This basically sums up everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party.
MAKE A FUSS, YOU NEVILLE CHAMBERLAINS!!
Even if you can't figure out what good it's going to do. Like with the goddam Supreme Court, Barack. You might not have been able to make the Senate confirm anyone, but Jesus Christ you could have shamed them for it, and maybe it would have made a difference.
Probably the best president of my lifetime, and I am still consumed with rage at the idiot.
Not to rehash every old argument at once, but it reminds me of the "Fuck this, fuck that thread. In a policy sense the Democratic Party is good enough to be worth supporting, of course, but at what point can we start blaming them for uselessness in a tactical sense? I'd say Pelosi is the best leader the Democratic Party has had in the past eight years, because unlike Clinton or Obama at least she gets her actual job done.
Is this news in any way, except maybe in some partar specifics? The broad outline has been known for months. (Although I'm happy for anything that puts it back in the news.)
The logic makes some sense if you are operating on the assumption that Clinton wins. (It may still be wrong in that scenario--I'm not sure--but I can definitely follow the argument.). It makes no sense whatsoever in any other context.
5: What do you mean by when do we start blaming them? I've been blaming them for ages -- I'm still voting for them because what else is there to do, but I'm blaming them.
6: I thought that the level of certainty and awareness at the highest levels was new, as well as that what was known wasn't just stealing and releasing emails, but also directly fucking with election systems. The last thing -- that the President knew with reasonable certainty that a foreign power was directly trying to alter our election results -- it seems insane that it wasn't treated as a 50 state emergency.
What do you mean by when do we start blaming them?
FWIW I mostly was in fact rehashing that thread. All that discussion over whether the Democratic Establishment sucks or not seems to mostly be about whether its friendliness to Wall Street is beyond the pale or not. By contrast, I'd say they suck because they keep screwing up. Losing elections, and then this Obama story which is separate but related. I don't need to be able to run business to determine that the person who's doing so is bad at it if the sign in the window says "going out of business."
Prior to this election, if you had told me that Russians (or anyone) were trying/successfully managing to subvert the actual voting process, I'd consider you a tinfoil-grade paranoid. Given that Obama was already a huge magnet for conspiracy insanity, I can totally see the judgement that making a big public fuss would *only* play into spinning up conspiracy frothing, without actually solving anything.
There's a certain despondence here. The time to secure election systems is before the campaigns are underway. In the heat of the campaigns, it's too late.
I don't really know what to say.
Yeah, me neither.
6.2: And then when Clinton didn't win what was there to do but make sure that all the normal protocol was followed, so that there was as little sense as possible that there had to been any disruption of the normal American election process..............
As much as I understand, and even share somewhat, the "wtf, Obama" reaction to all this, my primary and overwhelming reaction has been more like, "wtf, everybody, did you see what the Russians just did? Why isn't everybody acting angrier?"
Like, this seems to me like a horribly effective strike against the US with a subtly-but-massively destructive descendent of the neutron bomb: it leaves the buildings AND the people standing but kills the functionality in governance. Putin just installed a moron in our white house and ratcheted up the potential for social unrest and instead of worrying about whether we're about to go to war with Russia in retaliation, I'm wondering why nobody (in government and mainstream discourse) is acting like it's a big deal.
And yes, I know we here all already know most or some of this, but it's the extent and undeniability that comes through in this story that feels new. I mean, this shit happened and everybody at upper levels of security services and leadership knew it. And yet half the Republicans are loudly dismissing it as conspiratorial nonsense, and the other half, along with about all the Democrats, are mostly saying not so much about it at all.
Holy shit! The motherfucking Russians fucked our election! That's big! I'm mad! I want somebody hurt for this! Isn't that just the kind of energy the right is supposed to be so good at exploiting? Where are they? Where is anybody!? Do something, god dammit!
Right. That is, I bet part of the reason Obama underreacted is that going public with it, it's a genuine act of war, and figuring out what the hell to do about it is a giant problem.
On the other hand, rolling over and pretty much ignoring it? Not on the list of useful responses.
12. I suggested alternatives and people here thought they were inappropriate.
Hello everyone, and to risk sounding obvious, this means, on the one hand, that we should blame Democrats, but on the other hand, we can't really blame Democrats for any recent electoral losses, or any future ones, because our election system has been compromised. Instead we should try to deal with the fact that the party which benefited from any hacking, if it occurred, controls all three branches of the federal government, and mostly denies that any hacking was even attempted, and thus clearly cannot be expected to do anything about it. Given that our election systems depend on elected officials doing their jobs, and given that our elected officials don't want to do that, because it's not in their perceived self-interest, how can we have any confidence in election results going forward? I have to think that if the KGB really wants to hack into a system, that they can at least be considered a credible threat of doing so. So Obama can be blamed, but Pelosi cannot be blamed for the Democrats' recent losses, as they may very well have been illegitimate. Further, Republican citizens don't and won't care because they have been fed a calibrated diet of disinformation, which they find tasty, and will likely continue to enjoy in the near future. Enough Republicans will stay happy to prevent a great majoritarian uprising. Maybe the union will one day be dissolved so that at least the Republicans' current strategy will fail them vis a vis the blue states, but I don't see a happier outcome. I think it's that bad.
Hope you're all doing well, and sorry for being a jerk.
I completely disagree with 12. Maybe it was sarcasm? When Clinton didn't win, Obama should have done everything in his power to bring the interference to light, and explore potential remedies. I was and remain firmly convinced that should have included exploring a do-over on the election (with the facts of Russian tampering in full daylight).
I feel pretty sure that 12 was indeed sarcasm.
So, does Russia want a change in the House in 2018? I can imagine they might.
I'm not disagreeing with you, because I don't get it at all, but I don't get it all. Like, making impeachment possible will be massively disruptive, or something like that?
Hi Teo!
Russia might want a change in the house, or they might want to keep a party in power which is beholden to them, especially one which is willing to "do business." From Putin's perspective, I think that maintaining a government in debt to Putin, which can't actually win a majority of votes on its own, is more valuable than a temporary destabilization.
I don't think the destabilization will be temporary.
Is the GOP as a whole, or even the Trump administration as a whole, actually beholden to Russia, though? The Senate just passed new sanctions and the military has started shooting down Syrian planes.
Yes, but I think the status quo the Ukraine is now fixed, plus a NATO security guarantee is clearly never going to be worth what it was before.
24: I'm a bit of a nutjob, but I think that Russia had to expect some saber rattling from the GOP in keeping with the GOP's official line that they aren't in Putin's pockets. Who knows what Russia really wants, but my guess is they want freedom to exploit Ukraine and a weakened NATO. Or what 25 said.
Also, another middle eastern war couldn't hurt oil prices.
And I'm sure they'd like to open up new markets for little wooden dolls that fit inside other little wooden dolls.
I would like to issue a new call for civility.
I've been calling for civility all afternoon, but all that happens is the Starbucks manager comes outside and tells me to move three feet. That seems reasonable enough, but you keep moving three feet and soon enough nobody can hear your social commentary about Ted Cruz.
Well it seems like they withheld this info from the public for reasons of perceived partisan advantage, and it blew up in their faces.
Under Salic Law, it isn't a buttplug if there is a hole all the way through the middle.
That's how Cruz got disinvited to all of the Dunkin Donuts.
Maybe a silver lining to this story is that by making Obama look bad through his inaction, the WaPo has given the right an incentive to actually consider the truth of the Russia hacking and act like it matters. If they accept the premise that it happened, then they get to beat Obama over the head with it.
36: Trump will argue that it was Obama's fault for letting it happen and that it's all a hoax invented by the Democrats to justify their defeat.
I keep fantasizing that there is a long game that we haven't seen yet and everything is going to be okay.
A Democratic House majority can't do anything that harms Russia, and can make Trump even less effective.
Maybe a Democratic House ends or drastically curtails our military involvement in Syria.
Maybe a Democratic House make war on Iran impractical.
I'm not sure we can resist impeachment, God knows there will be grounds enough: the Senate Republicans won't vote for removal, but we still end up with 15 months of stalemate in DC.
38: Like that Tolstoy story, "Barack sees the truth, but waits".
10.1 seems to me to make the salient point:
Prior to this election, if you had told me that Russians (or anyone) were trying/successfully managing to subvert the actual voting process, I'd consider you a tinfoil-grade paranoid. Given that Obama was already a huge magnet for conspiracy insanity, I can totally see the judgement that making a big public fuss would *only* play into spinning up conspiracy frothing, without actually solving anything.
I'm assuming that Obama and the national security apparatus would not in any way have been in a position to actually disclose how we know with such certainty that the Russians were up to these dastardly deeds. Even now, many people don't believe they 'hacked the election' (even just hacking the DNC). Prior to the election, it would arguably have been in fact counter-productive to go public with such information, and then refuse to offer any evidence to prove it. Hence the "don't make things worse." It makes sense.
As always, the lesson is that Mitch McConnell is deeply evil and has done a truly extraordinary amount damage to our country.
None of the options were obviously good, and letting Clinton win and then punish the Russians in some sort of thought out way, outside of the glare of the election, was an understandable gamble. Which went totally wrong.
42 is completely right. Obama fucked up, but his only no 8 or 9 in line for worst offenders.
I'm not sure fuck up really covers doing things you are incentivised to do. People fear the Republican base and have hatred/contempt for the Democratic base, and in both cases for good reason.
President Obama would have gotten a lot more shit for doing the right thing here, than he's going to get for doing the wrong thing.
I'm paywalled out of the OP link, but from discussion it seems all the content was known both before and after the election.
Stating the obvious, while the Russians have fucked you, they were able to do so only because your polity was already rotten to the core. Their candidate just got crushed in France, because the French evidently aren't rotten in the same way. The Brexit case maybe lies somewhere in the middle.
WRT Syria, it has seemed for some time the Russians have (unlike Assad) recognized that government reconquest of the entire country is impossible, and have aimed instead to consolidate a rump state in the west. More active American involvement might persuade Assad to that course, and so isn't necessarily contrary to their policy.
But even if it was, it wouldn't matter: they've gained the breakdown of the Atlantic alliance. Even if that costs them Syria, it's still a bargain.
I think if the ACA gets repealed on top of the Russia revelations, then Obama's historical reputation will basically be mud. On domestic policy we got a very slow recovery from recession, plus a unpopular entitlement that was quickly repealed. On foreign policy, you could view Obama as judicious, but Russia makes it look less "judicious" and more "ineffectual".
On the other hand, if Trump blunders into one or more world wars Obama is going to look like a freaking genius in comparison.
Not to forget withdrawal from Paris and refreezing of Cuba relations. And given that Middle East policy is now made by KSA the Iran deal is likely doomed.
50: True; but Trump is 6 months in and he's making GWB look like a genius by comparison. That's about the lowest bar you can set.
24 et seq. They would like more of this kind of thing.
It depends on whether historians view Obama as a Kenyan Islamosocialist usurper, or Republicanism from 1994 on as world historically toxic. That is, it depends on who gets to write the history.
Too bad an historian is somebody who speculates on whether or not aliens helped build the pyramids.
On the list of malefactors, I shouldn't have put Obama at 8 or 9 above. Actually, he is lower on the list than every single person who voted for Trump. And every single person who didn't vote because there's an insufficient difference between the parties.
I mean, sure, he's higher on the list than HG, LB, and me, for example, but will behind at least half the population.
49: Put that way, there would be an interesting parallel between Obama and Bill Clinton -- who made serious compromises and also had major accomplishments which amounted to less than he hoped when he was succeeded by a bull-in-a-china-shop Republican rather than the Democrat he expected.
In Clinton's case, his compromises on Welfare Reform, and his lack of action on inequality look worse without a successor who could address the problems and his successes in raising taxes and balancing the budget look like (somewhat) pyrrhic victories.
I am more inclined to defend Clinton than many people here, but considering the possibility of Obama ending up in the same position makes me think that we should recognize the problem as a structural issue, not just person failure on the part of Clinton / Obama.
49: Put that way, there would be an interesting parallel between Obama and Bill Clinton -- who made serious compromises and also had major accomplishments which amounted to less than he hoped when he was succeeded by a bull-in-a-china-shop Republican rather than the Democrat he expected.
In Clinton's case, his compromises on Welfare Reform, and his lack of action on inequality look worse without a successor who could address the problems and his successes in raising taxes and balancing the budget look like (somewhat) pyrrhic victories.
I am more inclined to defend Clinton than many people here, but considering the possibility of Obama ending up in the same position makes me think that we should recognize the problem as a structural issue, not just person failure on the part of Clinton / Obama.
Trump just tweeted "Just out: The Obama Administration knew far in advance of November 8th about election meddling by Russia. Did nothing about it. WHY"
Which is pretty much an admission that the Russians did what everyone knows they did but he's ben denying. Finally coming around apparently.
52: There's still a really good chance that Trump doesn't manage to catch W on the list of worst presidents. W was a really really spectacularly bad president. Trump is obviously completely and totally incompetent and also has huge huge risks and may yet be a worse president and even a much worse president, but even Trump is going to find being worse than W is a challenge.
60 is up there with the kid I once knew who burgled a house on a snowy night and then walked straight home.
61: Depends on whether you are grading on proficiency or outcomes. W was clearly a more proficient (i.e., less worse) president, but Trump may avoid being responsible for thousands of excess deaths in terrorist attacks, natural disasters and pointless wars. (Note he is intent on not avoiding excess deaths due to uninsurance.)
If Al Gore had served two terms, would he have avoided the Great Recession? What plausible concrete actions c. 2005 would have prevented the banking industry from blowing up?
What plausible concrete actions c. 2005 would have prevented the banking industry from blowing up?
I'm not sure, but I recall expanding home ownership was a major rhetorical point of GWB's presidency. Not that there was widespread opposition to that part of what he did.
That is, he claimed credit for it. But I can't recall that he actually caused it.
60.2: Which is pretty much an admission that the Russians did what everyone knows they did but he's ben denying. Finally coming around apparently.
Sadly, none of his base (or his non-base, but perforce supporters) will see it that way: they just don't see cognitive dissonance or self-refuting statements or sentiments. Both things are true! The 'Russia thing' is a hoax + Obama failed the country over Russia = a general yep, that's just what we always figured about the Dems, and thank god Trump speaks the truth about it.
It's weird, and I find it impossible to know what to do about it. Watching Fox News from time to time, it's just shocking, the stoopid.
I'm probably going to come off as an Obamabot but I think the case can be made that 20/20 hind site is causing a great deal of the negative reaction to his response to the Russian interference. His administration did try to work with congress to put out a bi-partisan statement about the issue but Mitch shut that right down even saying he wasn't sure it was valid intelligence. They tried reaching out to the governors of all 50 states to offer assistance in protecting their election systems. They pushed back with states rights claiming that it would be unacceptable Federal interference. They did but out a general statement about Russian interference but it stomped on half an hour after it was released by the Access Hollywood tapes. He could have pushed on anyway without bi-partisan cover but he couldn't reveal the source of the SIGINT because of its level of secrecy. He would have been murdered by the republicans and even some of the more craven in his own party might have turned on him.
In hindsight I too wish he had done more but I can understand why he did what he did.
Murdered how? He was a lame duck president.
69 - Sure - it wouldn't have affected him politically but The right wing media machine would have made endless hay out of his obvious intent to swing the election via fake news. The congressional oversite hearings about it might have gotten interesting though...
Hillary would have been murdered: she had been billed as Obama's third term, no?
That's the thing about poisoning the well, it's not something someone can just power through (dare I say, Green Lantern it?). You really do need a broad consensus in society to address problems with voting, and the GOP has maliciously made that impossible.
1. Hillary got murdered anyway.
2. Noisy Russia investigations ordered mid-year would have led to all the shit currently swirling around Kushner, Flynn, et al, and while that would have made no difference to Trump's voters, it might have to Clinton's.
69: the Republicans would have refused to hold hearings on Garland, which Obama was so vehemently calling for them to do.
I'm sorry, were we talking about actual 2016? I got distracted.
1. Hillary got murdered anyway.
I'm sorry, who are you?
Hillary didn't get murdered. She lost the election by something like 50.000 votes in 3 or 4 states. I forget the exact numbers, but I can look them up if necessary.
Do you really think that Obama going public with the Russian involvement would have turned out more Clinton voters in those states?
Look, I'm not in the business of explaining why Obama did the right thing; only that I understand it. The issue at hand is the right-wing media machine that makes such revelations either irrelevant or downright detrimental.
75 - exactly.
Although I say again, with hindsight, I would have preferred that Obama let it all hang out. Couldn't be worse that it is now? But my foresight is not as perceptive as my hindsight.
75: I meant murdered in terms of e-mail ratfucking.
would have turned out more Clinton voters in those states
Good point. I don't know.
Complaining about the right-wing media machine like high school students the uncool vice principal has gotten us so far since 1996. We should keep it up.
Complaining about the right wing media machine was by way of explaining the the potential consequences of being open about Russia, not to "get us anywhere." But fuck that uncool vice principal though. He was the worst.
What's to be done going forward? Given how surprising the results were, and given the evidence that Russia tried to interfere, does anyone else believe that they may have succeeded? In that case, blaming Hillary wouldn't make very much sense, and expecting any major electoral victories in the future would also make little sense. What does make sense in that world?
I think it was important enough information for the public to know that's it's worth telling them even if it turns out not to be towards your partisan advantage. The job of the Obama administration is not to get Hillary Clinton elected, and they were garbage at that anyways.
79: Fine: "as high school students...."
If Democrats ever do win another major election, I want to see mandatory voting laws as a mechanism to perpetuate their victory. Is that too much to ask of career politicians, that they try a little bit to consolidate their power?
Motor Voter 2: This Time It's Personal.
Australia managed not to elect Donald Trump that way.
Something with an ego that fragile could never cross the Wallace Line.
Putin did not like clinton's policies toward Russia as secretary for state
When democracy granted democratic methods for us in the times of opposition, this was bound to happen in a democratic system. However, we National Socialists Republicans never asserted that we represented a democratic point of view, but and we have declared openly concealed that we used democratic methods only in order to gain the power and that, after assuming the power, we would deny to our adversaries without any consideration the means which were granted to us in the times of opposition. In spite of this, we can assert that our government meets the rules of an ennobled democracy.
I must say: Fuck Julian Assange.
Oh yes, I've been saying this for the past four or five years. And, as a result, have got into some weird arguments with lefty friends of mine, who were (and some of them still are!) convinced Assange was (still is!) a hero for speaking truth to power, or what have you.
I've long since given up on convincing anyone who hews to the pro-Putin Left (I'm sorry, call me intolerant, but that's just too utterly stupid and incoherent, or maybe just too impossibly complex, for the likes of me: I'm just a simple person, after all...). But I do feel a little bit vindicated in my initial distrust and disgust toward Assange.
In a sensible country, Assange's conduct would have been meaningless. Once it became indisputable that he had lost interest in the whole "information must be free" thing and decided to work for the Trump campaign (and, only slightly less overtly, the Putin regime) the media should have acted accordingly.
This wasn't some kind of subtle transition on his part. He had a big pile of information and decided to leak it in pieces for no reason other than to damage Clinton. His motivation and tactics were news; the content of the document dump was trivia.
I sign on to MC's 46 and 47. In a country whose institutions had not gone rotten, Assange's conduct would have worked against Trump.
But yeah, to be clear: Fuck Julian Assange.