I know some people are commenting on the possibility but it seems to me that there is a big thing going on with Wikileaks emails. It is entirely possible that before the hackers uploaded the emails they inserted damaging comments and text. The only way to disprove that would be for the victim to release the originals (which of course could themselves be altered). For several reasons, that would be a bad idea.
Now is the time to start insulating everyone from email leaks-by asserting any given email could be altered/fake and therefor no one should trust any leaks. That is in the best interest of everyone except the hackers. Anyone can lose control of their emails. With this current case, we have the start of a method of minimizing the damage. People need to start taking advantage of this opportunity.
I havent seen this, but yes, they have definitely taken things out of context and lied by omission. The so called “attack” on the foreign journalists is an example, where they post as if no one was armed at all, even tho the guys walking with the journalists had AKs and RPGs.
Hillary wasn’t getting my vote. WikiHillary is. I’m not alone in thinking that she appears more competent in private than her public persona would indicate.
When I was in college at UW-Madison (home town of Oscar Mayer) in the 1980s, we had a guest lecturer in our Market Research class – the director of market research for Oscar Mayer. It was a very interesting lecture, but what I still remember was at the very end.
He asked us if we had any questions, and a friend of mine asked, “So, what do you put in the hot dogs?”
His response, word for word, was, “Oh, good stuff, stuff you’d eat. Meat.”
I hope I don’t end up eating my keyboard for saying this, but I can’t imagine they have anything bigger at this point. The best possible time to use it would’ve been right after Trump’s bus encounter to blunt the impact of his most explicit shitbaggery. It seems clear to me their strategy was to dribble out the emails with the assumption that each dump would be a body blow to the Clinton campaign, each more devastating than the last. Maybe they hoped that Trump wouldn’t do or say something so reprehensible that their “revelations” would land with a hollow thud.
If they’re holding onto something “huge”, I have to wonder that at their common sense. Millions of ballots already cast and trusting in some story to swing the national vote five or more points? And the debates are over so you won’t have “America” watching a single source for you to hammer in the scandal. Plus, the closer we get to Nov 8th, the more people are just going to feel like “Screw it, I said I’m voting for this person and I’m going to” because who wants to drag this out more with a new “revelation” at the zero hour?
Seems like, these days, your October Surprises expire about mid-month.
There is nothing particularly damaging about them but they would have been a serious liability if she had been running against a normally competent opponent. They make her look like a phony,calculating politician and the drip-drip of minor revelations would have have put her on the defensive at a crucial time in what would probably have been a close race.
I doubt there is anything massive in the pipeline and we are fast approaching a point where even a significant scandal may not be enough to change the result. It would have to be something enormous and I doubt that even exists.
This story would have killed Barack Obama, since he was running as a change candidate and emails of this nature would have exposed him as just a typical politician. Imagine them discussing how Obama supports gay marriage but has to say he doesn’t, and how he really supports an individual mandate but it would help him against Clinton to say he was against it, and he really supports NAFTA but needs labor endorsements? We’d never hear from the guy again if Wikileaks had gotten hold of Axelrod’s emails in 2008.
But we know that Clinton is a typical politician, so this is more of a “water is still wet” story. Mistrust of Clinton was already baked into the numbers, this doesn’t add to it. Vox even wrote an article, “This proves that Clinton is exactly who we thought she was.”
Oh come on… hyperbole much? It might have damaged him a little in '08, but he still had an amazing campaign and turnout machine, and his supporters still were for him as a person and not for his campaign people. This would have shaved a point or two off at most, and I think probably nothing since Axelrod never pretended to be anyone but a political professional.
Of course he was, but exposing Obama taking political positions he was likely to abandon once winning office would have been much more damaging than one or two points. For Clinton it’s nothing, just like it would have been nothing for Romney. But someone like John McCain, or anyone else claiming to be a straight talker, Joe Biden too, that would have been very, very bad.
As much as I admire the purity of an innocent progressive, the truth remains that you cannot accomplish a damned thing if you lose. Is Obama a politician? Damned sure bethca he is, and a darn good one! Learned his chops in Chicago, which has less Eugene V. Debs and more Darwin.
That’s what we all said, but a lot of people who knew better played along. Apparently politics is a team sport and even the little people in discussion boards must do their part.
But don’t worry, I think everyone knows better now. It will be very hard for anyone to claim they are anything but a politician and Donald Trump hasn’t really been helping on that front either.
RCP has a column up talking about why the Wikileaks largely fizzled. Primarily because Trump couldn’t shut up long enough to leave an opening for them to stick but also because, as mentioned, little was actually surprising news about Clinton. I’ll add to that that little was news at all about Clinton and stories of what Podesta, Mills or Palmieri were saying is a lot less interesting to anyone who isn’t a big nerd.
He also suggests that this was kind of the only chance for this sort of attack to really stick. Next time a hack like this happens, people are likely to immediately assume it’s more boring nonsense and tune it out from the start.
