The evidence has been pretty compelling. But as has been stated, there’s no evidence as to whether the hack was state-sponsored. The context of the information, its timing, and the fact that the hackers are known to the FBI is what’s led them to suspect Russian intelligence involvement.
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What I found to be telling details was how the hackers seemingly worked on UTC+3 time (which includes Moscow and St. Petersburg) and took time off on Russian holidays.
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Crime? Yes. Act of war? No.
Is important to ask why Clinton has survived all her scandals. I mean, she’s been under continuous investigation since the 1990s with a bit of a lull during the Bush administration. Why had nothing stuck? Could there really be no there there? Clinton may have well hidden skeletons in her closet, but she doesn’t seem to be able to hide much humiliating shit, that she’d rather not see the light of day, now does she? Clinton has a terrible image problem and a lot of that is self-inflicted – she either has no concept of optics or doesn’t give a fuck. This isn’t a good thing, but it does mean there’s been a whole lot of digging into her past.
It’s at the point where the New York Times Public Editor had stayed on the record that she basically thinks that Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy, which at first seems shocking and counterintuitive, but on consideration explains her primary campaign performance. Bernie Sanders more or less ran circles around her because Clinton was reluctant to make promises she can’t keep and everyone found it both baffling and frustrating. Bernie made promises. Clinton made plans to address issues. For example, on forgiving student loans and the escalating cost of tuition, Bernie basically said that the loans should be forgiven and the states should offer free college. Clinton came up with a college funding/loan forgiveness plan, which she figured she could implement as POTUS, posted it on her campaign website and tried to summarize it in a townhall. Ouch.
Anyway, I found it baffling. It’s like she was deliberately avoiding doing things that any other politician would do even though doing those things would have humanized her or made her more popular. Oh well, at least it’ll make for a real study in contrasts this campaign. We all know Trump will say anything if he perceives it to be to his advantage and Clinton kinda sorta won’t. I wonder how that will play out in the debates (oh and is anyone else dreading the VP debates as possibly being the most boring in recent memory? I think Joe Biden and Sarah Palin have spoiled us).
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Most of them, yes. Benghazi etc; absolute bullshit.
But there was one genuine scandal: the email server. A blatant attempt to evade FOI law, which resulted in a massive intelligence leak that could have been predicted by a five year old.
The Sanders critique of Clinton’s honesty was never about the “scandals”. It’s about the obvious corruption that she shares with the rest of the US political establishment: the open and legal bribery that is business-as-usual 21st century campaign and personal financing for every US politician except Bernie.
Plus, of course, her long established habit of claiming a deep personal commitment to whichever policy position that her pollsters have told her is popular that week.
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I agree. I discount all of the GOP driven investigations that turned out to be nothing but a witch hunt, all the legal accusations that finally landed on Bill got a blow job from an intern. Thats all they could come up with.
The email server was a huge mistake on her part. I accept that lots of politicians have done this. But they have not turned around and run for President.
And this DNC collusion is also pretty clear.
It undermines the quality of our politics, lowers our standards, and worse of all gives Trump leverage. Clinton can not claim moral high ground. Against Trump. Thats pretty pathetic.
The thing is she is in the sole position of being able to turn this around. By being a pillar of integrity, and owning whats been done, and getting behind Sanders.
But she won’t, and our democracy is weaker for it.
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Can I assume then that “Yog-Sothoth’s daughter” is right out???
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If you only mention that “governments shouldn’t be interfering with elections” when Russia interferes with elections, and never mention it in the context of the US interfering with elections, then it seems a whole lot like you’re employing a double standard.
If it’s a big deal that Russia did this, then it should be a big deal that the US has been doing this. It didn’t seem like that’s what you were saying though – you seemed to just say it’s a big deal that Russia is doing this.
You didn’t say anything about the actions of federal intelligence agencies, so it wasn’t clear that you are against their actions. That’s pretty much the entire point of my response to you.
That said, the legitimacy of the CIA’s actions in this domain does not seem to be seriously questions by any element of the US government or the US political establishment in general. You’ve probably never voted for any candidates who’ve seriously advocated for ending the CIA’s interference in foreign elections – in no small part because there is no such candidate.
So the sense in which you are “against the CIA’s actions” seems to be a very strange notion of “against” that doesn’t involve taking any action that is likely to change or mitigate the CIA’s actions – in fact, it doesn’t even seem to involve vocally disagreeing with those actions unless you’re called out on the hypocrisy of criticizing some other country’s spy organization while not criticizing the CIA. Being “against” in this context seems like a position of convenience rather than principle.
You don’t have to be an anarchist to be clearly against the CIA’s actions, but you would have to be at the very least some kind of radical (socialist perhaps?) to be morally consistent here. (Again, this is because mainstream US politics does not question the legitimacy of the CIA’s interference in foreign elections.) If you’re against Russia doing this, you should also be against the US doing this, but when you only call out Russia and not the US for something they’re equally guilty of, it does look a whole lot like a double standard.
I’ll leave the last word to you.
You mean, get behind the guy that has deliver a speech saying he is behind her, supporting her?
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A straightforward binary question for those who have read this thread:
Which most closely reflects your view??
(A) - I would prefer to have all available information on how the degree of impartiality of the DNC respective to the Clinton and Sanders campaigns.
(B) - I would prefer to have that information withheld from me.
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Yeah - exactly. You followed that, and who said the US electorate was stupid.
C) I already assumed that the DNC was backing Clinton because it was obvious. These revelations are unsurprising, and if Trump is indeed Putin’s preference for US president, then that’s much more important to how I vote than the DNC’s transparent shenanigans.
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All her skeletons have come out, from Whitewater and Vince Foster’s case onwards. Is there anything worse? No. The problem is what is there, what was left after the '90s onslaught: someone who’s learnt hard lessons about never saying a word too much, never saying anything that could be twisted against you, never marry a political position too much for fear that it will sink you, and weasel your way out of any situation without ever falling on your sword. Today, she’s the embodiment of her generation’s “career politician” stereotype.
The Clintons moved from being an ambitious but relatively naive power-couple when they landed in Washington, to building the slickest and most robust political operation in the US, one that could resist 20 years of Republican ideological domination and even the rise of history-making Democratic competitors without actually killing their personal positions. That’s a massive achievement for them, but not one that tends to warm hearts of people hungry for change. It’s the sort of thing that makes New York Times editors happy, though.
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Benghazi was not a “scandal” but it was an example of complete incompetence.
Taking a country ruled by a third-rate dictator who had stopped stirring up trouble in the rest of the ME, and turning it into a cataclysmic anarchic clusterfuck.
Lots of people here have accused us libertarians of wanting to create a Mad Max, Somali gangster society. Well, Clinton and Obama actually accomplished that.
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First time in my memory that the Democratic nominee will clearly be positioned as the Wall Street candidate.
The email server was bad, but it’s on par with a lot of the things I’ve seen being an IT contractor except it goes along the lines of “wouldn’t it be cheaper to host our own email instead of paying Google hundreds of dollars a month to host our email” instead of “wouldn’t I have more control over email policy and content if I had my own email server instead of putting everything through State’s server?” Thing is, even though James Comey made an unprecedented public reprimand of Clinton, he couldn’t really charge her with anything that would stick either.
As for the system, I’d say that Clinton is a product of the system and her experience is from working within the system. She won the nomination by working the system better than anyone else did. That’s her strength. Bernie ignored the system and worked from outside, which is the only reason why this wasn’t a coronation. If you believe that the system can be reformed from within, then Clinton is the person you want as the nominee. If you don’t, then you want Bernie as the nominee. There are good arguments for trying to change the system from within… it’s less disruptive in the short and medium term which counts for something.
As for your last point, I don’t think Clinton has had a tendency to pander to the electorate. Quite the opposite. That’s part of why the primary was so close. I mean, Bernie knew what his audience wanted and said he’d do it. Clinton knew what his audience wanted and tried to steer a path that would tilt in that direction while being implementable as POTUS subject to terms and conditions, blah, blah, blah, blah and OMG, she sounds like a lawyer robot again.
What Clinton seems to do is pick a general direction she wants her policy to go in (like, really vague) listen to a bunch of experts and interests on the matter at hand and try to craft a coherent policy out of all the information she’s piled up. It often leads to some weak, milquetoast stuff (once again, see her education “platform”), but you know it can be implemented :-P. If Clinton is convinced that the system needs to be reformed, she will change the system from within… she’s the best person for governing within our existing system.
Whether or not she believes the system needs to be fundamentally changed is another matter entirely. Clinton’s a cipher and, aside from her belief that people should get the same opportunities to get where she is that she had (as far as I can tell, that’s why she’s a Democrat), I’m not sure what her personal positions are, if there are any, with regard to the existing political system or how strongly held they are. The question boils down to trust… do you trust Clinton to figure shit out and do the right thing?
HAHAHAHA*snort*AHAHAHAHA, I know, right?
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I have to disagree with you here. Both the DNC and the Clinton Campaign broke rules of the Party Charter. Nobody is talking about the Campaigns interaction with the DNC around this, but this account for example clearly shows collaboration/collusion on the Victory Fund response by the Clinton campaign. If Wasserman Schultz is guilty, so goes the Clinton campaign.
3. DNC officials worked closely with the Hillary Clinton campaign to respond to Sanders’ money laundering allegations
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The metadata in the leaked documents are perhaps most revealing: one dumped document was modified using Russian language settings, by a user named “Феликс Эдмундович,” a code name referring to the founder of the Soviet Secret Police, the Cheka, memorialised in a 15-ton iron statue in front of the old KGB headquarters during Soviet times.
( All Signs Point to Russia Being Behind the DNC Hack )
Well, it certainly sounds as if someone wanted people to think it looked like the Russians. It’s not entirely clear to me why a credible Russian super-hacker would intentionally leave a bread-crumb trail not only back to themselves but in such a way that it looks unmistakably Russian. To be honest, now it only seems less credible the Russian state did it. That a competent Russian hacker would have done that inadvertently strains credibility. It seems more plausible to me that this was in fact done by an actor or agency who wanted it to seem as if it was done by Russians.
This is the goddamned problem with hacking acts and how they’re investigated. It’s a shell game. No skeptic can look at this and say that anything has been proven by anyone, at least as reported so far in the news. I’m certainly not on board with these hasty conclusions, I’m still waiting for something more credible, otherwise, file under ‘It’s a mystery, and for all we know this was perpetuated by the BfV in Germany or even the NSA, for purposes unknown.’
It certainly sounds to me as if someone’s straining credibility to deny all evidence to the contrary. If multiple independent security agencies and multiple experts analyzing the evidence isn’t enough for you, then I think you’ve already made up your mind.
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I don’t think you know what “evidence” is or means.
