is mapping, connecting, drawing inferences and helping you make sense of a complicated situation.”

Second, don’t neglect those you love. The father of five knows the “experience of a two-year-old running across the floor on unsteady legs to greet you when you come in the door. Do not miss that.

“It’s the right thing to do. It will protect you and nurture you and allows you to maintain that thing that allows you to exercise power responsibly.”

Judgment, in other words, is the ultimate manifestation of character.

As the life trajectories of Clinton, Trump and Comey intersect at this historic moment, how will it turn out? All we know is that character is destiny.

MILLIONS OF REASONS TO FEAR HILLARY

IT’S astounding how many foreign policy experts seem to view Hillary Clinton as the lesser of two evils in the US presidential election.

She might be a “known quantity”, as a visiting Israeli general told me in her favour last week, but what we “know” is shocking.

For starters, there’s the Clinton Foundation. The FBI is investigating how the foundation’s interests were intertwined with State Department business, how decisions were made which appear to favour big donors, how donors were accorded special access when Clinton was Secretary of State, and how she and Bill amassed a personal fortune.

The 2013 tax returns for the Clinton Foundation show it received $150 million income and paid out less than $9 million (six per cent) in grants to charities. Salaries amounted to $30 million and travel and other expenses were $84 million. Similar percentages appear in 2014.

While the foundation claims it spends 80 per cent of its funds directly running “programs”, there is little transparency about how the money is actually spent.

It matters to Australia if charity is a pretext for the Clinton Foundation, because we have donated $88 million directly to the foundation since 2006, and almost $400 million to associated entities, mostly by Julia Gillard.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said in a statement yesterday it has no “current agreements” with the Clinton Foundation, but it has “honoured” contracts by previous governments.

These include $3.3 million to the Clinton Health Access Initiative until June 30, 2017 for an HIV/AIDS program in Papua New Guinea, and an unspecified amount to the Clinton Climate Initiative contracted under the Rudd government from 2008-2016.

We can only trust it’s money well spent.