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Might there be other explanations for Trump's failure than the forces of Mordor using dark plots to defeat our lone hero? Maybe Trump was an ineffective executive with a lot more bluster than execution, who was too stubborn to not commit crimes that didn't benefit him at all?
This is a necessary condition to explain what we've seen, but not sufficient.
Given that we know Trump was spied on by the Obama administration, and that every lever of power came together to fortify the election against him, I don't think it can be honest to pretend that it's all just him, and what he's done.
Trump delenda est may as well be the motto of the uniparty wherever it holds power. Pretending otherwise is make-believe.
I enjoy talking to & listening to all sides of the political spectrum, because it gives perspective. Ken White just claimed that if Trump said what he said to witnesses on his current cases as a private apolitical defendant, he'd be in jail for contempt already, and he's getting special treatment anyway. It's funny how the side that's getting preferential treatment is always the other side.
You're like the leftist radical who notices some poor people can't pay their bills and announce CAPTIALISM DELENDA EST because a BAD THING IS HAPPENING. There have always been, and will always be, bad things happening. Yet that doesn't make today unique, nor does it mean that bad things are the only thing that is happening. Mild foul play is the everywhere in politics, and the system functions regardless. I believe this refers to obamagate / crossfire hurricane. Wikipedia claims there's no evidence Obama had anything to do with that personally - which, you know, eh, maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. But I think we can agree that this had little material impact on trump's election chances - if we're asking if the FBI's discretion helped or hurt trump, it's as close to help as hurt, given Comey's announcing he was re-opening the clinton emails investigation two weeks before the election. Why isn't that evidence the FBI hated Clinton? And this is all peanuts compared to something like Bush v Gore, where you can credibly say the supreme court decided the election. In favor of the, uh, republican. I think this line of thought undermines the claim that trump is being uniquely and unprecedentedly persecuted.
You need to apply some epistemic learned helplessness here. Observe from afar the buffeting winds of the hurricane that is political discourse - all sorts of ideas forming and crashing into each other. Accountants and cardiologists come to strong conclusions about corruption and malicious intent based on complicated inferences in fields like law, economics, foreign policy, and sociology. Does CarRepairGuy #MAGA2020 or TeacherMomOfThree #StopAsianHate really understand the latest legal controversy where the other side is undermining america because they hate us? Do you really understand all the subtle technical differences between the usual adaptation of an old process (elections) to the circumstances of the times, and active manipulation? Does - not republican media, exactly, but the distributed consensus of millions of trump partisans on the internet that you're informed by - really have good incentives or mechanisms of finding the truth? How likely is it that 'every lever of power' really 'fortified the election' in a way that mattered?
I went meta there because - there's so much stuff within claims of election fortification it'd take way too long to get into all of it, and it's years ago.
Why do people continue to think that this is a worthwhile point? Comey actually explained this and has been extremely vocal about his dislike for Trump.
I think this is the third or fourth time I've had to post this quote on the Motte.
No, I agree it's not good evidence the FBI hated clinton. But if things like that still happen to someone the FBI hates, why is it good evidence the FBI tunnel-vision hates trump given what happened to him? Especially given the impact on 2016 voters of comey's statement was, I think, larger than the impact of what they did to trump in 2016. Post-2016 actions would be a different discussion.
Huh? Clinton here is someone who the FBI absolutely loves. They were actually trying to help her - they were just incompetent. You don't even need to start reading tea leaves to figure out the FBI's position here because you can just read the Strzok texts, Higher Loyalty (please don't actually read this paper-based sleeping pill) etc. They absolutely did tunnel-vision hate Trump and went out of their way to try and hamstring him in as many ways as they could. I don't see how there can be any debate on this issue when you know the full context of the Steele dossier and how it was laundered in the media to justify Crossfire Hurricane even as they spoke amongst themselves about how the accusations had no substance but it was worth doing anything they could to take down Trump.
No, that's what I mean - FBI does something that hurts clinton even though they love clinton. This means that FBI doing something that hurts Trump less is not good evidence, absent a detailed internal understanding, that they are hurting trump because they hate him. You're getting caught up in an entirely 'everything is about the last 4 years' culture war issues' account of politics and the FBI specifically when that's not even true of trump, and has much less to do with e.g. these Jack Smith charges than trump's literal election-related conspiracies that he should have not undertaken.
That's exactly what I was posting - we do have a fairly detailed internal understanding thanks to the texts and documents that have been released/leaked. You can just go read them and see the naked, undisguised hatred of Trump and his base - "smell the Trump support" etc. This isn't hidden or obscured in any real way, and FBI officials have, in the past, put their names on anti Trump letters that had significant impacts on the outcome of the previous election.
2016 was 7 years ago, not 4 - I don't understand the point that you're trying to make here, unless you were just mistaken about the year and the passage of time (I make this mistake a lot myself). But even if I assume you meant the last 8 years, I still think you're wrong. To my understanding, the transition from Candidate Obama to President Obama represents the exact same kind of conflict - except Obama simply folded and gave up on his campaign promises rather than try to fight in the way he promised his supporters he would. Trump is the most recent and prominent outburst of anger from an internal proletariat whose material conditions have gotten worse and worse even while their complaints are mocked and jeered when they aren't ignored by the current aristocracy/PMC, and these trends have been ongoing for longer than I've been alive. I think that anger and resentment is actually a far bigger story than Trump the man, and it still boggles my mind that people think that removing him would do anything to resolve the problems that he rode to the white house.
hm, interesting.
I mean, my belief is that while bias against Trump does exist, Trump's many current prosecutions, and most of the action taken against him, were responses to unforced errors. A democrat who lied to the feds about the boxes would've been prosecuted too.
I agree the 'problems that led to trump' aren't being addressed by prosecuting him, and that the strategic approach to trump from the libs is clearly suboptimal from their own interests. But if he did breach democratic or procedural norms in harmful ways, then prosecuting him is important in keeping those norms alive.
I think most FBI action related to trump came from the perspective of 'he's pretty annoying but we're doing our jobs', not 'we must prevent this fascist from destroying the nation', and strong selection effects in leaking, publishing, reporting, and sharing selectively amplify things so that yous claims seem true. Not that what you describe is impossible, that kind of thing could happen. Making a strong argument for that would be difficult and time-consuming though.
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Well, because they did that against their will. They were attempting to keep the fact that classified emails were comingled with child porn on Clinton's top aid's husbands laptop, but the local FBI field office shared some of their intel with the NYPD who eventually got word to Guiliani who was then shopping an "FBI coverup of Clinton emails" story which Comey got wind of and instead got ahead of while simultaneously massively downplaying what had happened.
Hm, that isn't how wikipedia frames that. The thing is, a left-winger would have a similar response to the obamagate stuff, and I think each side is about as likely to be correct.
Wikipedia is a known captured institution...
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The dark plots by the forces of Mordor unquestionably happened, so it behooves us to address them rather than imagine hypothetical scenarios where they did not. This does not change when Trump is, in fact, an ineffective executive with more bluster than execution. It doesn't change even if he did in fact commit crimes.
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