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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Clinton could have easily de-escalated the situation and avoided turning it into a campaign issue simply through releasing the transcripts when first asked.
Instead, she deflects through invoking Sanders and questioning his own integrity. She challenged him first.
edited 19th Feb '16 1:29:00 PM by SolipsistOwl
Or maybe she doesn't want to release them because as they were a paid speaking event she said what the audience wanted to here, not what she believes, and she'd like to avoid the two getting mixed together.
Or it might even be the basic privacy implication that people who hire someone to speak at a private function don't want such speeches in the public domain (otherwise they have the press there covering it), and they're entitled to that right of privacy.
Hell a basic selfish reason, if she starts releasing speeches given when she's paid to speak at private events, she might stop getting paid to speak at private events, something she'd like to be able to do if she loses or simply after finishing politics.
Edit: Did she deflect to him directly? I thought the deflection was aimed at everyone, including the Republican candidates.
edited 19th Feb '16 1:28:34 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranI certainly doubt Sanders expects to find evidence of Clinton diabolically laughing behind scenes while swimming through a pool of cash, but as tiny a controversy as it is, it gives an advantage to him on the issue of being tough on "money."
What I would rather see focus on is Clinton's statements about how she talked to the financial institutions before the recession and told them to cut it out. Evidently, they did not listen to her. Has anyone simply asked her how she's going to make them listen to her now, or is it just assumed that they would?
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There's been speculation on the Clinton campaign originating the 'birther' conspiracy since at least 2011:
Related theories — including that he was radicalised in a “madrassa” in Indonesia — developed after Mr Obama entered the national stage with a speech to the Democratic National Convention later that year.
In 2005, Mr Obama went to Washington as the junior US senator for Illinois. The rumours about him persisted, but seemingly failed to take hold among political insiders and voters alike.
It was not until April 2008, at the height of the intensely bitter Democratic presidential primary process, that the touch paper was properly lit.
An anonymous email circulated by supporters of Mrs Clinton, Mr Obama’s main rival for the party’s nomination, thrust a new allegation into the national spotlight — that he had not been born in Hawaii.
“Barack Obama’s mother was living in Kenya with his Arab-African father late in her pregnancy,” it said. “She was not allowed to travel by plane then, so Barack Obama was born there and his mother then took him to Hawaii to register his birth.”
Birther row began with Hillary Clinton
And the Clinton campaign certainly benefited from strengthening such beliefs. Clinton's Chief Strategist Mark Penn in 2007, on questioning Obama's patriotism:
Penn also suggested how the campaign might take advantage of this. "Every speech should contain the line that you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century," he advised Clinton. "And talk about the basic bargain as about [six] the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child, and that drive you today. He went on: "Let's explicitly own 'American' in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn't... Let's add flag symbols to the backgrounds [of campaign events]."
https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/646516589857079296
https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/646513310527959042
edited 19th Feb '16 2:10:34 PM by SolipsistOwl
The Speeches thing I think encapsulates Hillary's chief problem: She comes off as two faced/flip-floppy/weather vane-y. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's an attack on the fact she might preach to the masses she's anti Wall Street, but then makes expensive speeches to Wall Street. (And has what, fundraisers from well known vulture capitalist firm Bain Capital?). Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of good, yes, but she has to realize that in this election, standing for 'something' matters to people. Especially when the population's finally been given some means of raging against the system and the banks.
She's insisting on cake and eat it too syndrome, when people want the heads of big bankers to roll, while she rubs shoulders with them, making mega money speeches off of "There's No I In Team" and "Many hands make light work" or whatever she's blathering at them. (I expect the speeches are essentially bullshit).
But it's all about image. And she's increasingly being portrayed as a weathervane who you can throw money at and you'll get whatever you want out of her.
Backing away from election news for a little bit, have you guys seen Cliven Bundy's pretrial detention memorandum
.
An excerpt from the document:
Nor does he bring his cattle off the public lands in the off-season to feed them when the already sparse food supply in the desert is even scarcer. Raised in the wild, Bundy’s cattle are left to fend for themselves year-round, fighting off predators and scrounging for the meager amounts of food and water available in the difficult and arid terrain that comprises the public lands in that area of the country. Bereft of human interaction, his cattle that manage to survive are wild, mean and ornery. At the time of the events giving rise to the charges, Bundy’s cattle numbered over 1,000 head, straying as far as 50 miles from his ranch and into the Lake Mead National Recreation Area (“LMNRA”), getting stuck in mud, wandering onto golf courses, straying onto the freeway (causing accidents on occasion) – foraging aimlessly and wildly, roaming in small groups over hundreds of thousands of acres of federal lands that exist for the use of the general public for many other types of commercial and recreational uses such as camping, hunting, and hiking.
Well, no wonder he objects to paying public land grazing fees, since he's obviously not ranching but instead doing some sort of illegal hunting of wild cattle on public lands.....
Tvtropes need an angry smiley.
edited 19th Feb '16 3:16:35 PM by nightwyrm_zero
That sounds like a really, really terrible approach. So the whole reason he was so against the government owning the land near him and charging for it...was because he was too crazy to bother putting any sort of fences up? How would that even produce good beef? Hell, there's probably at least one beef provider in the area who just stole Bundy's cattle because, how the hell would Bundy even be able to tell that's what happened?
Granted, we've known he's crazy for a while, but this goes right to the point of actively making more work for himself for sub-par product.
Before speech transcripts was private email servers. Before email was Benghazi. This trail of spurious but sensational accusations leads all the way back to Whitewater, investigations into supposed wrongdoings of the Clintons involving a real estate deal back in the 70s.
edited 19th Feb '16 5:27:23 PM by NativeJovian
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.I'm gonna echo PotatoesRock and say that this sort of thing is, again, why I just can't trust Clinton to follow through on her election commitments. People do not like it when the person they elected proceed to brazenly break their promises, which could cause people to vote for the other party.
edited 19th Feb '16 6:27:21 PM by Cronosonic

The "Wall Street speeches" thing is absurd, and Sanders knows it. He's playing to an audience. I hope he's not really working under the belief that the simple fact of accepting speaking fees means that you are politically beholden to the group that hired you. If so, I worry for him.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"