Omnibus Politics Thread: Campaign 2016 EditionFollow

With everything you know and have heard about Cheeto-Boy, you think he's above colluding with anyone for his own profit and aggrandizement. REALLY?


I've got this awesome bridge I'd like to sell you.

Also, and I know I've mentioned this before, but it is kinda relevant. The claim itself doesn't even make sense. How exactly is anyone even thinking that this supposed collusion occurred? Let's assume for the moment that the Russians did indeed hack the DNC servers, and they did indeed hand the contents of said server to wikileaks. Um.. Where does Trump come in here? We might speculate that Trump could be secretly calling up Putin and coordinating the release of specific tidbits of information they had (although, they'd have to also secretly share the information as well, so he and his team could figure out what would best be leaked when for maximum effect or something), but that all fails when you realize that the entire theory assumes that the Russians handed the info to Wikileaks and then Wikileaks leaked it. Wikileaks, not the Russians was in control off what information was released, and when.

So are we saying that Trump was somehow secretly communicating with Julian Assange to coordinate those releases? How exactly does that not get noticed, given where he is? And all of this to do what? Something that Trump didn't need to be involved in at all in the first place? There's a point at which the sheer contortions you have to go to in order to support the narrative just don't work anymore. We have to assume that the Russians secretly wanted Trump to win and not Clinton, despite every historical indication that her foreign policy would be better for them than the unknown Trump. We then have to assume that their method of achieving this was to hack into the DNC to get some dirt on Clinton and her associates. And then we have to assume that, having found said dirt, sometime in June of 2016, instead of holding onto it to use as leverage against what seemed to be a nearly sure bet of a future Clinton president they decide instead to use it in the slim hope of hurting her election shot and getting Trump to win instead. But instead of leaking it themselves, via any of a number of methods they could have used, and which would have allowed them to control the release, they instead hand it off to Assange and just kinda hope he'll do what they want with it?

The whole thing is way too complicated. It's a white cat and a monocle short of Bond villain level silliness. The real world doesn't actually operate like the folks who write screenplays might want you to think. It simply doesn't make any sense. What makes a lot more sense is that the whole thing started out as opposition narrative, and then grew out of the need for those who lost the election to come up with an explanation other than "we totally misread the voters, and ran a terrible candidate to boot. Oh and got overly arrogant about the whole thing too. And maybe we shouldn't have pushed so much of our nutty agenda on the people of the country for the last 8 years too".

Yeah. That.

Edited, May 2nd 2017 10:05pm by gbaji

It's not like he was born in Kenya or anything.

Some people would have just assumed Russia was spying on both presidential candidates, because they spy on us all the time, and it's a potentially good source of information, and it doesn't require any weird twists of logic or conspiracy theories. But where's the fun in that?

Edited, May 3rd 2017 12:52pm by someproteinguy

Putin* wants Trump president. Putin hacks DNC (as well as attempts elsewhere but DNC gets through) and gets material, passes it along to Assange who is anti-Clinton & anti-US and is a good source for distribution. Putin, who also has contacts within the Trump campaign, drops information to Trump so he can coordinate responses to the days Wikileaks drops. Conversations about Ukraine, Syria, Trump business interests in Russia, etc as well -- after all Putin's doing Trump favors.

None of this is especially complicated or takes any sort of mental gymnastics to figure out. You can argue that it's not true and I'm not stating it as fact but, c'mon, this is pretty simple shit.

Even if Trump didn't come through on exactly what Putin wanted, having an inexperienced and incompetent guy in the White House only helps Putin. Look at the Syria attack; Putin couldn't have planned that better. Completely ineffective and didn't do shit but gives Putin a pretext to cut coordination with the US thus making any future attacks on Assad much more difficult and allows Putin to increase military presence in the region under the excuse of protection against US aggression. Putin doesn't need Trump to be his buddy, he just needs him in office being Trump.

*Putin being shorthand for the Russian government in general, Trump being shorthand for the Trump campaign & machine in general, etc

Well, everything makes sense if you just assume anything you disagree with is a conspiracy.

I thought the whole "surveillance" thing came about because of suspected money laundering by Russian nationals, in which Trump's name, or the names of people involved in his campaign, came up. Trump wasn't being "wiretapped" by our side; he was just caught up in a wide net.

That's on our side. On the Russian side I imagine it's pretty much as Jophiel posited above; they spied on both sides, kept whatever they found (or already knew) about Trump for insurance and did what they could to influence the election to go the way they wanted. With, I may add, remarkable timing and success.

Adding, of course, even if they were to fail to influence the election it's still a success. They've done a great job of undermining trust between both parties and the intelligence community, created a lot of infighting, and made a lot of people look foolish in the eyes of the public.

I'm offering "Mechanical Strawman", You knock it down just like a regular strawman, but first you need to fit together five hundred little unnecessary parts.

Indeed

Edited, May 4th 2017 3:00pm by Jophiel

IKEA Strawman?

Are there meatballs?

There should be meatballs.

So the Senate's healthcare bill is being written by twelve men, one Ted Cruz, and no women. Considering they can only lose like two voters to get it passed that sounds like they're purposefully trying to fail.

Trump just fired James Comey. Guess he wants a new guy to be FBI Director as they investigate his Russian links.

Edit: I should preemptively note that that is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Comey has bungled the Clinton email thing horribly and doesn't really deserve to be in his position. That said, I question that Trump was all that concerned about repeated errors that made Clinton look bad.

Edited, May 9th 2017 5:05pm by Jophiel