Curb Your Authoritarianism? The 2016 Conventional Wisdom Thread (Elections, Part 6)

It is pushed back until the Senate Republicans either relent or lose their majority in the next election. Majority Leader Sen. Blobfish (R-Ky.) shows no indication of having second thoughts about this ugly obstructionism.

back when there was still a fair amount of coverage, the theory was that maybe during lame duck session if the GOP is looking at a president hillary clinton plus a democratic senate & thus ability to appoint and confirm someone more liberal, they'd get their act together and confirm garland. doubt it'll happen before then but maybe they will at least start hearings by the time they come back?

https://twitter.com/GarrettHaake/status/750084259101061120

trump out with another statement which doesn't explain the source of the image, who was responsible, just accusations about clinton
will keep this story going longer

i have no sympathy for the GOP being stuck with this guy. their leadership should have stood up against his racism from day 1 of his campaign.

but they agree with it

https://twitter.com/sarahkendzior/status/750127115446562816

uh

are they saying Hillary is a puppet of the Jews *and* a Nazi

the grammar of that trump statement is atrocious

As ever.

As she eyes potential advisers, Clinton looks not just to Wall Street, but to Silicon Valley — Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook perhaps, or Tim Cook from Apple. Cook would be the first openly gay Cabinet Secretary.

i think it's cool that hillary is going to create a more diverse cabinet -- 50% women! -- but does she need to look to silicon valley? h8 that valley.

worst valley. sad.

I prefer the one with the dolls tbh

https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/750348138167300096

i guess it didn't take a genius to see how this would turn out but sometimes ppl want something so bad that you have to give it a minuscule chance of happening just on the basis of pure will altering the fabric of reality

https://twitter.com/ryanjreilly/status/750349351764029440

"Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes..."

as in most things clinton, the scandal that's there is not the scandal the haters want

well remember they only found this scandal through the benghazi scandal - it's scandal turtles all the way down

If neither email and Benghazi produces the smoking gun, then it's time for another look at Whitewater and Vince Foster.

um neither / nor

If neither email and Benghazi produces the smoking gun, then it's time for another look at Whitewater and Vince Foster.

― takin' care of beersness (Ye Mad Puffin

prefer Travelgate imo

Lincoln Bedroom revive

Ooh, classic.

no shit:

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said on Tuesday that the bureau would not recommend criminal charges in Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information, lifting an enormous legal cloud from her presidential campaign, hours before her first joint campaign appearance with President Obama.

But Mr. Comey rebuked Mrs. Clinton as being “extremely careless” in using a personal email address and server for sensitive information, declaring that an ordinary government official could have faced administrative sanction for such conduct.

To warrant a criminal charge, Mr. Comey said, there had to be evidence that Mrs. Clinton intentionally sent or received classified information — something that the F.B.I. did not find. “Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” he said at a news conference.

no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case

where's ken starr when you need him, eh?

https://www.amazon.com/Starr-Reassessment-Benjamin-Wittes/dp/0300092520

Columnist at The Observer, owned by Trump's son-in-law, calls him out on the tweet imbroglio: http://observer.com/2016/07/an-open-letter-to-jared-kushner-from-one-of-your-jewish-employees

(Warning: Tons of vile anti-Semitic tweets embedded there.)

Here are some of the excuses I’ve seen, both from Mr. Trump’s camp and Trump supporters:

“It’s available on Microsoft shapes.” There are a lot of symbols you can make on Microsoft Word, and sometimes symbols SYMBOLIZE ideas, concepts, or groups. A cross for instance. I feel silly explaining this to you. This explanation is so inane that I feel so condescending refuting it to you, ostensibly my boss, that it feels insubordinate.

“It’s a sheriff star.” Because users on the white supremacist forums where this image was found were no doubt implying Hillary is in the pocket of the sheriffs. You know, sheriffs. The group stereotypically associated with greed and money.

“He didn’t make it; he’s too busy to pay attention to everything he tweets out.” This is not an excuse for racism. Mr. Trumps twitter account is seen by millions of people, and he is responsible for the message he’s sending to his supporters. Besides, Mr. Trump is running for president. Making mistakes because he wasn’t “paying attention” isn’t an excuse that qualifies him for the highest office in the land in any way.

“It was an accident.” Then where is the apology?

These explanations are so facile, infantile in their blatant disregard for context or logic that I can only imagine them being delivered by someone doing so while grinning and winking.

this star tweet issue has lasted in the news much longer than I'd expected. so close to the convention, holding out hope that this is a nail in his coffin.

it's interesting that he hasn't trotted out the "I can't be anti-semitic, my grandchildren are Jewish" canard - maybe he's just afraid that will alienate his WP supporters

sheldon adelson gives this guy a shit ton of money too. politics makes strange bedfellows.

His only MO is enjoying playing with shit and fascination with seeing which of it sticks. I doubt there's anything in the world he wouldn't retweet and then half back away from when criticized if he thought it would help him.

sheldon hasn't actually signed that check iirc

(he did endorse Trump tho)

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/understanding-the-trump-star-of-david-blow-up has the ring of truth imo

If the question is: is Donald Trump a racist, the answer is straightforward: Yes.

Running a blatantly racist campaign should probably be enough to answer this question. But if it’s not, even a cursory look at Trump’s public career going back decades shows racism (albeit not always this blatant) and racial grievance are strikingly consistent themes. But is he an anti-Semite?

Here the question gets a bit more complicated. And the nature of that complexity is worth exploring a bit to understand Trump and the nature of the campaign he’s running. I don’t see any evidence that Trump is anti-Semitic in the sense of holding a particular animus toward Jews, though he does seem anti-Semitic in a way that sometimes presents itself as philo-semitism: holding stereotypical views that Jews are high achievers, good with money, etc.

So what’s the story?

One of the most telling things Trump has said during this campaign is that he doesn’t go into rallies with any script or even terribly prepared sense of what he’s going to say. He starts talking and then waits to get a feel for what the audience responds to. In other words, he homes in on affirmation.

This is largely because Trump is a narcissist. But it’s also a trait of a salesperson. You intuit and understand what the client wants or needs (not the same thing) and then get about selling it to them. For these reasons and on both these fronts, I doubt Trump believes 3/4 of what he says on the campaign trail in the sense most of us understand the word. That is to say, things we believe in or believe to be true and would largely continue to believe even if it became less helpful to do so.

Racism and authoritarianism are core Trump values that predate and are separate from this campaign. The other thing that’s very apparent about Trump is that he’s shockingly, almost totally ignorant of the details of almost every public policy issue - much, much more than even your typically caricatured politician who knows little about the issues of public life without their advisors feeding them lines. This makes him more porous to the views and desires of his supporters because he has little to no matrix of pre-existing knowledge or core beliefs to reference them against or challenge them with.

yes i agree. he seems really gullible!

da jewz are good at responding to this stuff, this is just catnip for the adl etc. I'm pretty sure he's gonna have to actually apologize to make the subject go away.

he will not apologize

he won't, and that's what's going to sink him. he can shit on mexicans and blacks all he likes but shitting on jews gets harder to weasel out of. you know because they own the media.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu1NDepxkK8

the fact that he tweeted out an anti-semitic image, probably in ignorance, bothers me less than the fact that he has 1,000s of followers who are explicitly anti-semitic and racist and he'll happily re-tweet what they post.

that fool from The Fix wrote a little while ago that Comey's remarks are "very bad" for the Clinton campaign, but maybe I still don't get Beltway jabber. She wasn't recommended for indictment. What difference does it make to the voter what the FBI director say about her furtiveness and lying? Dems are gonna vote for her anyway. No one who cared about the story will or was going to.

for the vast majority of voters, her non-indictment means the email story will make no lasting impression and frankly that is probably how it should be.

What difference does it make to the voter what the FBI director say about her furtiveness and lying? Dems are gonna vote for her anyway.

Unless they don't? It feeds into the idea that "they" are all crooked. The "If it was anyone else then we'd prosecute" line in particular looks bad.

"the fact that he tweeted out an anti-semitic image, probably in ignorance, bothers me less than the fact that he has 1,000s of followers who are explicitly anti-semitic and racist and he'll happily re-tweet what they post."

by which i mean, it's part of a pattern, and that's the point. if joe biden accidentally tweeted out something with a coded anti-semitic jibe, it'd be out of character and i'd assume he or one of his employees made a really dumb mistake. but with trump it's just one in a very long list of coded racist messages; it's just that this one happens to be directed at a new group.

xpost

i thought comey explicitly said no prosecutor would prosecute for such actions!

It feeds into the idea that "they" are all crooked.

but they are!

"To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now."

hah! "security or administrative sanctions" would seem to mean losing some level of security clearance. but since she was a cabinet secretary that would never have flown, and atm she's not even working in the government. if she's elected president it's not as if this puts some red mark on her past employment file that would prevent her from being hired for that job.

If she was still Secretary she would likely be facing some sort of sanctions, yes. I would guess those sanctions would be rather light and may just require her to attend some sort of training to prevent something like this from happening again. But she's not Secretary anymore so idk what they're supposed to do

Yeah, I think Andrew Farrell is mischaracterizing that line. It doesn't quite reduce to "anyone else and we'd prosecute." It's more like "prosecution isn't the right consequence here - but that doesn't mean Anything Goes."

He's indicating that there are consequences other than criminal prosecution. He's saying there may be an appropriate other kind of consequence for this kind of behavior in the future. But that this is not his call in this case.

Like Aimless, I would interpret "security or administrative sanctions" as meaning punishment that is short of criminal charges: being reprimanded, having your clearance yanked, being fired. Those would generally be internal to the department, and follow that department's chain of command.

Because Clinton was the head of that department at the time, and she doesn't work there anymore, there is no real way for her to fire herself or retroactively punish herself. Nor is there a way for Kerry to punish her, outside the framework of law, which we have already found out is a dead end.

tbh I was hoping for a result pretty much along these lines: no one being frogmarched off to the hoosegow, but some statement saying "this isn't the way to do things, and not just because It Looks Bad."

Something like "in future, departments should issue clearer guidance and establish standard operating procedures" would also be apropos.

Generally I agree with Lord Alfred and Aimless: most people will process this as "she was cleared of wrongdoing" and move on. Ditto for Benghazi. People who are already frothing with hate for her will continue to froth, as they would in any case.

I saw somewhere else that Comey's ruling was pretty similar to Roberts's in the matter of Obamacare: "I don't much like it, but I also don't want to be the one person who completely upends the political universe with the stroke of a pen."

I'm not personally characterising it - my reading of it is much the same as yourselves - but I'm pointing out that this line is being read as "anyone else, we'd prosecute" - on Reddit etc to start with, but it'll spread.

In conclusion Bill Clinton is an idiot.