Il Douché and His Discontents: The 2016 Primary Voting Thread, Part 4

It's time for Senator Joe Hitler (D) to finally get his shot.

hillary clinton / ha ha clinton-dix

also this thread got off of bad elevator puns a few floors too early

You're just trying to push our buttons.

from what i understand the emails weren't classified top secret until after they were sent so i honestly do not get what part of this scandal is actually "real," and i suspect that the answer is "none of it."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3Yrhv33Zb8&list=RDh3Yrhv33Zb8

Richard M. Nixon ‏@dick_nixon
Why in the name of God am I watching Romney now?

The mob has pitchforks and scythes and this son of a bitch says "innovation dynamic."

mitt smacks his lips a lot

i was on a walk through the skyway and i had headphones on but i swear the crawl on CNN on a TV i walked by in the lobby said "Trump: I Ruined My Carpet Endorsing Romney"

???

i saw that too but i don't remember what it refers to. i do remember trump said that romney wanted his endorsement so bad that he could've told romney to get on his knees and he would've done it

don't look at the carpet trump drew something awful on it

lol

He's not a wonderful person, and he's got problems.

The thing about the alleged hypocrisy of the Republican establishment turning on Trump the Candidate when they loved Trump the Wealthy Donor is that it is not at all hypocritical or even surprising to think that a great donor would make a terrible presidential candidate. There's certainly the argument that you should only accept money from people whose views you agree with, and I understand where a hypocrisy charge could be leveled on those grounds, but even there people should be donating to the candidates whose platforms represent the policies they want to see in action rather that buying a plank on a candidate's platform with their money (nb I am not a naive college student and I know that this happens). Every party has donors that the candidates don't want to put in front of a camera because they are embarrassing/terrifying; I don't see why having a tv show should exempt Trump from that status.

from what i understand the emails weren't classified top secret until after they were sent so i honestly do not get what part of this scandal is actually "real," and i suspect that the answer is "none of it."

― Mordy, Thursday, March 3, 2016 3:11 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

for me, the claim that a professional lawyer with security experience would think hosting your own email was a good (or at least uncontroversial) idea is so far-fetched that i pretty much assume there is something "real" to it.

among mitt romney's bons mots: "this reckless is... recklessness... in the extreme."

er i mean "this recklessness is recklessness... in the extreme."

(said w/ no gravitas whatsoever)

Am I correct that there is a concerted push declaring Trumpf unfit to be president?

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, March 3, 2016 2:44 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the first 3 stories on nytimes.com/index.html right now fwiw:

Romney Leads the Charge to Stop Trump: Front-Runner Is a ‘Fraud,’ He Says
Anti-Trump Faction in G.O.P. Is Seeking Third-Party Option
G.O.P. Foreign Policy Figures Denounce Trump

for me, the claim that a professional lawyer with security experience would think hosting your own email was a good (or at least uncontroversial) idea is so far-fetched that i pretty much assume there is something "real" to it.

i just assume (maybe wrongly) that email security doesn't mean the same thing to a 60yo in 2008 as it does to me. at this pt i need to see an actual bombshell and not just all these "implications" before i believe that there's a fire to go along w/ all the [v artificial looking] smoke.

wondering if this election cycle is gonna put the nail in the coffin of political TV ads as major campaign expenditures - seems like they're increasingly irrelevant. Have any of those TV ads - Bernie's Erica Garner ad, or any of Jeb's anti-Trump ads, or Cruz's bizarre comedy ads - done anything at all?

mitt seems to be getting heckled pretty hard starting at 12:30 in this video of his anti-trump speech

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iefXdC794I

Watching the Romney speech now. Someone may have pointed this out, but I'm not sure if the "Hinckley Institute" is the best backdrop.

for me, the claim that a professional lawyer with security experience would think hosting your own email was a good (or at least uncontroversial) idea is so far-fetched that i pretty much assume there is something "real" to it.

i just assume (maybe wrongly) that email security doesn't mean the same thing to a 60yo in 2008 as it does to me. at this pt i need to see an actual bombshell and not just all these "implications" before i believe that there's a fire to go along w/ all the [v artificial looking] smoke.

― Mordy, Thursday, March 3, 2016 8:34 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I assume Clinton hasn't practiced since the 80s and I dont think there was alot of email server related discovery going on when she was doing it.

has a single email even been disclosed from the investigation that would've benefited hillary by not appearing on official servers? the only emails i've seen so far are about gefilte fish and thanking sidney blumenthal for sending max's articles over.

they locked file cabinets in the 80s iirc

xp

she's familiar with the legal implications of a written record, not "email discovery" in particular

Not a bad speech, but I can't see it changing anything, except maybe having the reverse effect. Heard someone unironically call Romney "the de facto leader of the Republican Party" last night. That's laughable--he pretty much vanished after the last election, and it's not like there was a lot of positive feelings within his party to begin with.

also the 'yay we sold a shit-ton of bombers to the Saudis' email

the gop's problem is that he's the de facto leader of the republican party _and_ you're right about his profile

I'm not sure that there is one, but I just can't see it being him. Maybe Ryan at the moment, maybe still Limbaugh or someone like that. Maybe Donald Trump.

Sometimes the internet truly is a gift.

http://worldmeets.us/images/donald-trump-tronald-dump-tron-caption_pic.jpg

It's hard to tell which one is the head chicken when they're all running around headless.

i'm not sure y'all have a handle on what "de facto" means

it doesn't mean "de wanto"

I would have said the Koch brothers

I agree the DIY home server is nagl, and I cringe inwardly every time I think about it. But the usual counterpoint to that is prior secretaries of state did similar things, as did many Bush admin officials. For me this is not very helpful - she should have known it would look sleazy and get used against her, the way so many things have been. Caesar's wife and all that.

That said, we've been hearing about the damn emails for many moons now, and no concrete charges have come out. If there's a smoking gun, go ahead and arrest her ass. If there isn't, do they just keep looking until they find one? Also, is there some halfway point between having her strung up for treason, and letting her and her entire staff off scot-free? Like some kind of "mistakes were made, here are some consequences, now let's move on" path?

I know this isn't CSI or L&O where you find a telltale shoeprint (DUN DUN) and call for the handcuffs. But how long is this investigation supposed to take? I honestly have no idea, but one might think it's being protracted for reasons that just may include - dare I say it - politics.

I do understand de facto, which is why I say it can't be Romney. The Koch brothers for the last couple of generals is a good pick, but I'm not sure about this one--are they good with Trump? Old Lunch might have it right.

yeah that's the thing. it's not like they're still discovering emails - they had them all to begin with. they were reviewing + releasing them to the public. if there was a smoking gun we should've heard about it a long time ago. xp

The Koch Bros are avowedly anti-Trump

yup, they are quite clearly NOT in control

He's such a good man, you don't understand. What, this? Oh, I just walked into a door, that's all.

― Telephone Meatballs (Old Lunch), Thursday, March 3, 2016 11:56 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is doubling back and i really don't wanna be an asshole, but man, this isn't cool.

I agree the DIY home server is nagl, and I cringe inwardly every time I think about it. But the usual counterpoint to that is prior secretaries of state did similar things, as did many Bush admin officials. For me this is not very helpful - she should have known it would look sleazy and get used against her, the way so many things have been. Caesar's wife and all that.

... I mean, you come into a new job, you ask "how should we set up things? what are the best practices?" and someone tells you "everyone set up a personal server" so you say "okay, let's do that" and then years later everyone comes down on you like a ton of bricks for following procedure with precedent that apparently didn't divulge any critical secrets to anyone who didn't already have access to them, and somehow at the originating point you are supposed to know that the best practice put in front of you is a set up for a partisan attack?

^^^

this whole thing is such a stupid non-scandal. People harmed = 0.

I mean it's one thing if they were like "use this Dropbox for all of your sensitive documents, that's our standard practice" but I do think you're basically saying "Hillary Clinton should have had precognitive abilities, then none of this would be happening"

The Koch Bros are avowedly anti-Trump

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Thursday, March 3, 2016 3:58 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yup, they are quite clearly NOT in control

― Οὖτις, Thursday, March 3, 2016 3:59 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

don't Kock bros own the R voter database? they could withhold it from Trump

... I mean, you come into a new job, you ask "how should we set up things? what are the best practices?" and someone tells you "everyone set up a personal server" so you say "okay, let's do that" and then years later everyone comes down on you like a ton of bricks for following procedure with precedent that apparently didn't divulge any critical secrets to anyone who didn't already have access to them, and somehow at the originating point you are supposed to know that the best practice put in front of you is a set up for a partisan attack?

personally i don't really care at all about the email thing, BUT while i could see some people in her position being that ignorant, i can't imagine that she didn't realize there was something fishy about what she was doing. proper recordkeeping is drilled into you in the federal govt. i have a hard time believing she didn't understand it herself, but certainly one of her handlers would have known something was wrong with that approach.

Doc Casino, apologies if that came off as insensitive. There's an obvious parallel in my mind with a Muslim defending Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric and insisting that he ultimately has a good heart, but I wasn't intending to be flippant about domestic abuse.

even if it is a real problem (which i'm clearly not even a little convinced about) republicans kinda blew it with all the other fake scandals they tried to make stick before this one. it's hard to believe any scandalous claims are valid at this pt, and certainly not ones so flimsily constructed.

karl otm