Hillary Clinton: Classic or Dud?

No, I think Hillary for me = Ken for me, + looks.

Ten years ago, CH was a pretty great writer. Five years ago, patchily great. Now — wonky on the BOUZE and courted at all the Right Sirees Dahling — he pisses away his gifts swapping undeserved mutual smarm with M.Amis, S.Rushdie and J.Fenton.

Can he have fucked up the Assault on Mt Kissinger? If he gets that right, I shall — I THINK I shall — forgive him his evermore desperately footling prose so-called style.

Hillary Clinton: is the Co*rtney L*ve of democratic reform politics. Except IT TAKES A VILLAGE is crap, and PRETTY ON THE INSIDE isn't.

"Sirees" = "soirees" — only I prefer "Sirees". It adds a mad Texa Panhandle flavour. Honour the hidden intention.

xoxo

Raggett: "made a bunch of old guys who should be dead mad"... Took a while working through all the ways to parse this sentence.

Went over to Lorraine’s house after school. She told me how her cousin Jim at Northwestern gets "high" by drinking cough syrup. We looked in her parents’ medicine chest, but we didn’t find any cough syrup. But there was a box of Sucrets. We didn’t know how many to take, so we each ate three.

I sat down and closed my eyes for fifteen minutes but nothing happened. So I decided to go to the kitchen and eat a banana. Then as I was getting up, the room suddenly started to spin real fast. The picture of Fabian on Lorraine’s wall looked right at me and winked. Then I got real dizzy. The walls were starting to collapse, so I fell on the floor and rolled myself into a ball. Lorraine was talking so fast that I couldn’t understand her. After a while I opened my eyes and the room was turning around slower and slower, like when you turn a record player off. Finally it stopped and I was able to catch my breath. I’ve never been SO SCARED in all my life. We’re taking some more tomorrow.

After this episode the girls went on a Sucrets jag that lasted until shortly after Christmas, when the local druggist got suspicious and refused to sell them any more. Hillary and Lorraine tried sniffing Elmer’s Glue, but it paled in comparison. They cast about for a substitute, testing and rejecting Vitamin C tablets, Carter’s Little Liver Pills, and St. Joseph’s Children’s Aspirin. The period of experimentation and disappointment lasted several months. Then Hillary found out about boys.

Hillary’s diary from this period reflects the anguish of a young girl cast adrift in a world she does not know or understand, bereft of the one thing that has given her life meaning. A typical entry reads:

December 20, 1961.

I’m bored. I wish it would snow. I want to move to Chicago. In Chicago you can walk into any store and get all the Sucrets you want. All the boys at school are yucky. I want to go to Chicago and meet a nice handsome boy and take Sucrets with him. My teachers assign too much homework.

A friend of mine was telling me today about how, when she was working in a convent in Kenya, one of the little boys she was looking after was called Hillary Clinton, that was his first name. She said that sometimes the people there really liked the sound of english words and would name children after them, so there were children with names like Pressurecooker and Birthcontrol.

I was going to ask how people rated Hillary as Secretary of State but knowing that somewhere in Kenya is a young boy named Birthcontrol has distracted me somewhat

slightly less obnoxious/obsequious than Condi

No second term as SOS or presidential run

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/16/clinton-running-for-president/

I'm a bit surprised about no run for the nomination. Whatever happens in 2012, I thought she'd be in good position for '16. She'd be 69, same age as that old guy who won. I know a lot of people love her no matter what, and a lot of other people hate her no matter what, but I think I'm fairly representative of people who couldn't stand her through the '08 campaign but who've come around since then. (If she had run, I probably could have learned to not-stand-her all over again.)

part of the problem

Me or Hillary? Let me guess--both.

no; like me, you don't matter!

All right--pressure's off!

do you think hillary would get significant support from former obama supporters who now think she'd have made a better president in the first place? (subquestion - does anyone think she would have?)

I think she would have ended up almost exactly like Obama tbh; they were always more similar than they were different.

I think she would have got a fair amount of support from Obama '08 supporters because of the way she's conducted herself since she lost. (The three or four weeks where she slowly came to terms with having lost were surreal--remember them well.) If I explain any further, Morbius and other people will jump on, and this'll become another ridicule-Obama thread.

I have no idea what kind of country will have left Obama's successor in 2012 (if he loses), let alone 2016, but I'm pretty sure I don't want HRC leading it.

*Obama will have left his successor

*jumps on clemenza*

in 2016 it will be called President of Thunderdome btw

she will run in '16

she will be 69 in 2016

will she still be "making change"?

The former U.S. secretary of state begins her Twitter bio with "Wife, mom."

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/clintons-reliably-bad-foreign-policy/

Well that's very kind, but I am doing what I want to do right now and I have no intention or any idea even of running again - 2011

reliably bad liar

Hillary Clinton: is the Co*rtney L*ve of democratic reform politics. Except IT TAKES A VILLAGE is crap, and PRETTY ON THE INSIDE isn't.

― mark s, Wednesday, July 4, 2001 8:00 PM (14 years ago)

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-JYEe9GZbEVY/VvYaJnQLcsI/AAAAAAADCAg/wr3x9KLtTzs/s640/blogger-image--825882656.jpg

throngs of well-wishers begged her to run again and she stoically agreed to once again mount the rostrum and humbly offer her leadership to the nation -- this has been the storyline ever since George Washington

fb friend (lefty, as in just left his Dem Party registration for indie):

"The most pertinent fact likely to be overlooked in this extraordinarily troubling report is the following: neither the Secretary nor her top aides consented to be interviewed by the Inspector General of the very department of government they had been entrusted with running."

A terrible attack on the only person that can possibly prevent the biggest threat to humanity since.....whatever the last thing was in american politics twonk circles

Nixon fans loved to say "They all did it."

The election thread is like a convention of mob lawyers this afternoon :)

each party has its lemmings. it's a beautiful thing.

Oh its like a lemmin party alright

dr morbius sounding a lot like the sort of person who lives by the movie 'fight club'

When life hands you lemmings, make lemmingaid.

omg deems

What do folks make of the Clinton Foundation stuff, and is there anything especially good to read on it? It continues to smell fishy to me even where many of their other "scandals" don't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8oAQOvOEXY

Is that a redaction or the monolith from 2001 (or are you just happy to see me)?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/foreign-governments-gave-millions-to-foundation-while-clinton-was-at-state-dept/2015/02/25/31937c1e-bc3f-11e4-8668-4e7ba8439ca6_story.html

maybe?

https://www.byline.com/project/27/article/520

This is a decent overview of some of it:

http://www.ibtimes.com/clinton-foundation-donors-got-weapons-deals-hillary-clintons-state-department-1934187

Doesn't really cover the big pharma / oil industry / uranium mining elements, though.

also worth looking at this imo http://www.factcheck.org/2015/06/where-does-clinton-foundation-money-go/

since that byline.com article repeats a lot of the more fallacious arguments that factcheck parses

eg

We spoke by phone with Sandra Minuitti at Charity Navigator, and she told us Charity Navigator decided not to rate the Clinton Foundation because the foundation spun off some entities (chiefly the Health Access Initiative) and then later brought some, like the Clinton Global Initiative, back into the fold. Charity Navigator looks at a charity’s performance over time, she said, and those spin-offs could result in a skewed picture using its analysis model. If the foundation maintains its current structure for several years, she said, Charity Navigator will be able to rate it again.

The decision to withhold a rating had nothing to do with concerns about the Clinton Foundation’s charitable work. Further, Minuitti said citing only the 6 percent of the budget spent on grants as the sum total spent on charity by the foundation — as Willis and Fiorina did — is inaccurate.

She referred us to page 10 of the 2013 990 form for the Clinton Foundation. When considering the amount spent on “charitable work,” she said, one would look not just at the amount in grants given to other charities, but all of the expenses in Column B for program services. That comes to 80.6 percent of spending. (The higher 89 percent figure we cited earlier comes from a CharityWatch analysis of the Clinton Foundation and its affiliates.)

How they're spending it is less of a problem than how they're getting it.

The most charitable interpretation is that US political-arms nexus is such a moral cesspit that the decision to sell cluster munitions to the people supplying al-Qaeda, etc, would have happened anyway. There was no undue influence brought to bear because there were no contrary opinions for the money to sway. Donors weren't buying privileged access to lobby Clinton, they were buying privileged access to lobby each other.

also it's been a while since i checked into this but state is just one group of a few that discuss + approve arms deals. not saying that means that they couldn't have been trying to buy influence with state by donating to the foundation but that if they were it wasn't sufficient. they have to consult w/ sec of defense, all arms deals get approved by congress, etc. and also iirc the link between donations and arms sales were mostly bogus? like some countries that donated funds got reductions in arms sales (like jamaica and ireland). it could be there was some v soft influence peddling but it def wasn't sufficient + it seems to like SV says assume that they wouldn't have made those sales anyway. which we had done before clinton and continued to do after clinton.

it seems silly to me bc of what SV says - they would have made those sales anyway* - sorry, syntax got weird there

Like many things with the Clintons, it seems hard to believe that there's is an explicit, 1:1 quid pro quo here, but it's also hard to believe that there isn't a lot of influence peddling and enriching the circle of cronies going on with the foundation and the global initiative.

Something weird is happening with YouTube embeds on here this week

god thank you i thought it was just me

everything has turned into a quarter of a black flag tattoo ime

"Donald Trump says America doesn't win anymore... Well, tell that to THE CAVALIERS!"

I guess she dint kno other team from Murrica too

srsly, just GO THE FUCK AWAY, NOW.

did she kill someone again?

she gave an interview: "I accept total responsibility for my loss, and here's whose fault it was..."

eye on the prize, Morbz

you're right she should refrain from ever appearing in public or answering questions for the rest of her time on Earth.

she had to wait an entire 100 days before she could blame everyone. that takes presidential fortitude.

YES, and it's for our own good... bcz the next step is she runs again. HEED MY WARNING. xp

no scott, she's been doing it for weeks now

i think there's zero chance she runs, i mean i cannot imagine the DNC letting her anywhere near the nomination process whatsoever, they're not that du--well, ok maybe.

Hillary Clinton says she won't run for public office again

she's not going to run again unless she wants to endure the humiliation of not even winning the nomination.

like Hubert Humphrey in '72 and '76? check

she's not going to run again gimme a break

ok, cancer kept him from running in '76, mea culpa

xp

it's much more likely that Chelsea would run, which would at least offer the lulz of causing the dirtbag left to commit seppuku.

Will put money on HRC running again in 2020. Don't think she would get nominated though.

Who else is there? Warren, and... um, uhhh....

Classic

flappy, i'd bet $500 that she doesn't run in 2020. i'm sure there's some escrow website we can use or something to enforce the terms.

Classic

Buncha senators (booker, gillibrand, warren, etc) wanna run. Plus Cuomo. At least! Dems are gonna have a big field.

Also, she'll be 73 in 2020. Of course she's not going to run.

probably a decent person, bad politician with moderately bad policies. gave us donald trump.

Gillibrand said today she will not run for prez, which i find ~2% more believable than HRC

gillibrand said she wouldn't yesterday fwiw (probably not much)

Glad we're finally having this discussion. It's been too long.

the emails were classic

i'll extend that bet to anyone who thinks hillary running in 2020 is easy money

shameless co-opter/panderer. good debater. very hard worker. knows policy as well as anyone. voted for iraq war and learned pretty much zero lessons from it. married to bill. overall admirable response to decades-long smear campaign.

Hillary Clinton did not give us Donald Trump. People who voted for Donald Trump gave us Donald Trump; I am not willing to delegate that responsibility away from the people who marked his name on their ballots.

i will say that 10 years ago it would have been a lot more fashionable to hate hillary on the left. i personally find the reclamation efforts pretty transparently disingenuous but i understand that that's how the current left-of-center political zeitgeist wants to see things

Anyone as wealthy as the Clintons is overwhelmingly likely to be a dud.

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/387201/BILL-CLINTON-AL-GORE-SHORTS.jpg

thanks djp

Would say automatically but Dirk Nowitzki and Lebron seem pretty cool. I wouldn't want either to be President, though.

i will say that 10 years ago it would have been a lot more fashionable to hate hillary on the left

is it not incredibly fashionable now

that photo -- it's Hillary out with her gay manfriend!

on the bernie left it is for sure. i think the intersectional left currently is making a point of being pro-hillary, which again is understandable from an optics standpoint but kind of hollow imo

i will say that 10 years ago it would have been a lot more fashionable to hate hillary on the left.

don't understand this, hating Hillary is practically prerequisite for being progressive these days.

sorry when i say left there i don't mean hard left, obv they've always hated the clintons and always will

Minorities understand her like whites never will, as shown in the turnout.

I don't think it's "hollow" if you're a woman. My wife still hasn't gotten over November and it's hard to blame her.

it's because she's much more deserving of it now xxp

"$675,000? I don't know, it's what they were paying." Really what is up with these progressives who can't see she's on the side of the angels, and a true "ally" of "everyday Americans"?

yes, like Alfred said.

sentimental bullshit

you got it, that's the spirit that's making America great again!

you are a minority of one, it's true

I wouldn't really call you sentimental, Morbius.

Who else is there? Warren, and... um, uhhh....

― flappy bird, Tuesday, 2 May 2017 20:01 (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i doubt warren is especially liable to win over the "lock her up" brigade, even if I do enjoy watching her grilling bankers, it makes me feel powerful.

i'm not going to be quite as harsh as morbs because i think the lingering feelings are legitimate, but i def think there is a certain tendentious revisionism currently in fashion among certain people under the democratic umbrella that has more to do with her differences with donald trump than it does with her own virtues

huh?

she's viewed favorably because people would rather her be president

she*

(i mean, with good reason obv)

i would would rather she be president

i would would rather a tree stump be president

(ie a prez w/ Hil's charisma and better mic skills)

by "certain people" do you mean "minorities who have supported her for years" or "women who have supported her for years" or "LGBT people who have supported her for years"

I don't know a single person who criticized Clinton back in the day who wholeheartedly embraced her in this race. I know several who felt she was the only sane option but they weren't happy about voting for her; most of them had never voted for a Democrat in their lives. The people I know who vociferously supported her were the people who voted for her over Obama in the 2008 primary and were sad she wasn't running in 2004, and these people cross all of the demographics I mentioned.

Basically, it's inconceivable to a subset of the American left/Democratic party that some people may have never hated Hillary Clinton, and these people like to express their incredulous disbelief over and over, louder and louder, just to make sure you don't make the mistake of thinking they might not hate Hillary Clinton.

idk, i haven't really witnessed any of this favorable revisionism wrt Hillary. at best she's been pitied but mostly I just see people dunking on her everywhere.

which is why the propaganda machinery during election season at least made sense even if it was annoying, but at this point it's over, she lost, we can just admit she sucks now

by "we" you mean "ILX," not "the other people who are not white or men who voted for her."

She ran a fine campaign against an unconventional candidate against; she would've beaten any other candidate.

cross out "against"

man, your floor for "a fine campaign" surprises me.

isn't there a baseball game on or something

Way better than Dukakis, Mondale, and Kerry? Wayyyyy better than Gkre?

a fine campaign would have had a message beyond "that guy is ka-raaayzee" imo

But she didn't visit Michigan, which as we all know was the only swing-state she lost.

ok I guess "america is already great" was the other, even worse part of the messaging xp

also "I have experience, Kissinger is my friend and Nancy Reagan was an AIDS activist"

she definitely ran a campaign that would have worked against a conventional candidate. can't fault her for not adjusting, i guess

a fine campaign would have had a message beyond "that guy is ka-raaayzee" imo

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Tuesday, May 2, 2017 1:49 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

listen i looooooove to relitigate the fucking election but this received-wisdom-among-hardcore-leftists reductive ass view of her campaign is fucking stupid

what was her vision for the country beyond "third term of obama" brad

Just curious: Why isn't 'third term of obama' good enough?

i feel like people voted for obama

as their wages continued to stagnate

they voted for HIM, yes.

"third term of incremental gains for some while a widening chunk of the country burns" takes a way more skilled pol to sell imo

She would've won against a more conventional candidate.

She would've won if Comey hadn't made his late October announcement, of which there's plenty of data showing.

what was her vision for the country beyond "third term of obama" brad

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Tuesday, May 2, 2017 4:59 PM

is your name Mark Halperin?

no, thank god

"third term of Obama" is not the same message as "that guy is ka-raaayzee"

She is a policy wonk; her entire platform was built upon the idea that people should bring her problems and she would sit down with her team, study precedents and statutes, and forge a consensus-friendly answer that would benefit as many people as it could to the best of its ability. It's not a sexy platform or one that easily breaks down into soundbites but it is pretty much exactly how you need to run a government serving a plethora of needs and competing interests, not all of which are easily dismissed as cranks and unimportant.

Also, how much of that widening burning chunk of the country is due to states voting in obstructionist Republicans who do not have any ideas to bring to the table beyond trickle-down economics and "everything Democrats propose is evil and wrong because they allowed a black man to run for President"?

People who are Democrats will vote for the Democrat against this generation of nu-Reagan nihilists -- and a female Democrat. That was reason enough. It's not that hard. I'm quite sorry you can dismiss women and the blacks suspicious of Sanders so easily (and I was a fervent Sanders supporter in the primaries); they would be most likely to be hurt by a Trump administration and Congress working in sync.

But, sure, yea, fine, she shouldn't have spent so much time turning him into Darth Vader -- in part because he was.

has anyone else read Shattered yet?

fwiw unlike uhh a lot of people apparently I'm not necessarily convinced Bernie would have won

Why should we? It looks like we're writing our own versions.

xpost

she definitely ran a campaign that would have worked against a conventional candidate. can't fault her for not adjusting, i guess

― k3vin k., Tuesday, 2 May 2017 20:52 (twelve minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

one of the main things to fault her campaign on, really.

DJP otm

After the last few months, a third term for Obama sounds enticing. Or, for that matter, a third term for Bill. Or first term for Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, or Hillary. Maybe none of those is what we would design from scratch, but any of them would represent an improvement over Yamilton.

But sure, yeah, let's rev up the neg-on-Hillz machine anew.

what was her vision for the country beyond "third term of obama" brad

just out of curiosity, what was McCain's vision beyond "third term of GWB"?

(not being sarcastic here, I really don't remember)

In the last three months she ran against a candidate she portrayed as an incoherent racist and a buffoon who represented a threat to the world.

Guess she was wrong.

i don't know if bernie would have won either. probably had similar chances, maybe less, who knows

the suspicion regarding bernie was afaict due to the fact that he was viewed as a carpetbagger -- which isn't even wrong, it was his first time running for national office so obv he didn't campaign much in the south unlike some people who spent the last 20 years running for president with longstanding ties to the community. i understood the reason for their relative popularity with the dem base and didn't really begrudge them for preferring hillary. but i don't feel as though i am obligated to agree with their choice

sarcasm deems

when Obama first got elected he was saying he would have voted against Iraq. in his book, it was all over his website. it was a big reason he was so popular.

thks, i figured it was a strange one but americans are bad at humour so yknow

brad I fully understand that all this relitigation is tiresome as fuck, I do hope (and I think most of us can agree on this?) that if anything good comes of this mess it's that there's a broader field of candidates next time around and someone who isn't Sanders is around to eg fight for single payer, higher minimum wage, and maybe, just maybe, not being a gigantic hawk (Sanders also sucked on that)

people should bring her problems and she would sit down with her team, study precedents and statutes, and forge a consensus-friendly

so, "all the best people"

what happened to 'campaigning in poetry'?

i just flipped today seeing a clip of her on CNN going "Comey, Assange etc". Disappear.

Comey and Assange should both def be disappeared

brad I fully understand that all this relitigation is tiresome as fuck, I do hope (and I think most of us can agree on this?) that if anything good comes of this mess it's that there's a broader field of candidates next time around and someone who isn't Sanders is around to eg fight for single payer, higher minimum wage, and maybe, just maybe, not being a gigantic hawk (Sanders also sucked on that)

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Tuesday, May 2, 2017 2:25 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i also hope for this

How exactly do you run against a candidate like Trump? Outside of visiting the Midwest, what should she have done differently? The campaign was so strange. Every single thing Trump said or did was national news, while Hillary's dense policy speeches got no coverage whatsoever. Trump could say something stupid like "Obama and Hillary founded ISIS!" and talking heads would debate whether or not that was true for an entire day. Trump could get positive coverage by not tripping over his dick for 24 hours, whereas nearly every single story about Hillary was negative. Trump's supporters didn't care that he was unqualified or a bigot - in fact, they loved him for it. What do you do?

move left to inspire some of the 45% that doesn't vote imo

to summarize somebody's tweet i posted a few months ago, "We're going to give you a job and let you see the doctor."

Xpost a lot of the infighting can be attributed back to the spareness of that primary field. Other serious candidates, (especially pushing more progressive challenges) vying for it would have diluted the false dynamic, excessive villainizing that took hold.

yeah I'm clearly no Hillary fan but the DNC are many orders dumber

How exactly do you run against a candidate like Trump? Outside of visiting the Midwest, what should she have done differently? The campaign was so strange. Every single thing Trump said or did was national news, while Hillary's dense policy speeches got no coverage whatsoever. Trump could say something stupid like "Obama and Hillary founded ISIS!" and talking heads would debate whether or not that was true for an entire day. Trump could get positive coverage by not tripping over his dick for 24 hours, whereas nearly every single story about Hillary was negative. Trump's supporters didn't care that he was unqualified or a bigot - in fact, they loved him for it. What do you do?

If the Clintons were as nefarious and connected to shady dealings as people want to think they are, they would have had Trump killed.

move left to inspire some of the 45% that doesn't vote imo

Clinton DID move left and was roundly criticized by people on the left for it.

Xpost a lot of the infighting can be attributed back to the spareness of that primary field. Other serious candidates, (especially pushing more progressive challenges) vying for it would have diluted the false dynamic, excessive villainizing that took hold.

Clinton's biggest weakness as a candidate is that it did not actually matter what she said or did; a significant percentage of the voters who would agree with a large amount of the things her platform represented were going to reject her out of hand or look for reasons not to support her because she is Hillary Clinton (as evidenced by this thread).

I mean an actual left candidate, not someone whose rhetoric pivots on occasion

yes, we didn't believe a goddamn word of her Bernie impersonation

AND, so far it seems the takeaway from this election that is ringing true with white (male) Democrats is "we need to be more racist in order to get votes", which is going to lose them so many of the votes they already have that we should all really just start hoarding now and wait for 11 more years of blatantly incompetent Republican government to roll through the country before voters start thinking "maybe we should pay more attention to the ramifications of these policies rather than just following whoever yells at brown people the loudest".

imo Dems don't need to "win back" white racist blue collar voters as much as they need to energize and turn out *other* groups of voters - youth, latinos, etc. I'm always irritated when people act like the electorate is a fixed thing, instead of something that shifts and mutates depending on who's on the ballot, who's enfranchised, and who's motivated.

ie as if you can't win a majority in Michigan unless you get some old, uneducated white racists to vote for you

How exactly do you run against a candidate like Trump? Outside of visiting the Midwest, what should she have done differently?

I think she could have tried to appear more human, less scripted - more 'delete your account' tweets, unprepared zings in the debate etc.

the fact that people feel so removed from hillary clinton the human being made it easier to attach all kinds of nonsense to her, whereas trump's 'realness' let him get away with murder

hillary clinton "not appearing human" is a horseshit projection imo not something inherent to her

trump could've tried to appear more human and less like a sentient boil that had dragged itself out of a sewer having learned precisely three words of english

to a certain extent, sure. but she very, very rarely went off script and her whole campaign was run like an anonymous machine - not just her. like, who would follow the hillary clinton twitter account? why would you want to receive those tweets? in donald trump tweeting about his breakfast burrito or whatever.

xp

anyway, i'm done, alfred and djp resoundingly otm throughout this thread

'in donald trump tweeting about his breakfast burrito or whatever.' was supposed to be 'in contrast, donald trump was tweeting about his breakfast burrito or whatever.'

And uh she won the most convincing popular vote count in American history, so clearly this election was notIke the others.

i don't know i'm starting to think morbz/clinton and the resultant frequent flare-ups are a good case study for bullshit discussion loops and opportunity to develop best practices to address them

i'm starting to think you are Donna Brazile

I realize we're all concerned about like basic survival rn but I do think there were encouraging things about the race. However you feel about Sanders (and there's no way in hell he should ever run again, and not only because no one needs to relive these arguments again in 2019/20), the fact that an old fart who touted himself as a socialist was able to compete on the national stage thanks mostly to small donors is a big deal (and for anyone significantly left of center, kind of a revelation - less about Sanders as a candidate, imo, and more for the possibility his relative success represents) and should really be looked at as a model to build on rather than an aberration to be resentfully dismissed. I really think that if the Dems run anyone to the right of Warren (barring the sudden emergence of another Obama-level orator/personality in the interim), they're missing out on the chance to evolve and champion policies and viewpoints people actually, y'know, like rather than begrudgingly go along with cause the alternative is to align with utter ghouls.

in other words I'm trying to think positively which is probably a mistake lol

i'm starting to think you are Donna Brazile

― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius)

one of us cannot be wrong

feel like the fairly huge collapse in the vote between obama and clinton in low income people of all races is a problem that is not going to be solved when a less hated republican candidate comes up against whatever the democrats idea of a presidential candidate is next time around

also the idea "you can't beat trump because he is teflon and can say anything blah blah blah" is basically highly untrue, and also extremely defeatist considering the fact that someone will have to fight a presidential race against him in 2020

trump is easily beatable. with a couple of twists in the narrative Hillary would have won, maybe Sanders too. Biden would have probably handily defeated him, everyone loved Uncle Joe. I know, Morbs. but still, it's true i think.

also, the idea that democrat's policies are more for the rich than trump's is indeed dumb, but what are the democrats answers to these issues brought up in the polling in that wapo article yesterday:

50 percent of Obama-Trump voters said their incomes are falling behind the cost of living, and another 31 percent said their incomes are merely keeping pace with the cost of living.
A sizable chunk of Obama-Trump voters — 30 percent — said their vote for Trump was more a vote against Clinton than a vote for Trump. Remember, these voters backed Obama four years earlier.
42 percent of Obama-Trump voters said congressional Democrats’ economic policies will favor the wealthy, vs. only 21 percent of them who said the same about Trump. (Forty percent say that about congressional Republicans.) A total of 77 percent of Obama-Trump voters said Trump’s policies will favor some mix of all other classes (middle class, poor, all equally), while a total of 58 percent said that about congressional Democrats.

xp. biden is even to the right of clinton in everything but hawkishness but i mean yes, at least he seems sort of genial and is not without charisma

re teflon trump, jim- has to be allied with the ability to campaign from outside the system, not just the incumbent party. he wont have that in 2020

Everybody is also weirdly ready to forget that pretty much all the smart people who do nothing but think about this - Sam Wang, Larry Sabato, other aggregators - were putting odds of her victory in the 95%+ range. They were only undecided about whether it would be the biggest smackdown in 100 years, or the biggest smackdown in 1,000 years.

Yeah, 538, I hear you cry. Outlier 538 was roundly mocked (here and elsewhere) for being Not So Sure. However, that was less about whether she would win but by how much. They saw there was a large pool of undecideds, and registered resultant uncertainty, but still kept their predictions safely Hillarific.

There were serious discussions about whether Republicans were done as a national party, or simply done, full stop. There were serious panels about whether Democrats should focus merely on winning this particular election decisively, or focus instead on maliciously pounding Republican faces ignominiously into vats of steaming offal forever more. You guys don't remember this? It was in all the papers.

In light of all those things, messages like "She should have done more outreach to organized labor in the Upper Midwest, DUH, how come she was so stupid as to not have done this one simple trick?" rings a bit hollow. So does "[Different Candidate] would have won easily, jeez! Why didn't everyone simply vote for [different candidate] instead of this OBVIOUSLY toxic hagbeast?"

At the time, it looked to almost every knowledgeable person like her campaign was cruising to comfortable victory. It's really flattering to assure yourself that YOU, in that situation, would have seen through the complacency. Surely YOU would have insisted on 17% more appearances in the Madison - Sheboygan - McWhateverville market, a 12% increase in ads on WXYZ, a handshaking appearance at Pipefitters Local #5746.

42 percent of Obama-Trump voters said congressional Democrats’ economic policies will favor the wealthy, vs. only 21 percent of them who said the same about Trump.

these people are morons who live in a fact-free environment and thus cannot be appealed to with logic or well-reasoned arguments. forget about them. turnout voters that *can* be appealed to rationally.

xp

YMP otfm

"the fact that an old fart who touted himself as a socialist was able to compete on the national stage thanks mostly to small donors is a big deal (and for anyone significantly left of center, kind of a revelation - less about Sanders as a candidate, imo, and more for the possibility his relative success represents"

I agree with this and this should be a huge takeaway I just wish a lot of his own supporters looked at it this way rather than this idea that he had something stolen from him.

xp simon:

I don't think Bernie would have won. There's just too much dirt on him in the oppo files, that the GOP held in reserve and Clinton never campaigned on.

Then again, what I wanted was a fire breathing moderate, without decades of (mostly fabricated) baggage. I believe Liz Warren could have taken 2016.

yeah, again, I don't think Sanders himself is the point. I think what he points to in terms of viable long term strategy for appealing to a broader voter base (and, yknow, improving material conditions for a lot of people) is.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C-1yPXCXgAYiYAS.jpg:large

Everybody is also weirdly ready to forget that pretty much all the smart people who do nothing but think about this - Sam Wang, Larry Sabato, other aggregators - were putting odds of her victory in the 95%+ range. They were only undecided about whether it would be the biggest smackdown in 100 years, or the biggest smackdown in 1,000 years.

Yeah, 538, I hear you cry. Outlier 538 was roundly mocked (here and elsewhere) for being Not So Sure. However, that was less about whether she would win but by how much. They saw there was a large pool of undecideds, and registered resultant uncertainty, but still kept their predictions safely Hillarific.

We tend to forget: a 95 percent range still means a five percent chance of Trump winning. Or:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDoncJckows

idk when everyone thinks youre a shoe in to win and you dont win thats now usually a sign to not examine things critically afterwards

painting it as attacking hc or being wise after the fact smacks of an agenda of moral superiority which serves little or no purpose. not to say anything serves any purpose i mean yr president is a ham sandwich.

*not* usually

painting it as attacking hc

lol try reading this thread again

no fkn thanks but cmon ilx politics threads aint for the fine strokes

certain people - you may even be able to guess who they are - explicitly attack hc on the regular

How exactly do you run against a candidate like Trump? Outside of visiting the Midwest, what should she have done differently? The campaign was so strange. Every single thing Trump said or did was national news, while Hillary's dense policy speeches got no coverage whatsoever. Trump could say something stupid like "Obama and Hillary founded ISIS!" and talking heads would debate whether or not that was true for an entire day. Trump could get positive coverage by not tripping over his dick for 24 hours, whereas nearly every single story about Hillary was negative. Trump's supporters didn't care that he was unqualified or a bigot - in fact, they loved him for it. What do you do?

― frogbs, Tuesday, May 2, 2017 9:34 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

would it have killed the Obama DOJ to try to indict some of the banksters post 2008? feel like this utterly fucked them with some of the PWT who voted for trump.

42 percent of Obama-Trump voters said congressional Democrats’ economic policies will favor the wealthy, vs. only 21 percent of them who said the same about Trump.

these people are morons who live in a fact-free environment and thus cannot be appealed to with logic or well-reasoned arguments. forget about them. turnout voters that *can* be appealed to rationally.

xp

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, May 2, 2017 3:22 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah they voted obama 4 years ago but can never be persuaded to vote dem again.

certain people - you may even be able to guess who they are - explicitly attack hc on the regular

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, 2 May 2017 22:44 (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

cmon now you couldnt bellysnake antman pubes under this bar

yeah they voted obama 4 years ago but can never be persuaded to vote dem again

they aren't subject to "persuasion", was my point. they can't be relied on.

this continuing desire to identify some reasonable rationale for voting for Trump is so weird. vast majority of his voters were delusional, racist, misogynist, or some combination thereof. I don't want them in our party.

its a fair point, but it comes down to whether you think the aim is to win using logic and reason, or indeed to win in any specific manner at all, or whether the aim is just to win.

and if you reject the latter approach...... oh shit a trump!

would it have killed the Obama DOJ to try to indict some of the banksters post 2008? feel like this utterly fucked them with some of the PWT who voted for trump.

like in what universe do these "PWT who voted for Trump" accurately remember the events of 8 years ago, much less the legal rationale required for indictments, much less what a fucking indictment even is.

xp

or whether the aim is just to win.

the goal is to get a governing majority. (Trump didn't get that - and the Dems are confronting the issue of how to assemble such a majority w out racist/misogynist wingnuts)

ok, but for yr 'without' disclaimer refer to my post again

Your point is well taken, darraghmac. As long as the point is to gather wisdom that may help us advance good and defeat evil in the future. Personally, I remain skeptical that these are the main motives of everyone who traffics in the "Hillary blew [an obviously winnable election]" and/or "Bernie would have won [this obviously winnable election]."

I suck at sports metaphors, but here goes: Imagine you're the commander of a sportsing team. It's the eighth chukker and the only scoreboard you can see says you're four touchdowns ahead.

What is your thought process:

A. "Oh, shit, we're only four touchdowns ahead? That sucks! We need to win by at least eight! So we'd better take lots of risks in the next inning, and unleash the Hail-Larry play where we totally jimjam the opponent's hassenpoop up their Snitch."

B. "Looks like we'll win this BowlCup as long as we play it safe and don't fuck up. So we should probably play conservatively, avoid risks, try to not get our star Seeker injured. Let's just try to keep moving the puck toward the goal-thingies."

C. "This sure looks like a nice lead, but the scoreboard could be wrong. So we'd better take lots of risks. Let's totally hassenpoop the opponent's jimjammers. Quick, call in the left wing and the right drumstick, we're gonna run the untried Hail-Barry play where we shotput the shuttlecock up the crease."

D. "Even though the scoreboard says we're winning, tacheon transmissions from the near future have informed me that we actually lost. We'd better totally change our strategy. Move the wingbangs over to the jibjab, and balk the rubber with a gelatinous wicket!"

And uh she won the most convincing popular vote count in American history, so clearly this election was notIke the others.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, May 2, 2017 6:01 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no she did not

like in what universe do these "PWT who voted for Trump" accurately remember the events of 8 years ago, much less the legal rationale required for indictments, much less what a fucking indictment even is.

xp

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, May 2, 2017 10:58 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I can't find the tweet but some focus group/study of the voters who tipped the scales for trump were still PISSED bout 2008 and there being no consequences for the people who started it

fp'd you for uncalled-for Quidditch references

xp

yeah no one who had their home foreclosed, and or rented a home that had been foreclosed, then bought out by a bailed out bank, and was then thrown out for not paying their rent, was remotely bothered about any of that.

I don't think Bernie would have won. There's just too much dirt on him in the oppo files, that the GOP held in reserve and Clinton never campaigned on.

― behavioral sink (Sanpaku), Tuesday, May 2, 2017 10:25 PM (thirty-three minutes ago)

i voted for bernie in the primary and would've been thrilled to see him get the nomination but he definitely had some significant vulnerabilities that didn't come up in that race for obvious reasons. i have no idea who would've won a sanders v. trump race (before november i would've said sanders, but who fucking knows now that we live in the twilight zone) but i've no doubt trump would've run a more or less explicitly anti-semitic campaign against him, and it would've been really ugly to watch that play out.

voters who tipped the scales for trump were still PISSED bout 2008 and there being no consequences for the people who started it

so they voted for a guy who basically personifies and loves all the people who started it and was all set to hand them cabinet positions. Like I said, parsing this bullshit for logical consistency is not worth attempting. these people are idiots.

like, I don't really believe them that that was a motivating factor in their vote BECAUSE IT MAKES NO SENSE

And uh she won the most convincing popular vote count in American history, so clearly this election was notIke the others.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, May 2, 2017 6:01 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no she did not

― k3vin k., Tuesday, May 2, 2017 7:03 PM

you know perfectly well what I mean -- as far as electoral/popular splits go

ymp- fair points against revisionism, but not against criticism after the fact, which is an unavoidable reality of... action, unfortunately.

and if its accepted that doing the right things loses you elections in surprising and dismaying ways every one in two or three i suppose you need to wear that proudly and make a selling point out of it or something.

voters who tipped the scales for trump were still PISSED bout 2008 and there being no consequences for the people who started it

so they voted for a guy who basically personifies and loves all the people who started it and was all set to hand them cabinet positions. Like I said, parsing this bullshit for logical consistency is not worth attempting. these people are idiots.

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, May 2, 2017 4:07 PM (thirty-seven seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and the american liberals living in a country where they don't hold either houses of the legislature, executive power, and are soon to have a conservative court for the rest of their lives are the smart guys in this scenario?

Everybody is also weirdly ready to forget that pretty much all the smart people who do nothing but think about this - Sam Wang, Larry Sabato, other aggregators - were putting odds of her victory in the 95%+ range. They were only undecided about whether it would be the biggest smackdown in 100 years, or the biggest smackdown in 1,000 years.

Yeah, 538, I hear you cry. Outlier 538 was roundly mocked (here and elsewhere) for being Not So Sure. However, that was less about whether she would win but by how much. They saw there was a large pool of undecideds, and registered resultant uncertainty, but still kept their predictions safely Hillarific

this is pure revisionism. the flaws in wang's model were pointed out very early (both here and by 538 [the website with a history of getting elections right]). wang either was too dumb or too lazy to fix his model -- i assume the latter, since he made all sorts of revisions toward the end as it became clear the race was closer than previously thought.

and 538 indeed was uncertain about whether HRC, not just by how much. they were getting mocked for putting her win probability in the 70s, not for saying she wasn't going to win by enough

and the american liberals living in a country where they don't hold either houses of the legislature, executive power, and are soon to have a conservative court for the rest of their lives are the smart guys in this scenario?

in the sense that there's less of a disconnect between their stated interests and their voting patterns, yes.

also sports analogy only works if there are rules that both parties are playing by and there is a working appeal process.

and the scores are decided by votes from idiots and racists.

the sporting analogy maybe doesnt work.

wang's model didn't even have hillary at 95% -- it was at >99%, weeks out from the election. anyone with any knowledge of probability or statistics could have told you that was nonsense. and plenty of people did!

is that the singer from The Juan MacLean

and the american liberals living in a country where they don't hold either houses of the legislature, executive power, and are soon to have a conservative court for the rest of their lives are the smart guys in this scenario?
― -_- (jim in vancouver), Tuesday, May 2, 2017 4:09 PM

No one cared about the Supreme Court we had more important make or break issues like TPP

And uh she won the most convincing popular vote count in American history, so clearly this election was notIke the others.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, May 2

gone Trump but for the other side, eh

As we lay this thread to rest i refer you to post #2 from 2001.

thanks morbs. i recommend turning off your tv the next time hillary is on it

@DRUDGE Watch Terry McAuliffe. Watch him closely. He's Clinton ticket to redemption in '20. Vicious, perfect Dem. Will unite behind 'Mac the Knife'

I suck at sports metaphors, but here goes: Imagine you're the commander of a sportsing team. It's the eighth chukker and the only scoreboard you can see says you're four touchdowns ahead.

can we leave the Falcons out of this

too soon

xp J.D.

Mudslinging against Sanders wouldn't need to rely (overtly) on antisemitism, as there are enough children of the Cold War that could be swayed by his pride in socialism or his mid-80s praise of Fidel Castro and the Sandinistas. Or his unemployment til age 35, etc.

Also, if Michael Moore is correct that the Trump vote was a grenade tossed against the D.C. establishment, I'm not sure the flyover electorate would understand that a sitting senator could fill this role. Unfortunately, the marginal vote is no more familiar with civics than Trump himself.

Ideally, the next Dem nominee will be a wonk that can nonetheless speak impromptu, conveying the discontent of the masses with fervor, and not have to rise above decades of calumnies. Clinton only had the wonk down.

his unemployment til age 35

ok where are you pulling this out of

his parents died before he graduated are you saying he won the lottery or something

did he finish college at 35?

After graduating from college, Sanders returned to New York City, where he initially worked at a variety of jobs, including Head Start teacher, psychiatric aide, and carpenter.

both his parents were dead when he was 21 i don't imagine he lived rent free for the following 14 years

hard not to conclude Dud at this point, but fwiw i still like her and think DJP is otm upthread

Sam Wang is a hack fwiw, despite some tenuous connection to Princeton, and shouldn't be read or grouped with others

Mea culpa, I mispoke from my memory of the Kurt Eichenwald piece:

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas...

That Eichenwald piece was ridiculous.

It mostly just seemed like an excuse to rail against Sanders and his supporters. He provided no real evidence that it was those myths that cost the Democrats the election. I don't even really see how myth #2 would have done so: if anything, if Democratic/left/anti-Trump voters thought HRC was less of a strong candidate against Trump, that should have motivated them to come out in greater numbers. And a lot of that ostensible opposition research seems trivial to me, including the latter two points you quote. I don't think writing a dumb porny work of fiction 45 years ago would play as equivalent to the Secretary of State using a private server for classified communications.

i recommend turning off your tv the next time hillary is on it

i'm too poor for cable and an antenna gets nothing; the folx i work for have CNN on (always) in the lunchroom and dat election ain't NEVER gonna be over dere

vast majority of his voters were delusional, racist, misogynist, or some combination thereof. I don't want them in our party.

i have some bad news for you about millions and millions of people who are already in your party

Trump just tweeted about Clinton.

Clinton earlier: "Better that than interfering in foreign affairs, if he wants to tweet about me..." pic.twitter.com/hA82VrzG1Q

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) May 3, 2017

I mean, it must be hell for you, Morbs, but I can't think of anyone who can piss of Trump as much as a returning Hillary Clinton can, so...

And yeah, Trump then tweeted about her.

david axelrod is a brocialist!

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/331714-axelrod-on-clinton-it-takes-a-lot-of-work-to-lose-to-donald-trump

It's true, Donald Trump is indestructible teflon and also super easy to beat in elections.

"If I were her, if I were advising her, I would say, 'Don't do this. Don't go back and appear as if you're shifting responsibility.' ... She said the words 'I'm responsible,' but the — everything else suggested that she doesn't really feel that way," he said.

good use of eyes and ears

Here: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/

The impact of Comey’s letter is comparatively easy to quantify, by contrast. At a maximum, it might have shifted the race by 3 or 4 percentage points toward Donald Trump, swinging Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida to him, perhaps along with North Carolina and Arizona. At a minimum, its impact might have been only a percentage point or so. Still, because Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than 1 point, the letter was probably enough to change the outcome of the Electoral College.

so an estimated 1-4 percentage points. in this article from days before the election he characterized 2.7 percentage points as "Just A Normal Polling Error"

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-just-a-normal-polling-error-behind-clinton/

right but she didn't lose those states by 2.7

the email server thing, while trivial, was an actual criminal investigation by the fbi. it is the candidate's fault for doing something in the first place - that peers such as obama found stupid and mystifying - which could so needlessly cause them to be under-investigation by the fbi during an election.

also never owning the email server thing - admitting that it was wrong, admitting that top secret emails were sent through it etc. sometime quite a long time before the election, like i dunno, june or something, might have helped just a tiny bit

BUT HER EMAILS was a bullshit controversy cooked up by her opponents, it was mostly a media trap specifically designed to give Hillary no good options or way out.

Arguing that it could've been refuted somehow gloss over the fact that the accusations were nonsense contrived in bad faith to begin with.

Basically a "when did you stop beating your wife" frame.

She called it a mistake and apologized several times for it. I agree that she trivialized the whole thing more than she should but she was getting raked over the coals for it day in and day out. I'd probably avoid the subject too.

btw I don't think the argument was that the email thing was ok, it's that there were at least 20 bigger fires in the Trump camp that were getting like 1% of the attention. including an active criminal FBI investigation for crimes a bit more serious than "mishandling of classified data"

The real guilty party (as Silver touches on) was the media for taking the (click)bait

also Comey seemed to deliberately make it sound like Clinton was getting special treatment because of who she was, which really did fire people up

She called it a mistake and apologized several times for it. I agree that she trivialized the whole thing more than she should but she was getting raked over the coals for it day in and day out. I'd probably avoid the subject too.

she sort of half apologized for it and didn't mention top secret emails aspect until it came out in the press. not being more forthcoming made people - must throw a bone to the libs here, these people are mainly dumb - imagine there was more there than there was.

there are so, so many political controversies which have caused someone's electoral campaign or career grave damage that were ultimately trivial indiscretions. reacting to them is part of the game.

hillary was held to a higher standard than trump by the media and lots of other people because we live in a bullshit sexist society. (see our president, for example.) the whole thing stank. that a young James Comey served as deputy special counsel to the U.S. Senate Whitewater Committee is icing on the chocolate cake

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/james-comey-fbi-accountability-214234

^^^

sexism definitely played a big part but I think being the Candidate of Destiny/"Most qualified candidate ever" up against the TV Ratings Clown Candidate was even bigger. everyone expected Clinton to win and therefore she got criticized like someone who had already been in office for several years. Trump got positive press just for staying silent for a day.

I don't know the particulars of the email datasets the FBI had, but in my experience its not too hard to boil down emails to a MD5 hash value and dedupe one set of emails across another (weiner docs v. private server docs). Granted the hash values could be changed by Huma forwarding them to Weiner but I'd like to think the FBI has better resources than a mediocre sized law firm but I dont think it could have taken longer than a couple days to determine what exactly was in this stuff - or if it was just dupes of what they already had. The letter wasnt necessary, IMO.

* then again for all I know the broke ass government/fbi was reviewing this stuff in fucking paper form =|

on the merits, the email issue was of course pretty trivial. obviously, ideally a candidate wouldn't compromise her viability by exercising judgment poor enough to invite a legitimate FBI investigation. didn't help that the media seemed to treat her unfairly in comparison to trump. comey's letter obviously a disaster. plenty of blame to go around

* then again for all I know the broke ass government/fbi was reviewing this stuff in fucking paper form =|

― officer sonny bonds, lytton pd (mayor jingleberries),

it was!

we get what we pay for =(

I dreamt she was President last night.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/26/new-william-gibson-novel-world-where-hillary-clinton-won-agency

The Woman In the High Server Farm

FBI search warrant for Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop made public

The discovery of the emails on the disgraced New York congressman’s laptop prompted the FBI director, James Comey, to briefly reopen an investigation that he had closed over the summer into Clinton’s use of the private server to handle emails she sent and received as secretary of state.

After getting court consent to delve into the newly discovered emails on 30 October, agents spent several days analyzing them before Comey announced that they contained no new evidence of any wrongdoing by Clinton.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/20/hillary-clinton-emails-anthony-weiner-fbi-search-warrant

some william gibson-level irony here. the only reason the emails had to come back up was because of the Weiner investigation and the them forwarding some emails at the wrong time essentially stepping on their own rake. wasn't this supposed to be part of the famous Russian plot? how unfortunate she lost the election over some dick pics.

no.

when an election progresses over 16 months and involves more than a dozen candidates and 100 million voters, the outcome hinges on something more than dick pics

not so. close elections hinge on thousands of factors

both otm

when an election progresses over 16 months and involves more than a dozen candidates and 100 million voters, the outcome hinges on something more than dick pics

― A is for (Aimless)

i know we'd like to believe this

Surely the point of that article is in the final paragraph:

In statement, E Randol Schoenberg, a Los Angeles lawyer who had sued to obtain the court papers, said on Tuesday that he saw “nothing at all in the search warrant application that would give rise to probable cause, nothing that would make anyone suspect that there was anything on the laptop beyond what the FBI had already searched and determined not to be evidence of a crime, nothing to suggest that there would be anything other than routine correspondence between secretary Clinton and her longtime aide Huma Abedin”.

That is to say, it wasn't some dick pics, or a rake of their own design. It was institutional failure at the FBI and the media, caused by bullshit both-sides-ism, that blew a story out of proportion and allowed people to paint Clinton as equally bad as Trump. Because saying both sides were equally bad were too many places seen as evidence of objectivity.

I'm a bit frustrated by the seizing of my liberal friends on the Ivanka world bank fund Saudi donation thing given how impossible it was to convince them that there was anything remotely unseemly about the Clinton Foundation (which, unlike this Ivanka thing -- a World Bank project -- is actually controlled by the Clintons). Really I see many more parallels between the Clintons and the Trumps, and the Clintons are somehow always given a pass - nepotism, conflicts of interest, even sexual harassment and rape.

cool lookin' book

http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/how-i-lost/

With a foreword by JULIAN ASSANGE

disgusting imo

yeah id prob skip the intro

in the words of the Democratic candidate and her close associates

but speaking of disgusting

"But her slaves!"

I was wondering when that was gonna cross over

idgi

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-clintons-had-slaves

Slaves make license plates. Slaves sew products for third-party companies. Slaves cook for other slaves.

The Hillary-Bernie online camp battles get more annoying by the day (even with her mini-comeback tour I don't think she'd run in 2020) but the way she wrote about that is pretty horrifying.

WHO GIVES A FUCK

the Clintons used slave labor when he was governor of Arkansas and his wife was tone deaf about it? Fuck I'm glad to hear this is blowing up on twitter I thought I would have to think about some actual politics shit today

Thank god we didn't elect this woman amirite fellas

Without clicking on that can I just check what slave means in that article pls

Unpaid prison labour, see also that handy loophole in the 13th amendment

If you just want to read the excerpt without the commentary, it can be found here https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DBp4hQYVoAER0g8.jpg

there was also something about a country club they used to golf at too

It's wrong to keep throwing around the word "slave" in reference to this.

Though if you want to go ahead and talk about how Mike Huckabee "freed a slave" and then the "former slave" went to Washington and killed a bunch of cops, go right ahead. At least you'll sound consistent.

it's a more honest way to talk about the prison industrial complex than is generally done imho

WHO GIVES A FUCK

― El Tomboto, Thursday, June 8, 2017 3:47 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

LALALALALA

What? You mean we almost elected a racist as president?

Whew! Way to dodge a bullet there USA

It would be great if this was a part of establishing a more honest way to talk about the prison industrial complex, but I suspect it's just a way to shit on Clinton again, and many of the people outraged will be laughing at the new season of Orange is the New Black tomorrow.

I don't care about the excerpt, but the logic/morality pretzels being thrown out there in her defense over it are depressing. Take the L, people.

and yeah obviously this is just one small anecdote indicating a much, much broader issue

I don't think it's that hard to defend her, honestly. It was tradition, and she wasn't the governor so it wasn't her call. There.

to do something would have been a huge inconvenience to them

It's obviously horrific, and if it brings attention to the horror, good, and the Clintons clearly played their part in a horrific system. But are anyone surprised? I've never been to Arkansas, but it strikes me as exactly the kind of thing I would expect to happen in Arkansas, and we've always known Bill Clinton was the governor of Arkansas. So...

It's just fairly typical that this was posted in the thread about Hillary Clinton, and not a thread about race or the prison system or anything else.

Simon OTM.

what would be surprising is if they weren't acquainted w Trump at all during their early 90s real estate golfing with rich people heyday

It was tradition, and she wasn't the governor so it wasn't her call.

She was married to the governor. Do you not think she could have done anything about it if she'd cared to?

Sure. Eleanor Roosevelt passed and signed an anti-lynching law singlehandedly.

I kinda don't think it's a particularly good thing to criticize women for the decisions of their husbands. At the end of the day, it wasn't her call.

She is still implicated in the system, sure, but the guilt of Hillary Clinton is not the main issue here.

she's being criticized more (that I've seen) for the language she used in discussing it than for Bill's role in perpetuating it.

I agree that attacking anyone through their spouse (or any other family member) is below the belt.

she's being criticized more (that I've seen) for the language she used in discussing it than for Bill's role in perpetuating it.

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), 8. juni 2017 18:28 (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Link? What I've seen is mostly 'They owned slaves' and only based on a single excerpt taken out of context. I would love to know why she's even writing about it, it seems to build to a point. For those who don't know, btw, the book is It Takes a Village from 1996.

I don't use twitter at work if I can help it but the first people I saw posting about it were pretty squarely focused on the excerpt and its tone. Since then, yes, there's been plenty of "they owned slaves!" shitposting, but such is the nature of Twitter.

i suspect people on both sides of this issue are going to be making arguments in less than good faith -- "who cares" basically means let's focus on other things here -- but actually excusing the practice and clinton's actions seems...very bad

What actions?

i'm cool w/discussing the reasons why hillary lost, only bc it's interesting to look back at what went wrong strategically and demographically and all, but as far as why the clintons are bad, i mean at this point i just don't want to talk about them as people anymore. though maybe we can't have one w/o the other, idk.

What actions?

― Frederik B, Thursday, June 8, 2017 1:02 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the actually having a slave thing

Unpaid prison labor meets the definition of "involuntary servitude", but it sure as fuck doesn't meet the definition of "slavery". As bad as unpaid prison labor is, equating it with slavery belittles the absolute injustice of slavery, in which innocent people become the property of someone else, who is privileged to abuse them or dispose of them however they see fit.

It really sucks that convicted murderers had to leave the prison workshops for cushy jobs in a mansion.

nice man

saying you'd rather not think about it because we should focus on trump is one thing. finding ways to defend the prison industrial complex is another!

Unpaid prison labor meets the definition of "involuntary servitude", but it sure as fuck doesn't meet the definition of "slavery". As bad as unpaid prison labor is, equating it with slavery belittles the absolute injustice of slavery, in which innocent people become the property of someone else, who is privileged to abuse them or dispose of them however they see fit.

It seems to fit into the definition of "modern slavery" from the US State Dept here and UNESCO here.

saying you'd rather not think about it because we should focus on trump is one thing. finding ways to defend the prison industrial complex is another!

― k3vin k., 8. juni 2017 19:28 (two minutes ago) BookmarkFlag Post Permalink

Nobody here does either.

It really sucks that convicted murderers had to leave the prison workshops for cushy jobs in a mansion.

So long as they didn't step out of line and get "sent back."

note: the criticism I've seen really focused on the way she gleefully wrote about that part.

'gleefully'... At this point you're just making things up.

I checked Sund4r's State Dept. link defining "modern slavery" and the best fit was:

Forced labor, sometimes also referred to as labor trafficking, encompasses the range of activities – recruiting, harboring, transporting, providing, or obtaining – involved when a person uses force or physical threats, psychological coercion, abuse of the legal process, deception, or other coercive means to compel someone to work.

This definitely fits if the prisoners are threatened, beaten, or specifically punished for refusal to participate in the unpaid labor they are asked to perform. However, a prisoner (at least theoretically) has recourse to the court system to challenge this coercion and their lawyer could cite the State Department's definition as part of their case.

I don't know enough detail about Arkansas' penal system to know if it really fits that definition or not. I'm sure it treads awfully close to that line, but if obvious coercion is baked into the system, I can't see how it hasn't been effectively challenged in court.

finding ways to defend the prison industrial complex is another!

― k3vin k., Thursday, June 8, 2017 1:28 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm not defending the complex as a whole, but this in particular seems like an exceptionally kind way to treat a convicted murderer.

Hm, I think you're right, actually. xp

not defending it, just saying it is exceptionally kind!

wow they get to clean Bill Clinton's dishes what an honor

it is better treatment than their victims received.

Is it better or worse, on the whole, then being locked in a cell for 23 hours a day?

Has anyone asked the men who (were made to?) participating in this program how they felt about it?

it is better treatment than their victims received.

Oh cool, "eye for an eye" bullshit.

it is better treatment than their victims received.

This is the wrong yardstick to apply for so many reasons it is hard to know where to begin.

this strikes me as p fucked-up and indefensible

it is better treatment than their victims received.

― how's life, Thursday, June 8, 2017 2:14 PM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

seems like an interesting bar

just the lack of reflection stuck out to me, not surprised that it's a practice. there was an article or tweet thread a week or so ago about similar practices in Louisiana that rightfully made everybody mad

it would be funny if HRC's defense was that she didn't actually write any of "it takes a village"

I guess it took until 2017 for anyone to read far enough into It Takes a Village to uncover this scandal

^^^^yes, I found that detail amusing. Who tf wants to read a US pol memoir

I was surprised It Takes A Village came out in '96, I thought it was much earlier in the Clinton era, tied into the healthcare fiasco.

It was part of the post-1994 election rebranding of HRC as a First Lady who writes books about children and stuff

That tweet thread about Louisiana was really interesting. https://twitter.com/i/moments/866583376265977856

Just realised by this definition I was briefly a slave, apparently.

It takes a village to finish one of her books amirite

Just remembers one of Dole's big convention speech lines was "It doesn't take a village it takes a family!"

it's hilarious, I've been slapping my knee since '96

i was a little worried i was strawmanning ilx's hillary fans but phil d actually out here with the "actually, this isn't that bad"

No, I asked a question, one which I noticed you haven't bothered to answer.

Has anyone asked the men who (were made to?) participating in this program how they felt about it?

― Old Lynch's Sex Paragraph (Phil D.), Thursday, June 8, 2017 2:17 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If you mean this question, the answer is: their bodies were used to pave the Clintons' secret CIA Cocaine airstrip

Being in prison at all is shitty as all hell (yes I know people who both have been to prison and people who are currently in prison, one for a double life sentence) and the entire system of who does and doesn't go to prison is FUBAR in this country. Being forced to perform uncompensated labor in prison is also shitty. (Labor compensated at third world wages is not much better.)

Since we have pretty much given up on rehabilitation, if I were in prison, I, personally, would rather spend my time cutting some guy's lawn or serving his dinner than sitting in a cell or being subject to the other attendant risks of being in prison. And I was curious as to whether anyone had asked the people being referred to in Clinton's book if they felt the same. Have any of them ever been interviewed? Were they volunteers, or were they forced to participate? Was it something that could be earned, and if so, how arbitrarily could it be taken away?

Apparently kevin k. either a) has asked and declines to share the answers with us, b) hasn't asked but presumes to speak for them because reasons, c) is a fucking shithead or d) some combination of a, b and c.

It says something about how much people cared about uncompensated prison labor back in the 90s-00s that a)HRC wrote about this stuff in a book about parenting, b) the book was roundly attacked for various reasons, but not this one, c)seemingly no one found this stuff notable at the time, or brought it up when she ran for office in 2000, 2006, 2008 or 2016.

This also leads me to believe that no one interviewed these prisoners about their thoughts.

Prison labour in the US is generally mandatory, unpaid (or extremely low-paid), and menial (i.e has no value as work experience)

seemingly no one found this stuff notable at the time, or brought it up when she ran for office in 2000, 2006, 2008 or 2016

what are you talking about there were tons of people saying Hillary is bad and then you get a Fred B in your face

The US public generally is OK with punitive imprisonment and treating prisoners like human shit. It represents a total failure of imagination and empathy, let alone Christian charity and forgiveness.

Interviewing prisoners for their thoughts wouldn't really change anything. It's like every American work questionnaire - having no vacation and struggling blows but it beats dying in the gutter.

I'm sure the prisoners preferred working for the Clintons to breaking rocks - doesn't make either even remotely acceptable.

one of the differences is that when you work for a public institution you are beholden to the state. what was upsetting with this was that they were charged with an additional authority over the workers. they could report them for breaking rules and have them sent back to prison and likely disciplined if they didn't make these those two happy. this is pretty different from following rules in a public prison. much more easy to abuse this newfound authority. if you look at circa scandals like Paula Jones or the Iraq Air strike to divert attention from the Lewinsky trials, there is a pattern of abusing authority. if you were a prisoner who accidentally saw somebody doing some illegal shit (and working w politicans for decades you probably would) it seems like it you may make some powerful enemies.

this is mostly conjecture tho. the casualness of it is the disturbing thing. it would be interesting to interview these people, maybe they were great family friends and it was a way to legit get out of a cycle of imprisonment. it depends on how much you trust the Clintons, i suppose.

That's mindblowingly stupid.

Let's not forget that Killary had Seth Rich killed, so who knows what she did to these guys...

Fred you could probably be a big enough smug c*** to be a Clinton with a little ambition

According to Jones's account, on May 8, 1991, she was escorted to Clinton's (then Governor of Arkansas) room in the Excelsior (now Little Rock Marriott) Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he propositioned and exposed himself to her. She claimed she kept quiet about the incident until 1994, when a David Brock story in the American Spectator magazine printed an account. Jones filed a sexual harassment suit against Clinton on May 6, 1994, two days before the three-year statute of limitations, and sought $750,000 in damages.

Clinton and his defense team then challenged Jones' right to bring a civil lawsuit against a sitting president for an incident that occurred prior to the defendant becoming president. The Clinton defense team took the position that the trial should be delayed until the president was no longer in office, because the job of the president is unique and does not allow him to take time away from it to deal with a private civil lawsuit. The case went through the courts, eventually reaching the Supreme Court on January 13, 1997. On May 27, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against Clinton, and allowed the lawsuit to proceed. Clinton dismissed Jones's story and agreed to move on with the lawsuit.

On April 2, 1998, before the case could reach trial, Judge Wright granted President Clinton's motion for dismissal, ruling that Jones could not show that she had suffered any damages. Jones soon appealed the dismissal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

On November 13, 1998, Clinton settled with Jones for $850,000, the entire amount of her claim, but without an apology, in exchange for her agreement to drop the appeal. Robert S. Bennett, Clinton's attorney, still maintained that Jones's claim was baseless and that Clinton only settled so he could end the lawsuit and move on with his life. In March 1999, Judge Wright ruled that Jones would get only $200,000 from the settlement and that the rest of the money would pay for her legal expenses.

Before the end of the entire litigation, her marriage broke apart. She also appeared in the news media to show the results of a makeover and of a Rhinoplasty paid for by a donor.

In April 1999, Judge Wright found Clinton in civil contempt of court for misleading testimony in the Jones case. She ordered Clinton to pay $1,202 to the court and an additional $90,000 to Jones's lawyers for expenses incurred, far less than the $496,000 that the lawyers originally requested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Jones

this was going on while these people are working for them. of course she is a Trump supporter nowadays so feel free to pretend none of that happened in reality.

feel free to pretend none of that happened in reality

As I understand it, everything described in that Wikipedia article happened in reality. Paula Jones gave that account, she filed that suit, she got that nose job, the courts handled it as described, and the settlements were in the amounts stated. No pretending required. What's your point?

I don't think it's that hard to defend her, honestly. It was tradition, and she wasn't the governor so it wasn't her call. There.

― Frederik B, Thursday, June 8, 2017 3:46 PM (six hours ago)

she wrote about it in a gross and thoughtless way (or signed off on a book that did), which is more than enough reason to legitimately criticize her.

lol @ "she wasn't the governor so it wasn't her call" coming from the dude who once suggested that clinton's experience as first lady should count as genuine political experience comparable to serving in the senate.

Fred, Hillary isn't running for president anymore. You don't need to worry about damaging her reputation among feckless swing voters.

Also idk if you understand the close relationship between the contemporary American carceral state and slavery, especially in places like Arkansas.

It's not all hardened murderers in there. It's people involved in property or drug crimes who turned to those things -- at least in part -- in response to racial and economic marginalization.

Yes, Treeship, this is an absolutely fucked up part of American White Supremacy. That is why I think it's wrong to reduce it to 'Hillary bad'.

It's also why I would love to see the context for the excerpt, since she makes a point out of noting that they were predominantly African-American, had often been in jail since their teens, and were at times just accomplishes when someone else had shot someone. She is building to a point, but it's been cut to underline how bad Hillary is, rather than present an argument about prison labor.

The racial inequalities in the American judicial system are horribly lopsided and yeah, probably much more so in the South. There's no argument.

But for the love of God, comparing this:

http://i.imgur.com/2D4xFPl.gif

to this:

http://i.imgur.com/ksG9Uem.jpg

is patently ridiculous.

And LOL at this: if you were a prisoner who accidentally saw somebody doing some illegal shit (and working w politicans for decades you probably would) it seems like it you may make some powerful enemies.

If anything, a prisoner is going to make some powerful friends.

Convicted murderer on governor's mansion payroll

http://thegrio.com/2012/01/10/haley-barbour-pardons-4-killers-convicts-were-trustees-at-miss-governor-mansion/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Prince_(nanny)

I haven't read Clinton's book but the dispassion in the passages quoted in that Current Affairs article is monstrous. The prison labor system in this country is a crime against humanity. People should be outraged. Any politician who's aided and abetted or contributed to the growth of that system deserves whatever shit gets thrown at them.

there can be a spectrum, pplains

Morbs OTM - twisting yourself in knots to say today's systematic racism isn't as bad as your great-great-great-grandpa's systematic racism - hey look, it even ends up benefitting some of the poor fuckers trapped within it! - is really, really NAGL.

Just call it what it is: prison labor.

I know it's easier to go HILLARY LIVED ON AN ARKANSAS PLANTATION while the world burns, but you're the one not doing actual slaves - past and present - any justice.

The post upthread about "Iraqi airstrikes as distraction from Monica" Paula Jones and "maybe prisoners would be forced to keep quiet about stuff like that" etc brought things into kind of a "90s talk radio" territory.

Morbs OTM - twisting yourself in knots to say today's systematic racism isn't as bad as your great-great-great-grandpa's systematic racism - hey look, it even ends up benefitting some of the poor fuckers trapped within it! - is really, really NAGL.

― Futuristic Bow Wow (thewufs), Thursday, 8 June 2017 23:52 (yesterday) Permalink

OTFM

are we arguing that the Clintons are horrible people who should've nevertheless beat Donald Trump?

This definitely fits if the prisoners are threatened, beaten, or specifically punished for refusal to participate in the unpaid labor they are asked to perform. However, a prisoner (at least theoretically) has recourse to the court system to challenge this coercion and their lawyer could cite the State Department's definition as part of their case.

There is coercion involved. Prisoners at Angola can be punished with solitary confinement for not complying.

bernie would have freed the slaves

He had plenty of slaves - unpaid laborers assigned menial tasks like making phone calls, etc.

Bernie paid interns iirc?

those aren't slaves, they're the amanda palmer big band

re: interns, snopes is on the case

http://www.snopes.com/bernie-sanders-unpaid-interns/

domestic servitude was part of slavery too, re: those pics, pplains

It's also why I would love to see the context for the excerpt, since she makes a point out of noting that they were predominantly African-American, had often been in jail since their teens, and were at times just accomplishes when someone else had shot someone. She is building to a point, but it's been cut to underline how bad Hillary is, rather than present an argument about prison labor.

― Frederik B, Thursday, June 8, 2017 7:37 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The point she was building toward was that she couldn't understand how intelligent people had committed crimes until she read Emotional Intelligence and brain development blah blah blah

I finished Shattered. It was okay--not as good (not as trashy, if you will) as Game Change.

I should have waited, first of all--too close to the election. A lot of repetition; half of it concerns the two warring factions within her campaign, the old-guard Mandy Grunwald wing vs. the Robbie Mook analytics people. (It's a Miguel Cabrera vs. Mike Trout book.) The overriding theme is interesting, and it's presented plausibly, but it's all hindsight: that you could have seen the outcome from day one, essentially, and that the Sanders challenge (which probably takes up more space than the general) exposed every fault line on which she eventually floundered. The sad and shell-shocked Hillary of the last two or three pages is presented convincingly.

yeah I really enjoyed it, the election night chapters are really compelling. I remember hearing on election day that Hillary and Trump would be watching the results come in literally across the street from each other in Manhattan. Bill lounging on the couch, muttering "I knew it. It's Brexit" and shaking his head. It's still so mind-blowing...

preach brother michael

http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-real-hillary-clinton-conspiracy-is-what-stuck-us-with-president-donald-trump

She’s the most royally screwed-over person in the history of American politics.

oh boo fucking hoo

a self-screwer

She’s the most royally screwed-over person in the history of American politics.

oh boo fucking hoo

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Friday, July 14, 2017 8:19 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_American_politicians

Does anyone ever use the construction 'the most _____ in the history of ______' in a way that isn't demonstrably false and doesn't make them look like a total dipshit?

Charles Bent
1847
Governor of New Mexico Territory
Taos, New Mexico (in his home)
method of assassination: arrows and scalping

damn

it's a remarkably short list when you consider how many leaders the US has murdered

i dunno, there's plenty of assassinations there. i mean having 4 presidents killed is kind of a lot, britain has only had one assassinated prime minister

Yes, but the British has never murdered any foreign leaders or foreigners in general, right?

I'll never really understand why Swedish politics are so violent, btw. But that's another thread.

the British has never murdered any foreign leaders or foreigners in general, right?

Is this serious? I would have thought that the humanitarian record of the British Empire was fairly well-documented.

fred's attempt at droll humour

all those Indians who died in the Mutiny were suicides iirc

assisted

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/whitehouse/hillary-clinton-calling-new-book-what-happened/2017/07/27/7621141a-72bb-11e7-8c17-533c52b2f014_story.html?utm_term=.23eb4f6b8264

Slight chance of selective explanation.

I don't know how trustworthy Hillary Clinton is in general, but she's the last person I'd trust to write her memoir.

Trump should write it

pic.twitter.com/GzhfB5KlXT

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) July 27, 2017

i guess I Accept Responsibility for My Loss and Here's Who to Blame was too long a title

should just be called And Here's Why

should be called I'm OK in Case You Were Wondering

NY Magazine did that one already (too big to link)

Here's Your Sign

so did she write it or her body double

http://www.bizpacreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Hillary-Clinton-Body-Double.jpg

She probably had several different books ready to go, depending on the outcome.

Why Jill Stein is a Cunt

If I Did It

Nevertheless

http://huckcdn.lwlies.com/admin/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/kids-larry-clark-20th-anniversary.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of8JOVXYU0Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggodEBYL9MU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV3fYlhRBwI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXYuhtHN52M

Great, a Hillary Clinton media blitz. Take a year off, for god's sake.

I fucking can't stand her. I let it go months ago but they're pushing her on us again.

the claim she makes in her book -- that trump was "stalking" her during debate 2, following her around making faces and breathing down her back -- is so demonstrably not true. (during the period in question, trump is standing stock still, right by his station.) trump did so many bizarre things during that debate. why do you need to make something up that he *didn't* do, so that everyone can yell fake news?

He was definitely stalking her during the debate, wtf? It was a whole thing, SNL parodied it with the Jaws soundtrack. Are you gaslighting us right now?

well if SNL said it then it must be true

i think in this era of meme overload we sometimes have trouble remembering what actually happened from what the meme was

he was being weird but "stalking" and "breathing down my neck" are not really accurate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv_WZkp_-wQ

Any woman who experiences that kind of behaviour can call it everything she likes in my book. And trying to police what she calls it is nagl. And saying he was 'right by his station' is so far from being a good look it's just bullshit.

yeah of all the stuff that's come out in the excerpts that's maybe the least objectionable!

yeah he wasn't literally "breathing down her neck" but he was def stalking in her in this absurd Bond villain pose. Might be a slight exaggeration on Clinton's part but Fred B is right, it was menacing behavior.

Can everyone who uses "not a good look" go fuck off please

Why do people say "not a good look", but never say "that's a good look"?

saying 'that's a good look' is nagl

"That's a good look on you" is a phrase.

I'm trying out a new Andy Rooney schtick. NAGL or TAGL?

Acronyms are TOO damn LONG these days!!!!!!

Can everyone who uses "not a good look" go fuck off please

― President Keyes, Wednesday, September 6, 2017 2:17 PM (thirty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

THANK YOU. this is the day you truly became president.

Can everyone who uses "not a good look" go die in a fire

this is escalating quickly. how tf did we start talking about "nagl" in the first place

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/09/c4/9b/09c49b52ff4eedf0205f7a17509beb66--patrick-nagel-patrick-obrian.jpg

https://s3.amazonaws.com/thisismyjam/i/5dbdbd783cbc8390486740e912706f61.jpg?1368394918

(Long Look)

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-w9kLiSDYeJ4/Vrnl9ZIhbzI/AAAAAAAAThM/j9OHHD2x_R8/s400/Zoolander-The-Blue-Steel-Appeal.jpg

Hillary Clinton: Hecka Slammin

Hillary Clinton: "What makes me such a lightning rod for fury? I'm really asking. I'm at a loss." https://t.co/hKpkPPHT3V

— Dan Merica (@danmericaCNN) September 6, 2017

"Self-pity stinks." - my mom

Good God

Honestly just stop "policing" the way people talk *about* Hillary Clinton so hard. She's one of the most powerful people in the world. She will be ok without Fred's posts.

"takes ownership" is a loathsome phrase

x-post: That's so far from being the point.

That night was when the tape of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women had just come out. The whole scenario was extremely gross. And to now get mad at Hillary for the way she speaks about it is textbook rape culture. It's not about whether Hillary will be okay or not, it's just gross.

i don't know what the fuck people mean half the time when they say "not a good look" but fred's use of "gaslighting" (a term generally used to describe behavior in abusive relationships) to try to imply that someone is engaging in abusive behavior by daring to criticize hillary clinton on a public message board is, well, not a good fuckin' look.

Thus Sang Freud was literally writing about a sexual abuser.

we're aware of who and what trump is, dude, we live through this garbage every day. you can cut out the condescending lectures any time.

"But Her Emails!" the new magazine for the 65.8 million. In this month's issue, Hillary asks "why is everyone still talking about my emails?"

NEW: Hillary worried Trump really would 'lock her up.' https://t.co/MVvZTyyUzP pic.twitter.com/E0DQM34TQJ

— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) September 7, 2017

well this suggests that she gives an uncomfortable amount of credence to the idea that the office of the president can force the justice system to bend to his will

Or it suggests that threats have a psychological effect.

Seriously guys, there's so much to criticize Clinton for. The other thread is rolling along nicely. No need to do shit like this.

Fred otm

That night was when the tape of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women had just come out

tbf that would have probably been a bigger deal if she hadn't remained married to famed womanizer Bill Clinton who had set the low bar to "fuck an intern in the whitehouse".

are you equivocating their behaviour?

and is there anything you can't blame Hillary Clinton for?

Tbh, I'm kinda with Fred on these points, as much as the excerpts I've seen about the primary seem ridiculous and infuriating.

He did not fuck that intern, Miss Lewinsky, in the White House!

are you equivocating their behaviour?

On the Lewinsky point, no - though 20 years on we'd never give a pass to a person in a position of supreme authority having a secret workplace affair with a powerless subordinate - but Bill and Trump were accused of rape an equal number of times IIRC.

Um....

Trump then had 9 accusations of sexual assault, and his own admittance that he gets away with sexually assaulting women, so... It's kinda not the same.

Didn't realize Bill Clinton was running for president in 2016...

remember when we were guessing what we would call him when hillary was in office. "first laddy" "first gentleman" ... halcyon days

Can someone remind me why extending a thread about Hillary Clinton by another couple hundred posts seems like a reasonable way to spend our time?

Because she's fascinating, and her behavior & brain should be studied. She lost to DONALD TRUMP. it'd be one thing if she lost to Jeb, or Rubio. Even Cruz. But she lost.... to DONALD TRUMP. I know she must have a crustacean-like emotional exoskeleton, like all politicians have, but... how the fuck did she not 1) commit suicide 2) have a stroke 3) spontaneously combust on election night. The election had a profound psychic effect on millions of people all over the world. it made people physically sick. still does. To be the person that shoulders that. "embarrassing," "humiliating," - no. It transcends language. Oh my god, her brain needs to be studied. That's why I want to read her book, but I don't want to pay for it so I'll keep bugging them for a promo copy or get a pdf eventually.

Because she has a new book out.

It's all about as simple as the Republican base held together, largely because they'd been shut out of the presidency for 8 years and were motivated, despite the fact their candidate was Donald Fucking Trump, whereas the Democratic base that elected Obama also delivered 3,000,000 more popular votes for HRC than Trump got, but did not turn out in sufficient numbers in a few key states Obama won. So she lost.

You can call that a spectacular upset, because it is spectacularly upsetting, but it makes more sense to me to blame the people who voted for Trump, in the full knowledge that he was a human bucket of garbage, than to blame Clinton.

Oh, and self-serving books by politicians are almost never worth talking about.

You can call that a spectacular upset, because it is spectacularly upsetting, but it makes more sense to me to blame the people who voted for Trump, in the full knowledge that he was a human bucket of garbage, than to blame Clinton.

Why not both? This was HRC's election to lose. She underestimated her opponent, had a shit team, and smeared a much more organically successful and popular candidate opposing her in the primaries. That she hired DWS immediately after she was fired by the DNC speaks to her utter obliviousness and incompetence. She just couldn't stop making mistakes.

and yet she still won more votes than Trump

i could've sworn i woke up today in september 2017

this was doomed to happen as soon as the book was announced.

speaking of which, the finger-pointing excerpts coming out just as Harris and Warren are throwing their weight behind Sanders' healthcare bill seems like not such great timing

Yeah this book is the last thing we need right now.

The opening epigraph to this book is "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger." - Friedrich Nietzsche (and Kelly Clarkson).

people at my job are reading this. from what i've gathered it really is about her, she is trying to write in a voice that is playful and personal and even lightly irreverent. it's like she doesn't care at all how harmful it is for Americans to keep picking at the scab of the democratic primaries.

the election is just a thing she experienced that made her stronger and didn't lead directly to 800,000 innocent young immigrants being placed in danger of deportation

On the Lewinsky point, no - though 20 years on we'd never give a pass to a person in a position of supreme authority having a secret workplace affair with a powerless subordinate - but Bill and Trump were accused of rape an equal number of times IIRC.

― louie mensch (milo z), Thursday, September 7, 2017 3:52 PM (six hours ago)

the only rape accusation against bill clinton i've heard of was by juanita broaddrick, whose case is complicated by the fact that she testified under oath that it didn't happen

whereas trump was accused of rape in a court deposition by his wife

No one would find it "complicated" if someone contemporaneously told a bunch of people that she'd been raped and then told a different story in a deposition when her rapist became a hugely powerful person if the rapist were anyone else but a dem president. Trump's ex also told a different story later on but who believes that?

Keyes OTM. IMO what has happened with Bill Clinton was that, with the right wing crusade to get him on absolutely ANYTHING during his presidency, people got very dug in and it sort of clouded their judgment of his actual problems. I was one of those people -- I really resented the way the Clintons were treated too, although I was only a teenager and probably largely receiving my parents opinions. It was only recently when I started reading stuff about the Broaddrick case again that I started to think "Well wait a minute, why isn't this credible? If anyone else were involved, wouldn't we find this credible?" Her story reads as credible, and he's a notorious pathological womanizer who also abused his power as fucking PRESIDENT to have a rather lopsided affair with a young intern, which, btw, is another thing that I think people would find a lot more disgusting if it were anyone other than Bill Clinton. There's a lawyer in my field who was ousted from his firm for not dissimilar behavior with a young associate.

None of this is to give any credence to the absurd suggestion that Hillary being married to Bill Clinton makes her somehow comparable to Trump, that's just a gross sentiment imo.

if anybody has a pdf of the book please dm me

Skype it to my inbox

shoot it directly into my veins

Lol

Verrit it to my wordpress account

shoot it directly into my veins

Instant death

please

https://verrit.com/hillary-democrats-are-the-heart-and-conscience-of-america/

https://verrit.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/verrit-0443120.jpg

Oh sorry, the image version doesn't show the title (which shows if you click the link above, and is in the URL).

Jesus.

Is Hillary basically behind Verrit?

"Behind" as in responsible for or "behind" as in endorsed it? The latter yes, former I doubt. Daou seems like a bit of a hanger-on who is tolerated but outside the favored circle. I was actually surprised she even endorsed it. She probably thought of it as being like one of those meaningless book-jacket blurbs and didn't realize how many ripples her little pebble throw would have.

Yeah that's what I thought. It's a weird site though.
Hard for me to understand the purpse of it.

It kind of just reads like a really shitty version of the Harpers Index