LOL. Are you seriously suggesting that Dems gamed the system to get Trump the GOP nomination? That is sweet!
Trump apologizes for boasting about groping women, says he'll be talking about Bill Clinton more now
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It’s not about how far the Clinton campaign would be willing to go. It’s about whether it would REQUIRE or even MAKE SENSE for the Clinton campaign to orchestrate these kinds of scandals. You’re proposing deep-rooted conspiracies to explain events which require no such explanation.
Do you think the Clinton campaign somehow made Trump say any of the myriad of terrible things he’s said, past or present? As I mentioned above, given his comments about the Central Park Five on Friday he would have been mired in controversy all weekend long even if this recording hadn’t come to light.
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Not my suggestion, but a leaked email between DNC strategists well before his nomination.The email is from the newest wikileaks dump, and was written by the Chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.
I’m put in mind of 1 Henry IV:
GLENDOWER
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
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I would never suggest that either campaign is responsible for the deeds and words of the opposing candidate, simply that it would be in their best intetest to use what information that they have in the way that they thought would work to their advantage.
Wikileaks has, unfortunately, lost any shred of credibility over the past year. Given their political leanings I can’t trust a single thing that they claim to be sourced from the Clinton campaign.
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But you did seem to suggest that Hillary’s campaign is somehow behind the release of the Trump tape, or at least the timing of said release. I think that’s pretty far-fetched and unnecessary in any case.
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The release is from the WaPo who’ve been putting out a continuous stream of investigative articles pointing out massive flaws in Trump for months now. This one is in the same vein as the others, and happened to take off in the media more than others, but unless I see evidence, I’m not going to assume the Clinton campaign is some all-powerful Puppet Master that has mysterious powers to decide what the media runs with. Trump’s burned every bridge he has with most media outlets, demonized many media sources, and worked to humiliate and intimidate reporters, so it’s not unexpected for them to hammer him. It’s more surprising how gentle they generally are to a figure so openly hostile to a free press.
When he said it he was older than the current president. Normally people are held responsible for things they’ve said and done as adults, even when they did them in the past and not the immediate present.
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Here its a little different. The defense has to advise the defendant. But the defendant has final call on a lot of things. Counsel can’t enter a guilty plea if the client doesn’t want it. And Counsel usually can’t present a defense the client doesn’t agree too. Its usually not actually illegal or unethical to do so, but presenting a defense that the client refuses to participate in is seldom a winning strategy. And is often unlikely to meet the standard of a proper defense. Certain defenses like insanity, incompetence to stand trial and justification defenses can require court/judicial approval before they can be used. Basically you have little hearings and motions before the judge to determine if they’re a valid avenue of defense or bullshit intended to confuse a jury. So a defense attorney is sometimes actually pretty limited in terms of what sort of defense, and always very limited in terms of whether a defense, will be offered. Once you assert a particular defense you have to to take it seriously, to its full conclusion in order to properly meet the standard of a full throated defense. Which is required. Enforced both legally, and by internal ethical standards for the legal field.
ETA: which isn’t to say that this standard doesn’t get manipulated, violated, ignored, or flat out fail (like if the other side fails to live up to their legal and ethical standard). Just listing out how its supposed to work.
More over NBC has repeatedly been accused of softballing Trump, and has a long professional and financial association with the guy. The Aprentice, lots of celeb trash coverage before that. They’ve given him a hell of a lot more interviews than Hillary, and longer ones, over the last year. That Matt Lauer interview.
Reporting, including NBC’s own, on how this tape came out also indicate that NBC found the tape. Then sat on it for weeks ( ETA: ? I’m actually unclear on this, might have been A week, or just days its unclear how long they’ve known it existed and how long they actually had it in hand). Planning to release it after today’s debate. Their version of the video removes some of Billy Bush’s comments. And their reporting on it attributes one of Bush’s statements to the Donald.
So NBC has acknowledged they held onto the tape for a time, and its speculated that a staffer leaked the tape in response to that holding back. There have been serious questions about why. What else NBC might have on hand. And why it took them so long to start looking through their vast archives of Trump footage. Though the vastest archive isn’t with NBC. All that apprentice footage lives with Mark Burnett, and he’s been stone walling releasing any of it since reports of Trump’s on set behavior during the Apprentice first hit months ago.
So opposed to the idea that Camp Hillary were holding this back for an opportune moment. We have very good information that NBC and their various shows have been lack luster in actually checking their records for this sort of thing. And an acknowledgement that once they did both to dig up things they knew they had, they held them back. Best case scenario to get a well times scoop and protect Billy Bush.
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I think you misunderstand my point. A discussion of that idiot racist has been successfully derailed into a long, detailed discussion of legal ethics and HRC. Being (for the most part) intelligent and reasonable people, many respondents have engaged that debate with the good intentions of resolving a question.
The point of even bringing it into this thread was not, and is not, to engage in reasonable discussion. The point is to get us all talking about something other than the latest example of Trumpian awfulness, and to instead focus on something to do with HRC’s perceived ethics. As PR and astroturfing it is a masterstroke, but it certainly doesn’t help in any sort of democratic sense.
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This. I’m three decades younger than Trump and I would never try to pass off something I said or did 10 years ago as some kind of youthful indiscretion that doesn’t have any bearing on the man I am today.
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When Podesta was confronted with this, his statement was as follows:
“I don’t think we can dig in documents dumped by WikiLeaks and just
assume they’re all accurate and true,” he told CNN’s “State of the
Union.”
Pretty weak denial, IMHO
Yes, a good point. And my mistake.
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Wikileaks has been regularly posting things that are objectively false, have been releasing data provided to them by foreign intelligence agencies, and long since eroded their last shred of credibility. You say it’s a weak denial, but labeling them an unreliable source is perfectly true at this point.
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Assuming the memo is accurate, it still doesn’t describe anything akin to the conspiracy you seem to be suggesting. The Democrats wanted to paint the Republicans as crazed right-wing extremists rather than centrists and allow the party to destroy itself over ideology and in-fighting. This turned out to be a pretty damn easy thing to do.
Nowhere in the memo does it suggest secretly conspiring with the media to make this happen.
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Isn’t that what voting day is for? I doubt that discussion on Boing Boing will affect the outcome in any meaningful sense. Amongst other things, a lot of us don’t even get to vote.
You call it distraction. I call it an interesting digression. You might notice that most of people involved in that digression are also discussing the thing they’re supposedly distracted from in slightly different, intersecting chains of posts.
Its a webernets forum, not a political campaign or 8 hour CNN talking head fest.
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That email isn’t what I’d call “Machiavellian” so much as just kind of boring strategizing. Getting opponents to commit to unpalatable positions, undermining trust in opponents, and muddying waters on attacks against your candidate has been the status quo for the duration of our country. Reaching out to the press to push an agenda has also been the norm forever for both political parties.
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I think that Clinton’s accusers are very credible and they were vilified in the press because his taste was kind of low class in women. Fuck that. He may have denied it but they were brave in coming forward and there are so many of them that it’s hard to believe that it is all cooked up. What Paula Jones describes having happened to her is flat up rape. I think he was an amazing president, but can’t we find one person who can govern and treat women with respect?
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I don’t discount that accusation. It’s entirely possible Bill Clinton is a flat-out rapist. But equally credible and much more recent rape accusations have also been made against Trump (including the aforementioned 13-year-old girl) and Trump just boastfully confirmed, on tape, that at least some of the sexual assault complaints against him were true.
That, along with the fact that Bill Clinton isn’t currently running for President, is why the media is currently making a bigger deal out of this story than the allegations of what Clinton did to Paula Jones in the 1970s.
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