BROWNSTEIN: That's what's the most troubling, I thought, in this report. I mean kind of the insularity and the arrogance. Not so much the specifics of the e-mails, but about the kind of leadership style and what it says about how you might be as president. I did a panel a couple of years ago when Jim Baker and George Mitchell were winning the Lifetime achievement Award from the National Academy of Public Administration, and they each said the same thing, the toughest thing was to find someone who could tell a president they were wrong. And what was -- what was -- what was, I thought, most apparent in this report was that there was no one around her who was willing to tell her that she was wrong. And when people tried to raise questions, they were told to be quiet. That is a -- that was ominous traits for a president.But what about Trump? Are people around him able to tell him he's wrong? Peggy Noonan brought that up:
NOONAN: We talked about people around Hillary can't tell -- tell her the truth.... Who around Donald Trump says to him, boss, stop this, don't do that anymore, it's not nice?Speaking of Noonan, she also said this:
NOONAN: When you look at the tape of Mrs. Clinton saying things about the e-mails that have been shown to not of them true in the IG thing, she has been -- I hate to say lied, but she has lied coolly and -- in a creamy, practiced way. It doesn't look good.Creamy... I wrote that word down to search for in the transcript. Hillary lied in a coolly... creamy, practiced way.
ADDED: On the ABC show "This Week," Dianne Feinstein, the Hillary Clinton proxy, was confronted by Jonathan Karl:
KARL: But Mrs. Clinton has said -- that it was widely known that she was using her personal email. But, if you look at this report, it says that when State Department staffers expressed concerns about the arrangement, their supervisor, quote, "instructed the staff never to speak of the secretary's personal email system again." That sure sounds like somebody trying to hide something.Feinstein's answer was so weak, I almost don't want to copy it here. I'm embarrassed for her having to say something, but here it is:
FEINSTEIN: Whoa, wait a second. I don't believe she was trying to hide anything. I've known Hillary for a quarter of a century. Let me tell you what I do think, I think this is a woman who wants a little bit of a private life. She wants to be able to communicate with husband, with daughter, with friends, and not have somebody looking over her shoulder into her emails. Having said that, it is what it is. And you know I don't think we should make a federal case over it.Let's unpack that:
1. "Whoa, wait a second." Stalling for time.
2. "I don't believe she was trying to hide anything." Denial.
3. "I've known Hillary for a quarter of a century." Trying to vouch for her, but, really, owning up to bias. One likes one's friends.
4. "Let me tell you what I do think, I think this is a woman who wants a little bit of a private life. She wants to be able to communicate with husband, with daughter, with friends, and not have somebody looking over her shoulder into her emails." This is the heart of the argument, and it seems to evoke female privilege, to beg for deference to Hillary as a woman, but it's a kind of deference that, if we really believed it, would disqualify Hillary from working as Secretary of State and as President.
5. "Having said that...." The classic, empty transitional phrase.
6. "... it is what it is." That's just giving up!
7. "And you know I don't think we should make a federal case over it." And now she's regressed to talking the way I remember kids talking in grade school in the 1950s, when I didn't have the slightest idea what a "federal case" was. The fact is, obviously this is a federal case!
Posts
114 comments:
Of course Hillary! lies coolly, in a practiced,creamy way. Every public word she has spoken for decades has been a lie.
Trump has said his daughter Ivanka is one of the few people that can actually tell him when he's being a real a-hole and to tone it down.
Cold cream, Noxzema - - just smear it on and go to sleep.
I am still staggered by the fact that every Secretary of State from the last 4 or 5 presidential terms (most of the internet era) agreed to be interviewed for the OIG report. But not Hillary Clinton. Alone, Mrs. Clinton refused.
I suppose everybody has their own favorite talking point about this scandal and the investigation. That fact is my own #1.
Has anyone from the Clinton campaign offered any explanation? Why avoid the interview? They can't say, "Because she has a legitimate right to not incriminate herself." Because, of course, Mrs. Clinton claims that all of the investigations are perfunctory administrative matters. Not at all serious.
The Empress' New Pantsuit
It's a curious fact that, should Clinton be elected, the greatest security risk in the US government will be the President. I can imagine the arguments in the security agencies and the DOD about just what they can let her know.
It will be a strange situation.
The Big Issue is: Why doesn't she know right from wrong?
Is she setting up an insanity defense?
"When her staffers were asked about her private server system, they were told, do not ask about it again."
What? When they were asked, they were told?
The effort, led by that weasel Adam Schiff, to draw an equivalence with Colin Powell was worse. E-mail was much less important 12 years ago. No one has shown that Powell used AOL, the "private server" according to Schiff, for official business It may be that bringing a private lap top into the State Department floor where Powell's office was is now banned but it was probably not banned then.
This is going to take her down. Anyone who wonders about Hillary's private behavior should read "Unlimited Access" by Gary Aldrich.
White House staffers were not allowed to look at her as she walked through the West Wing.
Someone also tried to say that Trump is lying like she is. Trump may be a rolling PR disaster but he says what comes into his mind, I doubt he would bother to lie.
"What? When they were asked, they were told?"
When she took office, they tried to tell her that the private e-mail was not allowed and they were told never to mention that again.
I can imagine the arguments in the security agencies and the DOD about just what they can let her know.
It will be a strange situation.
Kaiser Wilhelm II was so erratic that his ministers did not tell him everything, in spite of his being head of state.
...the creamy, practiced mendacity of the Dowager Empress of Chappaqua.
You have to admit, this stuff practically writes itself. That Peggy Noonan is good with words, to be sure. That's a keeper.
What do the deleted emails show?
Answer: The details of her multi-million dollar bribery scheme
I think there are plenty of people around HRC who not only knew things were wrong but actively discussed with her how to evade criminal responsibility, avoid legal obstacles to what they wanted to do, how to best employ legerdemain to not be discovered in this process and more. The entire email server thing was employed for a purpose, done knowingly in contravention of the rules, with a plan in place for when publicity attached, and so forth.
This wasn't a case of people afraid to bring unpleasant things to Madame Secretary's attention. This was a design from Day One.
And remember, HRC is supposedly one of the brightest lawyers of her generation. The rules were not theoretical physics. They were straightforward policies written for entry level employees.
Hitler's military tried to tell him the truth about how the war was going....
Feinstein is a player in the criminal syndicate that is the California Democratic party. In a well-run country she and her husband would be in prison for corruption. They have enriched themselves through public contracts and exploiting legislation.
Feinstein is a player in the criminal syndicate that is the California Democratic party.
...and she's the good female Democratic senator from California........
..and she's the good female Democratic senator from California........ Yep. :-\
Sour cream...
Let's not forget the big difference between an email account, and a server.. when a person deletes email from a (yahoo, gmail etc) account, the email is still existing on the providers "server" and may be retrieved. . When you own the server, as Clinton did, the emails can be personally erased and destroyed forever. All the big time drug lords have their own servers.
Ron Brownstein doesn't listen to himself, because he contradicted himself two sentences in a row:
"There was no one around her who was willing to tell her that she was wrong."
"And when people tried to raise questions, they were told to be quiet."
Does Ronnie expect her staffers to slap her across the face then? They told her the truth; she told them to shut up.
what was, I thought, most apparent in this report was that there was no one around her who was willing to tell her that she was wrong.
The reason why there was no one around her to tell her she was wrong was because HRC had long ago banished from her presence anyone with the temerity to tell her she was wrong.
Could not this woman have the best & brightest of the political world of DC in her coterie? But, who are her lieutenants? Huma Abedin, Cheryl Johnson (who both at least appear to be human if morally challenged), Sidney Blumenthal, for chrissakes, & David Brock, a human being who makes Sidney Blumenthal seem normal, which takes a lot of work.
As my 86 year old mother posed this morning: "Why do all these politicians have personality disorders"?
Do you get the impression that the Democrats started off this election saying "Trump! That asshat couldn't get elected garbageman in a ten man town!" & now they see the polls & it seems that ain't the case no more. The Dems thought they'd come to the races with a horse that could run a hole in the wind, & now, all of of a sudden, they notice their horse seems to have a bum leg.
Vince Foster tried to tell her no.
No one *who was willing* to tell her that she was wrong?
My guess is that she had no one in her inner circle who thought she was wrong at all. She said in that debate that the enemy she is proudest of is, Republicans. I imagine she attracts people to work for her who share that sentiment. Opponents are one thing, but enemies? Just win.
The Clintons have been in the public eye since 1977 when Bill became attorney general in Arkansas. They have never acted differently. It is total B.S. when these media pundits act surprised now.
traditionalguy said...
Vince Foster tried to tell her no
Is the mention of "Vince Foster" a joke on the Clintons? Or is it a joke on the most-unhinged element of Clinton critics? Rightfully, it ought to be the latter.
"Vince Foster" could well be ancient history, unworthy of any jokes for or against any side; but not since Donald Trump bumbled his way into it, with another of his patented cheap-shots-but-hey-I'm-not-the-one-saying-it routines.
Di Fi is the smarter of the two current Senators from California. But occasionally she plays with an empty deck. However she's not a creamy good liar.
If the Clintons had, indeed, had Foster offed, do you really think we'd have found out about it? Really?
Male chauvinists are similarly arrogant and thereby insular.
@Chuck,
Is the mention of "Vince Foster" a joke on the Clintons? Or is it a joke on the most-unhinged element of Clinton critics?
One doesn't have to buy into any deep, dark conspiracy theories about Vince Foster to believe that his death is just one more piece of collateral damage to the body politic by the Clinton Machine.
Not a lot of folks in this forum like Jimmy Carter either, but JC isn't a tornado on two feet to everything & everybody in close proximity like the Clintons.
It goes without saying that noral scruples are off limit when it comes to a Clinton.
Now in terms of being pragmatically wrong, I am sure that people who know the secret reasons and motoves do counsel her, like her lawyers, maybe. And they probably counseled her to maintain a copy of all the e-mails she sent. Which she did.
She knew what she was doing. She once had government e-mail, and then, when there was an investigation, she had to "accidentally" delete two years worth of it and stop archiving. It as much simpler never to use government e-mail at all.
http://nypost.com/2016/05/29/hillary-has-been-burying-emails-since-she-was-first-lady/
In 1999, as investigators looked into Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate and other scandals involving the then-first lady, it was discovered that more than 1 million subpoenaed e-mails were mysteriously “lost” due to a “glitch” in a West Wing computer server.
The massive hole in White House archives covered a critical two-year period — 1996 to 1998 — when Republicans and special prosecutor Ken Starr were subpoenaing White House e-mails.
Despite separate congressional investigations and a federal lawsuit over Project X, high-level e-mails dealing with several scandals were never turned over. And the full scope of Bill and Hillary Clintons’ culpability in the parade of scandals was never known....
...During the Project X e-mail scandal, career White House staffers and contractors found that someone close to the first lady had basically turned off the White House’s automated e-mail-archiving system. They fingered White House “special assistant” Laura Crabtree Callahan, who was overseeing the computer contractors despite obtaining computer-science degrees from diploma mills.
And New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo also doesn't use government e-mail, or any orm of spontaneous unprepared communication that is archived.
http://www.pressconnects.com/story/news/local/new-york/2016/03/12/cuomo-shuns-email-leaving-trail/81686934/
Cuomo doesn’t have a state email account, according to his office. And his BlackBerry, which he has been known to use to communicate with his staff and confidants, isn’t owned by the state....
Cuomo is not alone among governors with a distaste for email.
Last month, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner explained to reporters why their open-records requests for his emails came up empty: He doesn’t use email. “None whatsoever,” he said.
“Email causes all kinds of trouble, as you’ve seen,” Rauner said, according to NPR Illinois. “And people send out spams, send emails, copy, forward — nothing good comes from that.”
"If the Clintons had, indeed, had Foster offed, do you really think we'd have found out about it? Really?"
Since we haven't found out about it, you're saying it's true?
"...During the Project X e-mail scandal, career White House staffers and contractors found that someone close to the first lady had basically turned off the White House’s automated e-mail-archiving system."
Wow.
Does Althouse have a "Hillary is like Nixon tag".
...there was no one around her who was willing to tell her that she was wrong.
This is Brownstein fishing for a way to deflate the mail server scandal into a staffing problem, as if Hillary is a Little Wooden Lady who only needs a Jiminy Cricket to fulfill the Blue Fairy's moral conditions and become a Real Live President. The reality is Hillary wants no one to tell her right from wrong; she's quite certain that whatever serves her purposes is Right and Fitting because she is who she is — a woman who wants and deserves power.
"Feinstein is a player in the criminal syndicate that is the California Democratic party."
She and Pelosi are the California Mafia, in more ways than one. Both have been feeding husbands empires for decades.
There was a famous B-52 crash, where the pilot was this "favored son" of the commander.
He would park in handicapped parking spaces, and no one would question him. Other pilots started refusing to fly with him because he was going outside the envelope, and the commander thought he was hot shit.
He killed his whole crew. Same as Clinton - she caused the death of people. There is no question people died for her arrogance.
The only people who want her to be President are murderers, rapists, and sexual perverts.
Hillary learned a lot from being a lawyer on the Watergate investigative committee, however she learned the wrong lesson.
YoungHegelian said...
@Chuck,
...
One doesn't have to buy into any deep, dark conspiracy theories about Vince Foster to believe that his death is just one more piece of collateral damage to the body politic by the Clinton Machine.
Yeah, you do. You really do have to buy into some of the deepest, darkest, looniest conspiracy theories of this young century, in order to take Donald Trump seriously. He's been a Birther. And a Vaxxer. And a Truther. He thought it suspicious that Justice Scalia died with a pillow "over his head" which was subsequently explained clearly by the people on the scene. There's Trump's own mention of the Vince Foster death, suggesting it was "fishy." Oh, and there was Trump suggesting that Ted Cruz's father was involved with Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination.
Before anyone suggests that we have to carefully scrutinize Trump's exact wording, and look for the strategic exit holes that Trump left in order to avoid being pinned down on the details of any of these conspiracy theories, just stop. Trump was not forced into any of these controversies. Trump waded into them on his own. Unforced, and even to the complete mystification of most observers.
There are some people who like these theories and believe in them. The name for most of those people is "stupid." The better ones are merely gullible, and the best ones rise to the level of "low information voters."
Isn't creamy sort of like blood coming out of her wherever? Sort of post-menopausal gender attack?
And the real problem is ...... No real reporters, and no real newspapers.
It's not about being afraid to contradict or question her. The email scheme was deliberate. We know this because we know that it's not like Clinton set up a private server herself, it's obviously something that would probably involve multiple technicians at least, plus political overseers.
So what you have is not people afraid to ask, but people who were not in on the crime asking the obvious question, then being hushed by people who were in on it. I don't see how there's any other way to look at it. These violations didn't happen accidentally because Clinton never heard that it was a bad idea. They happened because there was an organized effort to make them happen, and that's the only way they ever could happen.
Oh dear, Grampa Chuck forgot his meds again.
@Chuck,
Yeah, you do. You really do have to buy into some of the deepest, darkest, looniest conspiracy theories of this young century, in order to take Donald Trump seriously.
Chuck, how did a thread & comments on the walking disaster that is the Clinton Machine become yet another meditation by you on the vagaries of Donald Trump? Honestly, you're starting to step over the line into monomania here, buddy.
Donald Trump's problems with reality & HRC's problems with morality are just two completely different subjects.
"One doesn't have to buy into any deep, dark conspiracy theories about Vince Foster to believe that his death is just one more piece of collateral damage to the body politic by the Clinton Machine."
"Yeah, you do."
No you don't. I don't know if this is what YoungH meant, but I think you could believe that Foster committed suicide because of unsavory things that were happening that he was involved in or had knowledge about. Stuff that was killing his conscience. I'm not saying this is what happened, but it's believable. And not incompatible with the rush to "clean" records after his suicide.
"Yeah, you do. You really do have to buy into some of the deepest, darkest, looniest conspiracy theories of this young century, in order to take Donald Trump seriously."
Trump is no Vaxxer. You are a jackass. He is no Truther. You are a jackass. The birther stuff? He forced Obama to produce the birth certificate. Obama would have drug that out forever.
Paco Wové said...
Oh dear, Grampa Chuck forgot his meds again.
I'm not big on moderating comments, but a content-barren personal insult like that would earn a deletion of the comment and a suspension of the poster if I were the moderator.
Regarding Althouse's #4, I did a spit take. Female privilege? What the hell! Let's just skate right past the obvious problem with that answer and invoke something way down the line of logic. As long as I've ever had email and a job, I've had a work email and a separate personal email for privately talking with family, friends, etc. If she were in a location within the state department that precluded access to private email, then I bet there were dozens of others with identical restrictions who would equally like to have talked to their families etc. Even before the internet, people had multiple phone lines for different purposes. What kind of answer was that? And what kind of criticism of that answer was avoiding the BGO in order to invoke some completely unnecessary feminist angle.
That would be a great defense for a burglar. "Nobody was around to tell me it was wrong."
Speaking of Hillary's proxies, the Adam Schiff/Chris Wallace dust up this morning was worth the price of admission.
"That would be a great defense for a burglar. "Nobody was around to tell me it was wrong.""
Hillary's "If I had it to do over again..." is also rich. "If I had it to do over again, Your Honor, I wouldn't have robbed that bank".
Achilles said...
...
Trump is no Vaxxer. You are a jackass. He is no Truther. You are a jackass. The birther stuff? He forced Obama to produce the birth certificate. Obama would have drug that out forever.
This is the beatdown I have been yearning for.
Trump the Vaxxer; my primary source is the verified Twitter account of the real Donald Trump:
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/507158574670573568?lang=en
Much more, here:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/09/15/the-long-sordid-antivaccine-history-of-donald-trump/
Trump the Truther:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSJwgD0I91k
Technically, Trump may not be a "Truther" in the truthiest sense of that term. Trump has never said that he thinks 9/11 was an inside job by the CIA/Mossad/Trilateral Commission. However Trump's clear, unequivocating claim is that the Bush Administration (and it must be hundreds of people in on this particular game) "lied" their way into an invasion of Iraq. So Trump may or may not be a classic "Truther." Trump is a classic idiot, in any case.
Trump the Birther:
He claims to have sent his own investigators to Hawaii, to investigate Obama's birth, and Trump claimed then that his investigators "cannot believe what they are finding." "It's one of the greatest scams in the history of politics and in the history, period. You are not allowed to be a president if you're not born in this country. Right now, I have real doubts." Trump publicly claimed that his investigators would produce some "unbelievable" (Trump's own unique usage) results from the Trump investigation of the Obama birth.
But what does a simple investigation of Obama's birth look like? The Atlantic showed us:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/04/what-donald-trumps-birther-investigators-will-find-in-hawaii/237198/
And I am sorry about one thing; I should also have mentioned one other Trump-favored conspiracy theory. It was the bogus, not-a-whisper-of-truth claim that while on the Army general staff in the Philippines, General John J. Pershing instructed a firing squad to dip bullets in pig's blood before executing all but one Muslim rebel, sending the one survivor back to his comrades to tell them what had happened. That howler, used by Trump repeatedly on the stump, was debunked by every historian familiar with the details of that time.
Dianne Feinstein is rumoured to be a multi-millionaire Soviet mole.
Chuck,
Twenty years ago I would have agreed, and made fun of all conspiracy theories. Now, no. There is far too much I know of that has not been investigated correctly by anyone, much less the media. Insider dealing, convenient legislation, cover-ups and a mass of other goings-on tell me that we are dealing with massive system.
As for pigs blood - this is a story I have heard regarding the Philippine Constabulary. I also know for a fact that information of goings-on in those areas is, let us say, sketchy. You certainly could trot out a historian dealing in official archives and even personal memoirs (those he knows of) who will, with no idea how things go over there, say that something did or didn't happen. They will be wrong. I have been researching, for my own reasons, the campaign of 1941-42 and the subsequent guerilla war. It's amazing the holes that exist in the official histories.
Does no one in Clinton's wife' inner circle have the wherewithal to tell her the truth?
That assumes that Clinton's wife's inner circle has an agenda that differs from Clinton's. That agenda is amassing power and cash, into, and past the Presidency. And to be continued by that inner circle.
Seen in that light, what Clinton did was not wrong, as seen by her inner circle. It was the end justifying the means. Just as letting Bill have his perverse, abusive, sexual assualts and rape 'peccadillos' was the means to getting Bill into power, as long as he advanced the radical feminist agenda. A couple dozen female souls left to rot is a small price to pay, for having Bill carry the water.
The Clinton's really are a crime family. And like crime families, they get a cut of the illegal take. Why would the inner circle do what in not in their own self interest?
The birther stuff? He forced Obama to produce the birth certificate.
Obama used to mock the birthers. I wonder how Obama knew where he was born?
I used to have my real birth certificate from the late 1950s. It had my footprints, it was filled out by hand. It also had my race written on it. It said I was born in Minneapolis, and of course, all my life various relatives have told me I was born in Minneapolis. I don't remember the occasion, myself. When I was in my teens I was introduced to the doctor who delivered me. He didn't look familiar at all :)
I lost the original birth certificate and ordered a replacement from Hennepin county. It looked like a car title, it just had name, age, parents' names, and place of birth. No footprints, no race info. And they spelled my mother's middle name wrong (they changed 'Janice' to 'Najice'). According to some anti-birthers, this means that my mother's middle name must be 'Najice' because an official birth certificate can never be wrong and you are crazy to even question it.
Of course it is at least as certain that Obama was born in Oahu and not Kenya as it is that Reagan was born Illinois and not County Tipperary. That doesn't mean that the six month old 'real' Obama could not have been swapped for another six month black child (our Obama) from God knows where. Ditto Reagan (except for the Black part).
Anyway, suppose you managed to prove Obama was not a natural born citizen. What would happen? All the laws he signed would become void and he would be led out of the White House in handcuffs? Really?
Blogger coupe said...
Dianne Feinstein is rumoured to be a multi-millionaire Soviet mole.
There are no Soviets anymore. There are still KGB agents. The USSR is gone, but they just changed the name "KBG" to "FSB".
Forget about the outlandish stories about the Clintons, the ones that are plausible are bad enough. She was involved in the Whitewater Real Estate Scam which involved worthless but nonetheless overpriced "resort or retirement property." The lots were sold to poor people at low monthly payments and if the buyers missed a single payment, the land escheated back to the MacDougals and the Clintons. The land was completely worthless and could not be developed. But the real money was in foreclosing previous contracts and selling the same property over and over again. As one wag described the land, "It ain't at the end of the world but you can see it from there." Then there was the cattle futures scam in which she told the most ludicrous lies to explain how she could make a fast fortune in cattle futures contracts that would have been quite a feat for an experienced broker and trader. At bottom, it was a bribery scam, similar to these six figure speaking fees. Hillary Clinton is a low down crook with a degree from the Yale Law School. A modified version of Henry Ford's theory of history applies to the Clintons: it's just one damned crooked thing after another. And one damned lie after another.
Re Moros and pigs blood.
Yep, I was right, it was done by the Philippine Constabulary. It's even in Snopes.
"Jungle Patrol", Hurley, Kershaw and Harris, 1938, a history of the Philippine Constabulary. Many of the officers were Americans so it found a US publisher.
It's a bit disingenuous to claim "It didn't happen" when it really did, and quite a lot of it too. The detail about whether Pershing himself ordered it is a bit pettifogging, if the only important error is that these incidents happened later under the command of Leonard Wood.
And the Snopes excusatron misrepresents things through selective quotation. Both Pershing and Leonard Wood killed thousands of Moros.
Chuck said...
'There are some people who like these theories and believe in them. The name for most of those people is "stupid." The better ones are merely gullible, and the best ones rise to the level of "low information voters."'
Chuck, why does one have to be stupid to believe that in 1961, a young white woman pregnant with a black child arranged to have someone other than the father claim paternity?
"a content-barren personal insult like that would earn a deletion of the comment and a suspension of the poster if I were the moderator."
Chuck, just consider it punctuation in your comments. The "Birther" thing was begun by Hillary in 2008. They might well have picked up something about Obama's admission to HLS. I don;t know. Trump pushed it until the birth certificate was put out although it does not seem to an original.
As for "vaxxers" half of West Hollywood fits that description.
Calm down, chuck.
Since Hillary believes her ends are always justifiable, she also believes any means required to meet those ends is likewise justifiable.
How long before Hillary supporters will refuse to make public spectacles of themselves?
Hillary, back then, looked for advice from a suicidal man. He probably wasn't the most grounded person around, but he was a senior advisor. Nowadays, she looks to Huma. Huma's choice of employers is on a par with her choice of husbands. There's reason to believe that Huma's judgment and perspicacity isn't all that great, but there she is......... There are way too many fishy people and occult machinations around the Clintons.
If you were one of Hillary's advisors, would you want to get a reputation as a 'troublesome priest'? How'd that work out for Vince Foster?
Michael K said...
...
The "Birther" thing was begun by Hillary in 2008.
No, it wasn't. It may have been helped along by some political dirty tricksters who were aligned with the Hillary '08 campaign, but she didn't "begin" it, and it is a lie for you to persist in that.
And what kind of response is that, anyway? I don't fucking care who started it! It was a moronic notion from the start. A stupid, idiotic baseless charge on the part of everyone and anyone who made it. And almost no one short of Orly Taitz made a bigger fucking ass out of themselves in the "birther" controversy than Mr. Donald Trump.
Who the fuck cares whether it is a "record of live birth"? What constitutional difference would it have made, if Barack Obama's father was Mr. Obama, or Malcolm X, or Martin the Martian? Barack Hussein Obama was born to an American mother, in Honolulu. Where is the legal issue after that?
Trump pushed it until the birth certificate was put out although it does not seem to an original.
No, Trump was sort of unique among the high priests of Birtherism in that he kept it up long after the birth certificate was produced.
No, it wasn't. It may have been helped along by some political dirty tricksters who were aligned with the Hillary '08 campaign, but she didn't "begin" it, and it is a lie for you to persist in that.
Man..I'm sure glad Chuckles doesn't defend Democrats,,,can you imagine the type of things he might write if he did?
Re birtherism
People aligned with the Hillary 08 campaign are at least in theory agents of Hillary. What's the point of making this distinction? It is pettifogging.
And secondarily, there is quite a set of mysteries about Obamas background, not least his birth. Not whether he is a citizen, but there seems to be lot being hidden, I think this may include who his father really was. More to the point, such an inquiry may extract information as to his university career, who paid for it, what his qualifications were, whose protege he was (because he was someone's protege). Such as for instance his easy entree into Chicago leftist circles. I suspect they understood that he was family.
Decades from now when we are all dead I am sure some interesting details will emerge.
I found that was a poor proxy to understanding obama's thinking, a better one was the window jodi cantor offered in her profile of his lectures at chicago, which was not explored again till charles johnson, rediscovered derrick bells' influences in the primer,
how times have changed,
http://nation.foxnews.com/president-obama/2012/03/07/obama-harvard-tapes-exposed-hannity
Blogger buwaya puti said.
And secondarily, there is quite a set of mysteries about Obamas background, not least his birth.
It doesn't help when Obama makes statements about his past that are known to be incorrect and the media not only doesn't correct him, it pays no attention at all.
Obama has said, more than once, that his father left his mother when he was two years old. Here for example:
Even though my father left us when I was two years old, and I only knew him from the letters he wrote and the stories that my family told, I was luckier than most.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/us/politics/15text-obama.html
In fact there is no evidence that Obama's parents ever lived together as husband and wife. Obama was born on August 4, 1961 on Oahu. His mother moved to Seattle with Obama within a few weeks, at most, of Obama's birth. Ann Dunham was enrolled at the University of Washington for the fall semester of '61. Obama's father remained on Oahu to finish his undergrad degree in economics at Manoa. In '63 Obama Sr. went to Harvard, and Dunham returned to Oahu.
One of the many theories re Obama is that his true father was Frank Marshall Davis, a longtime friend of the family, and apparently a surrogate father of sorts.
Since Davis was well connected (through communist front groups) and well known to the scene, I suspect Barak was considered a red diaper baby and received surreptitious help through the network.
I don't think so, I think he was a major influence though, frank davis adored stalin, hated general motors and the military, who does that sound like,
are you from the phillipines, that is tagalog no, and have you read him:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3401500542.html
BHO looks like Obama Sr., he does not look like Davis. Stanley Ann Dunham was a weird chick. She was obviously reacting against her utterly bourgeois roots (regardless of her parents encouraging this). Obama's biography is not that of a moderate. He has a habit of saying things that sound moderate but have no force of law, such as in his speech at Howard University:
“There’s been a trend around the country of trying to get colleges to disinvite speakers with a different point of view or disrupt a political rally,” Obama said at his commencement addresses at Howard University.
“Don’t do that, no matter how ridiculous or offensive you might find the things that come out of their mouths,” the president said. “Because as my grandmother used to tell me, every time a fool speaks, they are just advertising their own ignorance. Let them talk.
“Listen, engage, if the other side has a point, learn from them. If they’re wrong, rebut them, teach them, beat them on the battlefield of ideas.”
Meanwhile his political appointees institute a hard-Left socialist agenda. Lynch says the that laws keeping biological men out of ladies rooms are abominations, HUD secretary Castro says landlords cannot protect their non-felon tenants by refusing to rent to felons.
F Sionil Jose, yes, some of it. "My Brother My Executioner" and the other one in that cycle.
He writes in English. He taught at La Salle but after my time. I used to drop by Solidaridad every week or so, in my college days!
I read the first two, very interesting insights in 20th century phillipines,
The most insight I have had on the twentieth-century Philippines I've had recently is "An Anarchy of Families", McCoy.
Its amazing so much of the "big picture" we all missed living inside, when someone looking from the outside put it together.
Also worth reading, and F Sionil Jose would agree, is get Rizals "Noli" and "Fili". They are the foundation of so much.
i'm skeptical because of his earlier work 'the politics of heroin, but you could look at most countries in south asia, and one sees a similar pattern,
I just finished a biography of Pershing by Jim Lacey. Lacey claims the story of the Moros being buried with pigs [not shot with bullets dipped in pigs' blood] came from Pershing's own unpublished diary. Whether or not it actually happened, the story is not without foundation.
this dynamic does help explain how duterte, an odd character, but not as odd as some of this rivals like triana won,
mockturtle said...
I just finished a biography of Pershing by Jim Lacey. Lacey claims the story of the Moros being buried with pigs [not shot with bullets dipped in pigs' blood] came from Pershing's own unpublished diary. Whether or not it actually happened, the story is not without foundation.
No, the story is completely untrue. Some glimmer of largely-unrelated partial truth does not make Trump's story valid.
Did you watch the video of Trump's leering, lurid telling of the story? Mentioning Pershing by name, with the entire point being a sort of, 'This is how you treat the Muslims with toughness...'
When in fact the story, if true, would have merited a court martial for Pershing and as such it is a slander perpetrated by the malignant and wholly unserious Trump.
And what a perversion by the rat-bastard Trump today, to appear in front of the Rolling Thunder rally. A rally founded on activism on behalf of American POW's and MIA in Vietnam. You know the Vietnam POW's; the people that Donald Trump didn't like so much. Trump likes people who weren't captured.
Somebody should have kicked Trump in the balls today.
No one was willing to tell the Sec. of State that she was doing something wrong. Not even the President. Very strange. I guess the buck stops somewhere else in Obama's administration.
Has anyone ever asked Obama when he knew about this email server setup -- presumably it would've been the first email that he received from Hillary that came from that server; either he would've noticed the email address or one of his system administrators would've caught it and notified him. Why didn't he call his Sec. Of State to talk about this breach of security protocol? (If his computer security staff didn't inform him of the server setup, why not? Have they been fired for incompetence?)
This would've been a major Watergate-type scandal if it took place during a Republican administration. It will be nice to have a Republican back in the Oval office so that we have someone who can be held accountable for his actions.
Bottom line: Hillary is unfit to be President since she has proven incapable of following simple rules relating to national security. And Obama and his computer security staff have some 'splaining to do. (I won't hold my breath waiting for him to do it.)
Somebody should have kicked Trump in the balls today.
Cowboy up Chuckles.
so pershing's own words don't count, huh, alrighty that.
Obama could have cleared up ALL the controversies about his background in one weekend but he hasn't. He doesn't want to so he spins out lies and the media are his lapdogs. These stories won't go away because he has told various lies in various situations. If he wasn't born in Kenya, why did he say he was born in Kenya in the publicity campaign for his first autobiography? Did he lie about his nationality when he applied to Occidental College, in order to qualify for Foreign Student loans? How did he manage to get a Connecticut Social Security Number when he never lived in Connecticut? His supporters call the people who raise these questions stupid, but Obama is the really stupid person here.
In my opinion, we are now coming to the end of one of the most damaging Presidencies in American History, perhaps second only to James Buchanan's. Obama's defenders and enablers in both parties need to understand this: Trump is the wage you will pay for Obama's feckless regime.
Chuck, that's nuts.
Nobody was court martialled for this, not in that sort of war.
The books referenced are available.
Your remaining argument rests on quibbles at best.
Concede, you are defeated.
oh dear, it's the argument clinic, with that I bid adieu,
Why wouldn't this qualify as a RICO case. A cabal of left wingers takes over a branch of the government and conspires to keep the public from knowing about it.
If you have advisors, you have peninsularity.
Bill Peschel said...
Ron Brownstein doesn't listen to himself...
He didn't say that such concerns were expressed to her directly. There's no contradiction if her enablers are the ones who not only refused to raise doubts, but who also told the "underlings" at State to mind their own business.
YoungHegelian "The reason why there was no one around her to tell her she was wrong was because HRC had long ago banished from her presence anyone with the temerity to tell her she was wrong."
This in spades.
Hillary was totally corrupt and unprincipled from the beginning. A thoroughly nasty and vicious creature even to her loyal subordinates.
"Creamy" indeed. Watch the Clinton videos at the beginning of the MSNBC clip with Mika.
http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/mika-it-feels-like-clinton-is-lying-straight-out-693313091808
Creamy. This is what lying looks like.
I don't really know what to do with this kind of thing. "Okay - I may talk to you again if I think you might have a good idea. But please never waste my time telling me anything where I have to trust what you are saying."
Blogger buwaya puti said...
Chuck, that's nuts.
Nobody was court martialled for this, not in that sort of war.
The books referenced are available.
Your remaining argument rests on quibbles at best.
Concede, you are defeated.
You can't even read, apparently.
I never said anybody was court martialed for what was described by Trump. I said it never happened. And certainly not as Trump described. What I said was that if General Pershing had done what Trump suggested, it would have been a war crime for which Pershing would have been rightly court martialed. And is therefore a slander on the part of Trump. Trump told a story which, if true (it wasn't) would have accused Pershing of a war crime.
But nobody worried about that. Because General Pershing, a decorated war hero, is long dead. And Donald Trump is a national joke.
Remember the level of Trump's arrogant mendacity in all of this. Trump didn't tell the story as if he were revealing a little-known fact that he had been privy to somehow (in his years of work as a military historian and scholar, no doubt). Trump said that it was a story that could be found in all of the history books. As if everybody knew the story; that it was accepted history about which there was no doubt. (Where does Trump even get this stuff from?)
He's a laughable monster.
There's a big difference between right/wrong, and truth/lie, versus opinion and politeness. Hillary accepts no one who disagrees with here and ends their career. This "cornered rat" syndrome is very dangerous.
He's a laughable monster.
Then don't vote for him.
I love it when her supporters emphasize that she produced 55,000 emails. Right, emails that legally she had no right to have in her possession.
Insularity and arrogance that led to criminality, corruption, treason, sexist denunciations of women her husband assaulted, and so on and so on.
Her problem is not her arrogance, it is her behavior and her policies.
Referring to them as "Hillary's emails" or "her emails" is a misnomer playing into her narrative. They were at all times "official government emails sent to or from Secretary Clinton."
From Larry's bio, which in crimethink to point out, how the juramentados were dealt with.
Lacey's bio of pershing mentioned above.
I have the book on my kindle and Lacey quotes directly from Pershing's diary of the practice of burying the Muslim juramentados with pigs. It should also be emphasized that Patton's relations with the Moros of the Philippines was very good overall. He showed respect for their leaders and used violence [and pigs] only when it became necessary to send a message.
Pershing's, not Patton's. ;-)
steve uhr said... 5/30/16, 9:35 AM
I love it when her supporters emphasize that she produced 55,000 emails. Right, emails that legally she had no right to have in her possession.
It's 55,000 [ages of e-mails.
The provision that government records should not be retained after someone leaves office wasn't written with this set-up in mind, but then nothing was written with this set-up in mind.
*pages of e-mails.
They wren't, of course, kept in printed-out-on-paper form. That was only done to fristrate search and retrieval (it didn't so much, because now there are good optical scanners, and the State Department was willing to spend the time and money to get it donw)
And to avoid disclosing the metadata, and things like message numbers.
People have to stay loyal to Hillary, or else she won't pay for their lawyers.
richardsson said...5/29/16, 11:54 PM
If he wasn't born in Kenya, why did he say he was born in Kenya in the publicity campaign for his first autobiography?
He didn't write that. His literary agent did, because she was guessing, and the book would be more intresresting to publishers (There's nothing like that in the book, though, and thats the sort of thinbg you want borne out in the book)
And Obama didn't correct it, because, well, the book might sell more or get a bigger advance etc..
He didn't correct it until he starting running for president.
Did he lie about his nationality when he applied to Occidental College, in order to qualify for Foreign Student loans?
Usually foreign students pay more, not less.
How did he manage to get a Connecticut Social Security Number when he never lived in Connecticut?
That Social security number is not his - it's his father's, and was probably obtained when he was living in Massachusetts. Prior to Feb. 1974, anybody in the world could get a U. S. Social Security number.
Anybody who knows enough to ask the question, also knows enough to know the answer.
Chuck: Where does Trump even get this stuff from?)
Some people working for him, or maybe Vladimir Putin.
Wait - Trump probably gets a lot of it from people who communicate with him via Twitter.
Who tweet tweets containing the string @realDonaldTrump and are not on his blacklist, or whatever tghey call it; or better yet, whom he is following.
It would not have worked, because they weren't really so religious. Maybe this was tried somewhere else.
Terry: In fact there is no evidence that Obama's parents ever lived together as husband and wife.
They did, but not for long after he was born.
Terry: I lost the original birth certificate
I think that's also what happened with Obama.
Donald Trump, a few years ago, produced his original birth certificate from 1946, and then he was told, that's not worth anything any more. Only later certified copies have any legal validity. That is on the grounds nobody knows - a few experts might know - bit the people charged with accepting them don't know - what they are supposed to look like, there being hundreds and hundreds of different styles. The ones issued later are supposed to be more counterfeit proof, also.
What I'd like to know is Bill Clinton;s original date of birth, because I think he changed it to avoid the draft.
Bill Peschel said...5/29/16, 3:14 PM
"And when people tried to raise questions, they were told to be quiet."
Does Ronnie expect her staffers to slap her across the face then? They told her the truth; she told them to shut up.
It wasn't Hillary Clinton herself who told them that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/us/politics/hillary-clinton-state-department-email-inquiry.html?_r=0
According to the inspector general’s report, two records information officials in the department raised concerns as early as 2010 that emails sent and received on Mrs. Clinton’s server might contain information that should be preserved under federal law.
Their superior told them that the arrangement had been reviewed and approved, though the inspector general found “no evidence” that this had happened. The supervisor told them their job was to support the secretary and “instructed the staff never to speak of the secretary’s personal email system again.”
The report did not name the supervisor, but several people with knowledge of the episode identified him as John Bentel, the former director of information resource management in the State Department’s Executive Secretariat office. Randall J. Turk, a lawyer for Mr. Bentel, declined to comment Thursday.
Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, mentioned Mr. Bentel’s role in remarks Thursday on the Senate floor, and complained that Mr. Bentel had refused a request to speak with the committee.
In all probability, John Bentel flat-out lied to his subordinates.
He retired from the State Department in Dec. 2012, at the about the time Hillary Clinto was leaving. He refused to talk to Congress, claiming, in a letetr written by his attorney, to have no emory or knowledge about the server. The attorney is a very expensive lawyer, and probably paid for by the Clintons in some way. He previously represented a key figure in the Filegate controversy
http://dailycaller.com/2016/03/15/filegate-attorney-represents-state-dept-tech-official-who-is-silent-on-hillary-server/
It doesn't say who.
John Bentel had been working there in the satte Department for 39 years, so may not always have been corrpt or a loyal hack all that time, but this bears further investigation..
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