Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Exceedingly bad judgment is disqualifying


Bernie Sanders is right.  Paraphrasing, judgment is vastly more important than experience.  No where is this most certainly than the case than in the individual in the office of the President of the United States. 

By the nature of the office and its span of responsibility and control, no one person will have experience in every area in which the electorate expects and demands the president to make sound judgments.  Business, foreign policy, national security, healthcare, finance, taxation, diplomacy, domestic policy, natural disasters, science, education, environment, cybersecurity, legislation, law, agriculture, commerce, transportation, veterans, and countless other matters demand the president's best judgment.  It is obvious, despite what our current POTUS may claim, no one individual can be the duty expert in each and every one of these topic areas, let alone the subtopics.  So the judgment of the president, as he/she takes in the facts and arrives at conclusions must be unassailable.

Just as unassailable must be the president's judgment in people.  He/she must choose the best possible team.  He/she must be able to take in opposing recommendations from a wide variety of people, judge their credibility and the quality of their recommendations.  He/she must be an astute judge of the character of individuals.

As the commander-in-chief, the president must have unassailable judgment when deciding to put our Armed Forces in harm's way.

No matter how one looks at it, judgment is overwhelmingly more important than mere experience.  Experience alone does not provide the basis for good judgment.  Perhaps an over simplification, it could be argued that one could have vast quantities of experience composed of exceptionally bad judgment. 

When it comes down to it, Ms. Clinton's record is all too rife with too many examples of woefully bad to abysmal judgment.  As current news reports reflect and she acknowledged (and regardless of how the legal matters are addressed), it was unbelieveably bad judgment to deliberately set up and exclusively use an unsecure private service for her email while Secretary of State.  Pure and simple: the requirements of the job as Secretary of State includes receiving and transmitting classified information.  Remaining on this topic for a moment, her deliberate and specific claim in March 2015 that there was no classified information in her email is another example of monumentally bad judgment.  As we have recently learned, some of the information is so highly classified that the Department of State will not release even redacted copies.  It was her judgment to make that now is a fully debunked statement.  Further, her deliberate and knowing judgment to exclusively use an insecure, private server for email communications also exposed classified information to individuals not cleared/approved to have access to it.

Two other notable examples of her deficient judgment: personally and publicly supporting Anthony Weiner prior to his resignation and the deliberate decision to publicly claim having landed under fire in Bosnia (proven false). 

Bottom line, taken alone and separate from many other reasons not to support Ms. Clinton, her exceedingly bad judgment is wholly disqualifying.

  


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