Assange Promises to Shake Up Hillary

Discussion in 'Political Discussions' started by Neuhaus, Aug 25, 2016.

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  1. decimon

    decimon Well-Known Member


    Compromising? I think Johnson told us who he is when he picked Weld.

    Did you read what Weld said the other day about guns? Military rifles with five-round capacity that can take clips with many more cartridges? Rifles converted to full auto with the removal of a pin? Has this joke ever seen a rifle?
     
  2. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Johnson picked Weld because he thought Weld could help him raise more money than any other choice while being "good enough" to be on the ticket. It was a controversial choice among long time LP members, to put it mildly. But I agree with you, it was an incredibly asinine thing for Weld to say, both for political purposes, and for the inaccuracy of it. (Happy, Sanantone?)
     
  3. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    Racist?

    https://www.conservativeoutfitters.com/blogs/news/100907393-black-female-employee-drops-bombshell-about-trump

    Sexist?

    Former Female Employees: Trump Ahead of His Time

    Personally, I can't understand how anyone with a sense of decency can support Hillary Clinton. She lies about anything and everything, left 4 Americans to die in a hostile foreign land, left a complete mess at the State Department, and endangered national security with her private email server.

    I also happen to think it's infinitely more sexist to try to destroy the lives and reputations of women who came forward with true allegations of sexual assault and harassment than it is to make a few off-color jokes.
     
  4. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    One of the difficulties in comparison of the two candidates is that one is a career politician and the other is a business person. That is very much like comparing apples and oranges.

    Trump used bankruptcy to his advantage. So have many other corporations. A politician can poke fun of that while managing an insolvent government agency that has only ever operated in the red.

    BUT they can rightly say that they never resorted to bankruptcy. So the two things don't compare. It ends up being a war of buzz words where you hope that enough uninformed people will have a knee jerk emotional reaction. Say that politician X foreclosed on mortgages that s/he owned and people who lost their homes vote against them because that monster had the audacity to properly exercise a fiduciary duty. Say that politician Y oversaw an inefficient and, at times, dangerous agency and you hope that people ignore the fact that the individual inherited a mess and maybe did the best they could.

    People vilified Eric Shinseki for ruining the VA. Perhaps ignoring the fact that the VA never actually operated as it should have.

    My professional experience prevents me from labeling a person as a "racist" or a "sexist" based upon a few remarks. But it also prevents from definitively labeling them NOT a racist and NOT a sexist based upon hand picked employees and former employees assuring us that this is the case. Some of the things he has said are not good. Is he just a politically incorrect fellow who occasionally says something we would now consider racist but, in his heart, he would smack the stupid off of someone if they actually did something racist in front of him? No idea. I don't know and neither does anyone else who hasn't personally met Trump.

    Hillary, I have no idea what the deal with Benghazi is. But if Hillary's inaction on Benghazi is so atypical so as to indicate nothing more than criminal neglect then why aren't we insisting on putting Condoleeza Rice on trial for ignoring the 9/11 intel? Or Colin Powell on trial for misrepresenting Iraq intel? Or any other president or cabinet member who ignored intelligence and death and mayhem followed?

    My opinion on the whole thing is that we need to stop attacking each other as being devoid of morals because it isn't true. No one is going to take a break from sacrificing goats to vote for either candidate. No one is casting their vote to bring about an end to civilization as we know it.

    Everyone is casting a vote to try to do what is best for our country. We all clearly disagree on what path will get us there. We may even disagree on what "there" is. Clearly if you are voting with the hopes that Trump will turn us into a perfect white society then that's not good. And if you are voting for Hillary hoping for a socialist rising where we seize the guns and ban Christianity then that is also wrong. But the bulk of Americans fall in the middle of that curve. And picking one of the two inferior, but most likely to win over a third party option, candidates is not an indicator of evil or sociopathy. It's an indicator of having a different opinion.

    And guess what? I'm sure that a Trump cabinet secretary will ignore some intel as well. I'm sure that Trump, and members of his administration, will have private email servers. I'm sure that there will be some scandal during the course of a Trump presidency just as there is for every presidency. At issue isn't whether a scandal will occur. At issue is whether we can take off our party blinders to hold administrations accountable for their scandals even if "our guy" is the one doing it. If we can get to that place we might just make it without tearing out each others throats while the private defense contractors lobby for the next war to impress their shareholders.
     
  5. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Very well said.

    Neuhaus for president! ;-)
     
  6. decimon

    decimon Well-Known Member


    From Neuhaus to Our House - Tom Wolfe ;)
     
  7. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member


    Strom Thurmond had a half black child who he financially supported. Does that mean he was not racist? Johnson got the Civil Rights Act passed, which is a lot more than Trump has ever done, but it's widely known that he held racist views. Lincoln and Jefferson also held racist views.

    Most of Trump's controversial comments were not jokes, and it seems that you are confused by what it means to be sexist. Defending your spouse from allegations, even if the spouse is guilty, is not, in and of itself, sexist. Donald Trump called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, and they were innocent. Using your logic, just because the boys were black, that would make Trump racist. If I remember correctly, he never apologized for his attacks against them.

    To add, defending housing discrimination carried out by your family's company goes beyond just merely being politically incorrect. These were actions with real effects on people. And, Trump lies just as much as Clinton. He's a typical politician.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Aug 29, 2016
  8. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    Bill Clinton's charges were not sexual discrimination. He faced allegations of sexual harassment, and Hillary argued his innocence. Roger Ailes is also being accused of sexual harassment, but he's an advisor to Donald Trump. If Hillary is sexist, then Trump is also sexist for working with someone who is being accused of sexual harassment.
     
  9. Abner

    Abner Well-Known Member

    "And, Trump lies just as much as Clinton. He's a typical politician."


    I look at it as a choice between someone who may have lied, and a pathological liar.
     
  10. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    Clinton definitely lied and withheld information. Trump, who was named as a defendant in the discrimination lawsuit, failed to abide by the consent decree after denying any wrongdoing. He even stereotyped the black applicants as welfare recipients.
     
  11. 03310151

    03310151 Active Member

    Let me guess. He'll release something and the right wing will tell you it's "THE BIGGEST STORY EVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD". And the left-wing will Jedi hand wave it all away and point to someone else who did something wrong, somewhere else, away from her and for good measure "Trumps a racist/misogynist/bigoted/capitalist/Russian spy/Nazi, who were we talking about anyway?"


    Meh. I'll be underwhelmed as always.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Aug 30, 2016
  12. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    I'm not sure what they could release that wouldn't leave me underwhelmed.

    Maybe if they had a video of Hillary personally torturing a Syrian orphan while laughing. Anything shy of that will just be politics as usual.
     
  13. 03310151

    03310151 Active Member


    That's a pretty nasty thing to set your bar at, below which everything else is underwhelming.


    What's your bar for Trump?
     
  14. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    That probably says more about Hillary Clinton than it does about you, though. :wink:
     
  15. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    We're talking about Trump/Clinton, not ancient history.

    It went way, way, way beyond defending her spouse. If she just put on a happy public face and said "Bill told me that he's innocent", that would be expected and totally harmless. However, while Hillary now states that every victim of sexual assault "has the right to be believed", she took a much different stance when it threatened her husband's (and by association her) political career;

    ‘Enabler’ Hillary Clinton haunted by efforts to ‘destroy’ husband’s accusers

    Did you know that those suspects all confessed? Trump only said what a lot of people were thinking; that someone who could commit such a brutal crime deserved to be punished harshly. New York doesn't have the death penalty for non-murder cases, and death sentences for rapes were ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in Kennedy v. Louisiana, so it was a moot point, anyway.

    Kind of like how Hillary Clinton tried to destroy the lives and reputations of her husband's sexual assault victims?

    Assuming for a second that you're right, there's a huge difference. Clinton lied under oath to Congress, which in legal terms, is a felony called perjury.
     
  16. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    I'm limiting my response only to the Central Park Five.

    New Yorkers were shaken to the core by that case. Not because of who the "five" were or what they admitted to at the time. But because in 1989 the city was pretty grungy. In today's New York I could see my wife taking my kids to a museum or a park and not fearing. But the frequency and severity of violent crime at that time had a lot of people on edge and I, as a kid at the time, could pick up on it.

    But Central Park was supposed to be safe. It was In the nice part of town. It was well manicured. It was where rich people walked their dogs and fed the ducks. To non-rich people the Central Park rape sent the message that literally no place in the city was spared from indecency and violence. For the rich, it was an assault on their home turf.

    This was only four years after Bernie Goetz shot those guys on the subway. The idea of a gang of youths robbing, killing or raping you was right in your face. If a case like that happened in NYC today it would draw shock. Then, because it was happening seemingly so often, it caused utter outrage. A lot of people wanted those individuals executed. Not because of their race but because of the crime they admitted to. By the time they were cleared the entire vibe of the city had shifted. Violence had more or less subsided and people, overall, became less angry.

    Should the Donald have apologized for how he felt years before when he knew that five people admitted to a rape? Maybe. If he were the mayor I'd say yes he should given the circumstances surrounding their confessions. But he was just a random outraged citizen. And he had years to let that initial rage wear off, likely to the point that a lot of New Yorkers reached, where they just weren't passionate about the case anymore to even really think about how they felt at that time.

    There was a dramatic shift from the 80s through the 90s. The NYPD got itself in involved in a Number of controversial cases. The fact that they acted with malice was not shocking. And people were now angry at their own police department. Many people didn't think "we better apologize to those five men" because they focused on "we are pissed at the NYPD for doing yet another corrupt and bad thing."

    There is plenty to criticize the Donald about. But there is a lot of New York context that gets ignored when snippets like that get blasted into the public eye.
     
  17. decimon

    decimon Well-Known Member

  18. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    That's not ancient history. Both candidates were alive when Thurmond and Johnson were in office. The point remains the same, regardless. Having a friend, associate, family member, or employee of a certain race does not mean you aren't racist against that race.

    Do you believe Trump's ex-wife when she said she was brutally raped and assaulted by him? His lawyer very ignorantly claimed that you can't rape your spouse.



    He wasn't just a citizen expressing his opinion. He paid $85,000 to put ads in newspapers calling for the death penalty for minors. I don't even know why you're bringing up the Kennedy v. Louisiana case. That case was in 2008. The Central Park Five case happened in 1989. It is very easy to get false confessions out of minors. Trump is not a social scientist, but he made a very public mistake. It wouldn't hurt him to apologize.


    Hillary Clinton was not a defendant and did not assault anyone. Trump was a defendant in the housing discrimination case, and his company continued to discriminate after the settlement. In addition to being accused of raping his wife and their divorce being granted based on his cruel and inhumane treatment of her, his attorney threatened to ruin her life if she talked about the rape.



    We don't have to assume that he's lied about anything. He's caught in lies on a regular basis.
     
  19. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    A Mark Wahlberg-like street assault on a minority.
     
  20. 03310151

    03310151 Active Member


    Another very high bar. And everything less than that (i.e. every single one of Abner's posts on Trump over the last year) is nothing more than "politics as usual"?


    I knew there was reason I liked Navy folks so much.
     

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