My own reaction is that I don’t expect another country or interests therein to piously obey our laws concerning election influence. So if Chinese interests donated money to a political campaign, I regard it as self-interest on the part of the Chinese, and, indeed, meh, everyone does it. I can hardly demand that the US be free to meddle in other nations’ politics but be considered immune from similar attention.
But since it’s illegal in the United States, I expect the beneficiary, the domestic campaign, to abide by the law and reject it.
And, indeed, the Clinton legal defense fund did just that with the $450,000 donated by “Charlie” Trie. After observing that the checks and money orders, while purportedly all from different names, were written by the same hand and the money orders were sequentially numbered, the fund returned the entire amount.
In contrast, the money donated to the DNC was only returned when the federal investigation highlighted its origins. That’s almost certainly the result of lots of donations and no resources to scrutinize them rather than any nefarious intent, of course, but it’s the kind of thing that opens the organization to political pot-shots.
In further contrast to your analogy, here there was no money to return.
Trump didn’t destroy the Democrats. Not by a longshot. Yeah, he won the election. If he had promised something like: “We’re gonna build a wall, we’re gonna pay for it, and we’re gonna have Mexico pay us that same amount later”,then lots of the gullible ones would not have voted for him.
For the Trump supporters reading this, you know it isn’t a requirement to support the person you voted for on every issue. You can for example, support Trump on the economy, immigration and healthcare and still disagree with how he’s handling intelligence, in general, and the Russian actions specifically.
For example, I voted for Prime Minister Trudeau. I agreed with the bulk of his platform. I disagreed with him that Canada should withdraw its planes from Syria. After the election, I contacted my MP to tell the platform positions I agreed with and those I didn’t. Canada did withdraw their planes and I still think it was the wrong decision.
Now maybe you already don’t. Maybe I’m preaching to something which is not real but is my perception. But it feels to me, and this isn’t just about Trump but politics in general that it has become super polarizing. If somebody disagrees with even one thing of the person/party I support than they are wrong wrong wrong on everything or worse evil.
I’ll never forget this quote by Bob Dole: “I’ve said repeatedly in this campaign that the President was my opponent and not my enemy” Somehow we, and I mean all Western democracies, need to get back to this understanding. The venom is out of control. Anyway, that’s enough of that tangent. My AIs are beeping at me to pay more attention to them. And since they often threaten to kill me, I guess I should go take care of that.
True; however, if[sup]*[/sup] the U.S. meddled in some other country’s election and the citizens of that country found out about it, I’d expect them to be properly pissed at us. I can hardly expect that reaction and not think that people are fully justified in being angry at Russia.
Yes we have in the past made covert and not so covert efforts to influence elections, but it is natural part of foreign policy that all nations engage in a double standard when it comes to actions they perform against others as opposed to actions others perform against them. We willfully bomb other countries that we have people we don’t like. Does that mean we shouldn’t be bothered, if another country decides to bombs us?
But by returning the money the DNC acknowledged that China’s attempt the influence elections was a bad thing. If Trump joined his Republican Colleagues in repudiating the hacking, I don’t think that we would be having this thread. Instead he actively encouraged it on the campaign trail and then refused to acknowledge its existence.
Well, sounds like Trump has made his mind up even before he has todays intelligence briefing about Russian involvement in hacking, and has said that the focus on Russian involvement is just “a witch hunt”:
Those poor, poor Russians. They are just the victims here, right?
True, but that’s more in the realm of a human reaction, not a logical one. I share the sentiment; I recognize that I’m not particularly pissed at revelations that the US nudged support away from Gennady Zyuganov and Vladimir Zhirinovsky in 2008, but AM pissed that the Russians dared to try to nudge support away from Clinton.
Perhaps it should mean that we define why we’re bothered: we should perhaps admit that we’re perfectly comfortable being the sole arbiter of who should be bombed, and why.
At the same time, we should recognize that this is a position that other countries’ populace will not support, and only accept because we have bombs and they do not.
If we are going to impose a double standard, for example, we should at least acknowledge it’s a double standard.
Before the ascendancy of Trump, I regarded the Democrats as the worst offenders for holding double standards. “Filibuster is evil; filibuster is important bulwark; filibuster is evil!” But the Republicans, I thought, were very close contenders: “States rights! (Except for medical marijuana!) (Oh and assisted suicide!) But otherwise states rights!”)
Now I regard Trump as the new champion, and every other Democrat and Republican playing for a very distant second place.
I am still dumbfounded about how rank and file Republicans… Average, everyday folks… can possibly support and believe Russia and Assange, over American intelligence agencies, containing actual American citizens who have sworn an oath to the Constitution.
I mean, how is it possible for these people (many of whom I presume were as Anti-Russia as you could get, only a year ago) to switch their allegiance away from their own country to a foreign power?
And I really don’t buy the “you Democrats just want to go to war with Russia” Bullshit that I hear from certain facebook acquaintances.
Because the Congressional conservatives are salivating over the fortunes they’re about to make by privatizing Medicaid, Social Security, veterans’ care, prisons, and education. The ‘nostalgic for the 1950s’ conservatives are salivating over the prospect of seeing non-whites, homosexuals, and uppity women put in their proper place. And the big-business conservatives are salivating over the masses of cash they’ll be able to bank from a combination of lower taxes and elimination of costly-to-meet regulations (such as paying out on pension obligations, keeping food safe, and eliminating toxic wastes. All that costs money!).
While eagerly anticipating these developments they are easily able to push out of their minds the prospect of nuclear annihilation. After all, nothing ever really changes, right? Since we haven’t had a nuclear war yet, that means we will never have a nuclear war, right? Because nothing ever really changes!
There are conservatives who are NOT ‘okay’ with this, of course. I’ve been enjoying reading and hearing what David Frum (of The Atlantic) has to say, for example. He’s not alone in being pretty much as alarmed by probable future events as are liberals.
My dad-- Viet Nam vet, commie-hater, all-Christian patriot and God-fearing American-- has been “liking” a lot of highly suspect things on Facebook over the past couple months, and they’ve been floating up through my newsfeed, much to my chagrin. They’ve become more and more pro-Russian and anti-media and anti-intelligence over the past couple weeks. The most recent one was a meme that said “Because of Obama/Hillary, Wikileaks has become more trustworthy than our own intelligence agencies.”
It makes me sick to see him slipping into nutter territory in his old age.
There was a time when I thought the internet was an amazing, liberating thing. We always had freedom of speech and press, but most of us lacked the resources to get our message beyond our immediate friends and neighbors.
Sadly, it turns out that access to a voice combined with the overwhelming stupidity of half the population is not a good combination- and for the record, I don’t mean that as necessarily directed at the right.
Thanks for the example, but I’m still baffled. Old age and mental degeneration can’t explain ALL of this.
What the heck? A patriotic American with a history of being anti-communist, over the course of a few months converts to loving Russia and hating his fellow Americans who are duty bound to work against foreign espionage? WHAT IS GOING ON?
What is going on is that certain elements on the right have been waging psychological warfare on the American populace (via Fox News, Drudge, Breitbart, etc.), to the point where a large segment of the population believes that Democrats are the ultimate evil and even Vladimir Putin is preferable to them.
It’s not that Putin and his actions have become admirable–it’s that people on the right are working hard to excuse Putin’s assassinations and other means of suppressing of dissent, and his looting of his nation–because the alternative is THE LIVING EMBODIMENT OF EVIL (i.e. Democrats).