You seem to think part of the cure for the disease is to ignore one of the symptoms.

See you're just referring to chain emails and Facebook posts. The hacking wasn't limited to the Podesta emails, there was info on Clinton foundation, strategies vs Bernie, donor information, etc.. I mean I must stress that these are "mini-scandals" and I'm not at all trying to say they weren't blown out of proportion.

But when you have leaks on this scale, and its reported on by basically all forms of media, its simply objectively damaging.

I don't get it either tbh.

Terrible analogy perhaps, but it kind of reminds me of how people see things in sport. Suppose you support a team and they are just ahead at the death of a game and then lose to a dodgy decision made by an official who turns out to be corrupt and on the take. Some would solely blame that official for the loss. Others may accept that was a factor but talk more about the rest of the game and that the losing team could have been way ahead by the end but for missed chances etc, so should look at themselves more so than the official.

The fact is that many people are stupid and easily led (some politicians believe in Adam and Eve ffs), but that isn't going to change any time soon. It's also obvious that the US has a crappy electoral system. None of that should prevent serious criticism of the Russian influence here. I think if you lived in Eastern Europe you'd want as much push-back against Putin as possible - he's pure evil and a serious threat to more than US democracy.

When it comes to the Russian / Trump connections specifically, a good idea would be to tell a very coherent, incisive story that lays out the specific theory of what the wrong-doing is, what the crimes are, the specific incentives of the people involved. I think the left is failing to do that, so coordinating more and settling on a very coherent story would be valuable.

If there are more shoes to drop, let's drop them. If there are investigations to have, let's do that.

But: if we're just planning to yell about this for the next few years, and build more p-hacking type evidence without a coherent frame -- I'd argue voters have for better worse heard enough now and internalized a conclusion either way. The broad outlines of the charges here were known prior to November 2016 and Republicans are in power everywhere, including Trump. It doesn't feel like a political winner even if there's merit. So we should move onto things that are more relevant to people. The focus on Russia feels like replicating some of the worst mistakes and impulses of the Clinton campaign to flatter and covert the remaining college educated white Republicans who might give a **** about the precise ways this story hits home but then loses the focus of the poor, racial minorities, the working class, the kinds of voters who ultimately are going to be behind Democratic ascendancy should it ever arrive and for whom Trump's collusion with a foreign power isn't quite at the top of their political priorities and have far more pressing needs Democrats aren't addressing.

Here's the problem, though, DVaut1. It's not a political issue. It's a national security issue. I must continue to yell about it because the very fabric of our democracy is at stake, and Republicans have absolutely no intention of working to rescue that democracy!

Russia’s ability to manipulate U.S. elections is a national security issue, not a political one
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/r...political-one/

"Move onto things that are more relevant to people"

National security is not relevant to people? The United States system of democracy is not important to people? Corruption and treason at the highest levels through the office of the presidency is not important to people?

If you're right, we might as well give up on democracy now. If you're right, democracy in the U.S. is absolutely 100% doomed to fail and we might as well abandon it early rather than continue to put it on life support. And I had better start learning Russian on duolingo.

I mean, Nixon didn't break into the place where voting machines were stored.

I do see your larger point, though. In a healthy, functional democracy, Russia flooding the internet with pepe memes would be a zany side story to the 2016 election. That's not the sort of thing that swings elections. The left lost because the American electorate was already primed and ready to believe in Benghaziiii or emailgate or pizzagate or any of the other right-wing agitprop and the most you can say about Russia's influence is that it offered some mild encouragement to the deplorable squad.

On one hand, foreign nations dicking around with our elections is a problem that should be taken seriously and investigated. Let's not put that **** on the back burner. On the other hand, "Dems lost because Russia hacked the election" is a dangerous narrative that papers over the dysfunction in the Democratic party and the nation as a whole.

It's the flywf emailzzzz test.
What law was broken?
What is the specific evidence do you have that that law was broken?

So you're saying that the email scandal failed to hurt Hillary?

Anyway here's a start as to "actual laws the Trump admin has broken:"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perjury

Are you trying to hurt Trump with fake scandals like they did to Hillary? Like if the goal is to nod and wink and try to innuendo him out of office, godspeed. I'll justify those means to achieve a noble end but you're preaching to the choir here and I doubt the deplorables will be swayed by the tactic.

No, I'm talking about a long list of crimes. Right now the biggest and most easily provable one is PERJURY by the friggin' Attorney General of the US! But people don't want to look at that because they're too busy handwaving away the entire scandal because they really enjoy their Greenwald hot takes, served fresh and stupid in the morning.


https://twitter.com/T_FisherKing/sta...30135500931073

Right. My point was that "DIRECT INTERFERENCE" is a purposefully alarmist characterization of what basically amounts to unleashing Pepe on the internet. If this is the kind of thing that really upends your political system it really wasn't worth saving. I categorically dismiss it, partly because I find it asinine but also because if I'm wrong and it's true that Spirit Cooking and Comet Pizza fantasies were truly dispositive, then the whole conversation is fruitless and humanity is ****ed. I choose instead to believe we have far deeper, more fundamental problems if only because it speaks to our possibilities. It's like finding a bed-ridden, paralyzed human and the doctor blaming it on a superficial wart. If it's true, then we should all become Shamen or witch doctors or something. Acknowledging Pepe brought down America is the worst sort of defeatism, it implicitly acknowledges our whole political system rested on norm of judiciously deploying racist frog memes instead of unscrupulously doing it, that once the Russians figured out the secret trick of being serially racist liars then the whole system was doomed. I remain convinced we have better in us, collectively. That the explanations for this moment lie elsewhere.

We're not talking about Pepe the frog here we're talking about a huge international conspiracy to discredit Hillary Clinton. Do you not remember that The FBI was in on this effort to discredit her, during the friggin' voting period no less?

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slate..._director.html

The fly test was aids for a lot of reasons. Russia covertly paying trolls to spread propaganda on the internet presumably doesn't break any laws. That doesn't mean we just let foreign interference happen with no repercussion.

There is no reason to reduce it to either or.

Both things are true, Russia directly interfered in the election and the US political and media systems were primed for this interference through long developing systematic weaknesses of thier own making.

What all this is ignoring is that you have a political party (Republicans) that lie constantly and pay absolutely zero price for it. And you want to let them get away with the biggest crime ever? That's not exactly how you solve the underlying problem. In fact, you're only encouraging them to lie more if you let them get away with this.


https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/sta...60169876619264

https://twitter.com/AshleyRParker/st...45823280058372

https://twitter.com/brianklaas/statu...84115707240453

https://twitter.com/NPRinskeep/statu...34265666015232

Ramming down the seemingly badly prepared TrumpCare seems to be a Democratic strategy:



http://www.dailywire.com/news/14329/...ats-frank-camp

This American Life has done several stories on the reprehensible actions of the US in abondoning the very people who helped them most during their two wars.

Anyone defending this is scum on the face of it.

It took a year to pass Obamacare, numbnuts.

Paul Manafort's daughter's alleged texts:

"You know he has killed people in Ukraine? Knowingly," Andrea Manafort allegedly wrote of her father in March 2015 in an angry series of texts to her sister, Jessica, about her father's personal and professional life.
"Remember when there were all those deaths taking place. A while back. About a year ago. Revolts and what not," reads another text in reference to the bloodshed in Kiev.
"Do you know whose strategy that was to cause that, to send those people out and get them slaughtered."


"He has no moral or legal compass," Andrea allegedly wrote about her father earlier as part of the same conversation.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/10/politi...xts/index.html

Thanks DVaut for saving me heaps of typing (and further attacks as a white supremacist!)

Careful though, the ghost of DVaut past did not seem to be a fan of maieutics.

Rockfsh,

Now those are some spicy texts. Crazy story. In another series they say:

The ol draft shared login routine!

Hacking into emails obviously does! I mean I seriously don't get how you and dVault could just miss that there was a very public join intelligence report going into depth about the Russian hacking. Even Trump himself caved and finally admitted "it was probably the Russians".

I mean I know neither of you are Trumpkins, and I actually agree with your larger point, but you're downplaying Russian interference to the point of simply being inaccurate.