The 2016 presidential race (former: The race to the 2016 presidential race)

[ABH2]

And that's why he's jail for other felonies and not murder.

And it's why he was blacklisted after his trial. Because he was obviously guilty. You want to pretend that not having been convicted of court means innocence, or that everyone should simply shrug off what is plain to them even when we are talking about electing the most powerful political official in the world. The standard to be President is nominally supposed to be high. Simply not being convicted in court is not good enough.

Even then, there is enough evidence available publicly to where she should full well be indicted and have to answer for the things above. Far less evidence and far less damage has resulted in convictions of people who were less powerful than her.

You think Americans should say integrity, national security, the rule of law etc.

Taking money from a corporation like Haliburton to declare war on Iraq may be legal (which I doubt), but equally wrong with taking money from other governments. It should also be illegal for the very same obvious reasons but it's not cause those corporations have muscled their way to not make it as illegal or cloak it into other things to make it seem legal, like "charity" donations (Hillary foundation) or whatever-trick-Jeb-used to get money before he became candidate.

I'm going to skip any talk of constitutionality and just say that the idea that Haliburton paid the Bush administration off and caused the war in Iraq is just absurd. You are latching on to a leftwing talking point from the Bush era that didn't even make sense at the time and trying to make it comparable to the documented donations Hillary took while Secretary of State.

That you compare foreign governmental entities to private American citizens shows the high level of detachment on display throughout this thread.

And if you don't think a host of foreign countries have access to her emails and god knows what else, there's not much to say. You are just a true believer.

So... no. Hillary is the run-of-the-mill long-time politician that has sacrificed too much integrity for power and owes too many "favors" to "friends" that happen to be very, very rich and generous.

This isn't even worth a response.

[Derpy Hooves]

anyone who has a problem with Hillary and Trump, needs to vote Gary Johnson/William Weld

Which is exactly what I'm doing

[alhoon]

Even then, there is enough evidence available publicly to where she should full well be indicted and have to answer for the things above. Far less evidence and far less damage has resulted in convictions of people who were less powerful than her.

You think Americans should say integrity, national security, the rule of law etc.

No, they should not. What I'm saying is that they say it surprisingly often. Cheney, Christy, Trump, Clinton... the list goes on. Trump draws the fire and revulsion of the Democrats because of his position and inflammatory remarks. Hillary? I don't understand why. She's not worse than many politicians.

I'm going to skip any talk of constitutionality and just say that the idea that Haliburton paid the Bush administration off and caused the war in Iraq is just absurd.

I never said that. I said that Haliburton's ties with Cheney were enough to change his stance from "NO WAR!" to screaming for a war that Halliburton made billions from at the cost of hundreds of Billions $ and thousands of lives for the USA.
Halliburton didn't cause the war. It was a significant influence to Cheney that was a significant reason for the war.
As shown here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney#Iraq_War

You are latching on to a leftwing talking point from the Bush era that didn't even make sense at the time and trying to make it comparable to the documented donations Hillary took while Secretary of State.

That leftwings were saying it, doesn't make it wrong. Not to mention the well documented links between Haliburton and Cheney as well as Cheney with the war. So, no, it does make perfect sense. You just don't like the obvious conclusion and discredit it.

That you compare foreign governmental entities to private American citizens shows the high level of detachment on display throughout this thread.

Or that's your (wrong) opinion...
Not to mention that multinationals are not controlled solely by private American citizens.


So, I'll restate: In the large pool of equally or more corrupt\power-hungry politicians from both parties, Hillary is not the worse. Yet, she draws all the fire for ages with anti-Hillary people repeating much exaggerated stories that don't hold much water.
I don't understand why, and I'm afraid you're not the one to explain to me why. OK, I get your opinion is "because she really is the worse of the worst!"

[snuggans]

Supreme court overturned Texas abortion law, since this is not a Christian nation. Hillary appears on stage holding up Elizabeth Warren's hand, celebrates the victory

not sure if Warren's already been picked as VP behind-the-scenes, or if this is an audition, or if she doesn't have anything to do at all with VP

[ABH2]

No, they should not. What I'm saying is that they say it surprisingly often. Cheney, Christy, Trump, Clinton... the list goes on. Trump draws the fire and revulsion of the Democrats because of his position and inflammatory remarks. Hillary? I don't understand why. She's not worse than many politicians.

This is the same fundamental issue I have brought up earlier in the thread. Hillary does legitimately slimy things. Trump says stupid . Hillary at one point or another has endorsed positions not too far from Trump.

I never said that. I said that Haliburton's ties with Cheney were enough to change his stance from "NO WAR!" to screaming for a war that Halliburton made billions from at the cost of hundreds of Billions $ and thousands of lives for the USA.
Halliburton didn't cause the war. It was a significant influence to Cheney that was a significant reason for the war.
As shown here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney#Iraq_War

There is no evidence that Cheney's ties to Halliburton influenced his decision to go to war in Iraq. Awarding them monstrous contracts is shady, but the same could be said for Hillary's pal Blumenthal who simultaneously advised Hillary and profited from Libya. In terms of Cheney and Halliburton, there is no invasion of Iraq without 9/11 and there is no evidence that the decision to focus on Iraq was simply personal profiteering. People didn't die because of Halliburton, but because America's foreign policy is incredibly misguided.

There is nothing in your link that shows Halliburton was the reason for the war. If there is something specific I should be directed to, then you need to quote it. Otherwise, it's just a link showing that Cheney was a strong proponent of invading Iraq.

You just don't like the obvious conclusion and discredit it.

I attack the notion that you are pushing that enriching Halliburton was the impetuous for the war because it makes little sense. There was a strong pro-Iraq war party in the GOP throughout the entirety of the 1990's that had influence within the Bush administration. It reduces Cheney to a caricature - a cartoon villain. It is simultaneously possible to criticize the ethics of awarding those contracts without reducing the entire decision to go to war to them.

If scoffing at something that has no real proof behind it and which is incredibly farfetched is a defense of Cheney, then so be it. There are enough provable claims to attack the guy on to where no one needs to come up with conspiracy theories to do it. More to the point, Cheney didn't deserve to be in the White House. So pointing to one of the worst administrations in American history to argue that Hillary is normal is incredibly weak.

Or that's your (wrong) opinion...
Not to mention that multinationals are not controlled solely by private American citizens.

No, it's American law. Taking donations from foreign governments/entities is against the law. A corporation wants to profit. A foreign nation is motivated by quite a bit more than that.

There are obvious first amendment reasons why banning campaign contributions from Americans is unconstitutional. People have the right to lobby their government. People have a right to freedom of expression. Giving the government the ability to curtail those is dangerous. More dangerous than corrupt politicians. When the subject is money in American politics, the entire conversation basically boils down to Citizen's United. The case where the American government argued it had the right to ban books, pamphlets, movies, and commercials in the lead-up to an election.

I'll simply link to the ACLU's defense of Citizen's United here.

So, I'll restate: In the large pool of equally or more corrupt\power-hungry politicians from both parties, Hillary is not the worse. Yet, she draws all the fire for ages with anti-Hillary people repeating much exaggerated stories that don't hold much water.
I don't understand why, and I'm afraid you're not the one to explain to me why. OK, I get your opinion is "because she really is the worse of the worst!"

Between her and her husband, they are the worst. No other politician has been so brazenly corrupt and so blatantly broke laws.

Hillary and Bill are the same couple that hid documents from the FBI in Whitewater and waited until a day after the statutes of limitations expired to release them. Hillary broke national security laws. She has broken every public record keeping law. The only defense anyone can claim for her here amounts to incmpetence. And she has indiscriminately taken unprecedented amounts of cash. There is a lot more evidence that they weaponized the IRS than there is that Halliburton motivated Cheney's decision to go to war.

There is no other politician with this much dirt on them in recent history.

[Ludicus]

Hehe
Hillary is less popular than the NRA, FBI and Sanders.

[alhoon]

That's not news. That Paul Ryan is so widely despised, even MORE than Trump is astonishing to me.
The American electorate keeps befuddling me.

[snuggans]

i feel for Paul Ryan, he's walking a tightrope, on one hand he has to babysit and tutor this total retard nominee, on the other hand he has to do it from a careful distance of 20 feet and he never downright endorses him

he has to carry out his duties as speaker over the cacophony of Democrats yelling for a vote on gun legislation. and half of his own party hates him anyway because of the "Washington DC bureaucracy is terrible" meme

awful job, wouldn't want to be him

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

Hehe
Hillary is less popular than the NRA, FBI and Sanders.

I have no idea who you are voting for.

I would never vote for a third party, it's a wasted vote.
Even if that party gradually gained strength over time it would take many elections for them to come to power and at the end of the day it is probably not worth it.

[snuggans]

Benghazi Report is out

takeaways:

the Republican Party spent $7 million tax payer dollars to bring down Hillary's ratings, ended up with Kevin McCarthy incriminating himself on national TV (the current majority leader), seems to have done more damage to itself

the very popular conservative rumor that Hillary personally ordered down military units or a response = so false

here is Hillary in 2011 speaking about the House cuts, more than a year before the Benghazi attack, warning that "we could pay a higher cost during crises"

House Republicans cut the administration's request for embassy security funding by $128 million in fiscal 2011 and $331 million in fiscal 2012


hahahahaha, and to think all of those hundreds of thousands of time that conservatives trotted around the corpse of Ambassador Stevens just to smear Hillary...

dear god

[crucify_ego]

She lied and blamed it on some video, period. What is it? Oh ya. "Crooked Hillary"!

[ABH2]

the Republican Party spent $7 million tax payer dollars to bring down Hillary's ratings, ended up with Kevin McCarthy incriminating himself on national TV (the current majority leader), seems to have done more damage to itself

I love how the left keeps touting the whopping $7 million spent. Nearly every policy and program Democrats support has more 'leakage' every day. The State Department under Hillary alone lost billions. Just vanished. Medicare has some $60 billion in wrong payments and fraud every year. Billions was wasted in Afghanistan, Libya, and to arm Syrian rebels who melted away as soon as they were put on the ground.

There never should have been any embassy in Benghazi of all places in the first place. Then you jump to budget cuts which is a red herring if I've ever seen one. If you are establishing an embassy in the middle of a war torn Islamic country to run guns into Syria for the CIA, it might not be the place to skimp on security. Only within the State Department were ambassador Stevens's warnings heard, and they were ignored by the chain of command there. Blaming budgetary battles in Congress is moronic. The State Department did a job making use of its funds.

Meanwhile, as just mentioned, the go-to response from Hillary and Obama in the aftermath of the attack was to attack free speech. And the witch is still doing it!

You can see this throughout the Benghazi chapter in Clinton's latest memoir, Hard Choices. "This was not the first time that provocateurs had used offensive material to whip up popular outrage across the Muslim world, often with deadly results," she writes. Amazingly, she is not talking about the Islamists who dubbed Innocence of Muslims into Arabic and then broadcast it with fiery denunciation on Egyptian television, but rather the originator of the art, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. Next sentence: "In 2010, a Florida pastor named Terry Jones announced plans to burn the Quran, Islam's holy text, on the ninth anniversary of 9/11." Once you begin to pin responsibility for faraway violence on acts of peaceful (if vulgar) free speech in America, the only thing standing between an artist and prison is an available crime.

This isn't new. The Obama administration has attacked freedom of expression after numerous terror attacks. Blaming free speech here for Muslim violence:

Republicans and other critics over the years have insinuated any number of darker motivations for the administration's video-focused messaging in the aftermath of the deadly Benghazi attacks, from the Sept. 11 communique that the "U.S. Embassy Condemns Religious Incitement," to Susan Rice's infamous turn on the Sunday chat shows, all the way to President Barack Obama's remarkable Sept. 25 assertion at the United Nations that "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam."

http://reason.com/blog/2016/06/29/th...scapegoating-o

It's Obama's version of 'they hate us for our freedoms'.

[snuggans]

>sees me talking about taxpayer money wasted on smearing Hillary
>has no answer for House republicans reducing embassy defense funding
>angrily starts ranting about general government waste with no sources and with the allusion that it's all the Democrats fault even though these services have over 77% support
>the waste resulting from mandatory spending on noble things such as Medicare/SS is somehow equitable or even worse than tax money spent on a political witch-hunt
>keeps all the Republican waste tightly to himself, not a word
>all the non-Republican theaters of war are massive wastes according to him, even the ones initiated by Republicans like Afghanistan, no mention of Iraq for some reason


never seen such frustrated posts from somebody who is allegedly not registered with the Republican party

no reply on the Hastert post? i loved writing that one up

[ABH2]

I did respond to those things. You choosing to ignore those responses isn't my problem. They are there for anyone to read. What's laughable is progressives pretending to care about wasting tax payer dollars when it is baked into every ponzi scheme they endorse.

Over 1000 times that amount disappeared from the State Department just during Hillary Clinton's time as secretary. Tying broad budget cuts to the very specific security at one embassy in a war zone is ludicrous. We should never apparently cut a single dollar from these bureaucracies even though there are gross deficiencies and unaccounted for sums of cash. Newsflash - if any embassies budget should have been prioritized, it was one being set up in the heart of Jihadi-land in Libya. But instead that is where the State Department decided to cut corners. It's grossly incompetent leadership. If the State Department wasn't bleeding far larger sums of money than any actual cuts it has sustained, you may have a valid point. But it does, and you don't.

You have no argument.

The scandal that was Benghazi:
1. Lying about what the attack was and blaming free speech. And what came out of Obama and Hillary's mouths were lies in which an America was prosecuted for political reasons
2. The fact that the entire operation in Benghazi was a front to get guns to Syria

Nothing says "competent" Top Man'ing or Woman'ing like using the chaos in the carcass of a country (Libya) that resulted from your last failed intervention to launch a new one in another (Syria).

Meanwhile, in other faux scandal news the obvious was confirmed today - Lois Lerner broke the law when she leaked documents on taxpayers to Democratic politicians and the State Department (but the White House was clueless!):

It is likely the largest unauthorized disclosure of tax-return information in history: the transfer of some 1.25 million pages of confidential tax returns from the IRS to the Department of Justice in October of 2010. And it was almost certainly illegal. The documents, which consisted chiefly of non-profit tax returns, were transferred to the DOJ’s criminal division from the IRS at the request of Lois Lerner, who wanted to get the information to the DOJ in advance of a meeting where she and several of the attorneys in the public integrity section of the department’s criminal division discussed their concerns about the increasing political activity of non-profit groups.

The Justice Department later told Congress that the documents contained confidential taxpayer information protected by federal law. The nature of that information hasn’t been made public, but the so-called Schedule B form, for example, which non-profit groups are required to attach to their tax returns, known as 990s, asks for the names and addresses of donors to the organization.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...=June29JOHNSON

One of the scariest things of the entire Obama administration was when progressives for a short while pushed the ridiculously, slavishly pro-government narrative bemoaning the budget cuts at the IRS. The poor IRS agents, they told us. How committed to your political party do you have to be to spin a narrative of woe is the tax collector?

[Condottiere 40K]

Regarding the Clintons, the Republicans shot their bolt in the Nineties.

If they kept their powder dry, it might be more effective now.

[ABH2]

It sounds good, but it doesn't really hold water. You can legitimately argue that the Lewinsky affair was absolutely moronic. It was, though also ironic. And no one forced Bill to lie under oath. He ultimately dug his own grave.

But Clinton staff went to jail over Whitewater. There were about a dozen convictions. And still key documents were withheld from the FBI until literally a day after the statute of limitations expired when they suddenly reappeared and were dumped.

The reality as I see it is that when one ideology dominates the media and the federal bureaucracy along with our educational system, a higher level burden of proof is going to be needed to show wrongdoing on the part of proponents of that ideology. Perhaps some would call that conspiratorial. I don't know - I see smoking gun evidence of law breaking, conflicts of interest and such.

The Department of Justice is supposed to prosecute people who break the law. Obama swears to us that no special prosecutors are needed for Hillary because, hilariously, they are professionals who would never allow politics to influence their decision. Obama and those who push this line are basically telling you that no special prosecutor is ever needed. The entire concept is just absurd. Unless they turn around and claim racism - then they demand its use. Lois Lerner broke the law, but did it in cooperation with the Department of Justice. The IRS has at ever step obstructed the investigation into that scandal while many in the media have continued to downplay or completely dismiss the case. They desperately argue that there is no evidence that the White House was involved.

If under Bush, some IRS agent openly talked about getting a job at with the Bush campaign while targeting leftwing groups, I really doubt the narrative would be the same in the establishment media. When thousands of emails went missing under Bush, it was a large scandal even though they were eventually found. Under Hillary, her unilaterally deleting 30+ thousand of them as despite a judge's subpoena is nothing.

A Trump presidency is less scary than a Hillary presidency. You know why? Because Trump will be held accountable in the media. Hillary won't be. The Republicans didn't exhaust their ammo. It wasn't drenched. It's simply always and forever going to be pouring on them because the people who have the most influence in setting the narrative in this country are leftists.

[fkizz]

Hehe
Hillary is less popular than [...] Sanders.

Wouldn't be surprised if Crooked Hillary used some dirt to steal Sanders some delegates.

If Snowden is on arrest list for leaking classified information, Mannings jailed (if I'm not wrong) why is Crooked Hillary only dubiously accused of arrest?

[ABH2]

Aide [Huma] said Clinton didn't want emails accessible to 'anybody'

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin said in a legal proceeding that Clinton did not want the State Department emails that she sent and received on her private computer server to be accessible to "anybody," according to transcripts released Wednesday. Her comments provided new insights into the highly unusual decision by the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate to operate a private email server in her basement to conduct government business as secretary of state.

Abedin also said under oath that she was not aware whether Clinton personally deleted any emails during her tenure as secretary.

Abedin told lawyers for the conservative group Judicial Watch in a deposition Monday that she could not recall whether she or Clinton discussed with any State Department officials Clinton's use of her server exclusively for government business. Abedin was Clinton's deputy chief of staff at the State Department, now works with Clinton's president campaign and often travels with the candidate. Abedin used an email account on Clinton's server occasionally for government business, although Abedin also used a government address.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...06-29-17-38-07

Kind of makes the whole 'intent' focus from earlier on in the thread with regards to public record keeping laws pretty ridiculous.

It's just further reminder that Hillary probably won't be charged, but it isn't because she did not willfully break the law.

[Dragus]

You kids might want to get off the internet and actually start doing some ground-game work for Trump. You're blowing every chance for a post-consolidation surge to make up lost ground and lose to us by a reasonable margin instead of a 7-to-12 range.

While you're on here letting people like snuggans troll you, people like me are whooping your butt in the actual election and on the fields of war. We were supposed to have a moderately more-even race at this juncture and not pull further ahead of you until post-Dem-convention, but it looks like beyond anti-intellectualist memesters on the internet in their basement blaming college graduates for being more hard-working and successful than them, you guys don't have much of an actual voting coalition to fight us evenly.

Thanks again for the easy win. I have never been in a more day-to-day happy and festive workplace at any point in my career, save for the previous presidential election nights themselves.

[Condottiere 40K]

She handled the eMail server issue badly, but most suspect it's because she didn't want to hand any material over to her political enemies.