Watch Tapper Ask Conway: If Wikileaks Didn’t Matter, Why Did Trump Invoke Them So Often?
A pretty good question that might stump the partisans who routinely deny that Wikileaks (or, as I call it, Putinleaks) had any effect on the election. Sure, it may be the case that the election result would have been the same absent Putinleaks. But, as Tapper points out here, Donald Trump sure thought the Putinleaks revelations were important — because he brought them up over, and over, and over again.
TAPPER: And if you listen to what Mr. Trump had to say on the stump, all the time, he invoked Wikileaks dozens and dozens of times to try to suggest that the Wikileaks had said that there were things that Hillary Clinton was doing or had done that were untoward. Take a listen:
TRUMP: What you have to do is just take a look at Wikileaks, and just see what they said about Bernie Sanders.
TRUMP: Wikileaks just actually came out, John Podesta said some horrible things about you. And boy, was he right. He said some beauties.
TRUMP: Wikileaks, that just came out. And, she lied. Now she’s blaming the lie on the late, great Abraham Lincoln.
TAPPER: So I guess what I’m confused about is, how can you say that the hacking had no impact on the election when Mr. Trump kept invoking Wikileaks, which was printing, publishing, things that the Russians had hacked? Obviously, he thought it was going to have an effect on the election.
CONWAY: Well, having an — it had an effect on his debate answer. And it had an effect on the Clinton campaign because it was quite embarrassing to watch her closest advisors question her judgment, question whether she would ever find her voice, wondering aloud why she was testing 84 slogans to find out who she was and what she’d run on. This guy had “Make America Great Again” — it never changed. And I know that’s very embarrassing. Them calling Chelsea Clinton, some of them, a spoiled brat . . . that’s very uncomfortable. But that’s what was hacked.
Conway goes on to make the points that the RNC had better firewalls in place, and that the DNC denied access to their server to the FBI. She argues that Wikileaks did not determine the election results, which may well be true. She also claims at one point early in the full interview that the intelligence community had determined that Wikileaks had no effect on the election results — a lie that Tapper corrects. (The intelligence community pointedly made no such determination.)
Tapper asks a good question. No matter what you think about the actual effect of Putinleaks, Trump thought they were important enough to bring up, time and time again. Partisan defenses of Trump should take account of this fact — if those offering the defenses care about the facts, that is.
Here’s the full video:
[Cross-posted at RedState.]
I would think the easy answer would be “because Trump had no idea what he was doing from one day to the next”, and “He (Trump) won because Clinton was such an awful alternative, not because he was so good”. And if you go with the second Wikileaks likely had little if any impact, people already knew what an awful person Clinton is.
eeSoronel Haetir (86a46e) — 1/8/2017 @ 3:16 pmI’m hardly a Trump supporter, but I don’t think it’s fair of you to call it “Putinleaks”. Julian Assange himself said the leaks didn’t come from Russia.
Chuck Bartowski (211c17) — 1/8/2017 @ 3:17 pmYet the 65 rizzotto tray carriers ran interference, btw Todd, Gibson d her
narciso (d1f714) — 1/8/2017 @ 3:20 pmit was so unfair how Mr. Trump had to do propaganda slut jake tapper’s job throughout the whole campaign and help Americans understand the revelations from the emails podesta released when he traded his email password for a handful of magic beans
good thing Mr. Trump, his shoulders are broad!
like Atlas!
happyfeet (28a91b) — 1/8/2017 @ 3:22 pmeven if Putin and his flying monkeys had managed to hack the RNC, do we really think the emails would show that the RNC was actively colluding with the anderson cooper propaganda slut fake news media to rig the election?
I highly doubt it.
We may have to agree to disagree on this point.
happyfeet (28a91b) — 1/8/2017 @ 3:25 pmWell, I’m not really in the business of defending all of the moronic utterances of our soon-to-be 45th President, but that disclaimer aside, I always thought that his constant exhortation for Wikileaks to release dirt on Hillary was an acknowledgement that the mainstream media was spending all of their time digging into his affairs while largely giving Hillary and the Democrats a pass. Yeah, the media paid attention to the private email server fiasco, but otherwise they showed no interest in performing their own investigation as to whether or not the DNC was favoring Hillary during the primary (surely the DNC had some Sanders supporters who would have been glad to leak damaging info), nor were they at all interested in whether or not Hillary’s health was up to the task (until they absolutely had to be). So I think what the GOP candidate was doing was taunting the media, in effect saying, “Hey, if you won’t do your job then I guess we need Wikileaks to do it for you.”
JVW (6e49ce) — 1/8/2017 @ 3:28 pmyes yes the more you go to the source on Trump’s invocation of the wikileaks material the more it seems like he was using them primarily to try to peel off Sanders supporters from Team Stinkypig
the tapperpoodle’s just trying to frame this in such a way that his CNN masters will pat his head and let him sleep inside on cold nights
happyfeet (28a91b) — 1/8/2017 @ 3:35 pmIn a similar sense that mark felt, had on the 1972 election.
narciso (d1f714) — 1/8/2017 @ 3:39 pmWikileaks were – and are – hugely important because they document the sleazy, if not illegal, behavior of the Democratic Party’s top players.
I want to know what material the Clinton campaign was using to blackmail Sanders, don’t you?
I want to know which other prominent Democrats were involved in the pedophile parties that Podesta attended.
These leaked email messages need to be investigated for their substance, not just their source.
I would also like to know who in the intelligence community has been leaking classified information about the leaks to their friends in the media.
This is an incredible scandal; it should not be trivialized. It as if nobody cares – even those Republicans who dislike Trump.
ThOR (c9324e) — 1/8/2017 @ 3:44 pmIt’s a sad day when Assange is more believable than Comey, Brennan and Clapper combined, but that’s where we are.
ThOR (c9324e) — 1/8/2017 @ 3:51 pmI’m so thankful that Mr Donald will be inaugurated instead of that nasty Hillary woman.
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 1/8/2017 @ 4:00 pmLMFAO — because the point of the entire post and debate centers around an unknown: all caps for emphasis:
WHAT WAS THE STATE OF THE RACE PRIOR TO THE RELEASE OF THE WIKILEAKS FILES????
Come on, tell me how the race stood prior to Assange starting to put out the Podesta and DNC emails.
BUT, don’t just tell me how it stood — tell me how you know your claim is accurate.
I’ll wait.
shipwreckedcrew (56b591) — 1/8/2017 @ 4:11 pmPS — this is a Donald Rumsfeld game.
shipwreckedcrew (56b591) — 1/8/2017 @ 4:16 pmWikidumps apparently reduced Hillary’s likelihood of winning from 98% to 80% or so as I recall. She did the rest on her own.
crazy (d3b449) — 1/8/2017 @ 4:18 pmSays who?
shipwreckedcrew (56b591) — 1/8/2017 @ 4:18 pmYou would think they would have gotten a heads up about it security with the chappaqua server, apparently not.
There are technical issues of attribution as wordfence and Robert m lee pointed out.
narciso (d1f714) — 1/8/2017 @ 4:30 pmHow Much Did Wikileaks Hurt Hillary Clinton?
crazy (d3b449) — 1/8/2017 @ 4:36 pmTAPPER: So I guess what I’m confused about is, how can you say that the hacking had no impact on the election when Mr. Trump kept invoking Wikileaks, which was printing, publishing, things that the Russians had hacked? Obviously, he thought it was going to have an effect on the election.
Huh? No, Jake. You seem to have thought it– or concluded it did.
He knew it was going to have an effect on the media. He kept pointing at the shiny object and you kept chasing it. Tally up how many hours CNN reported on it along side the Access Hollywood tape leak coverage.
And here’s a suggestion for you and your chums at CNN — instead of televising newsreaders getting ears pierced, dancing and doing shots while an international terrorist attack is in progress, or airing cooking shows and old, repackaged news footage, why don’t you do some actual investigative journalism and find out who leaked that tape. That would be ‘news.’
“Everything is jake.”- Johnny Hooker [Robert Redford] ‘The Sting’ 1973
DCSCA (797bc0) — 1/8/2017 @ 4:40 pmMEMO TO: Conway
cc: Podesta
Subject: What influenced my vote.
It wasn’t Putin. It wasn’t Wikileaks. It was teevee.
Abandoned Hillary because I will not tolerate on my living room big screen a plain, preachy old feminist, clad in retro pantsuits lecturing me about my faults, glass ceilings, or to take out the trash, reminding me of the miserable 1970’s. Trump is much more entertaining; a pragmatist with an easy-on-the-eyes wife and attractive kids that’s keeps me watching, closely, more than Hillary Rodham Frumpton ever could. Mawdie, if you dress like a fire plug, the Big Dog is gonna pee on you.
Twelve days to show time!
DCSCA (797bc0) — 1/8/2017 @ 5:00 pmRick santelli as usual brought some perspective on the matter, rizzitto tray carrier Mitchell dissented.
narciso (d1f714) — 1/8/2017 @ 5:27 pmHow the Hell else were the voters to hear about the Democrat D-baggery and the fully voluntary collusion and water-carrying done by the media? The alphabet networks, PBS/CNN/MSNBC?
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 1/8/2017 @ 5:32 pmSmoke signals and handpuppets coronello.
narciso (d1f714) — 1/8/2017 @ 5:34 pmmaybe it would be better to ask if finding out what the democrats were up to affected the election. Although a lot of that was inside baseball and you need a program to keep track.
Richard Aubrey (472a6f) — 1/8/2017 @ 5:37 pmI suspect more people understood the Foundation shenanigans, they being fairly straightforward.
This is the first time in American history that the SOURCE of negative information about a candidate has mattered. I wonder why? But I’ll play along with this stupid, dishonest, partisan game.
The CIA/FBI etc. lack both the competence and jurisdiction to determine whether any piece of information allegedly disclose by the Russians actually influenced a single vote. At best, the agencies can speculate about what information they thought the Russians would consider damaging to Hillary, and whether that information was fake. So certainly (if “truth” is so very important to you, we need congressional hearings with the following witnesses:
(1) Donna Brazile & Hillary Clinton. They MUST be asked whether they received any debate questions in advance, and from whom. Brazile must also name names of those who she said “persecuted” her as a Christian.
(2) President Obama. He MUST address whether he knew about her private email server and wrote to her under a pseudonym, or whether that was another Russian fabrication.
Etc. etc. So either stamp your feet and demand this, or just be quiet.
ProLifer (ea6c4f) — 1/8/2017 @ 5:42 pmHillary Clinton will never be president.
Get over it, Democrats and #NeverTrump.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 1/8/2017 @ 5:45 pmOnly twelve more shopping days until Mr Donald’s big party!
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 1/8/2017 @ 5:50 pmPutinleaks. That’s adorable.
== they were important enough to bring up, time and time again==
Note to earnest but apparently somewhat naive blogger: All campaigns “bring up” unsavory stuff about the opposing candidates. That’s what they do. That’s what they do every chance they get. That’s what they always have done. When campaigns have negative information no matter what the source is they use it. To try to sway voters. To try to win elections. Pussy Pussy Pussy. Too bad you were not around to tut tut in 1884. You would have been scandalized, I bet. That election was a doozy.
Does any of this sound at all vaguely familiar?
elissa (4648c4) — 1/8/2017 @ 6:00 pmHelp me out here. Near as I can tell, the only debate is on the source, not the content. No one has claimed the emails were forged or doctored to make members of the DNC appear worse than they were. The complaint is, if somebody hadn’t leaked, nobody would know we were thinking these horrible thoughts about all y’all. Weak sauce. The elites hate the ordinary guys and gals. Piss on the elites. Wikileaks has said several times the source was not the Russians. I’ll be an angry Saunders supporter leaked them.
Milwaukee (313fad) — 1/8/2017 @ 6:01 pmWho cares? She’s gone. We can work out the rest from here man.
Donald (bd230b) — 1/8/2017 @ 6:09 pmThere are more emails b÷ING dumped, unlike trying to pin the russiata
narciso (d1f714) — 1/8/2017 @ 6:18 pmTail on the unicorn.
narciso (d1f714) — 1/8/2017 @ 6:19 pmTed Kennedy Secretly Asked The Soviets To Intervene In The 1984 Elections… http://thefederalist.com/2015/03/10/ted-kennedy-secretly-asked-the-soviets-to-intervene-in-the-1984-elections/
Carter, Democrats Asked Soviets to Stop Reagan… http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=21736
” Instead of picking apart mistakes by Trump, let’s focus on the damage the Democrats have done. It’s legion. In the guise of economic “fairness,” they gave us the worst economic recovery since World War II. They simply ground to a standstill our economic engine, causing massive unemployment and a job market that gives no hope to Americans for the future. They ruined our alliances and fed our enemies under a horrifyingly stupid, feckless president and secretary of state. They laid the groundwork for ISIS to become a power and were virtually useless in dealing with that organization. They destroyed our borders under the idea that it is racist to have them, flooding us with illegal aliens who don’t care a whit about American values of the past, and they steal from our kindness. They were on the way to destroying health care, paving the way for massive government control of doctors, insurance companies, and yes, us as patients. The evidence is in: Obamacare was a failure. They lied to get it passed, they lied to keep it, and they are lying about how good it is now. Thankfully, most people understand they now have a pig in the poke that costs a ton, and they can’t use it. They corrupted our bureaucracies in Washington, destroying the faith the American citizens had in their government. They did a lot more damage than this short list, but the point is that they ruined everything they touched. ”
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/01/broken_the_sickening_stale_and_worn_out_narratives_of_the_left.html
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 1/8/2017 @ 6:19 pmStick that up your tapper, Jake.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 1/8/2017 @ 6:20 pmNot to mention, the narratives they continue to put forward.
narciso (d1f714) — 1/8/2017 @ 6:33 pmI’m old enough to remember this past summer when the MSM were insisting that talking about emails and hackings was “old news.” (LOL)
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 1/8/2017 @ 6:44 pmSeems like ages, doesn’t it
narciso (d1f714) — 1/8/2017 @ 6:54 pmAt no time was it revealed in confidential emails that Patterico let the Dem Party edit his blog.
AZ Bob (f7a491) — 1/8/2017 @ 6:58 pmIf Americans even cared to view this, they’ll only see Jake is going gray and too much make-up makes Kelly-Anne look like Tammy-Faye.
DCSCA (797bc0) — 1/8/2017 @ 7:00 pmAsk Tapper how he feels about so many in the media colluding with the DNC and Clinton as well as waiting to get their talking points from those same places.
The public has a right to know when someone is trying to pull the wool over their eyes.
NJRob (43d957) — 1/8/2017 @ 7:00 pm#38 DCSCA, yeah normally Conway’s lips are subtle. I don’t know who advised her to go with that over-the-top red. It’s distracting, kind of like when Megyn Kelly showed up to that debate in Iowa (?) with those comical fake lashes.
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 1/8/2017 @ 7:05 pmI think we can agree that millions of SS numbers of gov’t employees stolen in the OMB hack was a bad thing.
Bruce (3b65b7) — 1/8/2017 @ 7:21 pmI think we can agree that having voters know that Democrat big wigs rigged the primary so that Bernie couldn’t win was a good thing.
I think we agree why the Democrats and the MSM howl about the good thing.
If what Jake Tapper asks Kellyanne Conway is more important to you than that that Horrible Person Hillary Clinton will never be President (LOL); and that Mr. Trump the Donald will make America great again; and we will finally have a good-looking First Lady who is only rumored to have been an “escort; than I guess there’s nothing more to be said, Patterico, except possibly: “For goodness sake, Kellyannne, eat something!”
nk (dbc370) — 1/8/2017 @ 7:25 pmWho, in good conscience, would have voted for [class] diversity, elective abortion, Planned Parenthood, progressive wars, immigration “reform”, and the Pro-Choice Church?
Of course Deep Plunger’s expose of Water Closet and the Nigerian Phishers catching a Democratic Ass mattered.
Placing us on a progressive slope to catastrophic anthropogenic global warring also mattered.
In the words of the defeated party and the uncritical sympathizers: What difference, at this point, does it make?
Mr. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and in particular at Fannie Mae…
I mean, we do not have a constitutional crisis in the United States, and in particular a lurking Soviet menace. Although, our adventures in social justice from Benghazi to Damascus to Kiev are a clear and present risk. America, Europe, and NATO need to cease and desist from their belligerent behavior and wreckless (sic), violent coups.
nn (35b724) — 1/8/2017 @ 7:35 pmWhat wrtr the big events this week, the tragic goings on in streamwood and yet another intelligence failure in ft Lauderdale. How much did taper address either rhetorical.
narciso (d1f714) — 1/8/2017 @ 7:43 pmThis was a frustrating interview to watch because Tapper and Conway — both sharp cookies — kept talking past each other rather than engaging in responsive questioning and answers. She is better at it than him, but he has the host’s advantage of getting to ask (or re-ask) the same slanted question again and again. They’re each pitching an argument, but they’re also each ignoring the other’s argument.
Conway I understand doing that — it’s her job to obfuscate and cross-promote as necessary for President-elect Trump, rinse and repeat.
A fair-minded judge would sustain an objection as to form, to cut the snarky inferences out of Tapper’s questions; and then, the question having been reframed, would instruct the witness to answer it responsively. But there is no judge to rule on such things on Sunday morning talk shows, so we have our time wasted like this. I wasn’t entertained or informed.
Along with all the other craziness in the country, the mainstream media, the talking heads, the intelligentsia, the Twitteratti, and all the cool kids are still suffering from lingering neurochemical effects of the run-up to the election and then the election itself. If they had an ounce of perspective, they’d take a moment to take a breath and look at stuff in context. This is not new news, not a bit of it. It’s filler for the comparatively slow-news period during this lame-duck gap between the election and the inauguration.
If you’re in a particular frenzy about this today and you weren’t frenzied about it when these hacks were first reported — any of them, and depending on which we’re talking about in particular it may be stuff that’s been known for well over a calendar year — then you’re being played, successfully, to keep you in a lathered up state for your mouse-kicks and eyeballs and political donations.
Beldar (fa637a) — 1/8/2017 @ 7:47 pmTrump got elected despite the media’s best efforts to elect Hillary, and the media is still flailing about for someone to blame — from deplorables to Wikileaks to Putin. Anything except the way their (metaphorically) fair-haired boy Obama f***ed America over the last eight years, and the fact that the majority of the American people trusts the media less than it trusts used car salesmen.
nk (dbc370) — 1/8/2017 @ 7:50 pmConsistency isn’t really a thing in TrumpWorld.
Dave (711345) — 1/8/2017 @ 7:50 pmNot that there’s not enough blame to go around. From the two totally f***ed up parties who have gotten into a pattern of putting up candidates worse than the one before to the American electorate who let them get away with it.
nk (dbc370) — 1/8/2017 @ 7:53 pmExcuses are lies wearing make-up. And that’s all we’ve been getting from the Beltway, the Obama bureaucracy and the media. Nothing more than bullsh*t and excuses.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 1/8/2017 @ 8:02 pmHere is the problem with the entire debate:
It presumes that HRC was ahead in the race when the Wikileaks releases began. It assumes that the Wikileaks releases damaged her position vis-a-vis Trump — i.e., her lead diminished and then was lost.
On what basis are we making those assumptions? If there was ever and election season — and I mean from Jan. 2015 to Nov. 2016 — where polling and “snapshots” of the race at a frozen point in time were MEANINGLESS and LIKELY WRONG, it was the 2016 election cycle.
The FACTS are that we have no idea if Clinton was ahead or behind when the releases started, and we have no idea of the releases hurt her standing or didn’t hurt her standing.
We don’t know because the polling that we would normally rely on to give us that answer proved to be WHOLLY UNRELIABLE. And not just in Nov. 2016 — the polls REPEATEDLY got wrong Trump v. Everybody, Hillary V. Bernie. Hillary v. Trump.
There is no way to know if Trump was actually ahead or behind when the releases started, and there’s no way to know if the releases moved the race in his favor, against him, or not at all.
So the exercise of the exchange between Conway and Tapper, and the snark in the post, are both pointless. You have to assume that Trump was behind, and the Wikileaks releases worked to his advantage to even reach the point that is being debated, i.e., Russian influence on the outcome of the election, egro undermining legitimacy of Trump’s victory.
Neither assumption in 2016 could be adopted in an intellectually honest fashion.
shipwreckedcrew (56b591) — 1/8/2017 @ 8:07 pmNot impressed by the “Putinleaks” line. Zero evidence has been cited for Putin’s culpability. Zero.
The only reason any of this matters to the Dems, the media, or #NeverTrump is because they think it hurts Trump in some way.
This is easy to demonstrate: because they don’t care that that CIA is illegally leaking material to the press that, if there is any evidence for it, should be highly classified. CIA leakers publicly saying what we know and how we know it is a serious breach that people who claim to care about that sort of thing, should be 100 times more indignant about than anything that came out of Wikileaks.
Gabriel Hanna (f9a792) — 1/8/2017 @ 8:08 pmBut its most fake news, now our cyber defense posture going forward, including preventing intrusions into got agencies that’s a bfd the fact that santiago or hammed, was able to slip through every gap on our surveillance net.
narciso (d1f714) — 1/8/2017 @ 8:09 pmJakey Boy’s question is silly.
And the obvious answer to his silly question is, “Uh, Jake, we were trying to win an election — that’s why Donald was talking about Wikileaks during the campaign. It’s customary in American politics to say things which make your opponent look bad.”
By the way, does everyone remember how everytime there was a Wikileaks dump, Hillary’s cheerleaders in the MSM bent over backwards to characterize the info contained in each of the leaks as a big fat nothingburger. Many newspapers buried a story about the leaks on page 18. Now they claim the leaks were so important that it turned the outcome of the election.
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 1/8/2017 @ 8:19 pmNow as I say, going forward, Wikileaks $has been legitimated as a clearinghouse for leaks, but that’s just a day ending in y.
narciso (d1f714) — 1/8/2017 @ 8:25 pmIt’s important to you to insult me, isn’t it? It doesn’t seem to matter if the insult is fair. This particular insult suggests that the point of my post was to decry the nasty tactics of the Trump campaign. If you really think that was the point, elissa, then the actual point sailed over your head.
Patterico (115b1f) — 1/8/2017 @ 8:53 pmAgree. Not sure where that quote came from, but it sounds quite right.
The point of this post is simple: those who strenuously deny that Wikileaks could have had any effect on the election whatsoever do indeed have a stumbling block to overcome: Trump’s repeated citation of Wikileaks material in the debates and elsewhere. This fact seems to upset some people quite a bit. And yet, there the fact is — standing there calmly, and refusing to go away no matter how much people scream and wave their arms.
Beldar:
I admit to being a bit more upset about this stuff now . . . mainly because I read Garry Kasparov’s book over the winter break and have learned more about Vladimir Putin than I knew. It’s more in the nature of putting meat on the bones of opinions I already had, but that meat does tend to change my outlook a bit.
I started working on my book review a couple of nights ago but life overtook things since.
Patterico (115b1f) — 1/8/2017 @ 9:00 pmWas there any value to learn that the media was in bed with the Dems? Of course not, we already knew that.
AZ Bob (f7a491) — 1/8/2017 @ 9:49 pmAnd certainly it wasn’t Hillary’s fault.
AZ Bob (f7a491) — 1/8/2017 @ 9:49 pmWe suspected in 2008, that there this coordination propping up Obama. And tearing down his opponents, but we didn’t know it was anything as concrete as the journalist, same with the rizzotto tray bearers, haberman, thrush, Todd, chozick, so Wikileaks served like a lens concentrating the attention that guccifer and schweitzer and the Panama papers brought to light
narciso (d1f714) — 1/8/2017 @ 10:05 pmPolitical discourse on the right has degenerated into “Trump good, everything else bad”. Any subtlety seems impossible.
The problem with the hacking is NOT that it threw the election to Trump. The problems are:
1) A hostile foreign power brazenly attempted to put their thumb on the scale of a presidential election. Even if it was not decisive, as Tapper shows, it DID profoundly affect the campaign.
2) During the campaign, the beneficiary of the hostile foreign power’s intervention publicly thanked them, and encouraged them to help him further.
3) Then, once the FBI, CIA and NSA came to a consensus among agencies, with “high confidence” about what had happened, the beneficiary of the foreign intervention (the incoming president) publicly attacked them and defended the hostile foreign power against our own law enforcement, intelligence and national security professionals.
Hostile foreign powers influencing our elections is a threat to national security. A president who publicly encourages and thanks them for doing so (because it helped him) is a unfit to serve. And we now have the spectacle of an administration engaged in a full-on cover-up before even taking office…
Dave (711345) — 1/8/2017 @ 10:30 pm@Dave: 3 lies, one right after another:
A hostile foreign power brazenly attempted
No evidence has ever been produced for this assertion.
During the campaign, the beneficiary of the hostile foreign power’s intervention publicly thanked them
A clearly facetious statement, and nothing of the sort happened: Russia is not known to have ever obtained any emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server, and Russia was not the entity releasing them–that was our own government.
encouraged them to help him further.
Which is not what he said. Hillary was supposed to have already turned them over and this had nothing to do with Trump, but her obligation as Secretary of State.
Then, once the FBI, CIA and NSA came to a consensus among agencies, with “high confidence” about what had happened
Another lie. Leakers have claimed there is high confidence of Russian meddling, but it’s based on super-sekrit evidence which they can’t say what it is. PUBLICLY the agencies have only issued supposition based on publicly available sources like media reports and RT.
Hostile foreign powers influencing our elections is a threat to national security
I would say that a politicized CIA, selectively leaking what is supposed to be classifed to allied journalists, taking part in domestic politics, is FAR more concerning than anything Russians can be plausibly shown to have done–and that bothers you NOT AT ALL.
Gabriel Hanna (678b43) — 1/8/2017 @ 10:44 pmWow! That is subtle.
ThOR (c9324e) — 1/8/2017 @ 10:46 pmWe should not forget that the content of the Wikileaks was true? Podesta’s emails reflected more on the nature of the Democrat Party than Hillary herself. The media has most to be embarrassed about in the emails.
AZ Bob (f7a491) — 1/8/2017 @ 10:55 pmI would say that a politicized CIA, selectively leaking what is supposed to be classifed to allied journalists, taking part in domestic politics, is FAR more concerning than anything Russians can be plausibly shown to have done–and that bothers you NOT AT ALL.
Gabriel Hanna (678b43) — 1/8/2017 @ 10:44 pm
Yes.
AZ Bob (f7a491) — 1/8/2017 @ 10:57 pm@AZ Bob:We should not forget that the content of the Wikileaks was true?
This is the only reason the media, the Dems, and #NeverTrump are still on it. If the content had been false they’d be talking about that–think of Obama’s birth certificate. But since the content is true, the manufactured outrage has to be about how it was obtained.
Gabriel Hanna (678b43) — 1/8/2017 @ 11:00 pmA hostile foreign power brazenly attempted to put their thumb on the scale of a presidential election.
Hmmmm. A ‘hostile foreign power’ the United States pays $75+ million/seat for rides aboard Soyuz spacecraft up to and down from the International Space Station; which cost $100 billion and $3 to $5 billion/year to maintain in an expensive cooperative agreement with… “a hostile foreign power.”
“Aw, Jeez, Edith, stifle yourself!” – Archie Bunker [Carroll O’Connor] ‘All In The Family’ almost any episode, CBS TV, 1971-1979
DCSCA (797bc0) — 1/8/2017 @ 11:05 pmDidn’t affect my vote what so ever.
papertiger (c8116c) — 1/8/2017 @ 11:06 pmThe rest of you if you were waiting until Wikileaks to decide, what’s your problem?
#60 Dave, we’ll look forward to your outrage regarding how Barack attempted to put his thumb on the scales of the March 2015 Israeli election.
We’ll also look forward to your expressed outrage that Barack attempted to put his thumb on the scales of the Brexit vote.
We’ll also look forward to your outrage over Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs carrying water for the Soviets.
You’re absolutely right that Barack is unfit to serve as President considering that the alleged hacks occurred on his watch. He knew about it, and admittedly did nothing because (in his words) he believed Hillary was going to win anyway. Yeah, that’s great leadership from his behind.
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 1/8/2017 @ 11:14 pmTrump’s repeated citation of Wikileaks material in the debates and elsewhere. This fact seems to upset some people quite a bit.
Only the media. It’s just another shiny object they keep chasing. He could have cited people who eat pizza with a fork and they’d have chased that down as well… and it would have led to Trump himself.
Step away from the Putin… he’s the last gasp from a once great superpower with withering tendrils on life support; desperate for the life blood of European cash flow for energy resources and even U.S. tax dollars for rides into space. He reclaimed Crimea; Britain fought for the Falklands. They have some nukes, some subs and plans, missiles and space toys, one carrier and a glorious past. So does Britain.
Who knows, Queen Elizabeth II might just outlive him, too.
DCSCA (797bc0) — 1/8/2017 @ 11:29 pm@DCSCA:So does Britain.
Britain no longer has a carrier. Gave it up. Thailand has one, but not the United Kingdom. Wonder if Alfred the Great is rolling in his tomb.
Gabriel Hanna (678b43) — 1/8/2017 @ 11:38 pmAnd you believe him why?
Indeed, but the CIA has been politicized for a long time, and it’s always been dominated by Democrats. Witness its not-very-subtle attempts to get Kerry elected in 2004.
What I don’t get is why it is that foreigners are not supposed to try to influence US voters. The results of US elections affect millions of foreigners; does anyone really expect them to just sit quietly and hope the US voters decide things the way they’d like, and not do anything to try to persuade them? Why? Don’t they have the same freedom of speech as any American? Isn’t it an unalienable right endowed to all me by their Creator? The US constitution, by its nature, only protects the rights of those under US jurisdiction; but surely nobody imagines aliens who are outside US jurisdiction have no rights!
So why the upset if Russia tries to influence voters by informing them of true facts of which they had been unaware? How is a more informed electorate a bad thing?
I’ve seen it suggested that the Russian interference (assuming it happened) was a bad thing because they didn’t leak anything embarrassing about the Republicans. Well, why assume they had such information to leak? Not only did they (as far as we know) not crack the RNC server, but even if they did what makes anyone think there was anything embarrassing there to be found? This is the common Democrat delusion, anytime they’re accused of anything underhand, that “everyone does it”. No, Democrats, only you do most of the things you’re accused of. Republicans don’t.
Milhouse (40ca7b) — 1/8/2017 @ 11:42 pm@70. Right. Sloppy grammar on my part. Meant to refer to ‘glorious past.’
All the same, yes, Winston is likely choking on his cigar as well. Once the world’s greatest navy– with no carrier. Britain has been ‘arked royally.’
DCSCA (797bc0) — 1/9/2017 @ 12:27 amwe all know if harvardtrash ted had gotten the nomination (lol) he would’ve never mentioned wikileaks, instead maintaining a laser-like focus on the bathroom tranny menace
happyfeet (28a91b) — 1/9/2017 @ 3:53 amWe need to help ourselves remember a few things,
Almost everyone pushes a narrative and manipulates the information available to their personal interest, virtually no one is interested in the truth and fair handed evaluation,
Not the Dems, not most of the repubs, not most of the American people (though, I guess to be fair, some of the public doesn’t realize what is going on), and certainly not the press.
Things that we should already know, like Putin is a power mad tyrant who will project his power around the world if given the chance, should not make us unsteady.
Everything that is spoken in secret will one day be broadcast from the rooftops, Podesta and other Dems got in on this a little early, so what.
If someone can demonstrate that there were specific reasons Putin wants Trump as president, I’m interested,
Otherwise, I am going to believe that the New Soviets just want to mess with us any way they can and hope to cause mischief and chaos to take advantage of,
And the left in this country will cooperate, either purposefully or as useful idiots.
And Trump will say things that will make us question whether he is crazy, or crazy like a fox, or, most likely, a combination of both, perhaps not even knowing himself how much of which one it is.
MD in Philly (f9371b) — 1/9/2017 @ 5:00 am“The media parrots Democratic Party talking points without embarrassment, which helped elect Obama president. But as those talking points corroded the credibility of the press, the parroting helped elect President Trump.
And the hits keep on coming.
From Roger L. Simon:
Of all the tantrums being thrown by the Democrats in their inability to accept defeat and move on, perhaps the most absurd is the Great Russian Hacking Scandal.
Did the Russians under express orders of Communist Party General Secretary… scratch that… President Vladimir Putin himself direct the hacking of the computers of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign?
Simon mocked the source of this conspiratorial theory, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper:
Clapper, it will be remembered, blatantly lied to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on March 13, 2013, when he replied to Senator Ron Wyden’s question “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” with a resounding “no,” which the DNI then doubled down on.
Poor Clapper got a bit of egg on his face, several dozen actually, only three months later when Eric Snowden revealed to the world that the NSA was collecting just such data on those millions of Americans via our cellphones.
So the ice is thin, and the sun is shining — but there goes the Washington Post saying crazy stuff like the Russians have hacked our electrical power grid.
So why is President Obama personally — and he has said it — pushing this nonsensical excise for losing an election to:
A rookie candidate
Unloved by a majority of Americans
With half the money Clinton spent
Because Obama thought he could get away with it.
Sure. Why not? He got away with demonizing Sarah Palin. He got away with saying Mitt paid no taxes. He got away with Benghazi. He got away with you can keep your doctor.
And the media by and large is accepting this from President Obama:
Based on uniform intelligence assessments, the Russians were responsible for hacking the DNC and that as a consequence, it is important for us to review all elements of that and to make sure that we are preventing that kind of interference from cyber attacks in the future. My hope is that the president-elect is going to be similarly concerned that we aren’t going to have foreign interference in our election process.
I doubt the public is.
Most normal Americans accept President Trump’s victory and think the Democrats are a bunch of entitled brats who need a spanking.
The longer Democrats and their media buddies act like poor sports, the longer they will be out of power.
And if you think the media has any power, you have not been paying attention.”
http://donsurber.blogspot.com/2017/01/an-example-of-how-softball-press-hurt.html
Colonel Haiku (6c3d91) — 1/9/2017 @ 5:33 am“Whine! Snivel! Those evil Russians let the voters know what a conniving bunch of crooks we are! It isn’t FAIR!”
OK, they have a slight point about Russia messing with the election. That’s the only point they have, so they are riding it into the ground. I guess they don’t have a choice. I really think the answer is “If the Russians had an effect on the election, it seems to have been to keep a criminal conspiracy on two legs out of the Oval Office. Good.”
C. S. P. Schofield (99bd37) — 1/9/2017 @ 5:42 amGood morning Patterico. No, I don’t think the “point” of your post “sailed over” my head. Your written commentary for which you used the Tapper video as support was quite clear. I (and also many others from the looks of the responding commentary to your post) just don’t happen to concur with your broad assessment of the “Putinleaks”, and reject and resent your apparent pre-conceived conclusions that we are all blinded partisan idiots if we don’t agree.
elissa (4648c4) — 1/9/2017 @ 5:43 amAs has been said by a commenter earlier, if Wikileaks mattered, why did the Democrats and the Democrats with bylines tell the American people for months and months that these leaked emails were a big, fat nothingburger?
Trump and his supporters may’ve just wanted to do what they could to make sure this wasn’t just another bit of news covered with a pillow until it stopped breathing.
Colonel Haiku (6c3d91) — 1/9/2017 @ 5:47 amHillary Clinton will never be the president of the United States of America, no matter how much whining and sniveling Hollywood, #NeverTrump, LowT David Brooks, HuffPo, WashPo, NYT, LAT, or any other unnamed jackals do.
And that’s a beautiful thing.
Colonel Haiku (6c3d91) — 1/9/2017 @ 5:54 amFurthermore, any aid provided to the people who are trying to de-legitimize a duly-elected president – that includes those who leaked the intelligence report – should be called out for what it is.
Colonel Haiku (6c3d91) — 1/9/2017 @ 6:21 amit is very pooper
happyfeet (28a91b) — 1/9/2017 @ 6:22 amMr. Trump is the most legitimate one even if meryl streep goes bra-less every year at the gorden grobes and refuses to shave her hairy pits
happyfeet (28a91b) — 1/9/2017 @ 6:25 ammr. trump the donald has a strange way of donalding
to mr. trump the donald the north carolina anti-pervert law was a distraction
as is wikileaks
as is mr. putin the vladimir getting back at hillary for ousting mr. yanukovich the puppet and putting mr. putin the vladimir in a border war with the ukraine
as is ms. monica the crowley’s copy and paste
what is not a distraction to mr. trump the donald is what meryl streep says at the golden globes
or what alec baldwin says on snl
or what is on mcdonald’s dollar menu (ok, i made this one up but it’s more importanter than streep or baldwin)
i beginner to suspect that distraction to mr. trump the donald does not mean what it means to people who know what distraction means
nk (dbc370) — 1/9/2017 @ 6:43 amWe hate selective leaks now?
Patterico (115b1f) — 1/9/2017 @ 6:46 amGreat comment by Dave @60.
Patterico (115b1f) — 1/9/2017 @ 6:46 amYou changed the subject to pretend my post was about Trump using dirt against an opponent.
Patterico (115b1f) — 1/9/2017 @ 6:48 amThat’s exactly what Donald Trump tried to say in one of his tweets, but it is not true.
https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/817701436096126977
Donald Trump also issued a statement Friday, which said in part:
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/politics/donald-trump-statement-hack-intelligence-briefing.html
Here, saying this more on his own authority.
Sammy Finkelman (2178a8) — 1/9/2017 @ 6:49 amAfter the show Donald Trump re-tweeted this:
Originally tweeted by NBC at 8:17 AM – 8 Jan 2017
Sammy Finkelman (2178a8) — 1/9/2017 @ 6:50 amBecause those leaks affected policy, renditions, interrogations, the start of the Iraq campaign.
narciso (d1f714) — 1/9/2017 @ 6:50 amRussia did not impact my vote not even a little bit
happyfeet (28a91b) — 1/9/2017 @ 6:55 amRussia’s like that nice car what pulls up and all these pretty people are in there eating grey poupon and failmerica’s the car next to it what has the bumper tied on with twine and everyone’s like yo let’s go do a black lives matter torture session on some special needs teenager
happyfeet (28a91b) — 1/9/2017 @ 6:58 amKellyanne Conway, and Reince Priebus, seem to be afraid to disagree with their boss. Reince Priebus is especially uncertain about what to say, and sometimes unfamiliar with what the question is talking about. He can’t go around like this, afraid that Donald Trump will say at any moment: “You’re fired!” and do good work.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell seems to answer questions well. Maybe it’s because he can’t be fired. But he’s also trying to get along. One point he made was that even if Hillary was elected, they would have to change Obamacare.
Sammy Finkelman (2178a8) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:02 amIf Democrats believe that hacking is such a threat to national security, then we should expect them to insist on an indictment of Hillary for her private server. After all, it’s about national security!
And we’re all old enough to remember how upset the Democrats got when the Chinese hacked OPM in 2015! (LOL)
It’s about national security!
What a joke.
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:09 amNow we have more provocations in the gulf by Iran. Can’t we re-position the USS Harvey Milk there to help dissuade the Iranian mahdiwits?
Colonel Haiku (6c3d91) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:12 am/sarcasm off
Colonel Haiku (6c3d91) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:15 amThe hacking had an effect inasmuch the content of the email was embarrassing. But it was embarrassing because of the content, not because of the hacking.
Is there anybody who can affirm with a straight face that the Democrats wouldn’t use true news indicting Trump,if they came from North Korean secret agents? Alas, they would consider that use their urgent patriotic duty. And they would be right.
PaoloP (db858b) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:17 amGabriel calls a commenter he disagrees with a liar, and elissa admits she resents Patterico — not disagrees but resents — all because she didn’t agree with his point of view. They seem to make no effort to acknowledge or understand another point of view, just to atrack it lIke Trump does. The Trump Effect has ruined the comments at this and probably every website.
DRJ (15874d) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:17 amI cannot find the video now but I saw Clapper saying that there is no evidence that the Russians hacked into the voting systems.
Davod (f3a711) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:19 amdid elissa really do resentment on Mr. P or did she do resentment on what she perceives to be his pre-conceived conclusions?
happyfeet (28a91b) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:27 amIs all very confusing but I take comfort that Charles Manson will never be President.
nk (dbc370) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:31 amThere is no such thing as The Trump Effect except in the unhinged minds of democrat leftists, Meryl Streep and #NeverTrumpers and the suggestion it “has ruined the comments at this and probably every website” is am unfounded leap from hyperbole to hysteria usually reserved for the aforementioned or at the Grammy’s.
Rev. Hoagie® (785e38) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:33 am98… true and I think that’s what some mean when they say “had no effect on the election”.
Colonel Haiku (6c3d91) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:35 amThat’s why they call it, “acting!”, Hoagie.
Colonel Haiku (6c3d91) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:36 amTeh ox goring began during the primaries…
Colonel Haiku (6c3d91) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:38 amAs Meryl said, Disrespect invites Disrespect. (Even liberals are right sometimes.) But disrespect is what Trump is about, isn’t he? He wants to Get Even with everything and everyone.
Obama created the resentment and Trump capitalized on it.
DRJ (15874d) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:39 amThe talk of voting others off the island is a recent phenomenon and has no basis in fact, it’s merely disagreement.
Colonel Haiku (6c3d91) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:41 amGet. Over. It.
Colonel Haiku (6c3d91) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:42 am#97 DRJ, I think if you go back and re-read elissa’s remark you’ll see that she didn’t actually say she resents Patterico.
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:43 amWhat she said is that she rejects and resents his pre-conceived conclusions.
If you are resentful of a remark, hf, you feel insulted by the speaker. Resentment is more personal than disagreement. I think there’s a lot of that now, in part because Trump’s insults are often personal and that legitimizes resentment.
DRJ (15874d) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:47 amWTF cares? The information was accurate, the emails were real. That they only helped Trump is immaterial, as is their provenance.
We don’t hear gnashing of teeth about Hillary getting support from Carlos Slim’s newspaper investments. We don’t hear (lately) about the MILLIONS of dollars given to her slush fund by foreign governments. We don’t hear that the press was MONOLITHICALLY against Trump. The WaPo alone published hundreds of poorly-sourced attacks in the last month of the campaign. THeir whole op-ed page was devoted to “Is Trump a Nazi or just very evil?”
Kevin M (25bbee) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:52 amThe specific things that came from Wikileaks didn’t amount to too much, even though Trump tried to use them. But KellyAnne Conway can’t say that.
The really interesting thing is that Trump didn’t refer to the results of Freedom of Information Act requests by Judicial Watch, the Associated Press and the Republican National Committee. One thing that RNC got, which they “leaked” to ABC was particularly damaging. It was a relatively new aide to Hillary at the State Department writing to someone at the Clinton Foundation that while she thought she knew who the “Friends of Bill” were, she didn’t know all of them, so could she be alerted when someone applying for some grant or contract related to Haitian earthquake relief wrote the State Department so she could give it special favorable treatment.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fobs-hillarys-state-dept-gave-special-attention-friends/story?id=42615379
I think Trump was probably trying to get the media to talk more about Hillary’s dishonesty and possible corruption and for that he cited Wikileaks. He was not interested in the examples of things Wikileaks had published, but the idea that Wikileaks showed Clinton dishonesty and maybe double-dealing. The media was covering Wikileaks, so he talked about it, and he also had the crowds chant “Lock her Up!”
By the way, Trump’s speeches largely didn’t matter, period. He used his rallies as a means of polling. What percentage of people in what categiries would come – and the categories were verifiable facts whose percentages were known, like users of certain store loyalty cards, or contributors to certain charities or people who had previously bought yard signs. What he said there hardly mattered.
The biggest thing of all, of course, was the secret and improperly used e-mail account, and Hillary and her aides and lawyers explanatons about it, and that was not discovered as a result of Russian hacking, even though the first glimmer of it (not yet attributed to Russia, but if RT is a Russian government front, as the intelligence community says, and devoted 8 pages of its 14 page unclassified report to 2012 analysis to prove it, then the leaks in 2013 by Guccifer [1.0] were done by Russia) that really didn’t cause anything, because it would not be too surprising to know that Hillary maintained a private e-mail account.
What was surprising was that she did NOT HAVE any official government state.gov e-mail account, and that was discooveed as a result of subpoenas by the Trey Gowdy led Benghazi committee. It subpoenadd e-mail and got nothing sent by her, although they did get things received by others from her, and they didn’t let it go, and the State Department, which had not noticed they had no e-mail records from Hillary Clinton, attempted to clean this up, and get her official e-mails befiore revealing anything to the committee. They got paper printouts, and only after having to request the same thing (old e-mails they might have retained) from ALL previous Secretaries of State since Madeleine Albright, so she could claim this request was nothing special.
And let’s not forget, Trump also got HURT by hs apparent closeness to Putin. Senator McConnell now says he doesn’t know what Putin got out of it, since Trump appointed some very strng hawks on Russia – former Senator Dan Coats as Director of National Intelligence ad Mike Pompeo as CIA Director, and James Mattis as Secretary of Defense. (John Dickerson pointed out taht he had also appointed Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, who receoved some kind of award from Putin, and Mike Flynn as National security Advisir and Flynn had even actually met Putin) McConnell said every president since Clinton wanted to get along with Putin, but he didn’t think this would last.
Kellyanne Conway couldn’t say a thing like that.
Today, in a radio interview on WOR after 8 am, Congressman Peter King, who just got a waiver from Paul Ryan to have another term on the House Intelligence Committee (He says he is the only Congressman also on the Homeland Security Committee) offered as reasons Putin might have wated Trump, cooperation about ISIS and something else, both of which he thought were OK. The only problem with that is Putin didn’t use Russian forces against ISIS – he just claimed to be against ISIS – also, before the nomination, Peter King didn’t use to be so sanguine about this.
Sammy Finkelman (2178a8) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:56 ami try to set a good example but sometimes i fall short
happyfeet (28a91b) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:57 amPutin did the world a favor. Really.
Here we have a guy who sees first hand the dangers and temptation of the vacuum caused by Obama’s “foreign policy.” Sure, he’s nibbled at Ukraine, because we let him, but more broadly he knows that there needs to be an international order.
America’s abdication of power in the last 4-6 years has caused Russia immediate problems. Syria first, where Putin finally decided that America would do nothing to stem the sh1tstorm it created. So he’s making the best of it. But Russia cannot police the world. Nor can China (nor does Putin want China to try).
So, 4 more years of this crap? Hell no. If I were Putin I’d want the USA back in the game, and so he supports Trump.
Is this bad?
Kevin M (25bbee) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:58 amWikileaks would only matter to 1) GOP supporters and 2) Bernie supporters
and 2 is only if you weren’t all in on anti-Trump
so the answer is “to engage the base”
JH (1fc204) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:58 am@Patterico:We hate selective leaks now?
When they come from the CIA, and the evidence is classified, and it is to meddle in the election.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:00 amAll of our foreign enemies are taking advantage of Barack’s inattention and weakness during these final days. North Korea is talking about missile testing, Iran’s being provocative in the Gulf, China’s bad acting in South China Sea shipping lanes is making Blackbeard look like Mother Teresa by comparison.
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:03 amAnd what’s Barack doing?
He’s having parties with celebrities and playing golf.
@DRJ:abriel calls a commenter he disagrees with a liar
I called a commenter a liar, because he lied, not because he disagreed with me, and I explained why he was lying.
And you micharacterized what I wrote. Anyone can read it for themselves, so the lie has little effect.
They seem to make no effort to acknowledge or understand another point of view,
Dave created a narrative out of whole cloth. This is not a point of view issue.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:03 am110… YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Colonel Haiku (6c3d91) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:03 am“WTF cares?”
Conway’s “You always want to go by what’s come out of his mouth…” accusatory remark to CNN this morning supports a contention no one should pay much attention to the utterances of the gibbering buffoon. I certainly can’t disagree with the sentiment. I do wonder how long Conway will be willing to keep trying to shovel up after her incontinent elephant.
Rick Ballard (bc0399) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:04 am#27: Blain was viewed as anti-Catholic largely because he was anti-Catholic. His one legacy, the “Blaine Amendments” were state-level rules to ban state funding of “religious schools.” This may seem reasonable until you realize that public schools of the period were unabashedly Protestant and the impact was to prevent separate Catholic or Jewish schools with the same level of state support.
The Blaine Amendments are still in effect today, and are used to stop vouchers in some states (e.g. Florida).
Kevin M (25bbee) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:05 amSo MANY dead-enders. Trump won. NOT MY CHOICE. But he won and get on with it. Acceptance is the key to happiness.
Kevin M (25bbee) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:07 am@DRJ: The Trump Effect has ruined the comments at this and probably every website.
I would say that people who respond to comments criticizing statements by conflating them with personal attacks, and mischaracterizing them in the process, are a much worse effect on a comments section, but YMMV.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:09 amThe crap that’s ignored/poo-pooed/swept under/smothered/shot dead/disappeared/hanged-by-the-neck/given a lethal injection and the stuff they go on and on and on and on about tells you all you need to know.
Colonel Haiku (6c3d91) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:10 am@Kevin M:So MANY dead-enders. Trump won. NOT MY CHOICE. But he won and get on with it. Acceptance is the key to happiness.
I’d second this. This isn’t even about anything Trump has actually done. He’s going to have four years to do wrong and stupid things.
And we could be spending our time on that, instead of dancing to the media tune.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:11 amMallard Shillmore
Colonel Haiku (6c3d91) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:12 amDavod (f3a711) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:19 am
Either Senator McCain (R-Ariz.) or Senator Reed (D-R.I>) tried to get Clapper to say that if Russia had successfully changed the election results it would be act of war, and Clapper wouldn’t offer an opnion as to whether the choices made by the electorate had been changed or whether what they did was an act of war *, but he did say there was tampering with the actual voting.
The Senate Armed Services Commmittee hearing was the day before Donald Trump and Mike Pence got their breifing (or presentation, as Pence called it)
http://www.nbcnews.com/video/mccain-asks-intel-head-does-russian-hacking-constitute-an-act-of-war-848241219980
A good answer would be that, “you, Senator McCain, are a better judge of whether it affected the election than I am” and whether something is or not an “Act of War” is a legal question, but not all things that technically are ‘Acts of War’ deserve to be treated with the same seriousness and the same response.
All he said was that that was not something they they should evaluate and war was a policy question. Clapper also said that hacking was only part of it. There was also classical propaganda, disinformation and fake news.
———–
Sammy Finkelman (2178a8) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:14 am* McCain has been pushing this “act of war” characterization for some time.
So why the upset if Russia tries to influence voters by informing them of true facts of which they had been unaware? How is a more informed electorate a bad thing?
Apparently the upset is that Russia’s information was one-sided. Yes, really. As opposed the even-handed treatment that Trump was receiving in the American press, where NOT ONE NEWSPAPER endorsed him.
Kevin M (25bbee) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:15 amWhat diminished this site was lemmings rushing to follow Patterico’s shortsighted dismissal of Trump’s genuine appeal to the mass of American voters.
He dismissed the greatest political upheaval in modern times as as little more than a cheap sideshow, unworthy of any serious consideration, while his willfully unobservent followers suspended judgment, mocked others, and focused almost exclusively on Ted Cruz to deliver salvation.
ropelight (19a16e) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:18 amit is such a lovely upheaval
happyfeet (28a91b) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:20 amMcCain has been pushing this “act of war” characterization for some time.
McCain calls getting 8 Chicken Nuggets instead of 9 “and act of war”
Kevin M (25bbee) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:21 am@56 Patterico. The quote @17 is the conclusion of fivethirtyeight.com’s Dec 23 analysis of the impact of wikileaks on Hillary’s 7 point lead. Sorry I botched the link.
The irony is that the Obama administration stood by while the IC tells us Putin went “all-Alinsky” on Hillary and Podesta when they undoubtedly expected Putin and RT to side with them against the dangerous, crazy and nuclear trigger-happy Trump.
crazy (d3b449) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:27 amMaybe if the media gave it half the attention they gave the Billy Bush audio he wouldn’t have had to mention it over and over again…
Bruce Redfield (45cf36) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:34 amand we come around in circle
during campaign tovarich donald fredovich think wikileaks hurt hillary
help him win
evil running dog media not push wikileaks
so tovarich donald fredovich push wikileaks
then tovarich donald fredovich beat hillary
now he say never mind what i say in campaign
wikileaks not matter
i win fair and square
media say then why you push during campaign
tovarich donald fredovich say because you no push in campaign
to beat hillary
and help me win
so i push
but now it not matter
and circle never end with tovarich donald fredovich
nk (dbc370) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:51 am#133 nk, a banana and a couple of glasses of V-8 has always been helpful to me during a hangover. (LOL)
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:58 am@nk:i win fair and square
And this of course is actually true. Illegal leaking to affect elections has long been a feature of American political life, as long as I have been alive, and the media has always been cool with it when it works for Dems. All the Detriot-style election cheating that media denies favored Democrats.
The “tovarishch” bit, though, doesn’t make you look good, Tailgunner.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:59 am@ropelight:while his willfully unobservent followers suspended judgment, mocked others, and focused almost exclusively on Ted Cruz to deliver salvation.
I can speak only for myself. I would 100 times prefer that Ted Cruz be President-Elect right now, than Donald Trump.
Not only is he better, from my perspective, on virtually every issue I care about, he would have provoked the same level of progressive pants-wetting and heads asploding as Trump has.
Would he have carried the “blue wall” states? No way to know now, I suspect not.
But I was #NeverHillary, which means that even though I am mildly anti-Trump I got 99% of what I wanted out of the election.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 1/9/2017 @ 9:13 am#136 Gabriel, many of us echo the same sentiment.
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 1/9/2017 @ 9:18 amropelight, papertiger, and mr happyfeet told us that Mr Donald would break through some of the blue states, and they were right.
I was disbelieving. I challenged them profusely about that prospect during the primaries.
Yet they turned out to be the prescient ones.
@Cruz Supporter:Yet they turned out to be the prescient ones.
The argument will always be that Ted Cruz or somebody else could have done it without all of Trump’s baggage and character defects. There is no way to know now if that is true.
Yet they turned out to be the prescient ones.
I’m tempted to say, no disrespect intended to them, that even broken clocks are right twice a day and the mere prediction is not enough. What holds me back is that Trump’s media strategy appears to work for him. It’s like watching Wiley Coyote and the Roadrunner.
Until Trump’s opponents–foreign, domestic, conservative/Republican–figure that out, Trump being Trump is going to keep working. I am afraid that if his opponents get smart and start doing something besides the old point-and-sputter Trump might fail to adapt, with serous consequences.
But any political figure who fails to adapt will have the same and most of them do fail to adapt. As Machiavelli said, people who get somewhere by doing things their way are reluctant to change when it stops working.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 1/9/2017 @ 9:30 amI will admit that this is small potatoes compared to what Putin did to us with Snowden, but I am in no way arguing that Obama is not a stuttering clusterf*** of a miserable Mau Mau.
nk (dbc370) — 1/9/2017 @ 9:30 amHe went on further to say that this is one of the strengths of republics, that it is easier to change the official than it is to get the official to change his behavior.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 1/9/2017 @ 9:31 amBTW, McCarthy was more right that he was wrong and the most extreme abuses of his committee came from its counsel, Roy Cohn, the “pixie” in the “have you no decency” incident, who was also Trump’s mentor and possibly good buddy in his later years.
nk (dbc370) — 1/9/2017 @ 9:39 am@nk: McCarthy was more right that he was wrong
Like his protege-by-association Trump, he stopped caring whether he was right or wrong, and he caused great damage to the cause he claimed to favor. He’s not a guy to emulate.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 1/9/2017 @ 9:48 amJoe McCarthy used to date one of the Kennedy girls.
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 1/9/2017 @ 10:09 amOf course, the Kennedy boys used to date everyone — even once they were married! (LOL)
Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis) was the only member of the United States Senate in 1950, of whom it might be said he owed his election to the Communist Party.
What’s called McCarthyism – excusing people of being Communists – exoxted before McCarthy. The Communist Party in the United States was pretty much dead after 1948, although perhaps maybe you cold argue he helped bury it further.
Before he got interested in Communism he was (successfully) defending Nazis – those Nazis who killed American soldiers at Malmedy.
And I got this idea: The whole thing also was possibly intended as a distraction from investigations into organized crime – which were getting serious.
Sammy Finkelman (2178a8) — 1/9/2017 @ 10:21 am@Sammy Finkelman:What’s called McCarthyism – excusing people of being Communists – exoxted before McCarthy.
Before and after. HUAC ran from 1938 – 1975. Its activities are often conflated with McCarthy’s.
McCarthy’s unsupported and irresponsible accusations without evidence were entirely his own work. Unfortunately we cannot say the same for the current Russians-under-the-bed hysteria.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 1/9/2017 @ 10:37 amBTW, Tapper is using a false equivalence.
The subject matter in the leaks matters. That’s why Trump and others on the right tried to make the American public aware of it.
Instead, the media focused on the leaks being no big deal and that they didn’t matter.
So, how much of the public was actually aware of the content of the leaks and how much did that influence their vote? Two different questions.
NJRob (43d957) — 1/9/2017 @ 10:44 am“When you’re [Meryl Streep] so stupidly pompous that Piers Morgan calls you on it… well, there’s your lifetime achievement award right there.”
Meryl, schmeryl…
Colonel Haiku (6c3d91) — 1/9/2017 @ 10:45 amhow much did that influence their vote?
Very much inside baseball. And the two candidates were better known to the general public, going back decades, than any two candidates have been in my lifetime.
There is no one in this country, born before 1981, who didn’t know who both of them were and didn’t have some opinion formed about them by 2015.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 1/9/2017 @ 11:06 amFor example, regarding the Clinton foundation, here’s our esteemed host on it in January of 2009, saying basically what we all know now, and complaining that the LA Times is distorting its coverage:
Hillary is sailing through her confirmation hearings. In a suck-up session on Tuesday, Senators heaped praise on Clinton. Jim DeMint assured her that he would have no tough questions for her about the Clinton Foundation.
The foundation’s list of donors was released just before Christmas, and has not received proper attention from the media or Senators. One exception is this column by Diana West of the Washington Times. West explains that the Clinton Foundation received between $10 million and $25 million from Saudi Arabia; $5 million from the Zayed family, which has donated to “a family think tank for anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers and jihadists,” $1 million to $5 million from the Dubai Foundation, owners of a company that wanted to run security for America’s ports, $1 million to $5 million from Hezbollah fan Issam Fares; and money from Chinese censorship collaboraror alibaba.com. But my favorite is the Alavi Foundation.
“Writing at Forbes.com, Rachel Ehrenfeld recently reported that this group, which supports Iranian causes, gave the Clinton foundation between $25,000 and $50,000 on Dec. 19 – the very day Alavi Foundation President Farshid Jahedi was indicted on federal charges related to an investigation of the foundation’s relationship with Iran’s Bank Melli. (The donation, according to Ehrenfeld’s report, also came two days after the U.S. Department of the Treasury designated Alavi’s partner, the New York-based ASSA Corp., as a terrorist entity.) Both the Alavi Foundation and Bank Melli, Ehrenfeld reported, have been “recognized as procurement fronts for Iran’s nuclear program,” with Bank Melli being designated in 2007 as a terrorist entity.”
I can’t imagine how any of this might complicate Hillary’s role as Secretary of State. Can you?…
The fact that this is not all being more widely reported is a disgrace. And the fact that Senators aren’t questioning her about it more closely is as well.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 1/9/2017 @ 11:10 amobama just let his friend Putin ship a million tons of uranium to Iran so they can make a lot of bombs to do genocide on Israel
I think that adds some important context
happyfeet (28a91b) — 1/9/2017 @ 11:14 amThe Iranian nuclear program is a front. What they have is djinns that they captured on Mt. Ararat under the eyes of the Turks and are trying to control with people who have memorized the Koran. Of course, they have a lot of catching up to do with Israel whose djinn program is much more advanced, since it has King Solomon’s djinns and the original cabalistic seals he used to control them.
nk (dbc370) — 1/9/2017 @ 11:43 amdjinnocide is just as bad as what obama wanna do on them jews with the nuclear explosions
maybe even worse
happyfeet (28a91b) — 1/9/2017 @ 11:53 amnk, if it comforts you to believe that the Iranians are mentally incapable of making a bomb, go for it. Sleep well. As a graduate student at MIT, I knew an Iranian who was quite functional in our culture who was a grad student the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. He seemed a little paranoid, always worried about the Shah’s secret police. Which is to say, he probably welcomed the overthrow of the Shah, and probably returned to Iran in the late 70s. There’s always the chance that if he went back, they used him a human mine detector in the wars with Iraq, but if he survived, he was the sort of person who could have designed a bomb. Iran has also been successful in purchasing the needed technology in western Europe, albeit indirectly. And then there’s the North Koreans … Sleep well.
BobStewartatHome (c24491) — 1/9/2017 @ 12:12 pm@BobStewart@Home, nk:if it comforts you to believe that the Iranians are mentally incapable of making a bomb, go for it
This is a part of the world where they use advanced technology to spread rumors of Jewish penis-stealing witchcraft. Yeah, they can build a bomb, even if they think there are djinn in it.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 1/9/2017 @ 12:38 pmThOR (c9324e) — 1/8/2017 @ 3:44 pm
I think that is Russian disinformation. Pedophile parties? Where did that come from??
This is just part of amuch bigger scandal. Too many reopublicans want to think or think that the Obama White House invented the story that the attacks ibn Benghazi were spontaneous. That came out of the CIA. They convinced Clapper and others and then those people in the White House wanted to get the “good news” out.
Tommy Vietor e-mail, Friday, September 14, 2012 8:43 pm EST:
Benjamin J. Rhodes Friday, September 14, 2012 9:34 pm:
http://i42.tinypic.com/2wflqn8.jpg
that story wasn’t invented in the White House.
Sammy Finkelman (643dcd) — 1/9/2017 @ 1:07 pmMeryl Streep.
As an actress she shines.
DCSCA (797bc0) — 1/9/2017 @ 2:12 pmAs an activist she whines.
Sammy, your willingness to believe the written word is touching. The political operatives embedded in the CIA by the administration would be obliged to fall on their swords in a case like Benghazi, that’s why they are there.
BobStewartatHome (c24491) — 1/9/2017 @ 2:24 pm“50. Here is the problem with the entire debate:
It presumes that HRC was ahead in the race when the Wikileaks releases began. It assumes that the Wikileaks releases damaged her position vis-a-vis Trump — i.e., her lead diminished and then was lost.”
Wikileaks had nothing to do with it. That’s just the Dems and nevertrumpers coming up with an excuse why they weren’t wrong.
I’ve just finished watching all the election night coverages on ABC, CBS, MNC, CNN, MSNBC (Thank you, youtube!!)
Up until about 10PM every single talking head on every single network knew that Hillary was going to win. They weren’t even considering any possibility that Trump could possibly win.
Earlier, they were making all sorts of predictions that it would be an early night and that she’d be over 300 EV’s before 10PM. They (the networks) knew all about Wikileaks and knew that it would have no effect on the election.
Between 10Pm and 11PM their faces began to change as it started to sink in that Trump might actually win after all. They *still* didn’t call it for him at 2:45 AM when he had started his acceptance speech. I watch the tickers, and they didn’t flip the projections to 270+ until after he began and said that he’d just received a call from Hillary.
fred-2 (ce04f3) — 1/9/2017 @ 3:00 pm“136. I would 100 times prefer that Ted Cruz be President-Elect right now, than Donald Trump.
Would he have carried the “blue wall states?”
No. The networks would have been able to call the election at 8 PM and everybody would have gone outside to watch Hillary’s fireworks over the Hudson. Even before having to put the kids to bed.
That was the thing about Patterico and the rest of the nevertrumpers. They were so dead-set on having a candidate that they preferred (Cruz) that it didn’t matter that said candidate would lose to Hillary.
News flash — it doesn’t matter how great your policies are if you don’t get elected.
“137. I was disbelieving. I challenged them profusely about that prospect during the primaries.
Yet they turned out to be the prescient ones.”
That’s because they saw what you either didn’t see or refused to see, about how the run-of-the-mill Republican base felt.
They knew the important stuff — illegal immigration, etc. and didn’t care about the unimportant stuff.
You guys just looked at the unimportant stuff — crudeness, etc. — and didn’t have the ability to differentiate things that were important from things that are not.
I got that rubbed into my face in March. The (female) instructor/owner of our gun range had Cruz buttons and stickers up the wazoo, handing them out to everybody, for several weeks. Then came the Chicago rally and Cruz joined the Democrats & MSM and blamed it on Trump.
When we went in to the range that Saturday, every Cruz item was gone, replaced with Trump stuff. I can’t begin to tell you how high the level of her seething rage at Cruz was.
“138. blah blah blah, I still am unable to figure out what is important and what isn’t.”
It’s going to be a long 8 years for some people.
fred-2 (ce04f3) — 1/9/2017 @ 3:00 pmPiers Morgan is alright (known brexiter, known Trumpist, anti-BLM, not an Islam fellator) except for the guns, thus he represents a poor barometer of Streep’s depravity.
urbanleftbehind (55d1dd) — 1/9/2017 @ 3:58 pmif Meryl Streep wants to be taken seriously she really should make a point of standing next to Natalie Portman as often as she possibly can
then she can be the smart serious one
happyfeet (28a91b) — 1/9/2017 @ 4:15 pmBobStewartatHome (c24491) — 1/9/2017 @ 2:24 pm
I think we can rule out the idea that those e-mails on the Fruday following the Tuesday, September 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi in 2012 were written for public consumption. And they don’t stand in isolation. And anyone who knew the truth would not have tried fooling people like that, because that story was destined to collapse. The nly reason the white House went with tthat story is because they thoughtit was the truth.
they didn’t fall on heir swirds, but, I believe with high confidence that they did maneuver the resignation of the CIA Director taht Barack Obama had put in, using foreign contacts and advice and Jill Kelley.
Sammy Finkelman (2178a8) — 1/9/2017 @ 4:20 pmfred-2 (ce04f3) — 1/9/2017 @ 3:00 pm
Illegal immigration was not important, and most of Trump’s voters didn’t regard it as important. It’s just that they
hot over the head with it so much by talk radio, and nobody had a coherent position.
It was like socialism in earlier days – nobody knew the arguments against a crackdown.
A majority of Republicans actually were for amnesty, especially for those who had jobs, but they were stuck on this idea that this should be the last amnesty.
That was always unimportant, although maybe there were people who didn’t realize that. Trump was also accused of everything except what he was actually guilty of.
BTW: What do you mean Cruz joined the Democrats?
Sammy Finkelman (2178a8) — 1/9/2017 @ 4:27 pmWhy did the CIA soft pedal the case, well perhaps the reports that the mastermind of the operation, bin qumu, had been contacted after being released from Ali Salem prison, to train the rebels.
narciso (d1f714) — 1/9/2017 @ 4:29 pmSammy, Trump held a rally in Chicago’s near Southside and BLM thugs went there and beat up his supporters who showed up. Trump, himself, never showed up. He ran off like the orange-skinned pansy that he is when he landed at the airport and heard there was trouble. Just tucked his tail between his legs, got back on his plane, and flew away like Tinkerbell.
On that same night, Cruz was having a rally in a Republican suburb, which went off without any trouble. Cruz made some statements that accused Trump of provoking the violence at Trump’s rally in Chicago. Which were true. Trump set the whole thing up to make himself and his supporters look like victims. Trump’s strategy always was to get whiny little b!tches who think of themselves as victims to vote for him, and that night they painted themselves as both BLM’s and Cruz’s victims.
nk (dbc370) — 1/9/2017 @ 4:55 pmActually you’re leaving out the part of Robert creamer and his trained nazguls.
narciso (d1f714) — 1/9/2017 @ 4:58 pmOk. *BLM, DNC operatives, and sundry goons and thugs*
nk (dbc370) — 1/9/2017 @ 5:06 pmNo shortage of WLBs in Chicago, fo sho.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 1/9/2017 @ 5:33 pm159. Fred. well put.
Harcourt Fenton Mudd (5e0a82) — 1/9/2017 @ 6:15 pmBack at the ranch, the hudna with the sepah is a bigger (redacted) deal, all making the late rafsanjani ( a more balanced view from aMari at the journal) dream a reality,
narciso (d1f714) — 1/9/2017 @ 6:47 pmGreat Minds—-
This weekend, Texas Senator Ted Cruz followed President-elect Donald Trump’s lead in building a close relationship with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen.
Texas legislators, including Cruz and Texas Governor Greg Abbott, met Tsai in Houston on Saturday, rejecting a Chinese demand that lawmakers refuse to acknowledge her, The Washington Post reported.
elissa (64cfec) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:25 pmhttps://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/01/09/ted-cruz-snubs-china-meets-with-taiwan-president-tsai-ing-wen/
elissa (64cfec) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:29 pmYeah, I’m just gonna go ahead and register my disagreement with any contention that Donald Trump has a “great mind.”
Patterico (115b1f) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:30 pmWell he has certain gut instincts that have served him well, so far, people don’t live at the level of theories.
narciso (d1f714) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:33 pmI think it’s wonderful that Mr Donald and Mr Ted are cultivating the relationship with President Tsai.
Cruz Supporter (102c9a) — 1/9/2017 @ 7:37 pmOn the other hand, that Barack chap likes to bow to dictators and kings, while giving the middle finger to our allies.
Take grechts piece on rafsanjani, in light of the fulsome profiles in every broadsheet.
narciso (d1f714) — 1/9/2017 @ 8:19 pmI think it’s wonderful that Mr Donald and Mr Ted are cultivating the relationship with President Tsai.
On the other hand, that Barack chap likes to bow to dictators and kings, while giving the middle finger to our allies.
I’ll second Cruz Supporter here. That we pretend Taiwan does not exist because the Communist Party objects is unworthy of a free people. I’m glad that Ted Cruz thinks so too.
Gabriel Hanna (678b43) — 1/10/2017 @ 4:46 am“163. Illegal immigration was not important, and most of Trump’s voters didn’t regard it as important.”
Wrong. Haven’t you learned by now that the polls are rigged?
“It’s just that they hot over the head with it so much by talk radio, and nobody had a coherent position.”
Nobody I know — not even our Mexican cleaning lady who hates illegals — listen to talk radio. And they don’t like illegal immigration.
They also have a coherent position: “kick illegals out, only allow legal immigrants in”.
“What do you mean Cruz joined the Democrats?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmxBp4IFe_I
That you are unaware of this shows that you are out of touch with Trump voters.
You know how to figure out if somebody doesn’t have a clue?
fred-2 (ce04f3) — 1/10/2017 @ 3:33 pmIf they jammer on about “talk radio” and “polls say {my preferred position}”
“Illegal immigration was not important, and most of Trump’s voters didn’t regard it as important.”
Fred-2: Wrong. Haven’t you learned by now that the polls are rigged?
They were rigged to show people more opposed to illegal immigrants and illegal immigration tahn they are.
Sammy Finkelman (643dcd) — 1/10/2017 @ 3:36 pm