The major PermaGov-controlled media are suddenly expressing second thoughts about her candidacy.
The bribery standard
—snip—
…we are hardly bothered by the routine practice of presidents rewarding big donors with cushy ambassadorships, appointments to portentous boards and invitations to state dinners.
The bright line seems to be outright bribery. Anything short of that is considered — not just for the Clintons, for everyone — acceptable corruption.
It’s a sorry standard. And right now it is Hillary Clinton’s saving grace.
The U.S. Department of Clinton
The latest emails show that State and the foundation were one seamless entity.By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
Aug. 25, 2016 7:29 p.m. ETThis is the week that the steady drip, drip, drip of details about Hillary Clinton’s server turned into a waterfall. This is the week that we finally learned why Mrs. Clinton used a private communications setup, and what it hid. This is the week, in short, that we found out that the infamous server was designed to hide that Mrs. Clinton for three years served as the U.S. Secretary of the Clinton Foundation.
—snip—
Foundation Ties Bedevil Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Campaign
By AMY CHOZICK and STEVE EDERAUG. 20, 2016The kingdom of Saudi Arabia donated more than $10 million. Through a foundation, so did the son-in-law of a former Ukrainian president whose government was widely criticized for corruption and the murder of journalists. A Lebanese-Nigerian developer with vast business interests contributed as much as $5 million.
For years the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation thrived largely on the generosity of foreign donors and individuals who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the global charity. But now, as Mrs. Clinton seeks the White House, the funding of the sprawling philanthropy has become an Achilles’ heel for her campaign and, if she is victorious, potentially her administration as well.
With Mrs. Clinton facing accusations of favoritism toward Clinton Foundation donors during her time as secretary of state, former President Bill Clinton told foundation employees on Thursday that the organization would no longer accept foreign or corporate donations should Mrs. Clinton win in November.
But while the move could avoid the awkwardness of Mr. Clinton jetting around the world asking for money while his wife is president, it did not resolve a more pressing question: how her administration would handle longtime donors seeking help from the United States, or whose interests might conflict with the country’s own.
The Clinton Foundation has accepted tens of millions of dollars from countries that the State Department — before, during and after Mrs. Clinton’s time as secretary — criticized for their records on sex discrimination and other human-rights issues. The countries include Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Brunei and Algeria.
Saudi Arabia has been a particularly generous benefactor. The kingdom gave between $10 million and $25 million to the Clinton Foundation. (Donations are typically reported in broad ranges, not specific amounts.) At least $1 million more was donated by Friends of Saudi Arabia, which was co-founded by a Saudi prince.
Saudi Arabia also presents Washington with a complex diplomatic relationship full of strain. The kingdom is viewed as a bulwark to deter Iranian adventurism across the region and has been a partner in the fight against terrorism across the Persian Gulf and wider Middle East.
At the same time, though, American officials have long worried about Saudi Arabia’s suspected role in promoting a hard-line strain of Islam, which has some adherents who have been linked to violence. Saudi officials deny any links to terrorism groups, but critics point to Saudi charities that fund organizations suspected of ties to militant cells.
—snip—
I repeat:
…if she is victorious…
UH oh!!!
Just last week she was being hyped as a sure thing!!! A Reagan-level victor!!! Now it looks like she’s only a couple of leaks short of being indicted. And Assange hasn’t dropped the big ones yet. Bet on it.
WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange has warned that his anti-secrecy campaign will release new “significant” documents concerning Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Assange, who has been hiding out in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since 2012 while fighting extradition, told Fox News that WikiLeaks was combing through thousands of pages of material.
A variety of documents from various institutions that are associated with the election campaign had yielded “some quite unexpected angles, that are quite interesting, some even entertaining,” he said.
“…some even entertaining…”
Show Biz is our life.
Drip, drip drip…
What could all this mean?
Are the controllers taking another look at the Donald? Has he convinced them that he’ll play ball better than HRC? Are the negotiations ongoing? Is the Deal being Arted as we speak?
Or… is there a fail-safe button on the Fix Board???!!!
Sorry, folks. Neither one of them meets our standards. The (
s)election is postponed. Chill.
UH oh!!!
Unthinkable.
Right?
Not.
The Blood For Oil War was unthinkable until it happened.
As were:
Nagasaki/Hiroshima
Viet Nam
The assassination years
LBJ.s resignation
The Chicago DemRat convention of 1968
Watergate
9/11
Etc.
Inquiring minds want to know.
Some of them do, anyway.
The rest?
Pfffft…
Watch.
AG
Outraged expressions of centrist horror?
Feel free.
I do, even though it’s just an illusion.
Later…
AG
I am free. I am free in my mind and although they can impoverish me, incarcerate me, kill me, I will not bend my knee, so I am free while Bernie Sanders is a slave.
I think that I am finally beginning to understand the Obama administration.
It’s been all virtual reality.
AG
John Cole was in characteristic form on the issue: using rapey rhetoric to threaten anyone who didn’t accept the righteousness of pay-to-play for a good cause.
The Democrats gained a fierce and loyal battle sergeant the day he switched his allegiance.
I don’t understand. (I am assuming you mean John Cole the cartoonist.)
A “fierce and loyal battle sergeant” who “switched his allegiance.”
Sounds kinda…contradictory. No?
Fierce?
Indeed..
Loyal?
To what? Maybe to the truth.
To whom? Maybe to his readers.
Certainly not to either party.
AG
John Cole, the chief poobah at Balloon Juice.
Oh.
A twitterhead.
Pffft…
AG
NY Times:
First of all…this is another anti-Hillary headline from the Centrist Grey Lady.
Secondly…when are the Trump opponents going to realize that every time you cut of one of the heads of this monstrous hydra two grow back? You have to go for the kill. (Not literally, fussinesses. Not literally.) Facts, not rhetoric. Facts!!!
Who did he pay off?
When and where?
How much?
Is there no one opposing him who cannot hack his records?
Sigh…
Alt.right indeed. She just produced another pro-Trump meme.
No talent for modern politics.
None whatsoever.
She would have been better off if she had stayed home and baked cookies.
As would we all.
I am really in fear that she is inches away from blowing this election.
Of course…I also fear that she will win and then blow up the world, but then I share that fear regarding Trump as well.
Sigh….
Scylla and Charybdis once again.
Time to go do what I do.
Later…
AG
Yes, AG, the interesting thing about dunking witches of either sex is that no matter what the possible evidence, the witch still dies. So do those who are not witches.
The lack of evidence and fact on all sides in this election and the distraction from policy on all sides are rather another example of the abysmal state of the US political process rendered at the hands of the media, the donors, and the politicians who serve them.
The interesting thing is the unwillingness of lefties to grant that the Clinton made enemies in Arkansas because they pushed desegregation (Jimmy Carter was an inspiration to the young Bill Clinton) and they did not wait their turn in the Democratic segregationist turned Republican establishment. I would be very curious as to who it was that told them that Dick Morris could help in the midst of the Gingrich “revolution” and the impeachment show trial. We know who funded the Arkansas project that brought Bossie to national attention. Guess who has sign on to help Trump? All the old gang from the 1990s. And on the Clinton side? All the old gang from the 1990s.
And the coming culture? Nostalgia for the booming economy of the 1990s. And the culture. It will be the Millennials’ version of the 1970s.
Yup.
To all.
Especially regarding Dick Morris.
AG
Very classy, AG.
The comment about Hillary staying home and baking cookies, that is.
Really classy.
You write stuff like this and then attack people for rhetoric?
You think that’s sexist?
I wouldn’t care if she had stayed home and run a bulldozer for a living. I don’t give a fuck what she did as long as she didn’t frontg for the PermaGov Mafia. She said it, not me.
And if a man had said something similar…oh, if say Bill Clinton had said “I suppose I could have stayed in Little Rock snorting blow off the asses of late night bar pick-ups , but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession” and I said that he (and the rest of us as well) might have been better off if he had done, so would that not be “classy” too?
Wake the fuck up, JDW. This is a family that permitted…supported a sex addict in his “cigar-up-the-yin-yang” sicknesses.
Classy?
In what dimension?
it is a family that has supported HRC in her quest for the presidency despite her many, many, many, many so-called errors…errors that have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands if not more.
You want “classy?”
Here’s my own view:
Like dat.
WTFU.
I await a president who vacations in Newark and drives around in an armored Chevy Volt.
Maybe we’d begin to get somewhere then.
Go vote for the past.
AG
Arthur wants Donald Trump to win the election. It’s the most important thing his disgusting rhetoric is intended to achieve.
He’s unwilling to own what he’s doing. But that’s what he’s doing. We don’t have to play along with his desire to delude us by occasionally stating distaste for Trump. Look at the very subject of this post, for example, and employ some common sense about what Arthur is attempting to achieve.
Just remember that Arthur is a Trump supporter the next time he attempts to condescendingly lecture progressives and liberals. He’s a supporter of the Trump campaign, with everything that entails.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Arthur Gilroy is a Trump supporter. He was a Ron Paul supporter during his Presidential campaigns, and he has continued to evangelize for Ron Paul here.
Ron Paul’s vision of government is not a liberal or progressive vision of governance. Nor is Donald Trump’s. Yet Arthur supports both.
A Trump supporter?
Yeah.
Right.
Always remember…this person centerfielddj wants the muderous PermaGov to maintain power. It’s the most important thing his disgusting rhetoric is intended to achieve.
AG
Trump wouldn’t disband the FBI, CIA and military. He’d use them to express his own terrible worldviews and dangerous impulses. Torture, bombings, drone use, military incursions, all would increase, as would dramatically stepped-up domestic oppression of anyone and anything Trump considered his enemies, and the dramatically stepped-up raiding of the Treasury by already wealthy money interests, most particularly the Trumps themselves.
He could fray the world order, however, which you stupidly seem to believe would be 100% good. In reality, Trump’s expressed desires to tear up our alliances (for example, NATO) and agreements (for example, Iran) would be enormously dangerous, would increase economic and political inequality, and would make a World War more likely, particularly in light of the fact that a person with 0% impulse control would have complete control of our international relationships and complete control of the most lethal weapons stock in the history of the world.
Once again…I am not pro-Trump. He scares the shit out of me. But then…so does Hillary Clinton. Can’t you get it through your stick-figure, two-diemsional view of the world that two rights don’t make a left? That a choice limited to two wrongs has no “good” choice?
Unbelievable.
It’s people like you…on the so-called left and on the equally so-called right…that have put this country into its current, gravely dangerous position as the most widely hated and distrusted nation in a world full of nuclear devices of all sorts.
Scylla and Charybdis? The only practical choices?
I’ll take another route, thank you very much.
WTFU.
AG
You spend all your time slagging Clinton, laying out many claims in great specifics.
You don’t spend your time slagging Trump, only offering generic critiques of him occasionally, and in a very defensive manner.
These things, coming from a Ron Paul supporter, coming from a person who supports a variety of anti-progressive people and policies.
In your support for voter ID laws, you don’t even believe low-income Americans should have equal access to the ballot.
You’ve drilled these things through our heads. Those actions of yours, and their implications, can’t help but have gotten through.
He actually has written more pro-Clinton stuff than anyone on this site. It’s just that it’s all time-stamped from 2007-8.
One could reach important conclusions when taking all these facts into consideration together.
I was in error. As I have said here often since then, I thought at the time that someone who understood the mechanisms of DC power would be a more effective president than would be a relative rookie like Barack Obama. What I did not understand was that they both were creatures of the same system, and that having a relatively ineffectual president might actually save our mortal asses from an even worse fate.
I know better now.
So it goes.
AG
You’re like Sisyphus and you’re political saviors du jour are your rock.
After each failure, you always think you know better, but you never do.
You’re right, Booman. I was like Sisyphus. I pushed that leftiness rock up the hill from the time I was about 16 years old until my final shove after Obama unveiled his true colors. I could never figure out why such a reasonable rock invariably fell back down the hill.
Then it hit me.
The fix had been in the whole time.
I don’t push that rock no more, bro’. In fact, I recommend that others stop pushing it, too.
Step aside and watch the morality play. It will play out as it must. Bet on it.
AG
You write these things and seem to expect us to believe that we should become persuaded to not give a damn about anyone or anything, as you claim to do.
Given that your actions, from your voluminous writings here where you show bitter opposition to Hillary to a community filled with people who will be voting for her, to the representations you have made of conversations you’ve had with Trump supporters where you did not raise any opposition to Trump at all, the evidence shows you actually do give a damn about something. And it sure isn’t progressive governance.
“Progressive governance,” eh?
“Progressive governance,” eh?
Define your terms.
AG
Progressive governance is repudiated by Ron Paul or Donald Trump, politicians you have attempted to foist upon us here.
Since Paul seems to be nearer and dearer to your heart, and since you inferred recently that Paul’s vision of government was in harmony with FDR’s, let’s see you make the case.
Here, I’ll give you one. Ron Paul would have agreed with Executive Order 9066, which forced Japanese-Americans into internment camps for the duration of World War II.
Please proceed.
I ask again…define your terms.
What does “”progressive governance” mean to you?
Does it mean undifferentiated murder from the skies?
Does it mean constitutionally prohibited surveillance with no evidence ofwrongdoing?
Does it mean an ongoing police state that kills people of color with little or no probability of punishment whatsoever?
What does it mean?
Tell me.
Please.
AG
These are not factually accurate descriptions of acts the current Administration has committed. The factually accurate versions of these claims do not represent the progressive movement and its goals.
In whole, this is so far away from a real attempt to engage in dialogue that to respond would have me agreeing to a long discussion with a dishonest actor. That would be unpleasant, and would help no one.
Thanks for conceding that it’s impossible to make the case that Ron Paul’s policies dovetail well with FDR’s.
And again…bullshit. Boilerplate bullshit. The facts are there.
The drone facts.
The surveillance facts.
The cops shooting black people facts.
And lots more.
But here you are, miming HRC.
She’s not really very good at the stonewall thing…I do give her credit for persistence, however the habitual tension in her voice gives her away…but you?
Pitiful.
AG
Same with me, only Bernie Sanders, urging everyone to vote for Clinton. Policy, to a politician, is only something to con votes out of the serfs.
If I was posting on a pro-Trump site, I would be posting about how bad he is, centerfielddj. But I’m not. I think that the pro-Trumpers are essentially unreachable.
What I am doing is posting on a site that started out as truly “progressive” but has steadily drifted right. I think that Hillary Clinton is a war criminal who is as guilty as were Dick Cheney, Bush II and all of their neocon allies. The trussed-up little froggie that serves as this site’s logo? That’s supposed to be a Karl Rove-ish character headed for the gallows.
War crimes are bipartisan in the U.S. now. Bet on it.
One mind at a time, and slowly the worm will begin to turn.
That’s my take on it, anyway.
Your results may differ.
AG
This comment of yours, other than the transparent fakery of the first paragraph, could have been written by the Trump campaign. Donald might say something quite like it on the stump today.
None of what you offer is intended as constructive critiques to Clinton and her campaign. It’s in service to the claim that she is unredeemable and unworthy of our vote.
And if Frog Ponders and others took you up on that and withheld their votes from Clinton, it would increase the likelihood of a President Trump. And all the things you claim to care about would be set back tremendously under a Trump Administration.
You’re not who you claim to be. You’re not a sincere member of the progressive community.
Bullshit.
AG
Reuters:
I repeat:
“I wish there was a candidate whom I could support enthusiastically. I will have to vote for Hillary Clinton, although I have serious reservations about her.”
This from a war criminal.
Talk about your left-handed compliments!!!
With friends like this, she doesn’t need enemies.
AG
Jeebus!
“I wish there was a candidate whom I could support enthusiastically. I will have to vote for Hillary Clinton, although I have serious reservations about her,” he said.
*
Yep. I can tell that Hillary Clinton enthusiastically sought this sort of damning with faint praise.
Say, I know this guy who is really unpleasant, throws rocks at puppies, shouts at neighborhood kids, yadda yadda yadda, but he told me that he’s going to vote to Hillary although he has a lot of concerns about her. Well hell…did you read what I wrote about how unpleasant this guy is? But he’s supporting Hillary? Why the hell hasn’t she distanced herself from this guy? She ought to take out an ad in the Wall Street Journal to do so.
And then there’s the guy I heard about in Peoria, Illinois. He’s also mean to little kids and dogs, but an avid Hillary supporter. Why hasn’t Hillary denounced him, too?
Why? Why should she? Those asses don’t have the blood of hundreds of thousands on their hands. Unnecessary hundreds of thousands.
She won’t denounce Wolfowitz for one reason and one reason only.
She shares his guilt.
AG