The alternative explication: that Comfey dearly wanted to cement his future as a GOP icon by finding Clinton indictable, but simply could not do it. The unanimous opinions of his minions wouldn’t allow it. So he delivered a non-indictment that implied what he could not prove. He could not prove indictable offenses, so he went for the next best thing, an accusation he would not have to prove, massive indifference, poor security, etc.
And who says he has a sterling reputation for non-partisan honesty? Where did he get it, and why? Not saying he doesn’t deserve one, but I don’t recall hearing anything about him until I heard what a great reputation he has.
You don’t know already? And yet, here you are… What investigation are you likely to perform before voting? That you haven’t already? When do you propose to find out?
Trump bragged about grabbing women in the genitals and kissing them without permission, and then 12 women (so far) came forward saying that he grabbed their genitals and/or kissed them without permission.
I suppose it’s possible that he totally made up his brag that he did this, and that all of these women are lying, but the simplest explanation to me seems that he was bragging about behavior he actually did, and at least some of these women were prompted by this blatant bragging to come forward and tell their true stories about being assaulted.
I’m beginning to wonder if Trump is going to vote for Trump: It looks like he has stopped contributing to his own campaign. Couple this news with his recent antics with his TrumpTV and his jumping off the campaign trail to promote his hotel opening, and I’m wondering if he’ll even show up to vote on Election Day.
I heard that republicans are all racist and sexist so its unlikely he has such integrity.
It’s more like I said I liked to punch people in the face for bad driving and then one month before I was about to receive a second major award twelve people step up and said I punched them in high school and don’t deserve it but I said I didn’t do it.
How would I know? Trump has been a public figure for a long time and already threw in (then withdrew) his bid for the Republican ticket, he was a serious contender for some time before winning the nomination, then won the nomination, then had a debate, and then these women found the courage to speak up. If Trump did this to even one of these women I will be ashamed for having voted for him but the time for these people to find their courage and pluck was a long time ago.
Even been a woman? They tell me its different for them.
And why now, why not then? Because then, maybe, it wasn’t at all likely that he was going to be President? Might that have had some effect on their decision making?
But, yeah, take your point. Given his spotless record for truth and candor, telling it like it is, and all…yeah, he deserves the benefit of a doubt. They don’t, but he sure does! And as much as I like to say “I told you so!”, this time, I’m willing to be deprived of the opportunity.
Who did you hear that from? Since you believe that person, and he presumably isn’t voting for Trump, does that mean you also shouldn’t vote for Trump?
The alleged sexual abuses happened in 1982, 1987, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1997 (x2), 1998, 2003, 2005 (x2), 2006 (x2), 2007, and 2013. Trump would have been between the ages of 36 and 67. So he probably would have already graduated high school by then.
I believe the first woman stepped forward when Trump made the claim that he’d never abused anyone. She was so angry he said that that she felt she had to step forward. The other woman followed her lead.
I hear this is something you can just decide now, but I’ve never made such a decision, no. The few women I know enough to discuss politics are not particularly persuaded by this event, except for one, a deeply religious born-again who was immediately turned off by scruffing a cat. I also don’t lump all women together as “they” when I can help it. I know it’s hard for people on the left to think of people as, well, people, rather than voting blocs or special interest groups but you might be surprised to find out women are just like men, they have different opinions on all sorts of things, it’s quite charming. For instance, I knew women that didn’t feel at all empowered by Sarah Palin’s vice president bid, and didn’t see Rice’s position of power as aspirational (though maybe that was racism and not internalized misogyny, you never can tell).
I have heard it said by people I have great confidence in that such sexual assault is bad whether or not Presidents do it.
I hope not because it seems more suspicious, not less. I suspect if anything had an effect on their decision-making it was the release of the pussygrab tape as it creates a narrative in which they can fit rather than risk just standing out—assuming they are telling the truth.
He doesn’t “deserve” the benefit of the doubt and neither do they.
Lest we forget, several of the women who have come forward apparently have friends and/or relatives who are wiling to state for the record that they had been told by the victim about these assaults, soon after they happened.
Buying property in a country doesn’t mean you’re not xenophobic. There’s a belief among conservatives these days that investing and doing business is a public good, that it’s a benevolent gesture. It’s not. If Trump bought properties in all these countries it doesn’t mean that he wanted to enrich the lives of the people who lived there, just that he thought he could make money by doing it. There’s nothing wrong with that, just don’t read more into it than is really there.
And my point wasn’t so much that Trump is xenophobic, just that his supporters dismiss such statements with the same “he didn’t really mean that” handwave that I was describing.
No Vince Foster-ish ghost; what do you think of the cases of discrimination that were brought against him and his father in the '70s? Trump’s answer is that they paid settlements with no admission of guilt, as if that somehow exonerates him. It doesn’t.
If the women charging him with sexual harassment had come forward six months ago, people would have wondered why they didn’t come forward six months before that. You can always find a reason why the timing wasn’t perfect, or the story doesn’t hold up (“airplane seats didn’t have movable armrests back then”), or whatever. People are great at finding reasons to believe what they already want to believe. These women went public when they went public. Deal with it.
And a new question (more than one, really, but on the same topic), if you don’t mind. What do you think of Trump’s claims that the election is rigged? If Trump loses the election, which do you think is more likely, that there’s a conspiracy of politicians, election officials, news media, and pollsters to thwart the true will of the people, or that Hillary got the votes to win? Do you think it’s responsible of Trump to stoke the fears and anger of his supporters by telling them their most core right in a democracy is being taken away from them? When Trump makes those charges, do you think he’s acting for the best interest of the country, or for the best interest of Trump?
I have not followed Trump all my life either. But whenever a claim on him appears and is well sourced (as in “linked to the original comments”), I do follow up. And the emerging picture is of a very, very, very selfish man. In and of itself it wouldn’t surprise me at all; he was born rich into a life of privilege after all and it’s probably not easy to become a “normal” person in those conditions. The point I was trying to make, though, was that he is auditioning for a political role at the highest levels. And things like preparing oppo research for his campaign are simply no-brainers. It’s a very basic strategy, actually: let my people prepare for possible blows and prepare strategies for that situation.
It’s the reason why armies prepare strategies for all kind of stupid scenarios: so they aren’t caught with their pants down.
And your explanation that “he’s basically in charge of it and doesn’t take outside advice” is something that’s horrifying about ANYONE who pretends to lead a complex and powerful office like the one of President of the United States. Someone with that attitude is not fit to run for mayor of a city, let alone any office with more than that responsibility.
Is there some new definition of xenophobic that relates to benevolence I’m not aware of?
I think his middle finger to the old money in Palm Beach proves he loves everyone about as much as being part of a class action lawsuit proves he hates them. I am extremely cynical about the intentions of people involved in lawsuits, mostly because the synopsis of them always sound wildly unreasonable (hot coffee lady) or perfectly sensible and righteous (discrimination suits) but the actual matter is never so cut-and-dried.
Maybe those people would have. Maybe they would have been right, too. But maybe we’d have six more months of useful investigation prior to a goddamn election.
This kind of counterfactual certainty is not something I can debate in any capacity. If things were different they wouldn’t be the same—I know.
Ugh. I’m sorry to do this to you, it’s a long opinion.
It’s possible. I think that normally general elections didn’t have to be rigged because the primaries were more or less rigged in the crony politics sort of way. It didn’t matter much if it was Obama or McCain, Bush or Kerry, they’re all the same political party to the kind of people that have an interest in rigging an election. When it is time to frack or give weapons to partisan nationalists resisting a government (while we try to take them away at home because you can’t fight a government with them anyway), miraculously it happens without much haranguing. They only squabble over relatively inconsequential things like whether insurance companies will get rich or whether they’ll get really rich.
I do believe that the 2000 Bush v Gore dispute really rattled some people’s cages, however. The rise of electronic voting also presented new opportunities that were previously out of reach. It may not matter much whether it was Romney or Obama but it does matter some and where there’s some advantage to be had you can bet people will try to extract something from it. The existence of 100% Obama districts and general exit polling irregularities do not receive the critical attention I think they deserve. And the Lucas Critique can really wreck havoc on using polling as a measure of fairness. If we believe polls can reflect fairness, then something really weird happened in Michigan with the Democratic primary this season.
And on Romney/Obama in particular I still remember Rove’s insistence that FOX called the results too soon. One way to read this is that Rove was cheating and couldn’t believe it didn’t work. Another way to read it is that Rove had internal polling that showed Romney should easily take it and couldn’t believe it was being stolen. Of course it’s also possible everything was fair and Rove is just a shill, a claim I do not take lightly.
Finally, media collusion is getting really bad right now. Even in my deep blue state I see tons of Trump signs but when I listen to my local NPR they can never quite seem to find Trump supporters to put on the air. We’ve seen from Wikileaks that there was serious off-the-record collusion between “reporters” and campaigns. Maybe someone will tell me, oh, it’s always like this. But this isn’t any better, it only means I didn’t learn soon enough. To the extent that a great number of Americans get their news from mainstream sources this kind of backroom wrangling with the media is really upsetting. I think the media’s reputation is very low since they buckled like cowards in the run up to the Iraq war, and now that their reputation has taken a hit they’re kind of flailing, but instead of doubling back and getting back to actual journalism in an attempt to restore trust, they just make their opinions heard louder. Like, “Oh, we’re biased? We’ll show you bias!”
Anyway, it’s been a lot of blathering. The election could be rigged, and I believe that saying it is going to be rigged could stave off some brazen rigging attempts if they were going to happen, but I don’t know that they were in the sense of fraudulent voting or voting machine tampering. O’Keef’s videos showed that the desire to do so is there, but I don’t think that it’s any more than, uh, locker room talk. I don’t think people are being bussed around. Electronic voting has been a concern for me for many years, though.
These can both be true, if it is possible to discourage one political party’s votes. At this time I am not convinced this is possible. Some people I know that think of an implicit, unorganized “conspiracy” suggest that polls are biased on purpose in order to discourage Trump supporters from voting, but to my mind one could just as easily argue that the polls are biased on purpose in order to make it seem like Clinton supporters don’t have to show up. I do believe that the constant MSM scolding of Trump supporters and Trump himself get people more motivated, not less, but that still doesn’t imply that they aren’t trying to discourage Trump voters, it only means that they’d be failing.
I don’t know a lot of right wingers personally. The people I know (all 3 of them) that claim they will vote Trump have not said anything about their rights being oppressed in this way or anything remotely of the sort. It sounds like a lot of bluster from nobodies that the MSM has elevated in order to garner a few more clicks and trigger sensitive bleeding-hearts. Kaine and Clinton discuss retribution for cyberattacks and no-fly zones which will put us in contact with Russian planes but the media is concern-shilling about whether or not a few Trump supporters—supporters they’ve been spending the better part of a year saying are dumb, uneducated, shout-at-the-television nobodies—are suddenly going to create some kind of democracy-threatening coup attempt. I can’t even begin to understand the mindset of people that believe this, nevermind report on it.
If the election is rigged then calling it out is 100% in the best interests of the country. Unfortunately, saying it is “rigged” is actually a rather slippery claim. It is that slipperiness which suggests to me that the paranoia that a civil war is looming is just as overblown. Trump cannot talk to the media and have the media convey his message to the people. (“Earned media.” A marketing term I learned just this year and wish I could unlearn.) He has to talk directly to the people, in spite of an overtly hostile media. I think he knows how to do this. I don’t think he’s an eccentric reclusive rich type. He knows, or at least is more than passingly familiar with, the people of this country that aren’t the donor class, aren’t the political class, and aren’t the journalist class. He can speak directly to them. When he said Obama founded ISIS, the stupid media fact-checked this to what can only be their embarrassment. When I say Obama founded ISIS you grant me the latitude of flowery speech, metaphor, humor, etc. Trump saying this is suddenly insane, but only because you’re so used to the media “reporting” on candidates rather than candidates talking to you that it’s shocking and difficult for you to process. He also says something like “acid-washed” and the stupid anti-Trump media again has to fact-check it to then tell the public “No, the program used to wipe the servers was called Bleach Bit. Record status: corrected!” I mean holy crap are they this cocksure of themselves? Those who knew didn’t need this correction and those who didn’t learned nothing other than “Trump was right, the server was wiped.” This kind of fact-checking is actually laughable.
I don’t understand they hyperbole. Horrifying? He’s running a tight campaign and knows by inspection that loose lips sink ships. The guy doesn’t single-handedly run his business and has already tried to develop some relationships which will almost certainly lead to cabinet positions. He knows that the party is unfriendly if not actually hostile to him, which was made clear very early on and which hasn’t let up since.
I don’t understand what you expect him to do in such a situation. Let people who have expressed hostility to him close to his campaign just to make you feel better? He’s clearly worked with a few people who haven’t tried to work against him in spite of a lot of other hostility. There’s no reason to suppose he won’t do the same as President: have trusted advisers in key positions. Like pretty much every President. Ever.
I figured I’d put some attention to it, and can find no reliable source that OBama won a district in 2012 with every single vote.
It is claimed on a variety of websites that Obama won Ohio “districts” with every single vote. But I’ve examined a spreadsheet just now of all Ohio reporting districts and none report Obama winning by 100 percent.
Karl Rove wasn’t doing anything in 2012 that would have put him in a position to cheat, so that would be a strange way to read it. It would also have been strange for Rove to have polling that disagreed with Ohio going to Obama, since the best pollsters in America said that, in fact, Obama led in Ohio. His reaction was simply an emotional one; he had trouble accepting what was obviously happening.
Calls of rigging elections always seem to come after emotional blows. Donald Trump wasn’t saying the election was rigged when the polls showed him almost tied. Now the polls say he is losing, and the talk of rigging is coming out. That’s very curious indeed.