Mueller Investigation pt5

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- Yes right now the Democrats really, really want to hang on to the "Hillary didn't lose the election, she was cheated out of it" narrative.

- That doesn't mean Trump isn't dirty.

Step from the details and we're basically saying "X won over Y by getting Z to lie about Y on X's behalf" and that's... hard to unpack.

It's not good but... it's bad in a weird way.
 
varwoche said:
Me me <raises hand>.

Mind you, I was similarly disappointed when they let Smollet and OJ skate free.
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Those are not equivalent situations. With both Smollet and OJ, the known facts of the case didn't change. The only new information was not about what either Smollet or OJ did, but only with how other people reacted to them.

Also... I'm not so sure that Mueller found "no evidence" of collusion.
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And if the report is released, and that's what it says... what then? How will you feel? Will you feel disappointed, or relieved? How do you think you should feel?
 
The facts of the Trump crimes haven't changed, either. We KNOW things that would get anyone but a president indicted.
 
Wayward son said:
You seem to imply that there is only one factor that cost Clinton the election,
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I can see how that implication can be read into what I said, but it's not my intention to imply it. Nor do I believe that is true.

and people won't agree on what that one factor is.
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Sort of. I'm saying explicitly that people will choose one factor to the exclusion of others, depending on which narrative they're engaged in pushing right at that very moment. Of course Clinton's candidacy was problematic. But saying that doesn't help push the narrative that the Russians stole her rightful presidency.

That is almost never the case, especially in an election in which there were very narrow vote margins in several States. It would actually be absurd to think that.
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I agree. There are very many absurd arguments floating around, not because very many people actually think absurd things, but because the process of pushing specific narratives in a vacuum leads to absurdness in place of internal consistency.

You could say (as a for instance) that roughly 15 out of 20 factors had to go against Clinton for Trump to win. Russian Interference was one. Comey was certainly another. Poor campaign strategy was another. etc.
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You absolutely could. But that's not what actually tends to happen.

And here's a thing: There are always lots of factors militating against a candidate, and against the success of the party with that candidate. In Hillary's case, there were maybe two factors under her control, or the party's control. One was the actual nuts and bolts of her campaign strategy. If she had campaigned differently, in a few simple and obvious ways, none of those external factors - Russians, Comey, etc. - would likely have mattered, and she'd have won.

The other was her problematicness as a candidate. If she and the party had recognized this during the primaries, and taken steps to mitigate it (or just run a less problematic candidate), the other external factors wouldn't have mattered so much. Comey couldn't have queered the campaign of a candidate he's not investigating, for example.

Russian trolls are going to be a part of every nation's elections going forward. I think they're going to be a marginal part at most. The sooner people start figuring out how to play around that phenomenon, and stop blaming it for their losses, the better off we'll all be.
 
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Belz... said:
How about we get to see the report, rather than play with hypotheticals?
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It's not within my power, or yours, or varwoche's, to produce the report. But we are all capable of introspection (aren't we?). It can be instructive to decide ahead of time what it would mean if you felt different ways, when you can be more detached and less prone to rationalize your response. I'm not sure why that's something to object to.
 
theprestige said:
*That one in particular is comedy gold. Comey was an honest cop while he was investigating Clinton and opting not to indict her. But the moment he announced he was re-opening the investigation, he became a partisan tool bent on her destruction. Then, a couple months later, when the president fired him for losing the trust of literally everyone, he became a darling of the left again.
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Comedy gold indeed. I just wish you could stop calling those people "the left". They aren't. They are parrots, NPCs, merely repeating the Zeitgeist which is socially and economically liberal and politically neo-colonialist. They don't care about classic "left" topics at all because they aren't told to do so - the opposite of "skeptics". And now they are trying to reduce cognitive dissonance which is quite a thing to watch.
 
Ziggurat said:
It's not within my power, or yours, or varwoche's, to produce the report. But we are all capable of introspection (aren't we?).
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But what's the point. Anyone will always claim that they will be entirely impartial when X happens, but it's when X actually happens that you see their reaction. Some, for instance, will consistently defend their "team" regardless of how many word games or logical contortions they have to engage in.

So let's see the report and judge for ourselves. Otherwise it's all speculation.
 
Wayward son said:
You seem to imply that there is only one factor that cost Clinton the election, and people won't agree on what that one factor is. That is never the case, especially in an election in which there were very narrow vote margins in several States. It would actually be absurd to think that. You could say (as a for instance) that roughly 15 out of 20 factors had to go against Clinton for Trump to win. Russian Interference was one. Comey was certainly another. Poor campaign strategy was another. etc.
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When a basketball team wins a game by a score of 99 to 98, some people will insist on attributing the win to the player who scored the most points or to the last basket, when in fact it should be attributed to scoring a total of 99 points.
 
WilliamSeger said:
When a basketball team wins a game by a score of 99 to 98, some people will insist on attributing the win to the player who scored the most points or to the last basket, when in fact it should be attributed to scoring a total of 99 points.
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Maybe so, but can you explain how this maps to a better understanding of presidential elections as such?
 
cmikes said:
On a more serious note, has anyone read the Matt Taibbi piece from Rolling Stone?

Rolling Stone

The end of the piece is particularly interesting, with potential consequences for 2020:

Bolding mine.

Now, there's very little I agree on with Matt Taibbi politically, but when you have a progressive democrat in good standing being this tough on the media, it's not hard to see that they done ****** up. :)

To me, the biggest takeaway from the Mueller investigation is how is the media going to earn back any semblance of credibility going forward? Can they? Will they even try or just double down and maintain their role as the face of the Resistance?
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It's only the GOP excusing their screw-ups that cry left-wing media. As far as the actual liberals (at least the ones I know which are a lot, plus all the reading I do) we blame the media for Trump getting elected: All the free media, covering every one of his rallies live, laughing off all the horrendous things he did and said, predicting no one would care, which IMO was a self fulfilling prophecy, covering any and everything negative about Clinton.

Calling this some left-wing media reflects on how brainwashed the Trump masses are.
 
Trump Tweets

@GreggJarrett: “Trump-Russia 'collusion' was always a hoax -- and dirtiest political trick in modern US history”
 
This may or may not have anything to do with Trump or the Mueller investigation. The mystery company that refused the subpoena that was handled in secrecy. I'm curious about people's perspective that they should have been allowed that secrecy. They are still requesting secrecy. This goes entirely against US principles.

Supposedly, the government...meaning Trump "prefers" that it not be revealed. To hide it breaks every precedence. I'm curious about people's opinion on this.

What is your position?
 
cmikes said:
Fair point, but most progressive criticism of the media is that the media was being too fair to Trump. To have a progressive acknowledge that the media's two minute 1440 minute hate of Trump every day may be counter-productive to actually beating Trump is the surprise. Progressives don't usually have that level of self-awareness.
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Ever heard that commercials people dislike still sell the product?

There was little serious negative media about Trump. The vast majority of supposed negative reports were always tempered with "no one cares" "he's teflon" or similar discussions.
 
WilliamSeger said:
Yes: every basket counts, including any made by the Russians.
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That's not even a basketball analogy anymore.

I mean, to even try to make this analogy begin to work, you'd have to say that they're trying to win 50 different basketball games more or less simultaneously - which isn't physically possible in basketball.

And it's not really 50 games, because some games are more important than others, some games are easier to win than others, and your "team" doesn't even have the resources to actually play all 50 games in the first place. And even after making these adjustments, the analogy is still a hairy mess.

"Baskets made by the Russians." What does that even mean? Someone posted an opinion on the Internet somewhere, and it cost Hillary the election? Why not just say that, instead of this tortured and tortuous sports metaphor?
 
cmikes said:
To me, the biggest takeaway from the Mueller investigation is how is the media going to earn back any semblance of credibility going forward? Can they? Will they even try or just double down and maintain their role as the face of the Resistance?
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Huh? What did the media do wrong other than report the news? That you didn't like the news is your problem.
 
We'll have to look for an important distinction in Mueller's report, revolving around the precise ordering of four words:

No evidence of collusion.

Evidence of no collusion.

Trumpistas are currently taking the former to mean the latter.
 
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