I don’t think people have any intention of restricting themselves to what’s reasonable. Something happened that they didn’t like, so it must be someone else’s fault, and that someone must be punished.
Personally I think that with the NRA spending $31 million dollars attacking Hillary Clinton, and right wing media moguls buying up all rural news outlets and running a constant barrage of anti-Clinton propaganda literally for decades, and Bernie Sanders providing an example of what a truly uniting, openly populist platform could be (showing up the deficiencies of divisive, bankster-appeasing mainstream candidates) there was no way Clinton could have won. Loose cannon Comey didn’t help, and Clinton collapsing during the campaign didn’t either, but it’s not like the opposition didn’t have even more embarrassing issues.
She did win the votes of most Americans who went to the polls. She came within 54,000 votes of winning the electoral college. It’s disingenuous to suggest she was a fundamentally unviable candidate even with the right wing set against her. Almost anything could have tipped the election the other way.
Someone must be punished, because a crime was committed.
Hacking is a crime, stealing people’s correspondence under any circumstance is a crime, taking this libertarian edgelord stance where you look down your nose at the plebes not using end-to-end encryption doesn’t negate the crime in the least. Or worse, the fact that you don’t like the person who got their correspondence stolen and think that they deserve embarrassment and negative consequences in place of whatever unprovable crimes you think they did, that also doesn’t excuse a crime and make it this trivial thing we should just get over.
Prosecuting email hacking is important, because there’s every indication that it will happen again. If your solution to this problem is “well, I guess we just don’t do anything that would upset the nations or private concerns capable of manning professional hacking operations”, that is an absolute capitulation of rule of law to authoritarianism. It’s not a good look.
I just heard this exact same sentiment a few hours ago!
It was in regards to immigration, though, and punishing the innocent children of illegal immigrants.
I didn’t agree with the argument then, and I don’t now - the law is not more important than pragmatism or morality, and frequently the law is no more than a tool for oppressors and dividers.
I am totally in favor of the DP suing everyone in sight, though. They should have their day in court.
By a hair-thin margin in a couple of critical states, leading to an extremely weak electoral college win, while she won more votes altogether. Clinton certainly lost, yes, but that doesn’t speak of “a fundamentally unviable” candidate.
I actually find the whole thing baffling. If one political party did something illegal to win an election, that should be resolved by an investigation undertaken by an independent body that oversees fair elections that is free from partisan influence, not by another political party taking them to court in a civil suit. It’s not like the democrats had a right to win the election, it’s the integrity of the country at stake.
But as for Clinton being able to win or not, I find at least this case very compelling:
…,the effect of those factors — say, Clinton’s decision to give paid speeches to investment banks, or her messaging on pocket-book issues, or the role that her gender played in the campaign — is hard to measure. 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.
(The Comey Letter Probably Cost Clinton The Election | FiveThirtyEight)
We might not be able to know that Russia’s involvement swung the election, but I think it’s denying reality to say she wouldn’t have won had Comey not involved the FBI in the election. Or imagine if the timing of the Comey letter and the Access Hollywood tape were reversed. It doesn’t make any sense to think Clinton couldn’t have won (I mean, unless you’re just generally a determinist).
I trend towards “she did not win, therefore she could not win” - but admittedly, I’m probably subject to confirmation bias.
I mean, I didn’t see how she could possibly win, and went around begging people to prove me wrong, hoping that they would, you know? You were in some of those conversations, weren’t you? I kept hoping I was wrong.
But now the same people who told me she couldn’t possibly lose say she was a victim of something far more nefarious than being the wrong candidate at the wrong time. They’ve got all the same righteous self assurance, the same dismissive attitude towards differing observations, the same confidence that everything is just as their numbers say it is. Surely it is unsurprising that I don’t find this at all convincing.
What I’m saying is that I find it completely bizarre that America doesn’t have a non-partisan body overseeing the integrity of its elections. I first became aware of it when I found out the Florida recount issue in the 2000 election was going to go before a person who had an (R) next to their name. It’s completely bonkers, banana republic stuff.
I was very nervous that Clinton was going to lose for most of the election. People did a lot of spurious analysis to suggest she would win for sure when it was obviously far from sure.
But trump’s incredibly thin margin of victory isn’t the number some analyst came up with, it’s his actual margin of victory in the real election. When millions of people voted, and millions more voted for Clinton than for Trump, and he won by less than 1% margins in a few key states - to me, that’s like winning a basketball game by one. You literally needed every single point you scored, if you go back in time and miss one basket, you lose.
Everyone who said Clinton would definitely win was obviously wrong. But given how insanely narrow Trump’s win was, how can someone say that Trump was definitely going to win? And if he needed every point he scored, how can we say that the Comey letter wasn’t a basket for Trump?
Because I went all over the country and observed people. I drove for hours through rural areas of PA, WV, KS, MO, NC, many other places, and I spent time in Boston, NYC, Wilmington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and many other cities. For me, personal observation always weighs more than hearsay, even when the hearsay is what I want to hear.
You have to remember that if it hadn’t been for the Access Hollywood tapes, Trump would have had a far greater victory. The remarkable thing wasn’t that Hillary Clinton lost - her loss was prepared for her by decades of unfair propaganda - it’s that she lost by so little, actually winning the popular vote.
I could not possibly agree with you more! And I think the USA also sends election observers all over the world, but refuses to let other countries have any meaningful audit of our election processes, don’t we? Totally bonkers.
That part would only seem remarkable if you were ignoring the overall polling data instead of basing your forecast on interactions with people from middle America.
And it was her failure to focus on those critical states that was one of her fundamental flaws. She could have won every single vote in California and it would have made no difference.
There were a couple of Democrats who could have wiped Trump off the EC map. The Democrats picked the only candidate against whom Donald Trump could paint himself as a populist.
The level of “Hillary really won” denial is still remarkably strong.
Is your claim (a) that the DNC Chair managed the primary in an impartial and evenhanded way, or (b) that the DNC emails provided no evidence that this was not the case?
There are quite a lot of mainstream media sources attesting otherwise.
Or perhaps we should look to the words of the new DNC Chair…
What connection? All I see is a list of events including two illegal actions of a foreign nation and the result of the election in which the Russian interfered.
(1) Was there a phishing scheme, originating somewhere in Russia, which netted passwords to DNC servers? That appears to be true based on what is known today. We’ll see if it’s proven and if it is, there should be appropriate punishment for the wrongdoers.
(2) Was the release of information in the DNC servers germane to Clinton’s defeat? This can be speculated about, but not proved. And to make that case requires the premise that seeing the internal communications of the DNC would discourage Clinton voters and make undecided voters more amenable to voting for Trump.
Yeah, as we all know, anyone who didn’t vote for Her is Putin’s puppet. (I voted Stein).
