Really outrageous stuff.
The Bernie Bros will say she’s a sell-out because she didn’t go into Goldman Sachs with a pitchfork and a lynch mob. The Trumpists will say she’s duplicitous because she used words with more than two syllables.
I feel like I could write a lot more on this topic. But in general, if last year you had asked me what it would look like to see the absolute highest level internal communications of both the 2008 and 2016 Clinton campaigns I would have guessed there was some pretty nasty stuff. Because I imagine that every politician has some dirty stuff going on and this is the god damn ‘Clinton Machine’, right?
But we’re seeing all that stuff now. A ridiculous amount. And it’s just professional with so little actual nastiness and bullshit. They argue over how to phrase things to appeal to certain demos, what sounds good to one group or another. Sometimes people blow their top and tell someone to fuck off. They get frustrated by attacks and discuss different strategies to respond. But it’s so normal. It’s like the West Wing version of politics instead of House of Cards. I feel like I feel into the propaganda machine and became way too cynical about politicians in general, or least the Clintons.
It’s business like, because the participants are business people–politics is their business. They ARE pros, and thus, we get fairly professional discourse. But yeah, it is sort of surprising based on how we’ve been wired. I like the House of Cards analogy.
All of these leaks being nothing but a wet fart is probably intentional, in order for Wikileaks to build credibility and eventually launch a (completely fabricated) bombshell later:
https://twitter.com/OnTacticsBook/status/787441395946622976
Isn’t a highly scripted campaign supposed to be a good thing?
Random tweeting is just more authentic. Besides, who wants a President who is prepared and careful with language? That’s so PC.
Anyway yeah, I don’t get why some of these stories are trying so hard to make these leaks sound sinister. It’s really bizarre.
At this point I can’t even think of a fabricated bombshell that would change the parameters of the election.
Back in 2012 the example I’d give of a potential election-changing October Surprise was Obama being revealed as a Chinese agent. But if Hillary were revealed as a Chinese agent tomorrow, it would be “Eh, do we want a stooge of China, or a stooge of Russia?”
(A Chinese stooge would be better for the economy, she could run on it!)
The comments to this ABC tweet are hilarious. One side is yelling at ABC because ‘this isn’t news’, and of course all real campaigns are researched and ‘scripted’ (heaven forbid, planning!), and the other side is screaming bloody murder because they aren’t revealing the “terrible things” revealed in the emails. Yet everything they provide as evidence of something horrible just… doesn’t look that bad. Nothing on the level of what Trump is doing so many times per day that no one can even keep up…
NO! Planning campaigns and debate prep are the stuff of real loosers!!!
Seeing whats in those Wall Street speeches makes me wonder why Hillary chose to not release the transcripts on her own. That was a major issue with me regarding her credibility. I dont see anything particularly damning in whats been released, so why keep them private in the first place? Im just wondering about the thought process because from what Ive seen keeping them private was more damaging to her credibility then releasing them would have been. Of course it could be her campaign felt that people would believe that her transcripts were “white-washed” if she had released them. So maybe its not such a bad thing that they got released through Wikileaks.
I can see both sides of it myself, but I tend to agree with the first viewpoint more. Getting out ahead of the story and showing she wasn’t fundamentally entangled would have been a net benefit, I think. Conspiracy theorists are going to conspiracy theorize and all, but a lot of “regular folks” got caught up in the story during the Democratic primaries. Seems like it’d have been easy enough to head off at the pass, unless there were some kind of hardcore NDAs in place (which, in fairness, there could have been).
Kristen Welker on MSNBC yesterday, “The problem with the Clinton emails is that there is no bombshell.”
‘Problem.’ I laughed. As awful as Trump is, the media will never stop looking to torpedo the Clintons.
I went through this somewhere on QT3 but not in this thread, I guess. People are forgetting the original context, which was:
Sanders Supporters: Release the transcripts!
Clinton: Why should I, when Bernie hasn’t even released his tax returns or filed his FEC financial disclosure? I’ve released mine.
Sanders never did either, and so there the matter rested. Trumpists didn’t seem to care much about the transcripts until recently.
One could argue there’s benefit in transparency regardless of what your opponents are doing, though I suppose that might be a dead concept in American politics these days ;)
Is he not on the Ecuadorean embassy’s internet connection? I guess Ecuador is a state party…
In case anyone gets caught up in the quid pro quo crap currently floating around:
Again, mostly pointing towards how 1980’s the technology was (is?) as well as how screwy the classification rules are.