Clinton gives a speech showing herself as a candidate thourghly beholden to the same aggressive hegemonic US foreign policy which has been failing for decades

On Thursday, Hillary Clinton decided to launch her first real attack on Donald Trump, giving a prepared speech (she seldom gives another kind) attacking the GOP candidate on national security and foreign policy - a curious choice, given few American voters support candidates based on foreign policy issues.

Trump had received a leaked copy of the speech the previous day, and launched a preemptive broadside at Hillary in Sacramento, mocking Hillary's points in advance as well as her mechanical speaking style based on teleprompters.

Clinton's speech was full of stale, unoriginal, premanufactured rhetoric. If this is the best her team can manage, she is going to be completely eviscerated by The Donald in live debate. Even though Trump had responded to the speech 24 hours before it was given, it plays like Hillary's staff did not bother to change a single word.

Clinton devoted special attention to Trump's position on Russia and Vladimir Putin. Her statements were really too idiotic to be worth repeating, the same old shameless Washington establishment propaganda about Russia, but I'll do her the honor just this once.

He praises dictators like Vladimir Putin and picks fights with our friends – including the British prime minister, the mayor of London, the German chancellor, the president of Mexico and the Pope.

If Putin is a dictator, he is a dictator supported by 80-90% of the population of his country. You will not find Putin's name or image on display anywhere in Moscow, except privately sold souvenirs at tourist kiosks. He has no camps for political prisoners. People can freely say what they want about him or his policies in Russia - in fact, leading opposition leaders (i.e., people polling between 0-5% support) are routinely invited to meetings and press conferences.

In other words, if Putin's goal is dictatorship, he is doing a pretty lousy job.

Hillary also conveniently forgot to mention other of "our" friends - like the tyrant king of Saudi Arabia, the head-chopping barbarians of of the Syrian "opposition", or the coup-installed corrupt acting president of Brazil, to name a few.

Now Moscow and Beijing are deeply envious of our alliances around the world, because they have nothing to match them. They’d love for us to elect a President who would jeopardize that source of strength. If Donald gets his way, they’ll be celebrating in the Kremlin. We cannot let that happen.

Not only will they be celebrating in the Kremlin, but all over the world - if Trump keeps his promises to deal with other nations forthrightly and on an equal basis. To say that Moscow and Beijing are "envious" of America's bankrupting imperial overstrech is a laughable assertion. They have shown no inclination toward trying to replicate or compete with the US in fashioning a unipolar world. Multipolarity is already a fact of international affairs, whether Hillary and the neocon policy dinosaurs who support her want to recognize it or not.

Countries like Russia and China often work against us. Beijing dumps cheap steel in our markets. That hurts American workers. Moscow has taken aggressive military action in Ukraine, right on NATO’s doorstep.

Well she ought to know about China dumping cheap goods in the US, since her husband brought China into the WTO and pushed free trade for 8 years which, together with his successors, has devastated every American industry except pharmaceuticals and medicine for treating a morbidly obese population eating a terrible genetically modified nutritionless diet and the defense industry necessary for maintaining the empire.

Russia has not taken any aggressive action in Ukraine, which it has the military capability to seize within days if it wanted, leaving everyone to talk about the pitiful Ukrainian military, which could not even defeat a handful rebels in Donbass, in the past tense. And if Ukraine is on NATO's doorstep, it's because NATO extended its porch all the way across the street into Russia's front yard.

But it doesn’t work like that in world affairs. Just like being interviewed on the same episode of “60 Minutes” as Putin was, is not the same thing as actually dealing with Putin.

You can believe Putin has absolutely no respect for Hillary Clinton, nor probably does anyone else who had the misfortune of having to deal with her during her horrendous tenure as secretary of state. Her incompetent staff couldn't even manage to translate the single word "reset" correctly into Russian in the infamous "reset button" scene she staged with Lavrov. That in itself is pathetic. But worse is that after Lavrov told her the word they wrote meant "overcharged", she barked, "Don't worry, we won't let you do that to us!"

The diplomatic, or just simply polite rejoinder might have been, "Don't worry, Mr. Lavrov, we have no intention of doing that to you." But Hillary Clinton is so schooled in the arrogance of American Exceptionalism by her policy handlers, that it never entered her mind that the USA could ever be perceived as an aggrieving party. Only other states which buck the instructions from the Washington-enforced World Order can do wrong in world affairs.

Even more embarrassing to Clinton was the incident during her 2008 campaign, when she tried to smear Putin by calling him a KGB agent with "no soul." Putin responded later when asked about it (as always, in a gentlemanly way, implying but not stating his target) that Clinton had no brain.

[H]e said if he were grading Vladimir Putin as a leader, he’d give him an A. Now, I’ll leave it to the psychiatrists to explain his affection for tyrants.

All the world's psychiatrists should be busy treating American policy makers for the next decade. Because the US has installed, propped up, and supported so many tyrants in the last century that it defies listing here. I hesitate to even give a partial list for fear of whom I may leave out. (Google is your friend. Well not really, it's spying on you.)

Trump knows how to size up the competition. He is a businessman. He deals with facts, not ideology. The fact is, Vladimir Putin has done enormously well for Russia, considering the position it was in when he came to power. He does deserve an "A", and Trump is again being more honest than a typical career politician.

A Hillary Clinton presidency, and the coterie of washed up neocons she would bring with her, would dramatically increase the chance of World War III. As a woman she would already have a psychological inferiority complex. In an attempt to prove her "toughness" she would probably be more aggressive and warmongering than either Obama or Bush.

Personally, I plan to vote for Donald Trump on the off chance he will even marginally improve relations with the rest of the world. And yeah, updating the US 1950s-era infrastructure and securing national borders rather than foreign ones, wouldn't be half bad either.

After all, the worst thing that can happen is, he's lying.

In that case, get ready for World War III as reality TV, and FEMA camps that are incredibly luxurious. It beats dying to the sound of Hillary's bellowing wicked witch laugh.