Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy

[Eric the Green]

(06-02-2016, 01:16 PM)Marypoza Wrote:

(06-02-2016, 10:00 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(06-02-2016, 07:28 AM)radind Wrote: One fact is omitted: Information is marked because it is classified, it is not classified because it is marked.
The best thing to do is to stop all speculation and wait for the FBI report.

I have no idea what that means. Classified but not marked? Who's to blame for letting classified documents unmarked? How do you blame that on HRC?

---- if she told her staffers to remove the word "classified" from the emails, then yeah, you can blame her

Yes, possibly you could in that case.

But that is not the same as "classified but not marked." That is classified but deliberately and knowingly UNmarked.

I find it dubious that Hillary would run for president while knowing herself that she broke the law and just hopes people won't find out. If there's anything Hillary knows, it is that she more than anyone is investigated, and that she can't hide wrongdoing.

I also find it dubious that her staffers could unmark classified material which Hillary then sends to other staffers of the State Dept. That's what most of her work-related email consisted of. I think some other employees of the State Dept. might know if this material had been marked classified or not. Again, I doubt she could have hid such activities from the Department of which she was the Secretary.

[playwrite]

(06-03-2016, 12:17 AM)Galen Wrote:

(06-02-2016, 01:16 PM)Marypoza Wrote:

(06-02-2016, 10:00 AM)Eric the Obtuse Wrote:

(06-02-2016, 07:28 AM)radind Wrote: One fact is omitted: Information is marked because it is classified, it is not classified because it is marked.
The best thing to do is to stop all speculation and wait for the FBI report.

I have no idea what that means. Classified but not marked? Who's to blame for letting classified documents unmarked? How do you blame that on HRC?

---- if she told her staffers to remove the word "classified" from the emails, then yeah, you can blame her

It would seem that Clinton has in fact done [/URL="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-05-31/wikileaks-asks-if-smoking-gun-email-will-bring-down-hillary"]exactly that[/URL].  No doubt Eric the Obtuse will still say that Clinton didn't do anything wrong.

Classified talking points???  You do know what "TPs" stands for, no?  

You guys are trying so hard; it's going to be so disappointing for you.

Better brush up on those "FBI is in the tank" TPs! 

[Eric the Green]

This is an effort to answer a question I’ve been struggling with since at least 2008: Why is the Hillary Clinton described to me by her staff, her colleagues, and even her foes so different from the one I see on the campaign trail?
http://www.vox.com/a/hillary-clinton-int...ip-quality

I’ve come to call it “the Gap.” There is the Hillary Clinton I watch on the nightly news and that I read described in the press. She is careful, calculated, cautious. Her speeches can sound like executive summaries from a committee report, the product of too many authors, too many voices, and too much fear of offense.

The Iraq War mars her record, and the private email server and the Goldman Sachs paydays frustrate even her admirers. Polls show most Americans doubt her basic honesty. Pundits write columns with headlines like "Why Is Clinton Disliked?"

And then there is the Hillary Clinton described to me by people who have worked with her, people I admire, people who understand Washington in ways I never will. Their Hillary Clinton is spoken of in superlatives: brilliant, funny, thoughtful, effective. She inspires a rare loyalty in ex-staff, and an unusual protectiveness even among former foes.

Obama administration officials, up to and including the president, badly want to see her win — there is something in the way she acted after the election, in the soldier she became and the colleague she showed herself to be, that has curdled the pride they felt in winning the 2008 primary into something close to guilt.

This is the Gap I set out to understand. While reporting this story, I spoke to dozens of people who have worked with Clinton in every stage of her career, going back to her time in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion. Every single one acknowledged its existence. Many were frustrated and confused by it.

So, too, is Clinton herself. We spoke for 40 minutes on a hot day in Raleigh, North Carolina, and it was clearly on her mind as she looks at the daily polls (you can watch video of our full interview here). As you watch this clip, remember this is a real human being — a human being who really believes she’s dedicated her adult life to helping others — trying to understand why most Americans say they don’t like her:

“It’s always amusing to me that when I have a job, I have really high approval ratings,” Clinton said. “When I’m actually doing the work, I get reelected with 67 percent of the vote running for reelection in the Senate. When I’m secretary of state, I have a 66 percent approval rating.”

Her explanation for the Gap is simple enough. “There’s a lot of behavioral science that if you attack someone endlessly — even if none of what you say is true — the very fact of attacking that person raises doubts and creates a negative perspective,” she says. “As someone Exhibit A on that — since it has been a long time that I’ve been in that position — I get that.”

I don’t buy it. Other politicians find themselves under continuous assault, but their poll numbers strengthen amid campaigns. Barack Obama’s approval rating rose in the year of his reelection. So too did George W. Bush’s. And Bill Clinton’s. All three sustained attacks. All three endured opponents lobbing a mix of true and false accusations. But all three seemed boosted by running for the job — if anything, people preferred watching them campaign to watching them govern.

Hillary Clinton is just the opposite. There is something about her persona that seems uniquely vulnerable to campaigning; something is getting lost in the Gap. So as I interviewed Clinton's staffers, colleagues, friends, and foes, I began every discussion with some form of the same question: What is true about the Hillary Clinton you’ve worked with that doesn’t come through on the campaign trail?

The answers startled me in their consistency. Every single person brought up, in some way or another, the exact same quality they feel leads Clinton to excel in governance and struggle in campaigns. On the one hand, that makes my job as a reporter easy. There actually is an answer to the question. On the other hand, it makes my job as a writer harder: It isn’t a very satisfying answer to the question, at least not when you first hear it.

Hillary Clinton, they said over and over again, listens.

“I love Bill Clinton,” says Tom Harkin, who served as senator from Iowa from 1985 to 2015. “But every time you talk to Bill, you’re just trying to get a word in edgewise. With Hillary, you’re in a meeting with her, and she really listens to you.”

The first few times I heard someone praise Clinton’s listening, I discounted it. After hearing it five, six, seven times, I got annoyed by it. What a gendered compliment: “She listens.” It sounds like a caricature of what we would say about a female politician.

But after hearing it 11, 12, 15 times, I began to take it seriously, ask more questions about it. And as I did, the Gap began to make more sense.

Modern presidential campaigns are built to reward people who are really, really good at talking. So imagine what a campaign feels like if you’re not entirely natural in front of big crowds. Imagine that you are constantly compared to your husband, one of the greatest campaign orators of all time; that you’ve been burned again and again after saying the wrong thing in public; that you’ve been told, for decades, that you come across as calculated and inauthentic on the stump. What would you do?

When Hillary Clinton ran for the Senate in 2000, she tried to do something very strange: She tried to campaign by listening. It was called her “listening tour,” and the press did not like it. “Mrs. Clinton brings to her public appearances a great deal of poise and seriousness of purpose which, more than anything she actually says, is what the events tend to be about,” reported the New Yorker, in a piece representative of much of the coverage I found from that time. “This was the singular insight of the First Lady’s unprecedented ‘listening tour,’ during which she tried to elevate nodding into a kind of political philosophy.”

The frustration pulses through the piece. What the hell is a listening tour, anyway? Is it just an elaborate distraction so the candidate doesn’t have to talk? Is it just one more way a secretive politician who combines radical views with a crippling fear of controversy can hide her true beliefs?

“Many of your colleagues in the press would call me and say, ‘This whole listening thing is a joke. She’s surrounded by the Secret Service. How will anyone get close to her?’” says Melanne Verveer, who served as chief of staff to Hillary Clinton in the White House. “What they missed was she was actually listening! By the time she finished those listening sessions around New York, she really knew more about New York, about the issues there, about what was on people’s minds.”



Clinton’s “listening tour,” Brooklyn, New York, August 1999. (Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images)

Clinton began her 2016 campaign with a listening tour, as well, and it is worth considering the possibility that these tours are not simply bullshit. This is, to be honest, a possibility I had not really considered until speaking with past and present Clinton aides who have been forced to take their boss’s process seriously.............

[Bob Butler 54]

(07-11-2016, 10:47 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Hillary Clinton, they said over and over again, listens.

There is a skit from the old Smothers Brothers variety show that I still remember, a contest of two all time greats.  It was short.  Bobby Fisher...  pawn to king's 4.  Muhammad Ali... right hook to the jaw.  Decision, Muhammad Ali by knockout.

I'm imagining the reprise.  Trump talks...  Hillary listens...

[Eric the Green]

(07-11-2016, 10:06 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(07-11-2016, 10:47 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Hillary Clinton, they said over and over again, listens.

There is a skit from the old Smothers Brothers variety show that I still remember, a contest of two all time greats.  It was short.  Bobby Fisher...  pawn to king's 4.  Muhammad Ali... right hook to the jaw.  Decision, Muhammad Ali by knockout.

I'm imagining the reprise.  Trump talks...  Hillary listens...

Hillary listening will be like Muhammed Ali's rope-a-dope strategy. She'll let Trump hang himself. All she has to do is repeat what he said.

[Bob Butler 54]

(07-11-2016, 10:10 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(07-11-2016, 10:06 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(07-11-2016, 10:47 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Hillary Clinton, they said over and over again, listens.

There is a skit from the old Smothers Brothers variety show that I still remember, a contest of two all time greats.  It was short.  Bobby Fisher...  pawn to king's 4.  Muhammad Ali... right hook to the jaw.  Decision, Muhammad Ali by knockout.

I'm imagining the reprise.  Trump talks...  Hillary listens...

Hillary listening will be like Muhammed Ali's rope-a-dope strategy. She'll let Trump hang himself. All she has to do is repeat what he said.

There might also be something to be said for reality based campaigning.  All that listening is well and good, but she has to get something out of it.  She has to show she knows what people think the problems are, and show she's thought through some answers.

[Eric the Green]

(07-11-2016, 10:25 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(07-11-2016, 10:10 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(07-11-2016, 10:06 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(07-11-2016, 10:47 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Hillary Clinton, they said over and over again, listens.

There is a skit from the old Smothers Brothers variety show that I still remember, a contest of two all time greats.  It was short.  Bobby Fisher...  pawn to king's 4.  Muhammad Ali... right hook to the jaw.  Decision, Muhammad Ali by knockout.

I'm imagining the reprise.  Trump talks...  Hillary listens...

Hillary listening will be like Muhammed Ali's rope-a-dope strategy. She'll let Trump hang himself. All she has to do is repeat what he said.

There might also be something to be said for reality based campaigning.  All that listening is well and good, but she has to get something out of it.  She has to show she knows what people think the problems are, and show she's thought through some answers.

She's been doing all that for years; maybe nobody better.

[Eric the Green]

Hillary on politics today and the attacks on her. What skills does a president need that campaigns don’t test? https://youtu.be/5VE9nihee7o?t=26m57s

The full conversation:

[Anthony '58]

But perception counts every bit as much as - and, quite often these days - even more than, reality.

Which is why the superdelegates need to pull the plug on Hillary between now and the Democratic Convention.

Yes, they need to Feel The Bern.

[Eric the Green]

Maybe they need to, but they won't. Decisions that come too late, in favor of candidates that are too old, aren't going to happen Tony.

(I'm not referring just to Bernie; Anthony's preferred candidates tend to be born in circa 1944.)

[Eric the Green]

Fact checkers confirm Hillary Clinton is more honest than any of her 2016 opponents
By Bill Palmer | March 20, 2016 |
http://www.dailynewsbin.com/news/fact-ch...nts/24196/

The trendy knock on Hillary Clinton, even among those who acknowledge that she’s the most capable and knowledgeable of the 2016 candidates for President, is the accusation that she’s just not honest. Her opponents keep insisting that she can’t be trusted, that she’s not telling the truth, and that there is therefore no telling what she might do while in office. But whenever fact checkers look at what Clinton and her opponents are saying during this election cycle, she rates out as the most honest of the bunch.

It may come as a surprise considering how often her opponents have tried to ding her for honesty issues. But according to campaign-long data from respected fact checking entity PolitFact, the picture looks very different. These sites only evaluate controversial or contentious claims made by each candidate, so if for instance they rate a candidate’s statements as being “true” half the time, it doesn’t mean the candidate is lying the other half the time. It’s more accurately an indicator of what percentage of the time a candidate turns out to have been telling the truth when he or she is specifically accused of lying.

PolitiFact has rated 24% of Hillary Clinton’s contentious claims as receiving a perfect “True” score (source link), which may not sound impressive until you consider that just 15% of Bernie Sanders’ contentious claims have rated out as “True” (source link). There are two other passable categories, “Mostly True” and “Half True.” If you add up the numbers from the top three boxes, Clinton comes out at 72% and Sanders comes out at 70%, which are both robust scores. In the bottom two boxes, just 14% of Clinton’s challenged statements have rated out as “False” or “Pants on Fire” while Sanders has fallen into those bottom two boxes 15% of the time.

Again, lest you get jaded, it doesn’t mean that either candidate is lying 14% or 15% of the time they open their mouths. This is merely a percentage of the most highly contested claims they’ve each made during this election. In other words, whenever Clinton or Sanders has been accused of lying, most of the time it turns out they were actually telling the truth. Objectively speaking, these are the two most honest candidates in the race, with Clinton receiving the slight numerical edge. Now for contrast, let’s take a look at the numbers for the top 2016 republican candidates.

It turns out Donald Trump’s statements have only rated out as being fully “True” a mere 3% of the time (source link). In fact he rates out as “False” or “Pants on Fire” an astounding 61% of the time. Ted Cruz is nearly as dishonest, rated “True” just 6% of the time, and “False” or “Pants on Fire” 36% of the time (source link). So what does this tell us?

The factual bottom line is that Hillary Clinton is the most honest candidate in the 2016 election. Bernie Sanders is a close second, making them the two most comparatively “honest” politicians in the race. In contrast, Donald Trump rates out as nearly a pathological liar, and Cruz doesn’t do much better. So much for the notion that Clinton is the one who can’t be trusted. This false perception is largely a function of her longtime status as the clear frontrunner and expected winner, causing the other candidates to take the most shots at her honesty out of desperation. But as the above numbers irrefutably spell out, when the others accuse Hillary of lying, it most often turns out they’re the ones who are lying.

[Eric the Green]

Ex-CIA Chief Morell: Hillary Didn't Lie About Benghazi

Hillary Clinton's assertion to the grieving mother of a Benghazi, Libya, victim that the deadly 2012 assault was caused by an anti-Islam video was as "true" as the fact it was a terror strike, according to ex-CIA acting director Michael Morell.

In an interview Sunday with ABC News' "This Week," Morell said "the video did play a role in that attack, and Republicans don't want people to believe that."

Morell said in 2014, the Federal Bureau of Investigation testified to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that it believed "the video was a motivation in this attack. Abu Khattala, who is the only person arrested, said that the video was a motivation."

But he acknowledged the mother of victim Sean Smith has called Clinton a "liar" for asserting the terror strike was caused by a video – and that this is resonating with voters.

"She said [the attack] was terrorism to Chelsea [Clinton]," Morell said. "She said to [the families of Benghazi victims] it was the video. Those two things can both be true at the same time," he said.

He also defended Clinton's misuse of classified information in her use of a private email server while secretary of state, saying "when she saw those e-mails, she did not see classification markings."

"So when she says there wasn't classified information, that's what she means," he said. "It wasn't marked. And the two that were marked with little 'c's,' she doesn't remember. So she's not trying to mislead anybody."

Morell also charged GOP nominee Donald Trump has become an "unwitting agent of the Russian Federation, and president Vladimir Putin.

"He saw that Donald Trump wanted to be complimented. He complimented him," he said, adding "And Donald Trump didn't even understand that Putin was playing him."

Breaking News at Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Benghaz...z4GiIEfhId


What is a concern is that Hillary does seem to have trouble stating her story clearly and believably. She's no "great communicator." So although she is very qualified in many ways to be president, speaking to the people and getting them "with her" on things she wants done is an important function of the job, so I hope she does better. We'll see.

[Eric the Green]

The Great American Brainwash: Half a Billion Dollars to Turn the Public against Hillary
July 14, 2015 ANALYSIS
By Peter Daou
http://www.hillarymen.com/latest/great-a...ialnetwork

The New York Times looks behind the curtain of the shadowy conservative effort to demolish Hillary Clinton’s favorable public image:

An expensive and sophisticated effort is underway to test and refine the most potent lines of attack against Mrs. Clinton, and, ultimately, to persuade Americans that she does not deserve their votes. While the general election is 16 months away, Republican groups are eager to begin building a powerful case against the woman they believe will be the Democratic nominee, and to infuse the public consciousness with those messages.

The effort to vilify Mrs. Clinton could ultimately cost several hundred million dollars, given the variety and volume of political organizations involved.

Crossroads, the group behind this effort, is led by none other than Karl Rove, the strategist who brought us George W Bush.

Crossroads plans to use a kaleidoscopic approach for its anti-Clinton campaign. In order to target particular voters with tailored messages, the campaign will feature tools including television and radio spots, digital ads on mobile devices, and pre-roll, the commercials that play before videos online.

The goal is to indoctrinate the public with anti-Hillary narratives, to insert carefully tested negative memes into the public debate. It is a form of mental manipulation, intended to discourage critical thinking and create predetermined biases in the minds of voters.

So far, Hillary has withstood decades of such coordinated attacks, emerging stronger than ever for this presidential run. That doesn’t mean these GOP brainwashing tactics aren’t a serious threat.

I’ve written at length about the cornucopia of fabricated anti-Hillary themes permeating mainstream media coverage and commentary:

Various narratives and frames (“calculating,” “secretive,” “polarizing,” etc.) paint Hillary Clinton’s actions in the most negative possible light. They are carefully crafted and patently false scripts, many of which were concocted years ago in GOP oppo shops to demean and dehumanize her. Distinct from legitimate policy critiques, these lazy shortcuts have seeped so deeply into traditional media coverage that it is virtually impossible to read anything about Hillary Clinton without encountering them.

Every public figure is subject to criticism. What is unique in Clinton’s case is that personal attacks which would normally be the province of political opponents and critics are promulgated by the mainstream news media.

Each journalist or media source will justify their particular choice of terms, but the net effect is that mainstream media coverage of Hillary Clinton is soaked in veiled (and sometimes explicit) sexism, politically-charged framing and character assassination. When a New York Times or Washington Post article is indistinguishable from a rightwing publication, something is amiss.

None of this is meant to place Hillary Clinton above reproach, simply to illustrate the complex process by which these memes are regurgitated, repeated and reinforced.

As a point of reference, the top anti-Hillary frames I've identified are:

• CALCULATING (Scheming, crafty, manipulative)

• SECRETIVE (Suspicious, paranoid, uncommunicative)

• POLARIZING (Divisive, alienating)

• UNTRUSTWORTHY (Corrupt, deceitful, dishonest, unethical)

• OVER-AMBITIOUS (Will do or say anything to win)

• INAUTHENTIC (Disingenuous, fake, unlikable, insincere)

• INHUMAN (Machine-like, robotic, abnormal, cold)

• OVER-CONFIDENT (Inevitable, defiant, imperious, regal)

• OLD (Out of touch, represents the past)

When reporters, pundits and critics across the political spectrum repeat these terms, they are unwittingly (and sometimes wittingly) doing the work of groups like Rove’s Crossroads. And in certain instances, they are also reinforcing the gender-based “wall of words” confronting Hillary:

The dizzying array of dehumanizing and demeaning terms targeting Hillary in recent weeks (Machiavellian, Lovecraftian, slithering, monstrous, imperious, musty, petulant, paranoid, stale, scornful, regal, devious, deceitful, robotic, abnormal, etc.) is a concrete manifestation of the gender barrier in American politics. It constitutes a “wall of words” blocking her path to the presidency.

It is not an accident or coincidence that the woman with the best chance to cross the White House finish line faces a constant stream of invective, a near-manic desire to take her down. That is the gender barrier in action. It is the use of words as weapons, with the objective of preventing a woman from attaining the top rung of the political power ladder.

As the 2016 campaign heats up, it is crucial for voters to understand the process by which a false image of Hillary is created. What people think they know about Hillary is often the result of sophisticated, focus-grouped memes methodically injected into the political bloodstream.

The mission of #HillaryMen is to bring this nefarious process to light and to tear down the wall of words barring Hillary from the presidential finish line.

Peter Daou and Tom Watson founded #HillaryMen to provide actionable analysis of the 2016 campaign focusing on the gender barrier in U.S. politics. Peter is a former senior digital adviser to Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative. He is a veteran of two presidential campaigns (Kerry '04 and Clinton '08). Tom is an author and Columbia University lecturer who advises companies and non-profits on social activism.

[Eric the Green]

Rolling Stone is with her!

Hillary's New Deal: How a Clinton Presidency Could Transform America
While Trump's rise wrecks the GOP, Clinton's success marks the resilience of the Democratic center
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/fea...ca-w433768

Hillary Clinton's candidacy can be traced back to the New Deal era.
By Sean Wilentz

The political spectacle of the past year has turned the 2016 election into a chasm with profound historical significance. By nominating Donald Trump, the Republican Party has become the vehicle for an authoritarian, nativist nationalism that until now lurked at the fringes of modern American politics. Hillary Clinton has launched a mainstream progressive campaign, in an updated Democratic tradition that stretches back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. This is the choice Americans face – between alternatives as starkly opposed to each other as in any election in our history, excepting the one in 1860, which led to the Civil War.

(Hillary and Bernie have waged campaigns full of vision, ideas and promise — and have shown us the best in American politics)

This year's political conventions substantively and symbolically revealed the fate of both parties in this crucial election year. The Democratic delegates in Philadelphia looked as culturally polyglot as the party's rank and file, affirming how much the party has changed over the past half century. The 1964 convention in Atlantic City that nominated Lyndon B. Johnson was roiled by the unsuccessful efforts of black voting-rights campaigners to seat a racially integrated delegation from Mississippi – the last stand inside the party of the old Democratic Solid South. Five decades later, the convention hall was a sea of brown and black and white faces as well as LGBT rainbows. And, of course, the convention was nominating the first female presidential candidate of a major party in American history – a connection that Clinton, who toned down the gender angle in her 2008 bid for the nomination, has now made central to her campaign.

Yet the convention also pulled its multicultural celebrations together into a patriotic whole, overcoming the inchoate diversity that has too often bedeviled the Democrats in recent years. As a direct challenge to the Republican nativists' nationalism, the Democrats proclaimed their own pro-immigrant nationalism, at once of this moment and a reprise of traditional Democratic themes. The sight of Khizr Khan, the Muslim immigrant father of an American soldier slain in Iraq, pulling from his pocket a copy of the Constitution and then contemptuously but calmly asking whether Trump had ever read it stopped the proceedings cold and dramatized the Democrats' rearticulated national pride. In the face of Trump's isolationism, the Democrats celebrated America's indispensable role in global affairs, not least in the NATO alliance, which elicited American flag waving and chants of "USA! USA!," reviving the kind of liberal internationalism that was central to the party of FDR and Harry Truman but had receded in the aftermath of Vietnam. And throughout the convention, there were other reminders of a fortified living connection with the past.

The Democrats repeatedly entwined diversity and inclusion with their party's old-time convictions about economic inequality and opportunity, convictions that have badly needed refurbishing and restating in the wake of the Great Recession, convictions that Sen. Bernie Sanders' stunning primary challenge forced to the very center of the debate. There on the convention stage was Sanders himself, railing against "the 40-year decline of our middle class" and "the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality that we currently experience." There was Sen. Elizabeth Warren, explaining how the system is rigged for CEOs and predators like Trump. And there, too, was Hillary Clinton, proclaiming that "Democrats are the party of working people," but the party needed to show it better; then saying, "Our economy isn't working the way it should because our democracy isn't working the way it should"; and touting a government program funded by targeted tax hikes on the rich, the "biggest investment in new, good-paying jobs since World War II," to rebuild America's infrastructure.

Vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine pointed to the Democrats' ownership of change and continuity in his acceptance speech when he talked of writing "the next chapter in our great and proud story," from Thomas Jefferson to JFK and LBJ, from Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta to Bill and Barack, and, finally, to Hillary Clinton.

The opposite was true for the Republicans in Cleveland. Unlike the Democrats', the Republicans' nearly lily-white gathering looked a lot like long-ago Republican conventions. Yet there was virtually nothing in the nobler aspirations of the GOP's past, including the Reagan years, that Trump could hold up as his own. The negative tone of the speeches brought to mind instead the acrid paleo-conservative Pat Buchanan at the 1992 convention, vowing to "take our country back" from the forces of depravity, block by inner-city block. The closest that Trump came to quoting a Republican president in his own acceptance speech was his channeling of Richard Nixon's fearsome, racially charged invocation of "law and order" from 1968. Clinton, however, in her acceptance speech, was able to sum up her case against Trump with the words of "a great Democratic president" at "a much more perilous time," the founder of modern Democratic politics, Franklin D. Roosevelt: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." In that rhetorical difference, and all clashing politics behind it, lies the essential choice Americans will face in November.

Politics, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, is divided between the party of Conservatism and the party of Innovation, a distinction that corresponds to deeper divisions in the human soul between the Past and the Future, between Memory and Hope. Emerson would have been appalled at the degradation of recent American politics, but we can still see in this year's election, refracted, the eternal struggle between Memory and Hope. Yet Trump's politics of Memory are hardly Conservative, apart from the turbocharged tax cuts; they are a concoction of bigoted, insular fantasies that Reagan-era Republicans repudiated. And Clinton's politics of Innovation and Hope are not at all divorced from the Past – they are deeply rooted in the long traditions of her party.

The fury of the campaign has something to do with Memory (or, more exactly, Nostalgia) and something to do with Hope. But the creation of the chasm in 2016 has more to do with history. Trump's rise depended on the hollowing out of the Republican Party over the past 25 years, beginning with the ascendancy of Newt Gingrich, in which successive waves of increasingly right-wing insurgents, backed by reactionary plutocrats like the Koch brothers, drove away the party's moderates and rattled many of its traditional conservatives. Trump took the trend to the outer limits of politics by appealing directly to nativist and isolationist sentiments – and he handily defeated for the nomination both the remnants of the old GOP establishment, above all Jeb Bush, and fire-eating darlings of the Tea Party like Ted Cruz. Clinton's candidacy, meanwhile, also has to do with history, in particular her role in the contentious evolution of the Democratic Party going all the way back to the New Deal era.

As much as Trump's rise catalyzed the collapse of the Republican center, Clinton's success marked the resilience of the Democratic center. Clinton won the primaries because vital, loyal constituents inside the Democratic base, above all nonwhite voters, backed her convincingly. Most important, she enjoyed the overwhelming support of self-identified Democrats, on the order of 64 percent to 35 percent. Although sometimes cast as a victory of the party establishment over a rank-and-file insurgency, Clinton's triumph showed that she was the strong favorite of the party's base.

Clinton's politics were also in line with the main themes of the Democratic Party's as they have developed over the past 80-odd years. Assembling various strains of reformist politics, Roosevelt's New Deal expounded a greatly enlarged conception of federal power to address the emergency of the Great Depression, to attack economic inequality and the power of those FDR called "economic royalists," and to expand public works for public benefits. Successive Democratic presidents adapted New Deal principles to the changing situation of a more affluent America after World War II, and put their own stamp on FDR's legacy, from Harry S. Truman's Fair Deal to John F. Kennedy's New Frontier to Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society.....

[David Horn]

Hillary is being Hillary.  She's attacking Trump and shielding herself ... and maybe that's all she should do right now.  I'm seriously worried about later. 

Trump is such a colossal douche that he shoots himself continuously.  It's hard to waste the energy to pile on, but Hillary piles-on anyway.  She should be promoting Democrats everywhere, but, instead, she's decided to play nice with Wall Street and orphan GOPpers.  I don't get it at all.  She has no strategic vision, nor is she focusing on the long game in any other way.  It's all thrust-parry-thrust-parry.  When she wins, she'll be a solo act ... even less capable of creating progressive coalitions than Obama, and a hole lot less interested anyway.

Assume a neoliberal Presidency, complete with SCOTUS appointments that check a niche box but don't create a power quorum on the court.  We're going to waste 4 years to put a woman in the White House who will do virtually nothing of substance, and then it's 2020 and reapportionment.  If she clings to power and runs then, it will be a blood bath in the worst way.

[Eric the Green]

Maybe. Count me optimistic. Hillary has great talents and has pledged to work to get things done. I hope she promotes Democrats though. I have predicted she won't run again, but I wouldn't put a bet down on that one.

Hillary today talked about her infrastructure bank and alternative energy proposals. But knocking Trump is absolutely necessary; the more often the better. Imagine that, in spite of his obvious unfitness to be president in every way, he is still only 5 or 6 points behind in many national polls. I am ashamed to be an older white male in America, given the level of support from our group for such a pig as Trump.

[David Horn]

(08-11-2016, 05:14 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Maybe. Count me optimistic. Hillary has great talents and has pledged to work to get things done. I hope she promotes Democrats though. I have predicted she won't run again, but I wouldn't put a bet down on that one.

Hillary today talked about her infrastructure bank and alternative energy proposals. But knocking Trump is absolutely necessary; the more often the better. Imagine that, in spite of his obvious unfitness to be president in every way, he is still only 5 or 6 points behind in many national polls. I am ashamed to be an older white male in America, given the level of support from our group for such a pig as Trump.

Hillary is very talented but also highly flawed.  She always sees herself under siege, and operates on that basis: secretive and suspicious.  Her operational core team consists of the same tired names we've seen for decades. 

Losing this year should have been OK, with the 2020 election being the one that was a must-win.  Now we have a reprobate running in the GOP slot this election, and we're stuck.  I wouldn't vote for Hillary if she was running against a sane alternative.  She's not.

[playwrite]

(08-12-2016, 08:30 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(08-11-2016, 05:14 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Maybe. Count me optimistic. Hillary has great talents and has pledged to work to get things done. I hope she promotes Democrats though. I have predicted she won't run again, but I wouldn't put a bet down on that one.

Hillary today talked about her infrastructure bank and alternative energy proposals. But knocking Trump is absolutely necessary; the more often the better. Imagine that, in spite of his obvious unfitness to be president in every way, he is still only 5 or 6 points behind in many national polls. I am ashamed to be an older white male in America, given the level of support from our group for such a pig as Trump.

Hillary is very talented but also highly flawed.  She always sees herself under siege, and operates on that basis: secretive and suspicious.  Her operational core team consists of the same tired names we've seen for decades. 

Losing this year should have been OK, with the 2020 election being the one that was a must-win.  Now we have a reprobate running in the GOP slot this election, and we're stuck.  I wouldn't vote for Hillary if she was running against a sane alternative.  She's not.

In the 2008 Dem nomination process, I was a Clinton supporter but moved quickly to supporting Obama once it became clear that he would be our nominee.  For most of his first term, I spent much of my time as an Obama apologist trying to explain political reality to all the disappointed Obamabots that ditched him when he didn't deliver all the magic ponies (e.g., single payer) they were sure would come; the ones I couldn't get through to became the lazy morons that stayed home in the 2010 election that resulted in the t-baggers coming to power.

A President Clinton has two big things going for her - (1) she will not repeat Obama's mistake of believing the GOP would put country ahead of destroying her Presidency  and (2) expectations will be so low that actual achievements may be more possible.

That is my primary hope - not having to become Clinton's apologist for not meeting high expectations - compared to 2008 Obama, she isn't burden with them.

The other hope is the counter to what most people believe will make her Presidency difficult - that the constant character attacks will become even more hyperbolic.  Instead, my hope is that the tactic of the "Gish Gallop" will become widely recognized, discredited and ultimately abandoned. 

Named after the creationist Duane Gish, the Gallop is a tactic wherein a debater spews so many lies and half-truths that rebutting each one is impossible.  You can see it applied on any Sunday talk show where the meme of Clinton being a liar comes up and the Rightee talking head starts spewing falsehoods and half truths to back the meme.  These have been done so often, and usually as a means to misdirect from the Trump idiocy du jour , that the moderator/interviewer doesn't challenge all the "gish" but instead just tries to get back on topic of the latest Trump idiocy.

Look at the two primary sources of the meme "Clinton lies" - (1) she stated it was a video that caused Benghazi and (2) she lied about sending classified information by email on her private server. 

Regarding the first, Benghazi happened the same night that riots were breaking out across the Islam world over the video; no one knew if there was something more going on in Libya particularly in the first 24 hours - particularly clueless were all the Congressional critters and t-baggin supporters who don't know crap about what is going on overseas.  As Obama's "please proceed, Governor" and Clinton's "what difference does it make" made clear, the whole cause-and-effect debate is meaningless dribble and only pursued by ideologues who really don't give a shit about the risks our foreign service personnel face each and every day - if you think otherwise, ask one of them how many embassies/consulates were attacked under Bush 2, how many Americans were killed in those attacks, and how many Congressional investigations of those attacks have taken place - their answer: they don't know and they don't care.

Regarding the emails, only 3 out of over 30,000 were marked classified and all three of those were not marked appropriately; the FBI Director stated that it would be reasonable for someone to have missed those markings.  Furthermore, as she stated, she did not SEND any of those emails.  One could go on about how she should have known that other emails had information that would someday be retroactively classified (and claim they know this because they saw something in the movies about it), but even if one accepts that very weak argument, it is not germane to the meme that "she lies" - she said she didn't send any classified information and did not receive any information that was marked classified.

Again, when the Rightess bring these up in their Gist Gallop, there is no time to go back over all of them and correct them with the facts and context.  My hope is that as this Gish Gallop ShXt goes on and on into the Hillary Presidency, people will finally catch on and discard  the tactic - just like we are discarding much of the other rearguard actions (gerrymandering, voter suppression, Faux News, Rush Limbaugh, corporate campaign financing, etc) of a dying political force at least at the national level.

[Bob Butler 54]

(08-14-2016, 01:21 PM)playwrite Wrote: Again, when the Rightess bring these up in their Gist Gallop, there is no time to go back over all of them and correct them with the facts and context.  My hope is that as this Gish Gallop ShXt goes on and on into the Hillary Presidency, people will finally catch on and discard  the tactic - just like we are discarding much of the other rearguard actions (gerrymandering, voter suppression, Faux News, Rush Limbaugh, corporate campaign financing, etc) of a dying political force at least at the national level.

You are allowed to hope, but people will continue to believe what they want to believe.  The Gish Gallop stuff reminds me of Clinton 42's time in office.  The Republicans pushed scandal the whole time.  It was to a great degree ignored.  Clinton 42 was the teflon man, nothing truly fatally stuck, yet the image of the Clintons as tainted persisted under the "if smoke then fire" theory.  Hillary is still tainted by the sheer persistence of it.

If Trump continues to sink his few remaining hopes, the Republicans will have few cards to play other than Gish Gallop.  I'm inclined to think Trump will not only make himself look foolish, but by implication anything that touches the Republican path.  But this is only true of those who haven't truly bought in to the Republican path.  We still have a few die hard partisans here, and there are many more of them out in the wild.  They won't vanish.  Even assuming a regeneracy does develop, they will sip tea and cuss out "That Woman in the White House" for the duration.  While Trump might leave a majority out of the Republican's reach for some time, if you aren't going to win a majority, Gish Gallop could allow them to cling to a rabid base.  If there is only one card left in one's hand, one plays it.

I'm not underestimating the power of values lock.  I doubt it can stop something like a regeneracy indefinitely, but FDR and Lincoln remained anathema to some right up until they died and were sainted.  I'm not expecting things to be much different in our time, not that I think Hillary is fit company for the true grey champions, nor that this crisis will seem like as key a transformational period as FDR's and Lincoln's.

[Mikebert]

(08-12-2016, 08:30 AM)David Horn Wrote: Hillary is very talented but also highly flawed.  She always sees herself under siege...

Are you suggesting she is not?  Presideint Obama is not a Clinton.  He is as gifted a pol as Bill--yet he is far more hated on the Right than Bill was. It is likely Hillary will be even more hated than Obama was.  Do you deny this?

Do you beleive that there exists an uppity Democrat* who would NOT be under siege by the right?

*Uppity means having the unmitigated gall to believe that someone like them deserves to be president--and then winning.