It looks like the CF could have some pay to play going on, though that’s optics. The optics are terrible, and the underlying reality is bad as well. There evidence of pay with no play and no unambiguous evidence of actual pay-to-play, but there’s definitely a lot of buying access going on.
In the grand scale of evil things politicians do, this one’s not one I rail on since it’s the status quo of virtually every elected official, and of the things I’ve railed on politicians I loathe about, that’s not one that raises the blood pressure since the Dems and GOP both play that game continuously.
It’s actually really notable to see this volume of targeted data dumps presented with the intent to harm a candidate where the worst that’s come up is status quo Washington insider business and nothing even remotely like a bombshell. Honestly the Wikileaks dumps have resulted in me being somewhat less worried about Clinton since under that level of scrutiny the worst hasn’t really been that serious.
It was brilliant. For the longest while you had to watch a Donald Rally or a Republican debate (ick) to see the crazy full-on. She provoked it on the main stage. Wondering if Trump just didn’t realize he was in front of a different audience.
I think, hope, really, that President Clinton is going to surprise you in a nice way. Too many have, knowingly or not, bought in to the Republican smears. They have been scared to death of her from day one.
I disagree that it is shady to pay for access, but I’m much less concerned about wealth coming with privileges than most on here. In fact, I prefer access through a charitable fund than a party/election fund.
Yeah. This seems pretty obvious to me. Donald wants to have been the first-born son. Look at how badly he treated his older brother’s family. Donny-boy wanted to be the natural heir to his daddy the king.
Well sure. But to be fair, she had an unfair advantage because she is smarter than those guys. Possibly put together. (I know Jeb is supposed to be the smart Bush and some of the others have reputations for being pretty savvy, but none of them ever showed it, frankly.) Also, hubris - they had it, in spades. They refused to take Trump seriously even as he was kicking their asses.
In bullfighting a matador really has a huge advantage over a bull-- he’s smarter, he’s quick on his feet, he has weapons at his disposal, and the bull is usually both enraged and tired, and already bleeding at that point-- but matadors do still get gored sometimes.
For the record I think bullfighting is barbaric and should have died with the Roman Empire, but can appreciate the skill involved, and in this case it serves as a good metaphor. If only Chris Wallace could have cut Donald’s ears off (or maybe just a big chunk of his hair) and handed it to her.
Bush Jr might be dumb, but he wasn’t dangerously deranged to the point of self destruction. Other than him I can’t think of a modern elected president who qualifies as incompetent or stupid. Evil, bigoted, corrupt, sure but not dumb maniacs.
And the point is: It does not take the combined efforts of the DC and Marvel universes to take on a dipshit like Trump. Playing up how she “played” him makes it seem like a chess match between equals where she had to really excel to defeat an opponent. The fact is she basically just hasn’t been an idiot, she’s been herself. Not terribly inspiring, but absolutely competent.
She’s super competent, but she’s not good at a lot of stuff (not my usual integrity gripe, I mean political skills), she’s really good at the hard stuff but she’s really bad at conveying sincerity and empathy towards certain groups. She’s gotten better at some stuff after some early missteps, but she really hasn’t had to be inspiring because she’s up against a buffoon.
Glorifying her is lowering the bar about where we’re going. Hey, maybe she’s your ideal candidate. I’m not personally a conservative, she’s my “selling for” candidate and I won’t laud her mediocrity just because that orange thing lowered the bar so much.
Because she fucking thrived when her family was being attacked, she thrived when he gibbered like a lunatic, she showed poise and leadership. The depths that he sank were matched by class.
The GOP is horrible enough to lose but is very very close to being just horrible enough to win. Incompetence doesn’t trump that their hatred is a near-winning strategy.
She’s dealt with the media giving Trump countless billions of dollars of free airtime and excuses and coddling, and spouts wonky plans that are PLANS and yet is making it work.
Fast forward to 12:30 to see the crowd turn. That face at 12:39 is AWESOME
Before that, it’s just a bunch of rich assholes brown-nosing each other. He throws his wife under the bus and they all cheer.
Here’s her talk at the same event:
She loses the crowd about 10 mins in, but seems to recover a bit, and her bombs are less explosive than Trump’s.
The whole bloody event triggers some gag reflexes for me, but a bunch of rich white people filling their mouths with talk of God and Charity while joking with their wealthy friends is…really just the heart of American hypocrisy.
This monstrosity apparently has a habit of inviting presidential candidates to speak at it, unless that candidate is pro-choice.
I interpreted that as an attempt to maintain decorum and keep it substantive, not help Trump. Same as how he was pretty tough with the audience. Judging by the actual questions, I thought he was relatively fair, so I’ll say that Wallace did alright in my book.
Ha! There is no team, in this sense. His campaign manager has practically admitted that she is doing the best she can in dealing with a rogue candidate.
The Court has become more politicized than it should be. But they are not insane. Any case that I can conceive of as a possibility would be the sort of thing dismissed in district court or at the state level, never to be heard of again. The reason cert was granted in Bush v Gore is that we genuinely had a nearly tied election. (Not that I liked that decision.)
Honestly my ideal politician is a dull grey bureaucrat who you’d never ever want a beer with because if you did they’d bore you with minutia of policy that they’re working on improving based on feedback from expert panels. So the fact she’s a boring wonk without a lot of charisma and who doesn’t have the typically more highly honed politician’s acting skills of sincerity and empathy doesn’t bug me, it makes me like her more. She’s not my ideal candidate, though, my ideal candidate is Noam Chomsky, and she’s far from that. She’s a banker’s buddy with economic ideas that are still stuck in the worst of the 90s and her peer group are privileged billionaires, access to her has been strictly managed for decades, and that access usually comes at a price. But I do like that she’s wonkish - the media hostility to candidates showing competence at their prospective job makes me die a little inside.
You guys really really hate her, don’t you? Thank goodness you found one fishy email, or you’d still be raging over Benghazi. Dozens of examples of white supremacy and open misogyny fade into nothing next to that one fishy email.
Others say it’s because she’s a woman, but I don’t buy that because you all treated her husband in exactly the same way. Investigation after investigation found nothing wrong, but keep hammering that story about the wicked wicked Clintons. They found one blowjob and nothing in America was as important. Nothing.
No, goddamnit, my first post was how I admired how she did in the debates and she was amazingly presidential, but you kneejerk partisan motherfuckers aren’t happy unless I write a goddamn hagiography.
This is why I hate the two party system so much, you twits who have to have everyone divided into 100% evil or 100% saintly. She’s flawed, she’s better than Trump, I’ve said what I like and don’t like about her, but you just can’t leave it at that. You have to attack reflexively everyone who says she’s not completely perfect because that’s just like licking Satan’s taint.
Edit: Apologies to everyone else for the @#$% nukes, but this kind of stupid shit really chafes my taint. I expect better from BoingBoing commenters. And my appreciation to the rest of you who engaged politely even if skeptically.
Why do you care about the happiness of us kneejerk partisan motherfuckers? When you repeat Fox News talking points, don’t be surprised if somebody pushes back. Does that feel like an unfair, vicious attack to you?
I don’t trust her, but I know she’s enough of a SMART politician to know she’ll want her legacy to be more than just ‘first female US president.’ So she’ll at least try. Whether or not congress lets her get a damned thing done is another matter.
I don’t care about you at all, other than you showing up at a roundtable and taking a dump on the table.
Go look at my first post here and tell me how much I blindly hate Hillary. Other people had some fair skepticism about what I was saying, which is perfectly okay, and I laid down the boundaries.
The Fox News dig is some extreme irony here. The Fox News talking points are flawed because they purposely fail to draw the line between access and favors, which I DID.
But your scorched earth debate style, where you just started out calling the other person a dishonest piece of shit, is pure Fox News. There’s no difference between you and them other than which whether you’re on the red or blue side.
What I CARE about is being able to have a polite, honest discussion even with people I disagree with (sometimes mildly, sometimes a lot), which I can usually do here.
“The Clintons routinely sell access, have been doing so for years, and American political regulation is so fucked up that this isn’t even illegal” isn’t a Fox News talking point. It’s a standard (and, IMO, accurate) leftist critique of the Clintons.
That said: perhaps you both should go hang out in the cakes and kittens threads for a while?
