Cgate
August 11, 2015 9:10 PM   Subscribe

Hillary Clinton instructed aides today to give the Justice Department computer equipment that had been used as a private email server while she was Secretary of State. Earlier in the day, the Inspector General for Intelligence stated that two of the 30,000 "work-related" emails that Clinton turned over to the State Department in December were now considered Top Secret (a larger number were earlier deemed to be Classified at a lower level).

In a sworn affidavit submitted Monday to a federal judge (presiding over a Freedom of Information suit by conservative group Judicial Watch) Clinton stated that her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, did not have an account on the private server but advisor Huma Abedin did have a private account. The judge ordered the State Department to instruct all three not to destroy any records.

In March, Clinton explained that an additional 30,000 non-work--related emails had been deleted off the server (previously). However, amidst emails subpoenaed by a House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks of 2012 --- from Sidney Blumenthal, a former Clinton advisor --- 15 were found that had not been previously released by Clinton.

Also previously
posted by pjenks (207 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Babe Winkleman is the chief investigator on this expedition, confirm/deny?
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 9:12 PM on August 11, 2015 [2 favorites]


Clinton stated that her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, did not have an account on the private server but advisor Huma Abedin did have a private account.

I hope nothing in that account puts the Clinton campaign in danger.
posted by Drinky Die at 9:17 PM on August 11, 2015


Hillary Clinton will never be president. It's not the email thing alone that will do her in, so much as the overall impression that she has no real principles, an impression the email scandal certainly reinforces.
posted by jayder at 9:24 PM on August 11, 2015 [15 favorites]


Based purely on MeFi comments lately, every single nominee across all parties will never get elected.
posted by MysticMCJ at 9:26 PM on August 11, 2015 [133 favorites]


Which is worse: a president with no principles, or a president with overtly terrible ones?

#vote2016
posted by saturday_morning at 9:27 PM on August 11, 2015 [24 favorites]


Yeah email regulations are a pain in the ass. I have them at my work too. I'm fairly certain if I decided/tried to use an alternate server my employer, the SEC, FINRA and god herself would all come down on me, and I would most likely never be able to work in my field again. Why this is supposed to be okay for someone in her position of authority is beyond me.
posted by H. Roark at 9:30 PM on August 11, 2015 [19 favorites]


So far, the explanation for why it is okay seems to be that Republicans did it too. Same as always.
posted by Drinky Die at 9:32 PM on August 11, 2015 [1 favorite]


THIS IS EXCELLENT NEWS!! FOR HILLARY!!
posted by un petit cadeau at 9:33 PM on August 11, 2015 [1 favorite]


It's not the email thing alone that will do her in, so much as the overall impression that she has no real principles

It's hard to credit this when the Republican front-runner is Donald Trump. I'm not being flippant, either: I don't know what you could point to, to demonstrate that an apparent lack of principles is some sort of detriment to presidential aspirations.
posted by fatbird at 9:33 PM on August 11, 2015 [17 favorites]


But it can't be the same if it's not what it seems.
posted by clavdivs at 9:34 PM on August 11, 2015 [3 favorites]


The impression that she has no principals is brought to you by the Koch brothers. This scandal is just another pile of shit brought to you by the right wing hate machine. Im disgusted by the ridicuous and baseless attacks on Hillary. The suggestion that she has no principles is as baseless as BLM protestors attacking Bernie Sanders in Seattle. Typical liberal circular firing squad.
posted by humanfont at 9:43 PM on August 11, 2015 [32 favorites]


Come on, she campaigned for Goldwater for petes sake.
posted by clavdivs at 9:44 PM on August 11, 2015 [7 favorites]


oh, I see, her campaign logo is the, "forward" button on my email reader.


posted by alex_skazat at 9:48 PM on August 11, 2015 [3 favorites]


there was no breach of email rules. the rules were modified after she shut down the servers. the classification is post-hoc.
posted by j_curiouser at 9:57 PM on August 11, 2015 [18 favorites]


Yeah, it's pretty obvious the bullshit machine figured out that Bengazi!!! wasn't going to work, so now they'll try out this email thing. This isn't going to work either.

If this is the strongest thing the GOP has, '16 is not going to be a very hard campaign for the Dems.
posted by sideshow at 9:58 PM on August 11, 2015 [8 favorites]


#FeelTheBern
posted by Golden Eternity at 9:59 PM on August 11, 2015 [35 favorites]


I won't say "it's okay because republicans do it too," but it does seem to me that the U.S. government has flatly never gotten this right, so this happening with Hillary Clinton is less gross negligence as it is a lack of any clear or coherent standard whatsoever. As is typical, this has already come out in one case, when the George W Bush White House was found to be using RNC accounts and private servers for official business. When it happened to the republicans, their reaction was to flatly delete absolutely everything and deny any wrongdoing. It worked, and there was so much else going on they managed to slip under the radar - largely because Democrats didn't make it an issue, being focused on other things. Clinton's response is going to be different; she's clearly intent on being transparent and accountable to the American people. Let's see how far that gets her.
posted by koeselitz at 10:01 PM on August 11, 2015 [34 favorites]


Based purely on MeFi comments lately, every single nominee across all parties will never get elected.

We're like a stopped clock with 719 hands.
posted by Freelance Demiurge at 10:02 PM on August 11, 2015 [37 favorites]


The impression that she has no principals is brought to you by the Koch brothers. This scandal is just another pile of shit brought to you by the right wing hate machine. Im disgusted by the ridicuous and baseless attacks on Hillary. The suggestion that she has no principles is as baseless as BLM protestors attacking Bernie Sanders in Seattle. Typical liberal circular firing squad.

I literally have no idea whether or not this is sarcasm.
posted by teraflop at 10:03 PM on August 11, 2015 [33 favorites]


My brother makes his living as a systems administrator taking care of databases that track money transfers for the Department of the Treasury. He works for a private contractor. He has clearances out the wazoo, in the past 10 years I've been interviewed to vet these clearances again and again.

In the DC area there's an entire industry of IT support firms that know the law and can provide secure services. I'd be happy to learn Clinton used a professional service to secure her electronic communications as the Secretary of State. But it doesn't sound like that was the case, it sounds like she had her own service and they muddled through it as best they could.
posted by peeedro at 10:15 PM on August 11, 2015 [3 favorites]


Is there anything she's done (legally, I might add; the rules were changed after she left office ffs and I'd expect the Mefi crew to be more cognizant of details like that) that Colin Powell or the entire GWB White House didn't do?

That's what I thought.

Bottom line, it's going to be her or Sanders (or both, if one picks the other as VP) on the ticket. If Trump is on the ticket in any capacity, the Dems could run a potted plant and it would win.

I think she's very smart to get this out now, giving the wingnut noise machine 15 months to get bored of it.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:19 PM on August 11, 2015 [15 favorites]


I predict a 2016 Hillary landslide.

She isn't perfect but she's smart, she's qualified, she has world leader respect and I prefer her over the other clowns in the 2016 clown car.

BUT... BUT... Bernie Sanders!

I'm sorry but we can't even get people to stop buying bottled water in this country. The best ideas and the best people don't win, the people and the ideas backed by the most money do.

that's a dark cynical thing to say, but it's true.

Yes, I'm thankful for Bernie's voice and ideals in the race to help push Clinton out of her hawkish comfort zone, but he's an outsider with a smaller base and not a lot of party support.

Without a LOT of money behind them, people don't make it to the next round because they get outspent and out messaged.

The media will sell this one as anyone's election up until the last minute, but she's going to crush it.
posted by bobdow at 10:23 PM on August 11, 2015 [10 favorites]


yay, election season!
posted by vrakatar at 11:19 PM on August 11, 2015 [10 favorites]


"The impression that she has no principals is brought to you by the Koch brothers."

What about the fact that she supported the Iraq War? You can't tell me she supported it on principle. If she did, that's even worse.

The email thing is just another example of her lack of judgment. It may or may not have been legal, but it was predictable that it would be used against her.
posted by mikeand1 at 11:22 PM on August 11, 2015 [6 favorites]


“Did Hillary Clinton emails reveal location of ambassador killed in Benghazi attack?” Lauren Carroll, The Tampa Bay Times PunditFact, 11 August 2015
posted by ob1quixote at 11:25 PM on August 11, 2015 [1 favorite]


I personally think this situation is pretty messed up, but it's also extremely confusing and unclear so I don't really blame anybody for disagreeing on this one. The Clintons have faced so much phony scandal that there is a very valid crying wolf effect going on.
posted by Drinky Die at 11:39 PM on August 11, 2015 [19 favorites]


I think this email business is pretty bad, I don't like the idea that sensitive emails to the Sec. Of State were not in a secure setup with auditing etc. I remember hearing that she used a third party service for virus scanning, if that is true then every email was unsafe or out of a secured setup for a spell.


But I have to say who in the govt failed to notice that the official inbox was empty? That should have been stepped on quick.

Is it a DQ for a POTUS seat? I tend to think not. But it was at best boneheaded.
posted by drowsy at 11:58 PM on August 11, 2015


A republican member of congress told the New York Times that Hillary was under investigation by the DOJ for mishandling email. This turned out to be a lie. Congressional republicans have been selectively leaking edited versions of her emails to attack her, only to be shown to be taking things out of context when the whole email is released. Objectively it was smart for her to mantain control over the server. It gave her the ability to keep her enemies from having immediate and total control over the information on the hard disk.
posted by humanfont at 11:59 PM on August 11, 2015 [9 favorites]


I used to head over to Talking Points Memo for a more nuanced take on stuff like this, but I guess they're just too busy covering who's Tweeting what about Donald Trump.
posted by one_bean at 12:01 AM on August 12, 2015 [5 favorites]


She isn't accountable to her political enemies, she's accountable to the public. You don't give all the communication of the Secretary of State over to a private entity with no real oversight in an era where you are prosecuting people for leaks like crazy. If another Snowden or Manning had been on the IT staff she hired, what then?
posted by Drinky Die at 12:05 AM on August 12, 2015 [8 favorites]


Snowden was on the IT staff hired by the NSA to safeguard our most sensitive infrastructure. This would seem to be an argument in favor of her personally hiring and vetting trusted system admin, rather than blindly trusting some random government IT contractor.
posted by humanfont at 12:28 AM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


She wasn't hired to make IT decisions for the American government, she was hired to lead our foreign policy.
posted by Drinky Die at 12:34 AM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


"Snowden was on the IT staff hired by the NSA to safeguard our most sensitive infrastructure."

Actually, Snowden worked for a private contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton.
posted by mikeand1 at 12:50 AM on August 12, 2015 [7 favorites]


Not a huge Hillary fan, but if it's her or a Republican, then hello Madame President!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:18 AM on August 12, 2015 [12 favorites]


Bernie got 28k supporters last night to wait for hours to hear him talk. I was there. I've never seen anything like it. He's now polling ahead of Hillary in NH.

I think either Dem will beat the GOP nominee, though. There are fewer angry white people and more cosmopolitan 18 year olds daily.
posted by persona au gratin at 1:19 AM on August 12, 2015 [10 favorites]


And I think Hillary will make a good president. As Obama has. Bernie would be great, though.
posted by persona au gratin at 1:20 AM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


There have been decades of fake scandals and outrage, but there is also a pattern of such transparent opportunism with her. The Iraq war vote is a good example (or moving to NYC to get elected in the first place, for that matter), and the clumsy attempt to bypass email rules fits into that. So while I don't think it is a huge issue in and of itself, the email thing is not helping her, either.
posted by Dip Flash at 3:47 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


> She isn't accountable to her political enemies, she's accountable to the public.

In reality, the way things actually work, she is more accountable to her political enemies (and friends) than to the public, and this is why things are so messed up in politics. Public opinion is just poker chips to play out the game with. It is your political friends and enemies that determine how many of those chips end up in your corner.

Politicians are accountable to those who get them elected, not those who elect them.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 4:38 AM on August 12, 2015 [5 favorites]


I think this is an incredible screwup that seriously damages her credibility and I'm a Hillary Clinton supporter. Even leaders have to follow the rules of their own organizations.
posted by miyabo at 4:45 AM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


clavdivs: "Come on, she campaigned for Goldwater for petes sake."

Seriously? That was half a century ago and she was 16 years old.
posted by octothorpe at 4:50 AM on August 12, 2015 [13 favorites]


This is the biggest scandal since Obama covered up his Kenyan birth.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 5:14 AM on August 12, 2015 [16 favorites]


I will support whoever is the Dem candidate to the hilt, but I'm disappointed the Clinton campaign isn't any better now than it was eight years ago.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 5:16 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Absent evidence of specific ill-intent, a woman in her 60s without a technical background using personal email for work is a modest screw up; certainly not persuasive that her judgment is too poor to be President.

But the rush to delete the supposedly personal emails, the general reluctance frankly to admit what happened, shows far worse judgment, and raises questions about the possibility of ill-intent.
posted by MattD at 5:40 AM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


She did follow the rules. The rules were bad and outdated and from an old era of technology because #bureacracy and they've now changed.

But even though she followed the rules, what she did was shady and was obviously going to be perceived as shady. Which is either her not getting a very obvious and predictable consequence, her using very poor judgment, and/or her being so desperate to hide something that it's better to come off as shady.

In other words, it was legal and in line with prior practice, but it was clearly NOT A GOOD LOOK. Classic HRC.

I'd still crawl over glass to vote for her against any Republican in the field.
posted by sallybrown at 5:44 AM on August 12, 2015 [9 favorites]


a woman in her 60s without a technical background using personal email for work is a modest screw up

Oh, come on. This is not Mrs. Clinton the dotty social studies teacher using her @aol.com address instead of her @springfieldmiddleschool.org address because the IT guy is tired of telling her how to switch profiles on her home computer.
posted by Etrigan at 5:54 AM on August 12, 2015 [24 favorites]


The minimum processes and requirements for setting up an email server in this domain are well documented and have been for years. If her staff followed those practices then I've got no beef, but if they just did it by the seat of their pants then this was really really really stupid of her, almost criminally so, especially given how many experienced contractors are in that part of the world who would jump at the chance.
posted by Runes at 5:55 AM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


I've worked with a number of brilliant and otherwise shrewd professionals between age 40 and 75 or so who don't understand BASIC technology related to computers. It's not because they're daffy or stupid, it's usually been because of an ego issue - they (mistakenly) think their time is too expensive and they are too high up to have to learn how to poke around with machines, Outlook, Excel, etc. They have younger associates and assistants for that!

(And also don't hate on the technical abilities of middle school teachers! The ones I know could compute rings around a lot of the partners I've worked for. One in particular, who made it through 20 years of practice and billions of dollars in verdicts yet didn't care enough to learn what caps lock did when typing an email.)
posted by sallybrown at 6:01 AM on August 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


It's hard to credit this when the Republican front-runner is Donald Trump. I'm not being flippant, either: I don't know what you could point to, to demonstrate that an apparent lack of principles is some sort of detriment to presidential aspirations.

Trump is divisive and there's no way he wins the nomination once the field starts to thin. 30% of likely republican primary voters are pro-Trump, while 60% are anti-Trump and only 10% are indecisive. That gets him a nice plurality in this stage, but no other candidate has nearly has many Republicans who adamantly don't want him to get the nomination.
posted by 256 at 6:04 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


I've worked with a number of brilliant and otherwise shrewd professionals between age 40 and 75 or so who don't understand BASIC technology related to computers.

So have I. Back in the late '90s, I was in the largest military intelligence battalion in the U.S. Army, with computer assets that totaled just over $100 million. Our unit was flying surveillance drones before they were called drones. And one of my daily tasks was printing out the emails for my commander and taking his hand-written notes on the previous day's emails and replying as him.

But here's the thing -- my CO didn't set up a private email server in his house. Playing that off as "a woman in her 60s without a technical background using personal email for work" is comical.
posted by Etrigan at 6:09 AM on August 12, 2015 [5 favorites]


More on topic, I was really pro-Hillary in 2008, but I'm a lot less enamoured now. The email scandal wouldn't be a problem on its own, but it definitely puts a cap on the way my feelings about her candidacy have changed.

Bernie Sanders looks like he would be a very interesting pick or, personally, I would love to see a Joe Biden presidency. But I do wonder if anyone but Clinton could defeat the more likely Republican candidates like Jeb Bush or Scott Walker.
posted by 256 at 6:10 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Why is there a stink about deleted emails? Doesn't the U.S. have the greatest backup system ever made in the NSA?

I'm sure Fort Meade is home to the smoking gun "Planned Parenthood baby parts sold on eBay to fund Benghazi Vince Foster attack" email that is being fished for here.
posted by dr_dank at 6:16 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Oh, come on. This is not Mrs. Clinton the dotty social studies teacher using her @aol.com address instead of her @springfieldmiddleschool.org address because the IT guy is tired of telling her how to switch profiles on her home computer.

From a recent NY Times article:

Responsibility for setting up and maintaining the server that handled personal e-mail communications for Bill and Hillary Clinton passed through a number of different hands, starting with Clinton staffers with limited training in computer security and eventually expanding to Platte River.

In 2008, responsibility for the system was held by Justin Cooper, a longtime aide to the former president who served as a personal assistant and helped research at least two of his books. Cooper had no security clearance and no particular expertise in safeguarding computers, according to three people briefed on the server setup. Cooper declined to comment.

“The system we used was set up for President Clinton’s office. And it had numerous safeguards. It was on property guarded by the Secret Service. And there were no security breaches,” Hillary Clinton said in March.


So, Clinton had people with no security background set up and maintain the system, and has stated that the physical security of the servers is equivalent, or at least primarily relevant, to their actual security. She's either ignorant or willfully, arrogantly indifferent here.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:24 AM on August 12, 2015 [9 favorites]


Only in the alternate universe MetaFilter apparently operates in will Clinton never win the Presidency but Sanders has a real good chance.

I've read this entire thread and haven't seen anyone saying this. Are you perhaps browsing from an alternate alternate universe?
posted by tonycpsu at 6:25 AM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


" And it had numerous safeguards. It was on property guarded by the Secret Service. And there were no security breaches,"

*spits out coffee*
posted by I-baLL at 6:34 AM on August 12, 2015 [5 favorites]


It was on property guarded by the Secret Service.

Now I'm imagining a guy with sunglasses and an earpiece throwing himself in front of a hacker.
posted by Etrigan at 6:39 AM on August 12, 2015 [12 favorites]


A. Does your average person really understand or care about what server emails are supposed to be on? Nope.
B. Does your average person occasionally use work emails for personal purposes/personal email for work purposes? Yep.

I don't think anyone who might otherwise vote for Hilary will care about this. I don't think anyone who would never vote for her in a million years will need another reason not to.

Unless there is something really juicy in the emails, though I'm trying to imagine worse than Iran-Contra, or ignoring the Bin Laden warning prior to 9/11, or 8 million other known things the government has done under Republicans.
posted by emjaybee at 6:50 AM on August 12, 2015 [13 favorites]


Now I'm imagining a guy with sunglasses and an earpiece throwing himself in front of a hacker.

You laugh now, but you'll wish the Secret Service was around when the hackers come for you.
posted by Sangermaine at 6:51 AM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


Lawrence Lessig w/Bernie Saunders as VP. It's your only hope!
posted by blue_beetle at 6:52 AM on August 12, 2015


If I were Hillary, I would be concerned about this, but more concerned that the narrative has really, really turned in favor of the huge crowds and poll numbers that Sanders is getting these days. For a 73 (will be 75 on election day) Brooklyn Jew, that's astounding.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:52 AM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


Forgot to add that yes, Mefi is full of computer professionals and people who know about things like government clearances, but vast swathes of voters are neither of those things, and also, if you don't do it for a living it's pretty easy to get lost/bored by discussions about it. There's always the "see a WOMAN is terrible at KEEPING US SAFE you guys! We need a DUDE president who understands security!" but that's just your garden-variety sexism. Nothing new for the Clinton camp.

I anticipate much video of Republicans wanting to explain why what Clinton has done is Very Bad but not really understanding enough about IT to be able to do so coherently.
posted by emjaybee at 6:55 AM on August 12, 2015 [5 favorites]


Unless there is something really juicy in the emails, though I'm trying to imagine worse than Iran-Contra, or ignoring the Bin Laden warning prior to 9/11, or 8 million other known things the government has done under Republicans.

Again, the NY Times:

Government investigators said Friday that they had discovered classified information on the private email account that Hillary Rodham Clinton used while secretary of state, stating unequivocally that those secrets never should have been stored outside of secure government computer systems.

Mrs. Clinton has said for months that she kept no classified information on the private server that she set up in her house so she would not have to carry both a personal phone and a work phone. Her campaign said Friday that any government secrets found on the server had been classified after the fact.

But the inspectors general of the State Department and the nation’s intelligence agencies said the information they found was classified when it was sent and remains so now. Information is considered classified if its disclosure would likely harm national security, and such information can be sent or stored only on computer networks with special safeguards.


You're correct, though, that the average Clinton voter won't give a damn about this, or anything else that she does or has done. This election is a battle between two fact-and-cognitive-dissonance-proof worldviews for which the candidates are largely unexamined proxies. Their actual behavior and record make next to no difference.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:56 AM on August 12, 2015 [10 favorites]


Ok, but what does "classified" mean here? The US government is known to define "classified" really broadly, there have been complaints and stories to that effect. Lots of things are classified. For the story to have legs with the average voter, it has to be something they can understand as dangerous and/or treasonous for Clinton to have had on her server, and there also needs to be proof that harm has/will be done as a result. Pretty high bar.

I'm not addressing the merits of Clinton's actions here, just talking about how the story is going to read to someone who is neither part of the intelligence community or in computer security.
posted by emjaybee at 7:02 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


First off, my Democrat street cred: voted D in every election since 1992 when I could first vote, volunteered for the Clinton, Dean, and Obama campaigns, and I regularly give the DNC money.

Now, to the meat of the matter. What bugs the shit out of me on this and every other Clinton related scandal is that they both know what level of scrutiny they are under. Back in the day, Bill knew every Republican out there was gunning for him and Hillary should be aware of the same. However, they've both continued to do things that look sketchy, even if they aren't. To me, making decisions like having your own email server, isn't a problem because I think she broke rules, it's a problem because she knows there's a witch hunt on and she still keeps carrying her black cat around.

It's like she has a total disregard for what impact it would have on the country if she were to be the candidate and be beaten. I get wanting to win and I desperately want a Dem to win, but I don't get wanting to win so bad you don't care if you burn your party in the process. If it were me, I wouldn't do a single thing that wasn't completely and 100% above board, to take away and ammunition the opposition should have. I wouldn't speed, I wouldn't forward emails, I wouldn't even cheat on my diet on weekends. Then again, that's a hellish life to live, but that's what you opt for when you opt to run for such an important public office.
posted by teleri025 at 7:09 AM on August 12, 2015 [10 favorites]


If I were Hillary, I would be concerned about this, but more concerned that the narrative has really, really turned in favor of the huge crowds and poll numbers that Sanders is getting these days.

That's because liberals want the candidate who will give them the maximum sense of betrayal down the line. Three years from now Hillary wouldn't generate the same "Bernie, how COULD you!?" threads.
posted by happyroach at 7:10 AM on August 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


That's because liberals want the candidate who will give them the maximum sense of betrayal down the line. Three years from now Hillary wouldn't generate the same "Bernie, how COULD you!?" threads.

Yes, liberals vote primarily based on who they can complain about on MetaFilter years later.

FFS.
posted by tonycpsu at 7:18 AM on August 12, 2015 [11 favorites]


Seriously, I use the "if this is the best criticism you got, the person must be a saint*" standard. (*saint by politician standards).

This is a third-tier scandal that is getting shouted about over and over again as though that would make something of it. (and sadly it does.)

Oppose Hillary Clinton if you don't like her politics: fine. But as scandals go, this is Fox network level mouth-froth.

On top of all else, I think female politicians are discounted by X percent. (10%? 20%? 40%?) Even Sarah Palin who is a 2 on a scale of ten is treated like a 1.2 because of sexism. The racism which has judged Obama's every move, will be nothing compared to the sexism which will be around Hillary's term as president. (Many people who would recognize racism in themselves and others don't see the sexism.)

Shirley Chisholm, a black woman, ran for president in 1972. She received 152 ballots first-round ballots at the Democrat National Convention. She said that during her campaign she ran in to more discrimination for being a woman than for being black.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:34 AM on August 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


I'm not sure this will have any effect on people who were already prepared to vote for Clinton, unless they manage to disqualify her from running by way of a felony charge or some such.

I don't believe for a moment that a lawyer who navigated Whitewater and assorted other scandals (trumped up and otherwise) would not be aware of where her classified emails were being stored. Further, I believe she probably did most of her more politically sensitive work on her personal server precisely because she could delete them at will.

All that being said, the relative shadiness of the whole thing sorta pales beside the idea of having anyone from the Republican field of candidates sitting in the Oval Office. I'd vote for a Democrat in the general election even if they were dressed as a goat.
posted by Mooski at 7:40 AM on August 12, 2015


Why can't Clinton supporters just admit when she does something dirty?

How soon we forget:

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/01/22/infiltration_of_files_seen_as_extensive/?page=full

We've basically got a nascent fascist political party in this country -- the GOP if you haven't been paying attention -- vs. the broad coalition of center-right to center-left that is the Democratic party.

Conservatives have basically destroyed my country* since 1970. I'm no big fan of Hillary (or Obama for that matter) but the immense evil of the current GOP gives centrists like the Clintons a pretty big umbrella to stand under.

I don't want to see a replay of this good-cop/bad-cop routine of the 1990s, but here we are anyway.

* ([1], [2], [3])
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 7:52 AM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


Even leaders have to follow the rules of their own organizations.

You mean the rules that were changed after she left office? Those rules?
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 7:54 AM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


ryanshepard: “Again, the NY Times...”

... has been shown over and over again to be woefully wrong about this specific case, so probably quoting their mistakes is a bad idea.
posted by koeselitz at 8:13 AM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


(cite / thread)
posted by koeselitz at 8:15 AM on August 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


I find the reporting on this whole thing to be truly awful. It feels like some technological hair splitting in search of something journalists can call a scandal because they're desperate for one.

Case in point, the thing a couple weeks ago where the NYTimes reported that a "criminal investigation" was being started against Clinton over her emails. The Times wrote it, and that same day local news programs all over the country - such as the WGN Morning News I watch most weekdays - copy/pasted the story, so people all over the country heard "Hillary Clinton + criminal investigation."

Except that by the end of the day, the Times had to walk back almost the entire story. There was no criminal investigation. It was nothing but a notice that classification rules about responding to FOIA requests had changed, and some of Clinton's emails had been released that shouldn't have been. (Or something close to that - I don't have time right now to go back and get the exact explanation.)

(on preview: what koeselitz just linked to.)

The point is there was no "there" there, there was nothing criminal involved, but have any of the however many small news programs that copied the story gone back and reversed themselves? I'll bet money none of them have. So how many people now have this lingering memory of "Clinton + email + criminal investigation" in their heads, compounded with these continuing articles about technicalities of email servers which most people won't read the fine details about, or fully understand even if they tried.

Thus the media creates a fog of serious SCANDAL around what seems more like a not very serious mistake.

Shit like this really drives me up a tree.
posted by dnash at 8:17 AM on August 12, 2015 [10 favorites]


NYTimes: Get in the sea
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:19 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


> This scandal is just another pile of shit brought to you by the right wing hate machine. Im disgusted by the ridicuous and baseless attacks on Hillary.

That argument only works if you also buy into the theory that you should expect politicians to be deeply dishonest and corrupt, and all you care about is winning - i.e. if you care nothing at all about ethics.

Let me repeat first what someone else on this thread said - if you or I did this, we'd be fired. Actually, I'd be lucky to only be fired - I'd expect to be sued.

Please remember - this really is data theft. It's not like she made a copy of these emails - she just kept them and didn't give the state a copy. Nor did she try to return the data after she left. Once the data theft became public she didn't apologize and return it - no, she returned some undisclosed fraction of the data, a fraction that is definitely less than 100% as we have the other side of emails that don't appear in there.

For those of you who mysteriously believe that this is somehow OK - imagine you were running a business and hired a senior employee. A year or two later you go to see the employee's work records, and there are none - they have been using their own email address and phone number and you have no records at all of even the identities of the people that person has been contacting, let alone the details of the deals she has made. When you complain, eventually the employee gives you back some portion of the missing data - how much, you don't know.

Would you find this acceptable? Would you hire this employee again for an even more senior job?

Yes, there wasn't a specific rule against this form of data theft when Hillary started. How does that make it OK? How does that make it ethical? Since when did "not illegal" become the gold standard of ethics and competency?

Bear in mind that it isn't like Senator Clinton was doing a good job during the period in question. The disaster that is Libya should alone make it impossible to contemplate Clinton as President - if almost a decade of support for the Iraq War hadn't already eliminated her as a viable candidate.

Hillary is a relentlessly bad candidate. She's been in the public eye for thirty years - what has she accomplished? Under no circumstances could our family ever support her.

Look, confirmed Democrats - let me clear something up for you. You guys will vote for anyone with a D after their name! You've proven this time and time again - you aren't even going to think of moving to the Greens or the Republicans just because the D candidate is incompetent and ethically bankrupt.

But there are a shitload of people who would otherwise vote Democratic but would never under any circumstances vote for Hillary. And there are a shitload of Republicans who don't bother to come out for elections - but would come out to vote for Trump or Cruz if Senator Clinton were nominated. If Clinton gets the nomination, who doubts that there will be record Republican turnouts?

If you nominate Hillary Clinton, YOU WILL LOSE. You will have thrown away your ethics just in order to win, and you'll have lost anyway, and you'll be left with nothing.

PICK... ANOTHER... CANDIDATE. Anyone else. Sanders, O'Malley, Biden, anyone else. Pick anyone else or you will lose.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 8:37 AM on August 12, 2015 [9 favorites]


For those of you who mysteriously believe that this is somehow OK

What she did, to bang the drum again, was well within the established rules at the time. Right in an ethical sense or not, it was allowed. And is no different from what Colin Powell did, or what the GWB White House did. Please pay attention to these facts.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:52 AM on August 12, 2015 [6 favorites]


Let me repeat first what someone else on this thread said - if you or I did this, we'd be fired. Actually, I'd be lucky to only be fired - I'd expect to be sued.

If you fired somebody for "data theft" for using their own email address when there wasn't a company policy against it, I don't think you'd have much of a case for suing them. In fact, the employee could probably sue you for wrongful termination.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 8:53 AM on August 12, 2015 [5 favorites]


> Yeah I know I mean the way she's raised fifty million dollars, dominates social media, and consistently beats every Republican candidate is just embarrassing.

I'm sorry! By "relentlessly bad" I didn't mean that she wasn't rich or good at getting PR! By "bad" I meant "dishonest and incompetent at her actual job".

It's very interesting to read this page.

No one seems to be touting Senator Clinton's competence or policies. No one's saying, "She did a good job on the Iraq War/Syria/Libya" or "She's the one we need to prevent the next war/keep Wall Street in its place." Instead, everyone touts how good she is at raising money or keeping her name in the public eye.

> What she did, to bang the drum again, was well within the established rules at the time.

As I said above, since when did "not illegal" become the gold standard of conduct?

> And is no different from what Colin Powell did, or what the GWB White House did.

"No worse than GWB" is even less of a gold standard.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 8:58 AM on August 12, 2015 [7 favorites]


No one seems to be touting Senator Clinton's competence or policies. No one's saying, "She did a good job on the Iraq War/Syria/Libya" or "She's the one we need to prevent the next war/keep Wall Street in its place."

The FPP and thus, this thread, is about her email and the 'scandal' around them, which is directly related to the upcoming presidential election. It's not absurd that people are talking about the subject of the FPP in that context.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 9:04 AM on August 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


> 'Should you penalize an employee for doing something that you only retroactively prohibited them from doing?' No, of course not.

Honestly, my mouth gaped open.

You'd be cool if your employee did that - as long as there was no policy against it? As in, stole all the data she was paid to produce?

"Ha, ha! You found a loophole that allows you to steal from us! How clever, we'll patch that up and we'll be certain to hire you again!"

I mean, Aaron Swartz coped a lot less data than that, data that was a lot less sensitive - and he was likely going to jail for decades for that. The fact that the US government didn't press charges in the same way doesn't make the data theft right!

Do you see this action as somehow ethical - because there was no explicit rule against it? Do you feel the decision to steal this data - because that's what it was, stealing - somehow benefited the United States of America? If so, can you explain your reasoning please? Because I only see one person who benefits from Hillary Clinton's taking all that data - and that's Hillary Clinton.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:05 AM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


If you nominate Hillary Clinton, YOU WILL LOSE. You will have thrown away your ethics just in order to win, and you'll have lost anyway, and you'll be left with nothing.

Forgive me if I am unconvinced by the notion that voters frustrated by Hillary Clinton's use of personal email when it wasn't against the rules to do so are going to seek solace in the ethical integritude of Donald Trump, Jeb! Bush, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Chris Christie, and the rest of the clown car posse.

I think I'm in the minority here in thinking that this scandal does actually hurt her, and does open the door up for Sanders to score a couple of early primary victories and credibly threaten Hillary's "inevitability." But the notion that Democrats will lose because voters are going to choose a non-Democrat with better ethics implies that such a candidate exists in the GOP field.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:05 AM on August 12, 2015 [7 favorites]


> l_y I'm not responding to yours or anyone else's personal opinions of Clinton; I'm responding to the constant mantra of "based on my opinion of Hillary, it's OBVIOUS she can't possibly win the election"

I'm sorry - where did I say anything was obvious? I said, "YOU WILL LOSE." And I believe it.


> when, and I mean this quite literally, every single fact presented in the last two years proves otherwise.

The top story on news.google.com is this right now.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:06 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


She is, by every definition, currently winning it

Well, not in New Hampshire, according to the latest polling.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:06 AM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


> Forgive me if I find the idea that voters frustrated by Hillary Clinton's use of personal email when it wasn't against the rules to do so are going to seek solace in the ethical integritude of Donald Trump, Jeb! Bush, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Chris Christie, and the rest of the clown car posse.

I hate to repeat myself for a third time, but "no more dishonest than the Republicans" is an exceptionally low bar indeed.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:09 AM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]




I hate to repeat myself for a third time, but "no more dishonest than the Republicans" is an exceptionally low bar indeed.

I acknowledge that what she did was unethical. You're the one who said she was going to lose.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:09 AM on August 12, 2015


I hate to repeat myself for a third time, but "no more dishonest than the Republicans" is an exceptionally low bar indeed.

In an essentially two-party election, it's the only bar one has to clear.
posted by Etrigan at 9:10 AM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


I'm responding to the constant mantra of "based on my opinion of Hillary, it's OBVIOUS she can't possibly win the election" when, and I mean this quite literally, every single fact presented in the last two years proves otherwise.

This is not the mantra I'm hearing everywhere online and elsewhere. It's more like Clinton is the inevitable winner so why would anyone bother voting for anyone else? Sanders gets the "nice try, old man, but you ain't got a chance" constant mantra.
posted by Kitteh at 9:11 AM on August 12, 2015 [7 favorites]


> You're the one who said she was going to lose.

No, I said that IF the Democrats are stupid enough to nominate her, then they will lose.

Progressives will stay home. Republicans will come out in record numbers. And - to America's shame - many Americans simply won't vote for a woman. :-(
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:13 AM on August 12, 2015


This 'scandal' and the 'scandal's of the other candidates are distractions to keep from having to talk about boring policy details. It sells infotainment and lets candidates stay out of staking out detailed policy positions.
posted by nightwood at 9:15 AM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


I know plenty of people who would vote for a woman who won't vote for HRC. They are all Dems.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:17 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Bernie Sanders looks like he would be a very interesting pick or, personally, I would love to see a Joe Biden presidency. But I do wonder if anyone but Clinton could defeat the more likely Republican candidates like Jeb Bush or Scott Walker.

Sanders beats them all by about the same margins as Clinton, actually (there are a couple other polls backing this up, too). And turning out 100,000 people in August of primary season is no mean feat. Everyone seems to be dismissing all of the people who are coming out for him as "seasoned political junkies" or whatever but I see a lot of quotes from college freshmen, housewives, and retired folks when people actually bother to interview folks at the rallies - not exactly the people I usually think of as Daily Kos jockeys. I suspect that a lot of people are reacting more to the media blackout of Sanders's success than anything; if Hillary Clinton or any of the Repubs got 100,000 people to come see them in August of primary season, I guarantee you it would suddenly mean a whole hell of a lot.
posted by dialetheia at 9:20 AM on August 12, 2015 [7 favorites]


I mean, Aaron Swartz coped a lot less data than that, data that was a lot less sensitive - and he was likely going to jail for decades for that. The fact that the US government didn't press charges in the same way doesn't make the data theft right!

The Obama DOJ also destroyed the career of NSA whistleblower Tom Drake, and charged and got convicted a Navy reservist and a Navy officer over their "mishandling" of classified material - but Clinton? No - much like David Patraeus, who gave classified information to his mistress and got a slap on the wrist, she's apparently above the law.
posted by ryanshepard at 9:23 AM on August 12, 2015 [5 favorites]


No, I said that IF the Democrats are stupid enough to nominate her, then they will lose.

Yes, and for your implication that this hypothetical loss would be the result of her ethical lapses, the fact that the Republican field is chock full of people with their own ethical lapses is absolutely relevant. People can't "stay home" or vote for an alternative based on ethics unless there's a more ethical alternative to vote for, and that doesn't look like it will be the case.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:25 AM on August 12, 2015


Quite honestly, the Republican juggernaut bent on putting me under surveillance and even imprisoning me in case I might miscarry in a suspicious manner is a lot...and I mean A LOT....more important to me than fine points of email data security.

I appreciate that many dudes (though not all of them are dudes) do not really think of things in these terms and so feel free to dissect the particulars of Clintons' email policies as though they were the most important thing in the world. But see, Republicans want to jail me and give my fetus a lawyer (already happening in at least one state) if I seek an abortion. They want to use military force to stop abortions from happening (Huckabee). Having largely lost the gay-rights fight, currently taking heat on racial injustice, they are doubling, tripling and quadrupling down on crushing the rights and futures of women. It's almost all they have left.

I am happy for those of you with the luxury of not being at risk of having your status as a citizen with full rights downgraded to "conditional" depending on whether you are fertile. But I do not share your concerns, especially given the aging liberal coalition on the Supreme Court.
posted by emjaybee at 9:25 AM on August 12, 2015 [31 favorites]


lupus_yonderboy: “Let me repeat first what someone else on this thread said - if you or I did this, we'd be fired. Actually, I'd be lucky to only be fired - I'd expect to be sued.”

If you did this, and you got fired, then you should sue your employer. I have had employers do this to me before: expect a specific result without actually telling me they wanted that result – which is what happened here. Nobody told Hillary Clinton or anyone at the State Department they wanted a certain level of security or secrecy. It was left up to them entirely, and they went a particular way. There is nothing wrong with them choosing to go a particular way. Then, after she'd left office, some new standards were set down. That's fine, but holding her to the new standards is balderdash. Isn't that clear?

I'm not saying I'm voting for Hillary Clinton – but this is a completely silly scandal based almost solely on the fact that it's difficult to explain, and Republicans know that difficult-to-explain things are kryptonite to democrats.
posted by koeselitz at 9:29 AM on August 12, 2015 [8 favorites]


That Washington Post article linked about Sanders to discredit him in this thread is both a terrible piece of globalism (fill if as absurdum reductions) and out of context of Hillary's missteps with data security.
posted by thebotanyofsouls at 9:33 AM on August 12, 2015


> You know I feel like I heard this before but just can't put my he's black on it

Ha ha. Yes, I knew that as I wrote.

But America has had equal rights for blacks for a very long time now, but even in 2015 does not have equal rights for women... and I was remembering Shirley Chisholm, who said that she felt far greater prejudice against her as a candidate because she was a woman than because she was black.

Honestly, the most likely outcome from the primaries would be Jeb! vs. Hillary (though I do think Sanders has a good chance - as the last three successful Democratic candidates all started as outsiders).

And I think that Jeb! would probably win against Hillary, horrible a candidate though he is. (Reasons? He's a Bush, he's handsome, he gives good speeches, he's naturally got the Latino vote, he's male, he has gravitas. Pathetic that "policy" isn't even a factor, but there it is.)

(I'm also surprised at how bad Ms. Clinton's speeches have been so far. I assume she has some reserve of fire and charisma that she's going to pull out, though - it's early days yet!)
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:35 AM on August 12, 2015


lupus_yonderboy: “You'd be cool if your employee did that - as long as there was no policy against it? As in, stole all the data she was paid to produce?”

This is an absolutely, utterly, incontrovertibly crazypants use of the word "stole."
posted by koeselitz at 9:36 AM on August 12, 2015 [6 favorites]


> Are you perhaps browsing from an alternate alternate universe?

AltAltMeFi is best MeFi.
posted by Sunburnt at 9:36 AM on August 12, 2015


That Washington Post article linked about Sanders to discredit him in this thread is both a terrible piece of globalism (fill if as absurdum reductions) and out of context of Hillary's missteps with data security.

I agree, I only posted it to make the point that "the top story on news.google.com" changes rapidly and isn't a very useful measure of popular opinion.
posted by chaiminda at 9:38 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


And I think that Jeb! would probably win against Hillary, horrible a candidate though he is. (Reasons? He's a Bush, he's handsome, he gives good speeches, he's naturally got the Latino vote, he's male, he has gravitas. Pathetic that "policy" isn't even a factor, but there it is.)

You are aware that Jeb! also unethically used private email for official business while Governor or Florida, right?
posted by tonycpsu at 9:40 AM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


AltAltMeFi is best MeFi.

$30, same as in the city!
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:41 AM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


But America has had equal rights for blacks for a very long time now

I defy you to give me a single point in American history where this was remotely the case. The President had a letter in the NYT literally today about how the fifty-year-old Voting Rights Act is still under assault.
posted by Etrigan at 9:42 AM on August 12, 2015 [20 favorites]


> > Do you see this action as somehow ethical - because there was no explicit rule against it?

> I see it as legal, because it wasn't illegal.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but not illegal(*) is a very very low bar. That's why I asked if it were ethical.

Is it ethical? Is this the sort of thing an ethical person would do?

I assume the reason that people are skirting the question is that no one could really claim that stealing data from your employer was ethical, and so no one wants to actually answer it.

Let me ask - is there anyone on this thread who is willing to argue that secretly removing all this data and then grudgingly replacing some portion of it when caught was the ethical thing to do?

---

(* Actually, we only know Hillary wasn't charged with anything. That doesn't mean she didn't do anything illegal.

(If you're so sure that what she did wasn't illegal, I'd like to hear your explanation as to why it was legal. How is it not grand larceny? She permanently took a great deal of information that no doubt has a huge cash value - even only if you counted the worker's time it took to generate that data. Why isn't this simply theft?

(I don't want to follow this down, as it's a sideline to the question - is this ethical. But please, don't claim it was "legal" unless you have a better argument than "not indicted.")
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:46 AM on August 12, 2015


> But America has had equal rights for blacks for a very long time now

Bullshit. America has SAID it has had equal rights for blacks for a very long time, but that doesn't make it true - and there is tons of evidence AT THIS VERY MOMENT that this is NOT the case.

For fucks sake, that was the exact logic used by the supreme court when they struck down the provision of the voting rights act that is absolutely needed today to prevent further oppression.
posted by MysticMCJ at 9:47 AM on August 12, 2015 [8 favorites]


he's naturally got the Latino vote

Wait, what?
posted by Kitteh at 9:50 AM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


And I think that Jeb! would probably win against Hillary, horrible a candidate though he is. (Reasons? He's a Bush, he's handsome...

Only because you brought up the topic of physical appearance, I think it's interesting to note that the last president to wear glasses regularly while in office was Harry Truman.
posted by Atom Eyes at 9:50 AM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


> I defy you to give me a single point in American history where this was remotely the case.

Please. We have and have had equal rights - as in Constitutionally-guaranteed legal rights - for a long time now. That doesn't mean we don't have racial inequity, cryptoracism (I'm looking at you, Republicans) or all sorts of other racial ripoff.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:50 AM on August 12, 2015


lupus_yonderboy: “And I think that Jeb! would probably win against Hillary, horrible a candidate though he is. (Reasons? He's a Bush, he's handsome, he gives good speeches, he's naturally got the Latino vote, he's male, he has gravitas. Pathetic that "policy" isn't even a factor, but there it is.)”

Everything in this parenthetical confuses the hell out of me – except maybe the part about Jeb Bush being male.

1. He's a Bush – well, clearly that will be a huge point in his favor, since the Republican Party has wholeheartedly embraced George W Bush's legacy, and since we've had Republican presidents for the past eight years who got elected by touting their strong ties to George W Bush's administration. Except the opposite is what actually happened: every Republican candidate who has run for virtually every office since W's presidency has run as fast as they can in the other direction whenever the Bush name comes up, and it hasn't always been enough; it certainly sank McCain, and probably didn't help Romney, though Republicans were screaming as loudly as they could that "you can't blame Bush for everything!" Even Jeb Bush himself has spent a huge amount of time distancing himself from his brother. He already did it in the first debate. He was forced to, because people asked him the obvious question: "are you going to be as bad as your brother?"

2. He's handsome. Sorry, I won't budge on this one – he's not. Let's move on.

3. He gives good speeches – I really don't think this is true, except by the standard set by his brother.

4. He's "naturally got the Latino vote" – this is also really clearly false, I think. He polls way behind Hillary on the Latino vote, for starters. He managed to nail down the Latino vote in Florida, yes, but it's been decades since a Republican managed it nationwide, and Jeb is not the one to do it, judging by his track record so far.

5. Gravitas – sorry, I'm not sure about this one. Maybe. I don't see it, but maybe.
posted by koeselitz at 9:52 AM on August 12, 2015 [5 favorites]


> > [Jeb!}'s naturally got the Latino vote

> Wait, what?

Fluent Spanish speaker, strong Cuban support, got 61% of the Hispanic vote in Florida, Hispanic family members...
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:52 AM on August 12, 2015


Let me ask - is there anyone on this thread who is willing to argue that secretly removing all this data and then grudgingly replacing some portion of it when caught was the ethical thing to do?

I, for one, have no problem admitting that what she did was unethical., but your initial claim was not only that it's unethical, but that it was going to cause her to lose the election. If you can leave the goalposts in one place long enough for people to respond, we can have a productive exchange.

Please. We have and have had equal rights - as in Constitutionally-guaranteed legal rights - for a long time now. That doesn't mean we don't have racial inequity, cryptoracism (I'm looking at you, Republicans) or all sorts of other racial ripoff.

Women have Constitutionally-guaranteed legal rights in the letter of the law as well, yet both groups experience a gap between the letter of the law and how they are treated under that law.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:53 AM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


> > [Jeb!}'s naturally got the Latino vote

> Wait, what?

Fluent Spanish speaker, strong Cuban support, got 61% of the Hispanic vote in Florida, Hispanic family members...


"Cuban" does not expand to "Hispanic" when you're talking about voting.
posted by Etrigan at 9:54 AM on August 12, 2015 [6 favorites]


lupus_yonderboy: “Let me ask - is there anyone on this thread who is willing to argue that secretly removing all this data and then grudgingly replacing some portion of it when caught was the ethical thing to do?”

"Secretly removing"? You're casting things in a really weird light. I work in database management. Sometimes I store data locally because it's faster and easier. That is not unethical. It doesn't count as "secretly removing" data. If my employer asked me tomorrow to start storing things on-server only, I'd spend some time on transferring it over. If this happened after I'd quit my job, it might be difficult; but it wouldn't be unethical if I couldn't fully comply with that request.
posted by koeselitz at 9:54 AM on August 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


And I think that Jeb! would probably win against Hillary, horrible a candidate though he is. (Reasons? He's a Bush, he's handsome, he gives good speeches, he's naturally got the Latino vote, he's male, he has gravitas. Pathetic that "policy" isn't even a factor, but there it is.)

- I'm pretty sure that being a Bush is a liability at this point.

- I'm not really qualified to say if he's handsome but he looks pretty dorky to me.

- Good speeches? Really? He ends up backtracking and having to unsay half the stuff he says.

- He's got the Latino vote? Why? Because his wife is Mexican? Because he's got some weak tea non-deportation policy? I'm pretty sure that the last decade of anti-immigrant rhetoric from Republicans has soured most Latinos on ever voting for them.

- Gravitas? Did you see him in the debate?
posted by octothorpe at 9:55 AM on August 12, 2015 [6 favorites]


Cubans, Mexicans, Central Americans -- virtually interchangeable, amirite?

I would say that the Bush looks like the least biggest idiot among the theoretically-possible GOP nominees and would probably do the least horrifically catastrophic job of running the country, which, I mean, Bush? LOL whatever this is fucking bizarro world now
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:55 AM on August 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


lupus_yonderboy: “Fluent Spanish speaker, strong Cuban support, got 61% of the Hispanic vote in Florida, Hispanic family members...”

Once more, with feeling: Hillary already beats him by a ridiculously large margin (17%) among Latinos.

Outside of Florida, Jeb Bush has really been quite mediocre among Latinos.
posted by koeselitz at 9:57 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


I need to call up my Latino family and tell them to not commit this inevitable horrible mistake, apparently.
posted by Kitteh at 9:58 AM on August 12, 2015 [6 favorites]


We have and have had equal rights - as in Constitutionally-guaranteed legal rights - for a long time now. That doesn't mean we don't have racial inequity, cryptoracism (I'm looking at you, Republicans) or all sorts of other racial ripoff.

And all of that stuff in your second sentence is far, far more applicable to who will win an election.
posted by Etrigan at 9:59 AM on August 12, 2015


I need to call up my Latino family and tell them to not commit this inevitable horrible mistake, apparently.

it's too late, the Borgtino has decided
posted by poffin boffin at 10:06 AM on August 12, 2015 [11 favorites]


remember, the only ones who count are the ones in florida!
posted by poffin boffin at 10:06 AM on August 12, 2015 [5 favorites]


Fluent Spanish speaker, strong Cuban support, got 61% of the Hispanic vote in Florida, Hispanic family members...

Please to explain how actual Cuban-American from Florida Marco Rubio isn't beating Bush if that's the case. Also, apart from the problem of not making an effort to differentiate the Hispanic/Latino voting blocs, the idea that Cuban-Americans are a reliable conservative vote no longer seems to be true:
[A]s Pew Research found in June, the Cuban population in the United States has shifted to the left politically. When the organization polled in 2000, nearly two-thirds of Cubans identified as Republican, in part a function of the party's strong history of criticizing the regime of Fidel Castro. Since, that has shifted dramatically.

In 2012, Obama won a majority of the Cuban-American vote in Miami. He won Cubans nationally by two points.

Part of that change is a function of the changing Cuban-American population. While the 2010 Census showed that Cubans are more likely to have been born outside of the United States than other Hispanic groups, a smaller percentage of the population immigrated in the wake of Castro's take-over. More than half of the current foreign-born Cuban population has immigrated since 1990 -- meaning, it's fair to assume, less fervent opposition to the regime, and presumably a smaller likelihood of having family in the United States with such strong feelings.
posted by zombieflanders at 10:11 AM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


(I should add - yes, there's an overall tendency for Hispanics to vote Democratic - but of all the Republicans, he's the least likely to repel Hispanics...)

koeselitz: Well, I learned a lot from watching George W. Bush.

I felt he was ugly, that he sounded like an idiot in speeches, and he had no gravitas. But I talked to a lot of Republicans and Democrats about it and read a lot more, and I realized I had no idea how your average American thinks - because I'm a college-educated intellectual who's lived in major cities all his life.

I have tried to rectify this, and I understand, I think, a lot better what people are looking for. This is why Trump as a front-runner is not a surprise to me.

To Americans, Trump is "handsome" - bear in mind that I personally think he's not just "not handsome" but a scary freak, but this is not what Americans think - notice how often he's on TV and in glamor shows.

Trump "gives good speeches"! Now, I personally think his speeches sound like a self-parody, but again, not how Americans think. He sounds decisive and masculine and says radical ideas that no one else dares to say - the other people don't dare to say them because they aren't actually true and are borderline crazy.

Will he be the candidate? No. He's too crazy, even for your average American - and he has no gravitas, yelling at women would disqualify him alone.

But if you don't understand why Donald Trump is the top running Republican right now, then you don't understand how a big chunk of Americans - not just Republicans but some Democrats - think.

And by that token, Jeb! will be the Republican candidate, and he'll be a lot better than the last two Republican candidates, who were sacrificial goats. The fact that I personally think he's a drooling, slope-headed, knuckle-dragging moron from a family of evil degenerates is irrelevant.

(And honestly, a lot of Americans secretly like the Bushes. Yes, still. Look at the online comments on, say, reddit when GWB reappears, either with one of his execrable paintings or some lameass charitable thing. While there's no doubt brigading, tons of people seemingly on both R and D sides say, "Well, he was a fuck-up, but he's a personally nice guy" and anyone - not me, why bother? - pointing out that he's responsible for god knows how many thousands of American deaths is downvoted into oblivion... People remember 9/11, when the country was united! and GWB. Yes, it's madness, yes, it's sickening, it doesn't make it not happen.)
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 10:14 AM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


Jeb!'s gaffes so far have been worse than Romney's (which is really saying something). Romney might have said weird shit about tree height, Jeb! came out and guffawed about women's health care spending in what is likely to be the first ever election with a female majority party Presidential candidate. He's dumb as a post. People only think he's smarter than GWB because of those (ugly) glasses. He ain't winning a thing. We should be more worried about Kasich (although I'd love to see temper tantrum Kasich debate coldly evil-seeming Hillary Clinton).
posted by sallybrown at 10:23 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


No one seems to be touting Senator Clinton's competence or policies. No one's saying, "She did a good job on the Iraq War/Syria/Libya" or "She's the one we need to prevent the next war/keep Wall Street in its place." Instead, everyone touts how good she is at raising money or keeping her name in the public eye.

Yes. Exactly. No one can point to anything she has done that is an example of extraordinary competence, courage, or leadership, because there aren't any examples. She is more craven than the average politician, and voters see this; it's very clear. Doubt me now, but check me after the election -- she will not win.
posted by jayder at 10:46 AM on August 12, 2015


Further, I believe she probably did most of her more politically sensitive work on her personal server precisely because she could delete them at will.

Pretty sure it's because the GOP did the same and worse and nobody gave a shit.

In any case, to second sallybrown, I would also crawl over broken glass to vote for her over any of the GOP candidates. And I can and will happily donate money to her campaign and volunteer for her to keep the GOP from winning. They are much more dangerous to the country than President Hillary could ever be.
posted by longdaysjourney at 10:47 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


"Uninspiring and bad at defense, but not Bush" worked so well in 2004, let's do that again
posted by theodolite at 11:08 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


> If Trump is on the ticket in any capacity, the Dems could run a potted plant and it would win.

I don't care whose ticket it's on, I would fall all over myself to vote for a potted plant.
posted by jfuller at 11:54 AM on August 12, 2015 [6 favorites]


(Necessary note: Not about Clinton's policies. I will vote for her if she wins nom or Sanders if he does. It's all about Supreme Court justices for me. If she becomes President I will advocate for pushing left on all her pro-business, wealth-privileging tendencies. As I have tried to do for Obama).

Yes. Exactly. No one can point to anything she has done that is an example of extraordinary competence, courage, or leadership, because there aren't any examples.

I think she does pretty well in the competence department. Anyone who can withstand that many congressional investigations trumped up on the thinnest of evidence and come out unspotted (while still doing her regular job) strikes me as competent. Unless you think that, like witches, the inability to find proof of wrongdoing or incompetence is in itself proof that she's a slick operator. In which case, why not bring back the dunking stool?

Courage: well, she weathered misogynist mouthbreathers treating her like their personal punching bag for several decades now, prying into her family life, her daughter's life, everything she's ever written or said since she was a child, her personal appearance, her facial expressions, and of course every financial decision she has ever made. They are still at it. Multiple completely made-up books have been written about her nefarious misdeeds; all proven false.

They are slavering at the thought of getting hold of her emails, and I will bet you one million American dollars that it has zero to do with national security and everything to do with the idea that they might find something else they can investigate her for. They've literally called her every possible slur that a woman can be called, and a few they made up just for her. Certainly there have been death threats. She's still here. She might become president, and it's not like all this shit will go away if she does. She doesn't appear to scare easy to me.

Leadership: Is being the first woman Senator from New York and then Secretary of State not "leadery" enough? What kind of "leadership" are you looking for, exactly?
posted by emjaybee at 11:55 AM on August 12, 2015 [13 favorites]


@HillaryClinton: "How does your student loan debt make you feel?
Tell us in 3 emojis or less."
posted by Golden Eternity at 12:10 PM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


"What kind of "leadership" are you looking for, exactly?"

The kind that doesn't lead us into the Iraq War.
posted by mikeand1 at 12:20 PM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


emjaybee, you haven't pointed to anything substantive; all you have listed are her successes at Being Hillary Clinton.

You've named ZERO policy/legislative/diplomacy accomplishments by Clinton. Isn't that remarkable, that you named NOTHING along those lines when she has been first lady, a senator, and secretary of state!

Everything you have described is basically "weathered the attacks against her." That's what qualifies someone for president now?

Courage is dealing with criticism of her facial expressions and finances? Did that courage get shown in being at the vanguard of something that matters to others, like advocating gay marriage? You can't point to any courage she's shown in standing up for something that isn't already popular, that isn't polling well, I guess, since you didn't name anything in your answer to my comment.
posted by jayder at 12:27 PM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Here's goddamn Fox News listing Hillary Clinton's accomplishments.
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:36 PM on August 12, 2015 [6 favorites]


jayder:
"That's what qualifies someone for president now?"
After careful consideration I have come to the conclusion that, at least relatively speaking, the answer is yes.

A small rock would be better qualified for the office of president than any one of the current GOP candidates.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 12:39 PM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


The kind that doesn't lead us into the Iraq War.

Hillary did not lead us into that, and there was nothing she or the other blue state (D) Senators could have done to stop the red state (D) senators from providing the votes necessary for authorizing military force as the Republican constructed the vote in late 2002.

The Republicans needed 12 democratic defectors for the 60 votes to ram the AUMF through the Senate, perusing the vote, looking at the "red state" Dems, it's easy to find the 12:

Blanche Lincoln of AR, Zell Miller of GA, Evan Bayh of IN, Tom Harkin of IA, the two senators of LA, Carnahan of MO, Baucus of MT, Nelson of NE, Hollings of SC, the two senators of SD

Plus Lieberman for the unlucky 13th defector, of course.

So the 2002 AUMF exercise was one of game theory. Register a protest vote on something that was going to pass with well over 60 votes in the Senate, or go along with the majority. Note that the optics of a filibuster was probably a non-starter in 2002, even if there weren't 12 Democrats wanting war.

Informing this vote was the 1991 AUMF vote on Bush Pere's war. Only 10 of 45 Dems voted for that, and they had egg on their faces after the war was over in a few weeks.

Back to the game theory, voting against the AUMF wouldn't have stopped it, and if it was successful like 1991 then you look good, and if it goes bad, well, you were in error like most people.

Voting against the war scores brownie points for moral strength and perispacity, but had the war gone well -- or at least WMDs had been found to justify the intervention -- you'd have fallen afoul of Goering's maxim about democracy and wars, how the pacifists lack patriotism and expose the country to present dangers.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 12:51 PM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


but given that, again, it it currently appears that she did not break the law it is a false parallel. Patreus did: he knowingly leaked classified information.

Both knowingly leaking information and taking insufficient care in keeping classified information secure are illegal. They're not the same crime but they are both illegal.

If Clinton was some low level functionary she'd lose both her job and her ability to hold a security clearance for this. And people have and are prosecuted for similar things. She won't be because, well, it's good to be the king. But it's no use trying to handwave away the situation, it was a real breach of infosec.

Does that mean I won't vote for her when she runs against whichever terrible Republican is put up against her? No. Because I suspect this was a situation of arrogance or oversight rather than anything sinister. And her opponents are terrible. But she really shouldn't have done this stuff and it calls her judgment into question.
posted by Justinian at 12:52 PM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


2004 was such a strange (and goddamn depressing) election. I think things would play so differently today. That was right on the cusp of social media. I don't know if the swiftboating would work these days, not to mention the demographics.

I mean really, would the war in Iraq even have happened if we'd had the same tools as we do today for poking holes in official stories? (I really don't want to find out...)
posted by sallybrown at 12:55 PM on August 12, 2015


I suspect this was a situation of arrogance or oversight

I even reject that. Given all the dirty tricks and how DC is wired GOP for the most part, keeping the server at home was more an act of prudence.

Again,

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/01/22/infiltration_of_files_seen_as_extensive
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 12:56 PM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


obstruction of justice

note that it is not a requirement for there to have been an actual investigation in progress for obstruction of justice to have happened

and although the article doesn't state this, it's not even necessary for the person to have actually been guilty of whatever she is being investigated for, to have obstructed justice

so hilary clinton is on very thin ice here - and considering that she has a law degree from yale law school and damn well should know all this, it really calls into question her judgment

this is not just a matter of ethics - there are very real legal questions involved here - it probably was legal for her to set up her own mail server - i'm not sure that it was legal for her to have classified documents on it - but for her to go through the emails and choose which ones to save and to delete is very dubious legally

if that phone call comes at 3 am and ends up on an answering machine, do you want a president who erases the tape?
posted by pyramid termite at 12:56 PM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm pretty sure Twitter would not have stopped the march to war in Iraq.
posted by Justinian at 12:56 PM on August 12, 2015


Both knowingly leaking information and taking insufficient care in keeping classified information secure are illegal. They're not the same crime but they are both illegal.

Unless I missed a detail about this story, Hillary did not leak information that was classified at the time she was sending/receiving emails on that account, rather, it was determined in an ex post facto analysis of the emails that they contained classified information. Comparing it to Petraeus' direct passing of classified-at-the-time information to his mistress seems rather suspect to me for that reason.
posted by tonycpsu at 1:00 PM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm trying to imagine Twitter if 9/11 happened in 2015 and...I can't. My brain refuses.
posted by Drinky Die at 1:02 PM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


Justinian: “Both knowingly leaking information and taking insufficient care in keeping classified information secure are illegal. They're not the same crime but they are both illegal.”

As others have pointed out, Hillary Cllinton absolutely did not do either of these things. We're not talking about information that was classified at all. We're talking about information that was classified later.

So, by this standard, any person who has ever disposed of any unclassified information in the federal government is guilty of a crime, because that information could be classified later after the fact.
posted by koeselitz at 1:30 PM on August 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


Voting against the war scores brownie points for moral strength and perispacity, but had the war gone well -- or at least WMDs had been found to justify the intervention -- you'd have fallen afoul of Goering's maxim about democracy and wars, how the pacifists lack patriotism and expose the country to present dangers.

And still, in the end she carries her share of the million+ Iraqi casualties, the US losses, all surrounding costs. That seems more than sufficient to not vote for her. It may be the case that the better option is voting against whoever she's facing, but cold "Lesser evil" pragmatism is not much comfort.

Similarly on the email front, whether it should've been done or not has nothing to do with "Was it legal?", or "Was everyone else doing it?". It seems small in comparison, but still. Lesser evil (with some bonuses to sweeten the pot).
posted by CrystalDave at 1:55 PM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


but cold "Lesser evil" pragmatism is not much comfort

I'm with you on Hillary's culpability for the war -- she doesn't get a pass for her vote just because it wasn't strictly necessary for the authorization to pass the Senate. The blood's on her hands as much as it is Blanche Lincoln's or Ben Nelson's in my book.

However, by that same logic, those who can't overcome their distaste for lesser evil pragmatism at the ballot box also bear some responsibility, however small, for what the greater evil does when they get elected. If someone has a chance to go on record for their preferred candidate or against their preferred candidate's opponent and chooses not to, that's on them, whether their vote mattered to the mathematical outcome or not.
posted by tonycpsu at 2:11 PM on August 12, 2015


I've never been a fan of the Clintons and will vote for Sanders in the primary, but I'd love to ask the Republicans who are pointing fingers over this how they feel about David Petraeus sharing highly classified information with his mistress when he was head of the CIA, and skating with a fine that he could pay by making one speech.
posted by donatella at 2:12 PM on August 12, 2015 [5 favorites]


Lesser evil or greater evil, that's the way the system has been designed to vend our choices. You can refuse the center-right but you'll get the far-right in its place anyway. See Bush vs Gore 2000 for how that works.

I see nothing wrong with Clinton keeping her email server at-hand, I hear you about 2002 but assigning her a leadership role in the runup to war is ahistorical.

Her 2002 speech on that was typical Clinton triangulation.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 2:14 PM on August 12, 2015


People seem to be hanging their hats on the idea that all of the information was unclassified when Clinton sent/received it and was only classified later. At least, what, three people replied with the same point. But as far as I can tell that's false. Some of the information was classified later. Some was classified at the time. That's directly from the Office of the Inspector General.

Now we can get into the legal weeds since people will probably try to point out that it hadn't been marked as classified yet. But that's a dodge based on a misunderstanding of the process and the legalities.
posted by Justinian at 2:16 PM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Here is the quote from the Office of the Inspector General that the emails were classified at the time they were sent and received. Via BBC or any number of other news organizations if you prefer.
posted by Justinian at 2:19 PM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Now we're arguing what "is" is, again.

Given the information security threats the SOS faced from the conservatives who are embedded so deeply in DC and our Federal security state, plus the media, I see prudence not arrogance or ignorance.

Now, had something bad happened with that information while outside .gov's purview, then their would be a real -Gate here.

Like Monica, no harm no foul in my book.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 2:22 PM on August 12, 2015


I'm with you on Hillary's culpability for the war -- she doesn't get a pass for her vote just because it wasn't strictly necessary for the authorization to pass the Senate. The blood's on her hands as much as it is Blanche Lincoln's or Ben Nelson's in my book.

However, by that same logic, those who can't overcome their distaste for lesser evil pragmatism at the ballot box also bear some responsibility, however small, for what the greater evil does when they get elected.


That is quite the pretzel of logic you got there.
posted by Drinky Die at 2:24 PM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


Now we can get into the legal weeds since people will probably try to point out that it hadn't been marked as classified yet. But that's a dodge based on a misunderstanding of the process and the legalities.

There are certainly legal weeds here, but you don't get to just declare victory by choosing which of the competing narratives you feel is correct.
posted by tonycpsu at 2:52 PM on August 12, 2015


That is quite the pretzel of logic you got there.

I don't see what's so complicated about it. Hillary voted for the war, therefore she bears some responsibility for that decision. Had she abstained, she would have also borne responsibility by virtue of the fact that she could have voted against it but did not. The same goes for people voting for elected representatives. The logic could not be simpler.
posted by tonycpsu at 2:53 PM on August 12, 2015


It seems like every week Sanders' numbers go up and Clinton's numbers go down. Good! The world doesn't revolve around me, but Sanders represents why I bailed on the right wing and became a progressive.

Clinton strikes me as a corrupt pro choice Republican, while Sanders is a lot like old school Democrats, very concerned with meat and potatoes working class issues. Fair or not fair, Clinton is mega rich, and I don't think someone that wealthy is ever going to be super serious about undoing our fascist tax system and replacing it with something more Democratic.
posted by Beholder at 2:59 PM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


I don't see what's so complicated about it. Hillary voted for the war, therefore she bears some responsibility for that decision. Had she abstained, she would have also borne responsibility by virtue of the fact that she could have voted against it but did not. The same goes for people voting for elected representatives. The logic could not be simpler.

Yes, she bears responsibility because she affirmatively voted yes for the war. That logic does not connect to blaming people for voting for candidate A instead of candidate B or C. She got the result she voted for, someone who votes for a losing candidate does not.
posted by Drinky Die at 3:11 PM on August 12, 2015


"Voting against the war scores brownie points for moral strength and perispacity"

"Brownie points"? Please.

Somebody above mentioned principles. If, when faced with the decision whether to support the massive invasion of another country, you cannot muster the principle to say "fuck game theory, this is wrong", then you don't deserve to be in office, as far as I'm concerned.

And of course, what you completely ignored is that she didn't merely vote for it, she actively spoke out in favor of it. Let me remind you of that speech. Part 2.
posted by mikeand1 at 3:18 PM on August 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


That logic does not connect to blaming people for voting for candidate A instead of candidate B or C.

There usually is no candidate C that has a chance to do anything except spoil the election for candidates A or B. I wish there were, along with candidates D through Q, but usually it's a binary choice, just like Hillary's vote for the war was.
posted by tonycpsu at 3:19 PM on August 12, 2015


I just want a President who won't literally try to nominate the Book of Deuteronomy to the Supreme Court. That's it. I have learned not to ask for too much. Just give me the safest bet, please, I don't give a flying ratfuck what's buried in their private email servers or who's buried in their back 40.
posted by prize bull octorok at 3:23 PM on August 12, 2015 [12 favorites]


Just give me the safest bet, please, I don't give a flying ratfuck what's buried in their private email servers or who's buried in their back 40.

Isn't this a variation of the electability argument? That we have to nominate a candidate who's wrong on issues concerning war and trade otherwise a Republican who's also wrong on war and trade will get elected? Of course it's more complicated than that, but I disagree with those who imply, either directly or indirectly, that Sanders is unelectable.

Sanders' economic positions are popular among progressives, moderates, and even working class Republicans. His opposition to more war is very much in tune with the public's aversion to more nation building. I can absolutely see Sanders being elected, and I'm extraordinarily suspicious of the electability and inevitability arguments being trotted out by establishment media.
posted by Beholder at 3:42 PM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Why can't Clinton supporters just admit when she does something dirty?

Because she's been accused of everything from murder to insider trading to eating roasted babies, and none of it it is ever true. She's been in the public eye since she was at Wellesley in 1969, and no one has ever proven any of the thousands of scurrilous accusations against her. If she were so dirty, don't you think something would have stuck by now?

I'm sorry to destroy your cherished beliefs instilled by the Koch brothers, but Hillary Clinton is not evil, she is not corrupt, she did not kill Vince Foster, etc. etc. etc. She is a lefty liberal who has been fiercely advocating for women, children, minorities, and the poor for her entire career, which spans decades in the spotlight, and by all accounts except those of her right wing enemies and those they have duped, she is a fine human being. Even Bernie Sanders likes, respects, and admires her. Granted, she has had to walk a fine line made even finer by the fact that she is a woman, but she has walked it.

No one can point to anything she has done that is an example of extraordinary competence, courage, or leadership, because there aren't any examples.

Bullshit. You just haven't been paying attention. Here's just one (since that's all you asked for). 20 Minutes That Changed The World: Hillary Clinton In Beijing. I was an adult and paying attention at the time, and it was a HUGE fucking deal.

And yes, she voted for the AUMF, but she did not support the invasion of Iraq. She made this clear in the speech linked above. Hillary Clinton Never Supported the Bush/Cheney Invasion of Iraq.
posted by caryatid at 4:15 PM on August 12, 2015 [9 favorites]


And yes, she voted for the AUMF, but she did not support the invasion of Iraq. She made this clear in the speech linked above. Hillary Clinton Never Supported the Bush/Cheney Invasion of Iraq.

I agree with every word of your comment except this, which amounts to a distinction without a difference. Congress was perfectly happy to give GWB a blank check and wash its hands of its responsibility to declare war, but we don't have to contribute to that deception by pretending they weren't aware of this fact at the time they cast their votes. Contemporaneous speeches announcing that they didn't intend their vote to be a vote for war don't change that fact that they voted for a vague authorization for war.
posted by tonycpsu at 4:31 PM on August 12, 2015 [7 favorites]


I would say that the Bush looks like the least biggest idiot among the theoretically-possible GOP nominees and would probably do the least horrifically catastrophic job of running the country, which, I mean, Bush? LOL whatever this is fucking bizarro world now

Surely George Pataki is far preferable. But, then again, polling at 0.2%.

Bush is probably second. I don't want another Bush presidency but, whenever I read anything about Jeb, I think: Why couldn't we have had him from 01-09 instead of his brother?
posted by 256 at 4:38 PM on August 12, 2015


We're not talking about information that was classified at all. We're talking about information that was classified later.

Are we? Or are we talking about information that was always classified, but was noticed to be classified later, when looked at again?

I have documents at work that are classified, and obviously I don't go emailing those around on the unclassified email. But I do have conversations over unclassified email all the time, with the very same people. If I type something into an email that discusses something of a classified nature, is that email classified even though it's straight out of my head and not reviewed by a classifying authority and marked? Yes, it still is. I would, and should, get into trouble for that.

Hell, just recently I did the reverse and accidentally emailed an attachment that I knew contained no [unclassified, but otherwise sensitive] information, but it turned out one of the pages had been incorrectly marked as controlled. We treated that as if it had been controlled anyway, because it was a security process failure, even if it turned out to be harmless in effect.

Had I done even that small thing intentionally, I would have no security clearance right now, probably. But can you even remove the security clearance from a cabinet-level official? Presumably that comes automatically with the job they were appointed for.
posted by ctmf at 4:45 PM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


But can you even remove the security clearance from a cabinet-level official?

You assign someone to bring them hard copies of all classified material, let them read it, and take it back. It happens every now and then with a flag officer whose clearance has been suspended but who hasn't been relieved of duty (generally because of mishandling classified information via simple fuckup rather than intent).
posted by Etrigan at 4:59 PM on August 12, 2015


she is not corrupt

She's filthy rich, which makes Sanders the better candidate. Why would a rich politician support restoring tax sanity if it means millions out of their pockets and less for their daughter?
posted by Beholder at 5:05 PM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


She is a lefty liberal who has been fiercely advocating for women, children, minorities, and the poor for her entire career

She is a centrist liberal. And she is great for white feminism, but seriously her record for the working poor and communities of colour is iffy at best.
posted by Kitteh at 5:09 PM on August 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


To Americans, Trump is "handsome"

I have very literally never ever heard even one person say this in a serious way. Of all the things I've read in this thread, this is the most troubling.

I'll give you Jeb Bush though, I think he's handsome. Though I do tend to like kind of dorky-lookin' dudes, so.
posted by triggerfinger at 5:21 PM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


There are certainly legal weeds here, but you don't get to just declare victory by choosing which of the competing narratives you feel is correct.

I'm not choosing what I feel is correct, or declaring victory. I'm saying what is, to the best of my understanding, the correct interpretation of the facts. Which is that if a low level person had done something like this they would have been stripped of their security clearance and likely lost their job. Would they be prosecuted for it? Probably not. But some people aren't saying that Secretary Clinton messed up yet remains the best candidate, they are saying she didn't mess up and did nothing wrong. Which seems clearly wrong.

It's not some kind of surrender to the forces of chaos to say that this was a screwup, it shouldn't have happened, and I'm almost certainly going to vote for her anyway.
posted by Justinian at 5:28 PM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Hillary may be evil, but has she ever pulled a Baldgazhi?!?!?
"The bald spot, he said, was the result of a repair incident in the kitchen when he banged his head on an open kitchen cabinet door while making repairs requested by his wife, Tonette," wrote the paper. "She kept telling him to go to the doctor to get the scar on his head looked at, he said. When he finally did, the doctor said his hair would never grow back in that spot, the governor explained."

I think NOT.
posted by sallybrown at 5:33 PM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


But some people aren't saying that Secretary Clinton messed up yet remains the best candidate, they are saying she didn't mess up and did nothing wrong. Which seems clearly wrong.

It's quite clear that she messed up and did something wrong without adjudicating whether she spilled classified information, which none of us is in a position to do. She may very well have, but these things are rarely cut-and-dried. Presumably the OIG has tried to piece this together, but they may be wrong, and none of us has anything to go on other than two different interpretations of the rules that were in place at that time.
posted by tonycpsu at 5:41 PM on August 12, 2015


Sanders once wrote a serious article where he claimed that being sexually repressed was the principle cause of breast cancer and perhaps all cancer had a psychological cause. Then there was the time he supported legislation to grant gun and ammunution manufacturers total immunity from liability for their products.
posted by humanfont at 5:42 PM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Bernie has changed his views on cancer.
posted by Golden Eternity at 5:47 PM on August 12, 2015


Again, both candidates aren't perfect, nor should we expect them to be. They're still oodles better than the circus that is the current crop of GOP hopefuls.
posted by Kitteh at 5:49 PM on August 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


someone that wealthy is ever going to be super serious about undoing our fascist tax system and replacing it with something more Democratic

Bernie's relative cred over Clinton here is going to be worth less than a fart kept in a jar until the Dems retake Congress. Both houses now.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 5:54 PM on August 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


We all remember how the last filibuster proof majority the Dems had in both houses a few years ago produced so many liberal bills. Single payer! Taxing the rich! Cutting defense! Good times.
posted by Justinian at 6:05 PM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


Sorry if someone else has posted this, but I find this Daily Beast article illuminating. It describes some of the emails as having "exceptionally high" classifications and describes the penalties for mishandling them:
... Information at the “TOP SECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN” level is considered exceptionally highly classified and must be handled with great care under penalty of serious consequences for mishandling. Every person who is cleared and “read on” for access to such information signs reams of paperwork and receives detailed training about how it is to be handled, no exceptions—and what the consequences will be if the rules are not followed.

People found to have willfully mishandled such highly classified information often face severe punishment. Termination of employment, hefty fines, even imprisonment can result.

In the real world, people with high-level clearances are severely punished for willfully violating such rules. At a minimum, those suspected of mishandling things like NSA “signals intelligence”—intercepts calls, emails, and the like—have their clearances suspended pending the outcome of the investigation into their misconduct. Any personal items—computers, electronics—where federal investigators suspect the classified wound up, wrongly, will be impounded and searched. If it has TOP SECRET//SI information on it, “your” computer now belongs to the government, since it is considered classified.

People found to have willfully mishandled such highly classified information often face severe punishment. Termination of employment, hefty fines, even imprisonment can result. Yes, people really do go to jail for mishandling classified materials. Matthew Aid, a writer on intelligence matters, served over a year in prison for mishandling TOPSECRET//SI information from NSA, for example. The well connected tend to avoid jail, however. Sandy Berger and John Deutsch—who both served in high-level positions under President Bill Clinton, did not go to prison for mishandling TOP SECRET intelligence (though Berger got probation and was fined $50,000).

What, then, does all this means for Hillary? There is no doubt that she, or someone on her State Department staff, violated federal law by putting TOP SECRET//SI information on an unclassified system. That it was Hillary’s private, offsite server makes the case even worse from a security viewpoint. Claims that they “didn’t know” such information was highly classified do not hold water and are irrelevant. It strains belief that anybody with clearances didn’t recognize that NSA information, which is loaded with classification markings, was signals intelligence, or SIGINT. It’s possible that the classified information found in Clinton’s email trove wasn’t marked as such. But if that classification notice was omitted, it wasn’t the U.S. intelligence community that took such markings away. Moreover, anybody holding security clearances has already assumed the responsibility for handling it properly.
posted by jayder at 6:12 PM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Anyone leaking information regarding the existence or classification of such documents to the reporter who isnt making it up,would be guilty of mishandling classified data. So chances are high this is someone talking out of their ass.
posted by humanfont at 6:23 PM on August 12, 2015


"And yes, she voted for the AUMF, but she did not support the invasion of Iraq."

I read the Daily Kos link. It's a ludicrous bit of ass-covering.

Here's Hillary's asserted position: "I only voted to give Bush the authority to go to war; I didn't think he would actually go to war with it. That darned tricky Bush guy lied to me!"

You'd have to be awfully credulous to believe that line. But if that's what Hillary was actually thinking at the time, then she is far too naive and gullible to be President.

Bottom line is that she supported the war. I want someone who had the wisdom to actively oppose the war.
posted by mikeand1 at 6:29 PM on August 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


We all remember how the last filibuster proof majority the Dems had in both houses

<img src="picard_not_this_shit_again.gif">

Ah, yes, the approximately nineteen minutes where Democrats had 60 votes when counting liberal stalwarts like Mary Landrieu, Max Baucus, and Mark Pryor.
posted by tonycpsu at 7:00 PM on August 12, 2015 [6 favorites]


Then there was the time he supported legislation to grant gun and ammunution manufacturers total immunity from liability for their products.

Does anyone seriously believe that Sanders would veto any gun control legislation that lands on his desk? Lots of rural state Democrats oppose gun control, because they know they'll get replaced with a Republican if they don't, a Republican who also opposes gun control, but also supports the entire right wing agenda.
posted by Beholder at 7:06 PM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


I want someone who had the wisdom to actively oppose the war.

Bernie's got my vote in the primary of course. I don't even care about the November 'electability' calculus, I'm happy giving the nation that choice.

95% of politics is BS, since the swing voter has an IQ of around 80, which is why they're a swing voter in the first place.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 7:30 PM on August 12, 2015


"fuck game theory, this is wrong", then you don't deserve to be in office, as far as I'm concerned

In 2006 Clinton won 83% of the primary vote against the purity candidate and just over 2/3 the vote in the General.

New Yorkers forgave her sin, but they probably wouldn't have had she voted against the AUMF (again, remember this was only a protest vote for her and the other blue-state senators) and the 2003 Iraq War gone more like the 1991 edition (or any WMDs at all had been found)

Clinton is a politician. She's going to do politician type stuff like straddling, weathervaning, and triangulation. Welcome to the world-as-it-is.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 7:51 PM on August 12, 2015


"and the 2003 Iraq War gone more like the 1991 edition"


That's a pretty fanciful piece of counterfactual history there.

Wise people knew very well that removing Saddam meant that the 2003 edition was NOT going to go like the 1991 edition. It was predictable that removing Saddam would result in a civil war. That's why a lot of wise people predicted it -- including me, and I'm far from a foreign policy expert. Even Colin Powell said it: You break it, you own it (the Pottery Barn rule).

Wise people also knew that Saddam Hussein didn't present an imminent threat to the U.S., and some wise people knew there were no WMDs.

Hillary isn't that wise, and she doesn't hire wise people unfortunately. She hires morons like Mark Penn, which is in large part why she lost in 2008.
posted by mikeand1 at 9:01 PM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


I thought going into Iraq was insane, yes.
But the future was not so knowable in 2002 as you assert. I assumed we'd find something, anything, that would be adequately nasty to ex post facto justify the invasion.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 9:57 PM on August 12, 2015


Why did you assume that?

Also, even Bush's father knew that taking Saddam out would destabilize the region. That's why he didn't do it in the first Iraq war.

Back to the e-mail server. I don't have a clue if there's anything in the e-mails. What I care about is how poorly Clinton has handled this thing politically. Her new conference at the UN was a disaster. It made her look entitled, arrogant, and as if she had something to hide. She can get away with that after she wins the election but she hasn't won yet.
posted by rdr at 3:03 AM on August 13, 2015


And the other thing was that her actions prior to the UN news conference didn't bring the story to a close. I doubt that the e-mails that she destroyed were truly destroyed and it invited her political enemies to press for access and that's exactly what happened.
posted by rdr at 4:26 AM on August 13, 2015


Bernie sounds great, but so did Obama. I have no doubt that Bernie would try to push things to the left, but there's zero doubt there would be huge push back from Republican members in Congress, so what actually happens is anyone's guess.

Bottom line, don't expect miracles from a Sander's presidency. The best thing to hope for is a liberal Supreme Court Justice or two.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:13 AM on August 13, 2015


We should just switch to electing Supreme Court judges directly if that is all the Presidential elections are about.
posted by Drinky Die at 6:16 AM on August 13, 2015 [3 favorites]


Good thing that's not all they're about then, eh?

My only point here was not to place a whole lot of hope and faith in Bernie presidency.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:24 AM on August 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


Does anyone seriously believe that Sanders would veto any gun control legislation that lands on his desk?

I do. His opposition to gun control is not just something pro forma to get elected - it's a position he genuinely holds. I find it funny that aspect of him isn't as attractive when you find out he has positions you don't like.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:55 AM on August 13, 2015


Ah, yes, the approximately nineteen minutes where Democrats had 60 votes when counting liberal stalwarts like Mary Landrieu, Max Baucus, and Mark Pryor.

... That's how you get 60 votes. You can't have a veto proof majority without center or even right-leaning Democrats.
posted by Justinian at 9:45 AM on August 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


Ah, yes, the approximately nineteen minutes where Democrats had 60 votes when counting liberal stalwarts like Mary Landrieu, Max Baucus, and Mark Pryor.

... That's how you get 60 votes. You can't have a veto proof majority without center or even right-leaning Democrats.


60 votes isn't veto-proof, it's filibuster-proof. And tonycpsu's point was that those particular Democrats could not be counted on to stop a filibuster of single-payer, defense cuts, or basically anything too "liberal".
posted by Etrigan at 9:59 AM on August 13, 2015


That's what I meant, filibuster-proof, as I said in my previous comment. Veto was just a thinko.
posted by Justinian at 10:37 AM on August 13, 2015


That's what I meant, filibuster-proof, as I said in my previous comment. Veto was just a thinko.

The clear subtext of your snarky comment citing single-payer and defense cuts was that a supermajority could have or even could have possibly led to those things, and that's patently false when considering the makeup of the caucus at that time, the short and non-contiguous time periods under which they had the supermajority, and the circumstances under how it came to be. This barest of mathematical but non-ideological supermajority (only when counting two independents who caucused with Democrats, one of which was Joe Fucking Lieberman) was technically in place for all of about six months in total at the end of 2009, but was dividied between two periods of about seven weeks (between Al Franken being sworn in and Ted Kennedy's passing) and four months (between Mark Kirk's appointment to succeed Kennedy and Scott Brown's swearing in.) This tumultuous period also included the summer recess, which further reduced the amount of time Democrats could have gotten anything done even if they had managed to hold the Blue Dog caucus at gunpoint and demand a lockstep party-line vote to rename a post office or something.

These details, which you are no doubt familiar with but were happy to gloss over for a cheap punch line, are important.
posted by tonycpsu at 11:30 AM on August 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


You've got it exactly backwards. I wasn't snarking in support of the idea that we would get those things with a supermajority, I was snarking at the idea that a supermajority would lead to them. Apparently we agree about that.
posted by Justinian at 12:53 PM on August 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


(ie any large enough majority to stop a filibuster much less a veto is going to include a bunch of people in your party who don't agree on a lot of issues. So the idea, as put forward by Heywood Mogroot, that we might undo our "fascist tax system" if we only gave a majority in Congress back to the Democrats is not supported by facts.)

Not that we shouldn't vote out the Republicans, but just giving Democrats a majority, even a filibuster proof majority, is not going to lead to a single-payer 90%-tax-rate-on-the-rich defense-cutting social security-increasing liberal utopia.
posted by Justinian at 12:58 PM on August 13, 2015


Basically you need at least 70 Democratic Senators before you can expect to get a major, country changing bill liberals will really be behind fully. In other words, adjust to it never happening in your lifetime.
posted by Drinky Die at 1:09 PM on August 13, 2015




Justinian: "any large enough majority to stop a filibuster much less a veto is going to include a bunch of people in your party who don't agree on a lot of issues. "

I came to this realization awhile ago; it helped adjust my expectations of Congress accordingly:
Assume the Pacific coast states (minus Alaska) and the entire Northeast north of DC get two Democratic seats each. That's thirty senators. Let's throw in the Great Lakes too, from Minnesota to Ohio. Forty-two seats. Still short of a majority.

There are still some states left that Obama won in 2008, so let's add them to the pile: Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. Fifty-six seats! But that's still vulnerable to a filibuster.

To get to a supermajority, things get dicier. What's left? Missouri? The Dakotas? Montana? The Deep South? That's slim pickings if you're looking for a liberal chamber. And remember, the two extra states you need -- plus all the ones garnered so far -- need two Dems each. Every Republican victory in Florida or Indiana or (sigh) Massachusetts requires a Democratic win in one of these other states to balance it out.

The practical effect is a significant number of conservative Democrats from the South and the Great Plains and the Mountain West. And when incessant Republican filibusters make sixty votes required for everything, any one of these senators can hold up the process or extract concessions, as we saw during the healthcare debates last year. It was Montana's Max Baucus who blockaded merely debating single-payer, and even Connecticut gave us Lieberman, who refused to allow a public option.

Short of a demographic shift moving progressive voters from concentrated cities on the coasts to interior states, the only realistic way to get anything liberal through the Senate is by reforming the filibuster.
Of course at this point, with GOP control of both houses and even odds to take the White House, filibuster reform isn't such a hot idea.
posted by Rhaomi at 2:21 PM on August 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


All you need are 51 Senators willing to eliminate the fillibuster. The fillibuster isnt in the Constitution, it is just a Senate rule. The Senate can change its own rules at anytime with a simple majority vote.
posted by humanfont at 3:22 PM on August 13, 2015




Basically you need at least 70 Democratic Senators

The GOP was down to 16 out of 96 seats after the 1932-34-36 cycle.

1960-1962-64 saw 64, 66, 68

All this was back when the South was (racist) Democrat of course. The other party is host to these guys now.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 3:50 PM on August 13, 2015


All you need are 51 Senators

I'd prefer the Dems not do the GOP's dirty work for them

Given the ideological divide in this country, and how dirt gets a vote in the Senate, 60 votes in the senate is not a bad bar to impactful legislation.

27% of the electorate are pretty conservative, 15% social + 12% fiscal. Another 28% are pessimists, natural conservatives.

http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/26/the-political-typology-beyond-red-vs-blue/


At this point liberals have achieved a lot, a lot that the GOP in DC can tear down if it ever gets the chance again.

Stuff like turning Medicare into a voucher program, stiffing Gen X on its share of the nearly $3T of treasuries held in the social security trust fund (by raising retirement ages and lowering payouts so that Congress never has to appropriate money to pay off these bonds).

Don't expect a lot when there's so many anti-government conservatives and pessimists in the electorate. FDR and LBJ eras truly come once every 30 years if you're lucky/unlucky.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 4:01 PM on August 13, 2015


You've got it exactly backwards. I wasn't snarking in support of the idea that we would get those things with a supermajority, I was snarking at the idea that a supermajority would lead to them. Apparently we agree about that.
...
(ie any large enough majority to stop a filibuster much less a veto is going to include a bunch of people in your party who don't agree on a lot of issues. So the idea, as put forward by Heywood Mogroot, that we might undo our "fascist tax system" if we only gave a majority in Congress back to the Democrats is not supported by facts.)


The "fascist tax system" quote was from another user that Heywood Mogroot III was responding to. They can speak for themself, but my interpretation of their comment:

Bernie's relative cred over Clinton here is going to be worth less than a fart kept in a jar until the Dems retake Congress. Both houses now.

was that Democratic majorities would be necessary but not necessarily sufficient to getting a more progressive tax code. It was in that light that your response read as more of an admonishment to the Democrats for wasting a mathematical supermajority by not getting more progressive victories, but I see how you could have intended it the other way.
posted by tonycpsu at 6:25 PM on August 13, 2015


actually my point was that Bernie's better redistributionist cred over Hillary's isn't going to cut any ice while the GOP controls both houses of Congress.

The 2006 wave election surprised the hell out of me, wonder where those voters went . . .

Amazing how hard it is to get people on the same page in our democracy . . . been meaning to read Upton Sinclair's:

http://www.amazon.com/Candidate-Governor-And-How-Licked/dp/0520081986>/a>
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 8:52 PM on August 13, 2015




Bern Your Enthusiasm
posted by Golden Eternity at 12:20 PM on August 14, 2015 [2 favorites]




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