How a poorly explained mistake continues to threaten the political career of Hillary Clinton

I do think Clinton has got to be the luckiest presidential candidate i’ve ever seen in my lifetime.

Against anyone even slightly competent, i think she’d be in serious trouble here.
Luckily for her though, she’s against the beyond-parody level walking dumpster-fire that is Trump…

Here in the UK i have a policy of not voting for the lesser of two evils in an election just to prevent someone worse getting in. Trump is so bad i’d suspend that rule for this election if i was a USA voter instead…

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Me: Oh ok let’s see if this article has some good information I might not know yet

TITLE: Admit It. The Clinton Email Controversy Bothers You, Yet You Don’t Actually Know What the Clinton Email Controversy Is

Me: close Fuuuuck you.

People need to stop acting like only stupid partisan fuckwits care about open records laws and classification regulations. The Bush administration provided Clinton a very specific example of what not to do, and she did it anyways because it was “convenient”. And as a possible direct result of her negligence those same emails are now available as a hacked, unredacted archive. It was a case of serious bad judgment and clear disregard for laws meant both to secure sensitive information and for ones meant to keep public servants accountable. That some people are turning this into a partisan talking point does not excuse the violation of the letter and spirit of the law.

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I concur. Had the Democrats fielded just about anyone else, I think Trumps numbers would be much lower. Trump is probably the only candidate the Republicans had that for sure would have lead to a Clinton win.

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If you got it, flaunt it.

If you doubt it, flout it.

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Por que no los dos?

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How’s that working out?

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Because Wikileaks and Snowden are recent history. Because the issue of communication monitoring is extremely important, so holding “higher ups” to the same standard of scrutiny they enforce on us peons is the only way to ever hope to stop the slippery slope we’re sliding down on. Because FOIA acts are possibly the only advancement in modern democracy since the '70s. Because political hypocrisy and triangulation against leftist movements have killed the left.

Of all the things in the world you can choose to ignore, why this one ? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not really because you don’t care about these topics. Dig deeper and you will find the true source of your myopic political position. :slight_smile:

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Due to the undemocratic FPTP voting system, i’ve never had a vote that’s actually counted in a general election in my 18 years of being voting age…

So not brilliantly really. :stuck_out_tongue:

That said, we’ve had some utterly terrible PM’s, but still none of Trump’s level…

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BoJo Foreign Secretary is very, very close though. Only Farage PM would be worse than that.

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Agreed on the first part, conflicted on the second. There’s a lot of Clinton hate on both sides, so Clinton isn’t as handily electable as she should be. On the other hand, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz et al aren’t likely to pick up any independents, unless those independents somehow want a theocracy.

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I think Farage is the closest we have to a Trump level politician, but again still not quite as bad.

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It was her job to oversee the State Department, and I’m gonna step out on a limb here and say that her email server was probably not high on her list of considerations to keep in mind when managing the Department as a whole (with it’s 65k various employees).

I wonder–do you feel the same about David Petraeus? He gave away his stuff, as a tactical warfighter in an area of responsibility, to his mistress.

No, she didn’t. The State Department is not the CIA/NSA/DSA/DIA etc etc.

Like, idk, Bernie Sanders? Or any of the 17 jackasses that were knocked out by…hmm…who could it be? Who could be the giant slayer to take out the whole field of Republican smarties, and who was then laid low by…idk, I think it was HRC, right?

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What? Are you talking about the Podesta emails, that weren’t on Clinton’s server? Do we know of emails that were hacked from Clinton’s server? If yes, link?

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Jesus fuck, yes. Petraeus is a complete and utter shitbag. I honestly don’t know how anyone can take him seriously, let alone get the pass he gets from US media.

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You are getting tied up in discursion. The reality is that people do what they do to get shit done, and often that isn’t precisely the thing that would stand up best to scrutiny later. So now, looking back on it, it’s easy for you to say “she shouldn’t have done that, and that, and that.” But living forward through it, those things she “shouldn’t have done” are just things that happened on the way to getting shit done. There was no careful plan to do something that would later look bad. It just fell out of circumstance. I’m sure if you look at your own life, you can see things that have this quality–you didn’t really see the implications when you did them, and then later the implications became clear.

Saying that because of this, she is unqualified, is silly. Nobody is qualified to be president. But if anybody is at least somewhat qualified, it is Ms. Clinton. Will she do a perfect job? No. Will there be things that you can nitpick in retrospect, like this? Yes, absolutely.

There are no adults in the room. We are all making this up as we go along. Mistakes happen. That is okay, and natural. It’s actually worse if you spend a lot of time trying to avoid making mistakes, because they are really difficult to anticipate, and the energy you spend on that gets in the way of getting stuff done. You should put some energy into it, think through what you do as carefully as makes sense, but then you have to decide and live with the decision.

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Sure, this is the real issue. But if we acknowledge this is the real issue, then we also have to acknowledge that her predecessor did the same thing, the Bush Whitehouse did the same thing, members of Congress continue to do the same thing, including some of those attacking her…

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Petraeus was the guy who said we should arm moderate Al-Qaeda.

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The problem with the Clinton email debacle is that no one got hurt. This cuts both ways. It makes us complacent about some real issues surrounding national security and records requirements until someone does get hurt, because we are complacent. It also fools us into thinking that this is incidental and limited to the behavior of a single person, when there is a serious, broader institutional problem.

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Well then, Clinton is definitely the candidate for you.

So much for competence!

That’s why I don’t stand for election, thanks.

Man, GWB had done exactly that, right before. The topic was already out. This is not a case of “well, she did something that turned out later to be bad”. No, she knew already that it was bad practice, and she did it anyway. There was no need for that to “get shit done” - those services were already provided, with certain rules. She didn’t like the rules, which were of no impediment to her getting shit done, and she just went “fuck’em, I’m beyond”. If that’s the attitude you like in your representatives, Clinton is for you – and tbh, so was GWB and Trump and a lot of others.

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https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/

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