US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6409

JULIAN ASSANGE: Let’s go back to 2013. There was a worldwide manhunt for Edward Snowden—at a particular moment in time, the largest manhunt the world has ever seen, more resources put into it over that two-week period than any other manhunt. The manhunt for Osama bin Laden over an expanded period is, of course, larger, but over that short period, because of the abilities now of the National Security Agency and the incredible paranoia by the U.S. deep state, the general intelligence community, which is about 100,000 strong, vast resources were put into trying to grab Edward Snowden or work out where he might go, if he was leaving Hong Kong, and grab him there.

So we worked against that, and we got him out of Hong Kong and got him to Russia, and we were going to transit through Russia to get him to Latin America. Now, the U.S. government canceled his passport as he was en route, it seems, to Moscow, meaning that he then couldn’t take his next flight, which had been booked through Cuba. And at that point, there became a question of, well, how else can he proceed? If he can’t proceed by a commercial airline, are there other alternatives? And so, we looked into private flights, private jets, other unusual routes for commercial jets, and presidential jets. Now, we managed to get some intelligence on the U.S. government thinking of the different types of jets and that they were concerned that the presidential jets might be difficult for them, from a legal perspective. In fact, from a legal perspective, they are flying embassies. They’re protected under the Vienna Convention. And no one has a right to go into the presidential jet. So, in assessing these options, President Maduro, for example, had already made an offer of asylum. I’m not sure if it was public by that stage, but it became public shortly after. And yeah, so we thought that and a few other presidential jets were a possibility, but we—particularly concentrating on—I don’t want to mention all the nations involved, but Latin American nations who were not Bolivia. There was an oil conference on in—there was an international oil conference in Moscow that week. Edward Snowden and our journalist, Sarah Harrison, still in the Moscow airport in the transit lounge, and so we thought, well, this is an opportunity, actually, to send Edward Snowden to Latin America on one of these jets.

Now, I thought and, in fact, advised Edward Snowden that he would be safest in Russia, that the ability to protect the borders of Russia was significantly stronger than Venezuela’s abilities, for example, to protect its borders or Brazil’s ability to protect their borders or Ecuador’s ability to protect their borders. But he was very worried about the optics. He didn’t want to be accused of being some kind of Russian spy, so he really didn’t want to be in Russia, because he didn’t want that kind of propaganda attack to distract from the revelations, even though it would place him at some increased risk.

So it’s the week of the oil conference. A number of presidential jets are flying back, and we are considering one of these. And so, we then—our code language that we used deliberately swapped the presidential jet that we were considering for the Bolivian jet. And so we just spoke about Bolivia in order to distract from the actual candidate jet. And in some of our communications, we deliberately spoke about that on open lines to lawyers in the United States. And we didn’t think much more of it. We had engaged in a number of these distraction operations in the asylum maneuver from Hong Kong, for example, booking him on flights to India through Beijing and other forms of distraction, like Iceland, for example. We didn’t think this was anything more than just distracting.

But the U.S. picked up a statement, a supportive statement made in Moscow by President Evo Morales, and appears to have picked up our codeword for the actual operation, and put two and two together and made 22, and then pressured France—successfully pressured France, Portugal and Spain to close their airspace to President Evo Morales’s jet in its flight from Moscow to the Canary Islands for refueling and then back to Bolivia. And as a result, it was forced to land in Vienna. And then, once in Vienna, there was pressure to search the plane.

So, it’s really a quite extraordinary situation that reveals the true nature of the relationship between Western Europe and the United States and what it claims are its values of human rights and asylum and the rights to asylum and so, and respecting the rule of law, the Vienna Convention. Just a phone call from U.S. intelligence was enough to close the airspace to a booked presidential flight, which has immunity. And they got it wrong. They spent all that political capital in demanding this urgent favor to close the airspace, which was humiliating to those Western European countries, and they got it wrong.

A month has passed since American voters took to the polls to elect our next commander in chief, with a general consensus having pervaded public discourse that, love her or hate her, Hillary Clinton would become president. Her erstwhile opponent, Donald Trump, a reality television star viewed as crass and inept, having boasted about possibly sexually assaulting women in a now-infamous Access Hollywood tape, had all but forfeited the race.

In the weeks leading up to the election, Clinton exhibited dominance over her Republican challenger that lead some to speculate that she was running up the score as her campaign expanded into typically red states like Texas and Arizona. Following resounding victories in the election season’s presidential debates, Vox Editor-in-Chief Ezra Klein proclaimed to the world that “Hillary Clinton’s 3 debate performances left the Trump campaign in ruins.” Her polling numbers indicated a landslide was imminent. Pundits speculated that Donald Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes was slim to non-existent.

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Just hours after the stunning upset that proclaimed Donald Trump president-elect, the vultures began to circle around the scene of Secretary Clinton’s political death, the body, so to speak, not even cold yet. Senator Bernie Sanders, her democratic rival in the primary, who spent the tail-end of that campaign impugning Clinton’s integrity and questioning her qualifications to lead, hit the talk show circuit immediately. Despite having begrudgingly supported Clinton following his primary defeat, both at the Democratic National Convention and on the campaign trail through November, he seemed to almost gloat with a “told-ya-so” self-righteousness, openly implying that he should have been the nominee and offering prescriptions to the Democratic party.

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The problem with all of these analyses is that they are all painfully reductive, overly-narrow displays of revisionist history. These arguments are just. plain. wrong. Entertaining them without looking at the broader systemic failure at play is contributing to a pattern of failure by the media to fulfill their journalistic responsibility as editorial gatekeepers, an historic injustice against the most qualified candidate to ever run for the presidency and who won record-breaking votes, and a heinous narrative shift that holds us back from looking at, or solving, the real problem.

Hillary Clinton did not lose the 2016 presidential election. We did.

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Any and every discussion seeking to analyze why Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election MUST begin and end with the following as its central premise: “Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by 2.7 million.” Or, put in another way, “Hillary Clinton won more votes than any other presidential candidate in history, second only to Obama.” (Note: Cook Political Report believes that she may surpass Obama’s 2012 total, for good measure.)

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Soon enough the liberal progressive voter base supporting Sanders began to regurgitate the same right wing talking points and lies used to impugn Clinton’s integrity for decades. Once maligned for being a liberal harpy and socialist, Clinton was now subjected to the cruel injustice of having fellow progressives label her “too conservative,” a “war hawk,” an “imperialist.”

This of course was the same lot who believed it an omen of their candidate’s rightful claim to the presidency when a bird landed on his podium at a campaign event in Portland.

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This is just one of literally hundreds of examples of lies that have been propagated about Clinton over the years that have been packaged as news, or that legitimate news sources will falsely equivocate with the truth. and spread like wildfire through fake news channels. The time required to engage with and disprove each accusation point by point with each person who consumed it would be nearly impossible.

“Fake news” is a major problem that has had an out-sized effect on our politics and our presidential election. It is not a new phenomenon, but it has reached fever pitch. Until legislation is passed that addresses the problem and/or the heads of various social media companies implement policies to forbid them, the proliferation of fake news will continue to meddle with our elections.

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Democratic faithful thought by November that the damage done by Sanders’ hail-Mary strategy would soften and fade. A week before the election, “Benghazi” and “Hillary Clinton’s e-mails” were still ridiculous fodder being churned out by the mainstream media and consumed ravenously by the electorate. The media failed time and time again to call these stories for what they were. Outright lies.

Some argue, and I subscribe to the notion, that the media failed to report on false equivalencies during the general election campaign, and Clinton’s adversaries were able to malign and abuse her ad nauseum without any checks by the media, because of at least one obvious reason. No one wants to admit it, her adversaries scoff at it, and even women seem to downplay it’s significance throughout the 2016 presidential campaign: misogyny. The 2016 presidential election, much like in 2008, revealed staggering gender biases, mostly in the constant and baseless scrutiny of Clinton’s character.

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Women, after all, cannot seek power without being innately bad, evil, or corrupt. Gender studies experts have talked about this phenomenon at length, and yet we failed to highlight the way it was taking life in the campaign before our eyes.

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Clinton’s massive popular vote victory is important in that not only does it dispel shameful myths that this superb, historic candidate FAILED us in some way, but serves to highlight one of the real problems: the electoral college system of apportioning votes is no longer fair or representative. This is not to say that the electoral college must necessarily be abolished. But at the very least, it must see reforms that address the country’s vastly shifting demographics.

Donald Trump won the electoral college with 306 votes. 270 are needed to win the presidency. The states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, with their 10, 16, and 20 respective electoral votes, all went for Trump and gave him the edge he needed.

The chilling truth: Donald Trump won those three states with a total of 79,646 votes in an election where more than 136 million people cast their ballots. That’s less than a fraction of a percentage point.
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How can this be possible? Let’s pretend for a minute that the very real possibility of foreign interventionism is not a factor, or the unaddressed fact that overwhelming evidence suggest Russia interfered, and ignore investigative journalist Greg Palast’s stunning revelation that more than 3 million absentee and provisional ballots were wrongfully disqualified and thrown away uncounted.

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Subsequently, the Electoral College has not been updated to reflect the massive population and demographic shifts in America, or update the strength or apportionment of the votes.

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These are the same voters who crave social democracy, just so long as it isn’t called socialism, a dirty word amongst the majority of the American populace, and a flaw that Sanders, untested on the national stage, would have seen exposed in a general election match up.

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There has been a real and demonstrable systemic failure to protect the integrity of our elections that Americans, and yes the Electoral College, must wholly reject. This isn’t conspiracy theory. This isn’t conjecture. This isn’t poor sportsmanship. This isn’t even about Hillary Clinton anymore. This is about protecting our democracy. Free and fair elections are one of the cornerstones of American democracy and we have now seen credible reports that our rights thereto have been impeded upon by:

1) Voter suppression in North Carolina* and Wisconsin; 2) Russian interventionism via hacking in Florida’s election systems*; 3) FBI Director Comey’s willful and intentional release of documents meant to suggest criminal wrongdoing by the Democratic nominee a week before the presidential election; 4) The use of Wikileaks as an agent for a hostile foreign power to meddle with our election; 5) A systemic failure by the news media to serve as editorial gatekeepers, differentiate false equivalencies, or to report on falsehoods propagated about the Democratic nominee.* 6) A voter-cross check system that allowed millions of valid absentee, provisional, and machine-error ballots to be wrongfully disqualified.

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Allowing revisionists to shape the narrative and lay fault at the feet of Hillary Clinton for losing, whether expressly or impliedly, is a historic injustice that, if allowed to continue, only hurts us as a nation and as a democracy. It allows a shift in conversation away from crucial global and sociopolitical issues facing our society, and towards petty partisan squabbles and the unproductive blame game. If we do not respond to threats to our democracy, the epidemic of fake news, the various interventionist forces in our election, and demand action be taken, we are more culpable than either of the candidates in this election. Indeed, we are complicit in the downfall of democracy itself.

As always, it is never Hillary's fault. No matter how many of her supporters explain this loss.....it is on her not on anyhting that happened. Sorry.....I do not support Trump, but we cannot be blind to what happened and why.

On December 13 2016 04:44 Nyxisto wrote:


Historically Clinton isn't actually that trade-deal friendly and has a fairly ambiguous voting record on the issue. (http://www.ontheissues.org/2016/Hillary_Clinton_Free_Trade.htm)

I think people have simply been projecting Bill's positions onto her because he's the poster child of 90's liberalisation. She often disagreed with him on trade issues.

Also interesting that Obama attacked Clinton on NAFTA support in 1998 which ontheissues considers to be misleading, funny how everybody's positions have switched around.

On December 13 2016 05:57 Doodsmack wrote:


Now consider what correlates with that plummet - hacks and the FBI. I think it's pretty clear that without those, she would have won.