Calling it projection might be too generous. It’s almost literally “I KNOW YOU ARE BUT WHAT AM I?” A lot of these people are just too fucking dumb to come up with or even recognize substantive criticisms.
“No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet!” Without the slightest inkling of who he supposes might be pulling the strings of a former FLOTUS, former Senator, former Secretary of State, and arguably the most powerful woman in American politics. If he were playing chess (and I doubt he even knows how) he wouldn’t even be looking one move ahead, he’d be randomly tossing pieces around the board.
My guess is that it’s all true, and that this is the way that the security services have chosen to ‘minimise’ the damage - leak it ahead of the Russians from a senior figure in an allied country.
No. It’s not. This isn’t dipshit trump wandering up to a microphone and blurting out nonsense about global warming being a Chinese hoax. The guy who released the information is a prior MI6 agent. He runs his own intelligence company in London that is focused on doing business in Russia. This is not “tabloid trash”.
And further, you’ll notice that Clapper (the Director of National Intelligence) called the report a “leak”, and not “a list of falsehoods” or thereabouts. This is a guy with 50+ years working in the military/intelligence field, the words he chooses are meaningful in this regard.
Even you link says that everything is unverified. The paper is real, the content of the paper hasn’t been verified.
Someone in the intelligence community writing a memo or paper describing a rumor or alleged event is normal. That is part of intelligence gathering, find out what is going on, and then follow up and discern the truth. So as I learned more, yeah, this seems normal the CIA and other intelligence groups would have circulated this paper internally as possible intel. They didn’t release it as fact like they did with the Russian’s hacking the DNC mail servers.
A paper got leaked, people like Buzzfeed were like, “Holy shit, we can get half the internet clicks with this today.” and ran with it (even though they said “there is serious reason to doubt the allegations”). And once it was out there everyone else HAD to talk about it too.
So yeah, sorry. I don’t like Trump either, but this IS tabloid trash until there is more evidence beyond “An MI6 guy heard this happened and maybe there is a tape of it, but we don’t really know.”
All this does is further damage “the media”. Hell it bolsters some fake news site, because for once it isn’t them. So that is just going to confirm the bias of people who frequent those sites because this one time they told the truth.
How does it damage the media if the paper is real, verified, and the content is in question? It isn’t fake news to leak a real intelligence document, just like many others leaked through many other means.
As for being tabloid trash here is Mother Jones’s, CNN’s, and Buzzfeed’s quotes on Trump’s sex life:[quote]There is no mention of Trump’s sex life in any of these articles.[/quote]
In fact, CNN and Mother Jones raised the topic of allegations important to the politics involved around Trump as president specifically, and Buzzfeed was only careful to state the report was unverified and full of spelling errors.
What’s telling here is that Trump is displaying the weakness that all Big Man dictators have. Attacking him doesn’t hurt - he seems to revel in both the attention and the fighting back - but mocking him? Everyone just laughing? That’s his fucking kryptonite.
And seeing as attacking him is a little redundant now, what with the election being well and truly over, maybe just turning him into Michael Palin’s Pontius Pilate is the way to survive the next four years while really getting under his skin.
I think that’s still campaign thinking. “His supporters” are a fraction of the population, and he has to impress and placate more than them now, whether he likes it or not.
As was just demonstrated, the GOP have the system sufficiently rigged that they can seize power with a small minority of the vote. That situation is not going to improve while the GOP control the executive, legislature and judiciary; instead, it is likely to be irretrievably solidified.
There ain’t gonna be a whole lot of brown people allowed to vote in the midterms in the GOP states.
Give me a break. The only way anyone can defend this sort of thing is because they dislike Trump enough to let their integrity slip because it feels so fucking good.
Or at least while the pee-party might be BS fed to the intel gatherers considering the source there is no reason do summarily dismiss everything in the report just because one or two things might be just stories made up to spoil things.
[quote=“Wanderfound, post:277, topic:92708”]
You can justifiably criticise Buzzfeed on journalistic standards grounds.
[/quote]This is actually the part I disagree with more. Buzzfeed posted a leaked document, talked about how the material was unverified and said it’s riddled with errors.
It is a real leaked intelligence document, just because it’s hilarious doesn’t mean it’s should be ignored by the media and not presented to the public.
