Why is meddling in an election by a foreign nation not an act of war? I don’t really want to glow in the dark for whatever the half life of a nuclear weapon may be, but it seems like we ought to make a major sword rattling stink over this at the very least. The way things are going, Putin will be sending his boys around to get Trump’s lunch money every day…
Help me understand this. Yes, for things like hacking into the DNC servers we take diplomatic action by tossing out a few diplomats. But if we get all self-righteous then our own spying could be exposed and make us look bad.
But this social media stuff, how is that worse than, for example, Obama coming out and stating that he was opposed to Brexit? Should the UK have imposed sanctions on us as if we had declared war on them in response to Obama making that statement?
What if I start a Facebook Group stating my support for Boris Johnson, knowing that UK readers can see it? Is that an act of war? Or am I immune because I am not directed to start the group by the government?
I think we are closer politically than many of other posters on this board, so convince me why I should be outraged over this. I get being slightly upset by it, but to hear the rhetoric, you would think that Russian spies are being planted in every American family and that they have a plan to interbreed so that we become One People.
You go down there general.
Well i know its not mine given that I linked to a news source
I’m not entirely sure what I should consider, because, like always, I stay away from the political ads and shit. I don’t go into the vitriolic communities. I’ll come out strong against Trump, but not the other candidates. The reason is the same as other ads–I don’t like being manipulated by appeals to emotion.
The only thing I have to consider is to go check and see if the rape accusations against Bloomberg have a legitimate source, as I know that is one thing that influenced me against him. Before that, he was just “guy I didn’t prefer” but now he’s “guy who I’d only vote for because Trump is worse.”
I guess I may also point out that the Russians are pushing out the anger that Bernie’s fans are spewing, and that we shouldn’t respond back in kind, but try to work together.
But I’d have to be careful, because I don’t want to push the message that Bernie is only viable because of Russia, and encourage even diehard Democrats to not vote for him if he becomes the nominee, or invite even more vitriol towards those who “fell” for it.
So I might just not mention it at all, and stick with my message of “we are not enemies. We just disagree on some things. We should still all be working together to fight Trump, not each other.” And, of course, debunk shit when the Russians push fake news again.
Hell, I’m not even sure if they’d be doing this becaue they want Bernie to win the presidency or even the nomination. They could be doing it to get Trump on board. Or releasing it to get the anti-Bernie people to gang up on Bernie, playing an extra dimensions. Or it could be a strategy after seeing that Sanders is ahead in a way to give Trump supporters ammunition to say “well, Russia supports Bernie, too.”
Trying to figure out exactly what they are trying to do is itself letting them influence the election. Sure, you want to point it out when you see it, but you don’t want to let the mere fact of who they are helping matter. And that’s a hard balance.
This is just so unreasonable.
You’re so afraid of Putin and you’ve attributed so much of Trump to Putin that at the slightest hint that Putin is doing anything, you jump to the most divisive, most obviously disruptive line of thinking possible, all in the hopes that you’ll then be on the against-Putin side, which also coincidentally is indistinguishable from you just being more emotionally entrenched in the same position you were already in. This news has done nothing but make you angrier about what you already believed.
Gee, weird! What an unpredictable and unlike anything in recent history outcome!
I mean, I’m sure Putin’s a smart guy, I’m sure it’s a fine operation he’s running. But yikes. You’re not exactly making it hard for him to be disruptive with this kind of reactivity.
I’m just waiting for the inevitable GOP Senators calling for multiple investigations into how the Russians helped President Sanders and not realize any irony in it at all.
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With the complete blocking of any action (bills, laws, etc) regarding election security and the continued refusal to govern for 50%± of the population due to ideological differences, it’s hard to imagine the man and party who invented 3 million voters… in victory… back in 2016 allowing President Sanders to even be a thing.
Russia backs Bernie, is blatant about it, Trump screams rigged, the Senate backs him up and all those judges… hopefully… provide a quick path to the Supreme Court to rule for Trump. Evidence is manufactured, people are arrested, and that will be that.
I have not seen any evidence… other than my own worries about whether I’m beginning to Old Man Conspiratorize… that says the above is impossible. I couldn’t even get Joaquin Castro to deny this was implausible.
My conclusions are much the same, JohnT. Based on all the information we have that is readily available to those who will actually study it, there is no other reasonable conclusion. When members of your own government (Trump Republicans) ignore lawful subpoenas and witness summons and most of the country barely blinks, I think we can be certain those same people will have no compunction in ignoring the outcome of an election – unless it unequivocally goes the way they want, of course. They’re already acting like autocrats.
They’ve been very busy over the past 3 1/2 years building uncertainty into the outcome. Did many notice? It’s why Warren and others are pleading for a large Democratic turn-out election. There’s no other way to assure Republicans will be forced to relinquish power – if they will at all.
In the run-up to the election, Trump will use the powers of his office to pull us out of Afghanistan with or without a plan to ensure that the sacrifices of all those who went before were not in vain; he will make sure the (non-existent) middle class gets a nice sop of a tax cut; he’ll keep filching from the military budget to “build that wall.” Then he’ll parade around the country on a ceaseless rooster crow about how he “kept his promises” made in 2016. There will be investigations into his political enemies, probably including the arrest of at least one opponent (especially if it’s Biden). A significant number of citizens will fall for all of it.
This is how Putin rolls. And like I’ve said at least a half a dozen times on this forum over the past few years, Trump doesn’t just admire Putin. He wants to be Putin.
We must pull together to stop it. I have little faith at this point that we will.
Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States of America:
(Actually swiped from Lord Feldon’s post above, though I did click on the link to Twitter just to verify.)
It continues to astound, shock, disgust, and dismay me that this sort of garbage is a DIRECT QUOTE from the President of the United States of America. This is “that one uncle no one wants to invite to Thanksgiving dinner any more” bad. (And I actually have some “Good Old Boy” uncles, with very right-wing political views, but I’ve never heard any of them say anything that’s this mean and this fundamentally unhinged.)
I’m not even saying this is the worst thing the man has ever said, either; this is just normal now. We’ve gone from the “Founding Fathers”, to “With malice toward none, with charity for all”, to “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”, to “the audacity of hope”, to…this.
And that’s the kind of leadership Vladimir Putin wants this country to have. We have GOT to come together and put a stop to this. This is, to use Franklin Roosevelt’s words, a threat equal to “the emergency of a war”, or if “we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe”.
See? (Reuters)
Everything’s just fine.
Yet he’s sleeping with a supermodel in the Whitehouse while you’re ineffectually raging at your keyboard on an anonymous message board.
By his own words (and dozens of credible accusations), Trump doesn’t seem big on consent; that society has elevated an admitted abuser of women and violator of consent is a poor reflection on our society as a whole, not an indictment of his critics. Better to be an angry person on the internet than an abuser of women and violator of consent like Trump. At least, if fighting abuse of women is important.
Yes. And Trump will liquidate the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to put gas at 25 cents per gallon. And, very possibly, will be filmed saving a baby from a burning building (or something equivalent).
All the squabbling among the Democrats will be exposed as the proverbial rearranging of deck chairs on the decks of the Titanic.
If Bernie gets the nomination the Making Trump Pres-for-Life process will go extremely smoothly. If some other ticket less subject to conspiracy-mongering prevails, it may go a tad less smoothly. But it will go forward.
There are only two ways that we won’t be dealing with Trump-for-life, next November:
[ul]
[li]He dies or is massively incapacitated (such that the kids can’t pull off a virtual Presidency through old videotape and such), or[/li]
[li]Americans take to the streets in Hong Kong-level numbers (proportionately).[/li][/ul]
((Dalej42, I’ll look you up—I get on Twitter only once a day, and not every day, as a sanity-preserving policy.)
So when Bernie wins in November will Trump use this to (try to) annul the election results?
Sure (as has already been described by Aspenglow and JohnT in recent posts in this thread). It’s been pre-established in American minds that Bernie’s results are “due to” help from the Russians, so that can be used—with an astonishing lack of irony—by the Trumpites, as a reason to invalidate the November 3 numbers.
I’m a teensie bit more optimistic than Sherrerd and hope my little shim of optimism is justified. Here are the 2 reasons why.
[ul]
[li]Let’s not forget how many Republican House members have stampeded for the door ahead of the election. They don’t do that if they think they’re going to win.[/li][li]If ever there was an election that Putin wanted to rig in his favor, it was in Ukraine in 2019. Presumably, it is easier to rig elections in Ukraine than in the USA. Zelenskyy won with a 70% majority against his Putin-backed opponent.[/ul][/li]If Bernie (or whichever nominee) wins in November by a healthy margin, say 7%+, it will be a lot harder for Trump/Putin to attempt to annul the election results. Election-rigging is hard work and not guaranteed.
Paper ballots, paper ballots, paper ballots. No voter tally machines connected to the internet. Eyes on at-risk precincts in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. A commitment to vote Blue No Matter Who, no matter what crap you hear about them.
Simple fixes can go a long way. And we have to hope like hell the line workers in our intelligence agencies can manage to maintain their commitments to their oaths for a few months more.
I’ve posed this question before, but I’ll pose it again; please feel free to NOT share your answer (frankly, it’s a question for you to answer to yourself, not to anyone else): what will you do if Trump does not concede the election and the Senate supports him? What will you do if our democracy is usurped from within, even with the veneer of legality?
Better to know that answer before it happens, IMO.
Why would the Russians want Trump in the White House?
- He’s the polar opposite of socialist leaning Sanders and is putting the US first including a restructure trade deal with communist China.
- He approved sanctions against the Russian pipeline into Germany.
- That led to chancellor Merkel agreeing to ocean port infrastructure for US natural gas as a counter to any Russian political influence like they’ve done in the past with natural gas in Poland.
- He promotes a strengthening of the US military.
- Under Trump US forces attacked and killed 300 pro-Syrian Russian mercenaries in Syria. A Russian puppet government.
There is nothing pro-Russian about Trump.