Poll? Did someone ask for a poll?
Percent of Republicans thinking the FBI is doing a good or excellent job:
2014: 62%
2017: 49%
Percent of Democrats thinking the FBI is doing a good or excellent job:
2014: 60%
2017: 69%
Reactions are welcome.
Right. You’re fine with accusing the FBI of acting out of political bias when it’s you accusing the FBI of being “pretty conservative” and “virulently anti-Hillary” as a motivation for acting contrary to the interests of your preferred candidate. But you’re not fine with Republicans making what seem to be very similar accusations about the FBI being virulently anti-Trump when acting contrary to the interests of their candidate.
You’re depicting your position as a “complex” and “multifaceted” understanding, and the Republican one as “appallingly simplistic”, but that itself seems like an entirely self-serving judgment, without any objective basis.
If the gumshoe fits…
I’m surprised the numbers started as close as they did for this particular question.
I don’t know that the question really gets at what I was talking about, though I should probably take it to another thread to stop cluttering this one.
That’s a good poll, but I don’t think it directly addresses what I was referring to.
I was talking about the notion that criticism of the FBI as being potentially corrupt and subject to abuse was damaging to national security and the like (i.e. “reverence”). As above this was fairly common in liberal circles but has been attacked of late in those same circles.
You do see the overall approval poll numbers move a bit higher on the D side as compared to 2014. But I think the whole issue of political bias and abuse in the FBI was not the primary thing people thought about when they thought of the FBI back in 2014, which is why the numbers moved more on the Republican side than on the Democratic side. (Had there been an potentially biased FBI role in investigating Obama at that time, then you would have had a situation more comparable to what you see now.)
IOW, issues of potential FBI bias and abuse were out there in 2014 but were not as big a part of the public image of the FBI at the time, since there was no hot-button issues relating to those at the time (compared to now, anyway). Therefore, these were not as big drivers of opinion on the FBI on the Democratic side back then as they are on the Republican side now. But I don’t there was any sort of reluctance to engage in these same criticisms as Republicans are doing now. Just that they weren’t as big a part of public consciousness and therefore not as big a part of the overall opinion on the FBI.
What would get at the point I was making is a poll asking “do you think it’s inappropriate and damaging to national security to accuse the FBI of abuse and political bias in warrant applications?” (or similar). I think the divide there would be more dramatic, but that’s not the type of thing that gets polled for.
Thanks, I was poking around myself because frankly “I doubt if anyone polls about this type of question” was so goddamn ridiculous. I think I found the 2015 Reuters poll referenced in a few recent news articles but it doesn’t break down by party in their “top line” summary. To the question “are you generally favorable or unfavorable” towards the FBI got a 74% favorable amongst all adults.
Oh, I see your point. That poll isn’t good enough, because some people may both support the FBI and think it is corrupt. That makes total… no, it doesn’t.
2014 is a good baseline for views of the FBI, since neither party was accusing them of being traitors back then.
I suggest this whole line of thinking that any poll is insufficiently precise to address your particular grievance, really calls into question the legitimacy of the grievance, not the polls.
That’s not logical.
It stands to reason that from a baseline in which neither party is being investigated by the FBI, and go to a situation where one party is being investigated, that there would be more movement among supporters of the party being investigated, all else being equal. If from that same baseline you went to a situation where the other party was being investigated, and that party’s supporters’ opinions did not change comparably, then you would have a basis for comparison. But as it stands, the change in situation was far greater on the R side, and it’s logical to assume that their supporters would be more affected.
Maybe put all together like this, you can see why some might think you’re moving the goalposts out into the parking lot and loading them up onto a flatbed.
Did anyone get a count on how many strawmen/erroneous arguments/mis-statements there are in this post?
No, that’s what I meant in my initial post by the term “reverence”. As in “can’t be questioned or accused of bias or abuse”.
Who says it can’t be questioned? The view is that, since the latest claims of corruption and bias etc. are coming from the very people under investigation, and at the same time, and in the same childish way we’ve come to expect from them, then those claims can be presumed to be bullshit. That does *not *preclude the possibility that they may be legitimate, but some evidence would have to be presented of that.
Sure, whatever.
Without bringing teams into it, you have two candidates who are both being investigated by the FBI for matters of national security.
One of them is under investigation starting in 2015. This is verified by the FBI almost immediately. When this campaign characterized the FBI’s involvement as a “Security inquiry” in 2016, the head of the FBI immediately corrected them in the media saying it’s an investigation. Although the investigation found there was no reason to press charges, the accompanying statement goes to great pains to point out how the candidate was “extremely careless.” Then, less than two weeks before the election, he announces to Congress that they are reopening that investigation, creating a firestorm which doesn’t dissipate even when they announce, much more quietly two days before the election, that nothing new was found.
As for the other candidate, the FBI started investigating the campaign in mid-2016 and players in the campaign were under suspicion as much as three years earlier. Despite this, on 10/31/2016, a week before the election, the NY Times runs a story placed by agency claiming the agency didn’t see anything. It isn’t until 3/20/2017 - four months after the election - that the FBI head admits that an investigation is in place.
Over a year later, candidate A is still exonerated while candidate B has several officials pleading guilty and/or being charged with felonies and the investigation is still ongoing.
So yeah, forget about “teams” for a second. With parallel investigations by the same agency against two candidates, one investigation was conducted in view of the public up to nearly the moment of the election. The other one had propaganda placed into the media at nearly the moment of election which vindicated that candidate (it also turns out to be completely false) and the agency didn’t even confirms the existence of the investigation until many months afterwards.
There is no equivalence here. So why are you shocked to discover that others see these inconsistencies and more importantly, why are you so quick to attribute it to personal biases?
It’s kind of hard, like one of those visual puzzles where you are supposed to guess how many squares are there in a bunch of overlapping and interlocking shapes.
You said that Dems have a “sudden” affinity for the FBI, did you not?
But the polling indicates that Dems have had a general affinity for the FBI. You’re implying that because it is higher now, that Dems have had a negative opinion in the past. But that isn’t the case.
I don’t know that democrats have had all that much issue with the FISA courts or intelligence gathering overall.
They do believe in staying vigilant on the intelligence agencies, as secrecy does allow for corrupt activities, but vigilance does not mean that there are negative feelings.
Now, what the democrats did have a bit of a problem with was the waterboarding and the warrantless wiretaps. Note, the FISA court has nothing to do with warrantless wiretaps. It was many democrats contention back in that time that the FISA court, being as permissive as it was, should have been more than good enough for our intelligence agencies, and it was that they went around that court that bothered them.
So, basically, the democrats had problems with specific actions being taken, not with the institutions overall.
No he’s clarified that by “reverence” he didn’t mean mere goodwill or trust, but holding the FBI sacred and unquestionable. He sees it all the time all of a sudden in the liberal places he gets his news but forgot to link to.
Taking your assertions about propaganda in the media etc. at face value, what you seem to be doing is focusing on the specific complaints that Democrats have and saying “if you look at this specific type of issue, the Democrats have a more legitimate gripe than the Republicans”. Republicans could similarly narrow things down by doing something parallel (e.g. “one candidate had agents with known biases on their case and the other did not”, or something similar).
Right. I don’t think I used the term “affinity” altogether.
Ooooooooh, it’s just a garden variety strawman. Because “the FBI shouldn’t be subject to fabricated attacks on its integrity” is not the same as “nobody should do oversight of the FBI.”
Issue cleared up entirely. Nothing more to see here.