Omnibus Politics Thread: Campaign 2016 EditionFollow

I had a little chuckle at Pelosi catching her self trying to rationalize various disparaging comment made about Kellyanne.



Half way through the thought she realizes she was making the "Locker Room Talk" defense. And the "Well, Trump grabbed pussies."

This whole "The other side is just as bad" thing is annoying.

It's getting to feel like neurosurgery isn't nearly as complicated as we've been lead to believe.

Seems like we're wasting Carson on HUD when he could be working in Intelligence, drilling holes in terrorists' skulls and extracting their secrets via electrodes. Or at least finding out what sort of books they read as a child.

One bit of follow on. One of the things I think I observed in the election (back in the primaries in fact), was that Trump was not running like a conservative (or even a Republican). He may be pushing Republican platform issues, but he's actually using many of the same methodologies that the Left has been using for decades. I was unhappy about that when I first noticed it during the primaries. I was unhappy about that during the general election, and yes, I'm still unhappy about it when he does it now. I'm maybe a bit old school when I expect my politicians to be upright and straightforward with their statements and actions. I'm uncomfortable with them playing media manipulation games, and tactics like the one mentioned above of flooding the public with a ton of minor things, so as to exhaust them and make them forget about "real issues".

I guess it's a bit ironic, because I see them instantly as such, probably because I've been attuned to seeing them when used by Democrats, while it seems like most Liberals don't know what's going on. He's using the Left's tactics against them. Obama did the same thing btw. He'd drag out investigations, and in the meantime make sure to put a half dozen new dramatic stories in front of the public, so that when anything "new" came up, it was "old news", and "why are we even looking at that anymore?". Wild speculations, that don't matter if they are true, because the speculation itself gains you something, and creates more uncertainty and doubt, is another common tactic.

Again, I'm not really happy about this. But I think it's worth noting. What most of you are feeling right now? This kind of exasperation at absurd claims, crazy statements, obvious distractions, etc? That's what we on the Right have been dealing with for a long long time. It actually sucks that my "side" has started using the same ugly tactics. I'd much rather that we lifted ourselves up and had actual rational discourse in our public offices. But maybe I'm just engaging in wishful thinking. Who knows. Maybe if enough Liberals see this being used against them, and realize how cheap and crappy it is, they'll start seeing it when their own side does it as well, and maybe that'll eventually push for a change. Until then though? You might want to get used to it. Because I don't think Trump is likely to stop.

IMHO, 45 tweets and makes outrageous statements, to distract from what he and Congress are doing.

No surprise that the latest tweets come as he signs new travel ban from 6 countries and Congress is rolling out new healthcare legislation.

I know if it wasn't for a couple friends, who keep me inform online with links to news coverage of Both 45 and congress, I would face spending all day checking several news sources for what 45 and the GOP don't want me to focus on.

Still I have congress.gov on my list of homepage links. I don't check out the whitehouse.gov, since it's been watered down to no longer actually covering any issue I care about.

It's funny how conservatives sit silent as the bill was kept under guard in a single room where no one could see it and is now being pushed without being scored by the CBO, etc.

Gee, it's almost as though the complaints about the ACA were never really about the process at all. I wonder if all those complainers were intentionally lying at the time or if they were just useful idiots for the GOP, repeating the party line about what a travesty this is. Maybe we'll get some milquetoast "I'm ever so sad the Republicans are doing this now but it's really all the Democrats' fault" because Party of Personal Responsibility and all.

"News from nowhere", etc.

Oh. I meant to bring this up a bit ago, on the subject of the whole Obama wiretapping the Trump campaign. I found the response from an Obama spokesperson very very squirelly:



So not an actual denial of a wiretap, just playing a bit of word game with whether the order to do so came from within the White House, or the DoJ. I'm reasonably certain that Trump wasn't alleging that Obama personally put a wiretap on him, so that's a pretty silly distinction to make.

Don't really have anything other than that. I just found the wording to be interesting is all.

That is exactly what he was saying. Maybe instead of being "reasonably certain" about stuff, you should read a news story that's not "I know this is from Breitbart, but..." for once.

Kellyanne Conway says that the CIA can turn your microwave into a camera so be sure not to plan any terror attacks from your kitchen, I guess.

Damn, Operation Hot Pockets has been compromised.

Sure. That's not the point though. It's about responsibility and accountability. It's not like Obama would have to go through official channels to make it clear that he wanted the source of leaks (like say that Podesta emails), looked into, or that he wanted to see if there was something to rumors of connections between Trump and Putin. The reality is that, whether done legally or not, the whole thing looks suspicious.



What channels though? The only reason one would be looking at the Trump campaign would be in response to rumors and speculations, all of which came about in the context of the current political campaign. You really can't step away from the political aspect of this. And it's hard to imagine that the DoJ, working for Obama, would not perhaps accept a lower bar for "sufficient evidence to proceed" when the target is Trump, versus say, if the target were Clinton.

Remember the IRS delaying conservative group's tax filing applications? I'm sure Obama didn't have to directly tell anyone to do that either. But it's very suspicious when it does, since it makes it obvious that otherwise "legitimate" actions just so happen to have beneficial political effects for the party in power in the White House.



Huh? Nixon didn't order any wiretaps (well, not specific to Watergate anyway). The taps were in his own office, because he recorded everything said there for his own records. The issue with taps was that there were missing records when the investigation demanded them, and that looked, not illegal, but suspicious.

The speculation wasn't about Nixon wiretapping, but that he had intelligence operatives break into the DNC headquarters and steal documents during his re-election campaign. It was never proven that he personally ordered this (it was almost certainly done by a subordinate in his administration and/or campaign), but what got him was that he attempted to cover up the whole thing (hence the issue of the missing tapes).

The comparison is that if surrogate of Obama, even operating independently (but on his behalf), decided to "help along" taps of the Trump campaign, it would be similar in effect to what happened under Nixon during Watergate. An attempt to spy on the other party during an election year and using the resources of the federal government to do it. Except as far as we know, the actions taken during Watergate were all done "off the books", so to speak. Someone in his campaign knew some guys who did work for <insert covert intelligence agency here>, and hired them out of a campaign fund to break into the DNC and gather dirt. All totally illegal. If what is being speculated about the taps in this case is true, it may be even worse, since this would be misusing actual official federal intelligence gathering tools to target a political enemy. At least back in 1972, Nixon's people had to go outside the official government processes to do this. Apparently, our system has evolved to the point where they can get such things done through what appears to be "legal" and "legitimate" channels.

Again, this is also pure speculation, since we don't know for sure if taps were requested, or allowed, and if so how broad they were, or who specifically was targeted. But the mere act of attempting to do so is very suspicious and rife with claims of using our intelligence services for political purposes. If they actually did put taps in place? That actually is as bad as what happened during Watergate (or arguably worse, as mentioned above).

It was *also* illegal for the White House to order operatives to steal documents from the DNC back then. Any such order clearly was done secretly,right? The idea that someone at the DoJ would go so far as to seek wiretaps of Trump's campaign without some kind of quiet nudge or wink or nod from Obama and/or his staff seems very unlikely. They usually go as far out of their way to avoid even the appearance of such things. No one's saying that Obama wrote an official executive order demanding this. But a quiet request behind the scenes? You and I would never have any way to know about this. Just was we'd never have known about it with Nixon (and still don't), except that he used to record everything in his office. I suspect Obama doesn't do that, right? So we can't know if he did or didn't, and we can't know if there was a "gap" in a recording, because now there aren't recordings for us to use in any form of investigation.



No. I'm sure what he meant was exactly what I, and frankly most conservatives, got from his statement. That Obama wanted Trump to be tapped, and magically, his administration found a way to do it. Again, no one's saying that he ordered it officially, because he can't do so legally. Um... But that doesn't stop it from being done unofficially (well, the request anyway). Again, the big issue is that the odds of such a tap having been done for any reason other than political seems incredibly tiny. Which leaves us to this having been done on behalf of Obama, at the very least, if not as a result of his request.


Obama's administration has had too many of these "convenient" actions taken by "someone else" in the administration, and "the White House had nothing to do with it" as the excuse, for the suspicion not to be there. I'll point out the whole Susan Rice thing. In that case, we also had the excuse that they were just reacting to the intelligence, and not generating it. But how lucky for them that the intelligence happened to help their political narrative in an election year. And how lucky that said false intelligence just magically inserted itself somewhere between the field operative reports and the white house intelligence briefing.

So yeah, you'll have to forgive me for immediately assuming that Obama had to have had something to do with such a thing (again, if it happened). He surrounded himself with people who did a great job at protecting him from the backlash of any action that went poorly, but after several such firewalls being hit, it starts to become obvious that he had structured his administration for just that purpose. Nothing that went wrong was ever Obama's fault. It was always someone else's decision, or intelligence he didn't control, or whatever. Always. So when I see a spokesperson say something like that? My BS detector goes off. Hard.