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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Sorry for being a killjoy, but there's nothing contradictory in being a spineless weasel and an iron-fisted dictator.
edited 17th Aug '16 4:58:41 PM by Stormtroper
And that's how I ended up in the wardrobe. It Just Bugs Me!This dates back, fundamentally, to the debate way back in 2002 over whether to grant George W. Bush authorization for the use of military force in Iraq. Most Democratic members of Congress voted no on this, but the bulk of the party’s leadership (Nancy Pelosi, then the No. 2 House Democrat, was the big exception) voted in favor, as did the major contenders for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination.
...
This vote would end up being a major issue in the 2004 primary, fueling Howard Dean’s insurgent campaign, and then again in 2008 when Barack Obama upset Clinton to capture the nomination. When Obama became president, he tapped Clinton to serve as secretary of state, in which capacity she served as a de facto leader for more hawkish elements of the administration, as opposed to officials such as Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes who’d backed Obama in the primary.
During Clinton’s 2016 primary campaign against Bernie Sanders, Clinton ran clearly to the left on a range of domestic issues to lock down interest group support in her favor. On foreign policy, where there is little in the way of interest group pressure, she did not — choosing instead to praise Henry Kissinger and hit Sanders from the right on Iran and Cuba.
This record raises suspicion that there is more at work than an alliance of convenience, with the Intercept’s Rania Khalek writing of a “Clinton-neocon partnership” that “has grown steadily over time” for reasons that go beyond Trump.
But despite the fears of her left-wing critics, Clinton is no neocon. Nor is there really much evidence to back up a broad-brush notion that Clinton is especially “hawkish” in a generic sense. Clinton’s record overwhelmingly reflects continuity, for better or for worse, with longstanding aspects of American foreign policy.
Critics of the status quo will find plenty to dislike, but there’s no reason to believe her administration would represent any kind of dramatic departure in foreign policy — not just in the Middle East but around the world.
Neoconservative thinkers and politicians such as John Mc Cain and Marco Rubio favor a coercive approach to North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs, confrontation with leftist regimes in Latin America, and a ratcheting up of American involvement in proxy conflicts with Russia in former Soviet republics. Last but by no means least, they endorse a hard line on China, seeing toughness and resolve as likely to succeed in intimidating China into good behavior.
It’s simply not the case that Clinton shares this worldview.
Upon taking office as secretary of state, for example, she made a good-faith effort (the “reset”) to improve a US-Russia relationship that she believed had been unduly damaged by the Bush administration. Were she running against a conventional Republican rather than Vladimir Putin’s favorite American politician, her dovish approach to Russia — and Putin’s ultimate spurning of her overtures — would be a key GOP talking point.
Nonetheless, she continues to support diplomacy with Russia aimed at reducing nuclear weapons stockpiles, and has generally stood by Obama’s reluctance to provide lethal assistance to the Ukrainian military.
Clinton favors a diplomatic approach to the North Korean nuclear issue, addressed Chinese adventurism with quiet (and effective) multilateral diplomacy, and worked publicly and privately on behalf of the Obama administration’s diplomatic opening to Cuba. And Clinton, like Obama but unlike any Republican, regards fostering international cooperation on climate change as an important foreign policy priority.
She’s not an ardent anti-imperialist, obviously. But she is not a neocon in Democrats’ clothing. She’s a wonky mainstream Democrat who has a lot of respect for America’s military and diplomatic professionals, who sees foreign policy as about trying to use the full range of tools to advance a wide range of objectives in a complicated world.
The news that a former secretary of state in the Obama administration has foreign policy views that are closer to Obama’s than to Obama’s Republican critics is fundamentally unsurprising. But Clinton does differ from Obama in at least one important specific way — her view of the alliance system prevailing in the Middle East.
The US–Saudi Arabia alliance has always had an odd-couple dynamic to it due to the massive gap between US and Saudi ideological commitments, but during Obama’s time in office it’s become a truly bad marriage. Obama and his core team of longtime advisers have been increasingly vocal about their discontent with the Gulf monarchies.
The Obama administration sees these countries as engineering a fundamentally irresponsible regional policy that helps fuel international terrorism and then deploying their considerable financial resources to push a political agenda inside the United States rather than to solve problems constructively. Obama’s statement in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg that the Saudis need to learn to “share” the region with Iran was a strikingly bold on-the-record remark, but entirely consistent with things he’s said more quietly for years.
The Saudis, for their part, have grown increasingly paranoid that Obama secretly dreams of orchestrating a reversal of alliances that would see the United States partner with Iran. More likely, Obama would simply rather partner with nobody at all — he’d like US foreign policy to focus on relationships with growing economies in Asia rather than on the balance of power between a series of authoritarian petro-states.
But Clinton gives no indication of sharing Obama’s revisionist sentiments. The Clinton Foundation has benefited from more than $10 million in donations from the Saudi government, along with millions more in smaller donations from Kuwait, Dubai, and other Gulf interests. Clinton has gone out of her way to say that she doesn’t see the nuclear deal with Iran as a prelude to normalizing relations, has indicating a greater eagerness to be involved in Syria, and does not engage in Obama-style public musings about the desirability of disengagement from the region.
On a separate, but related, front, Clinton has loudly and publicly pledged to get along better with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than Obama does, and internal emails from her time at State show her team viewing a close personal relationship with Netanyahu as indispensable essentially regardless of the specific merits of Netanyahu’s conduct.
In the immediate past, this friendlier disposition to America’s traditional Gulf allies has, operationally, lent a “hawkish” cast to Clinton’s record. It made Clinton one of the members of Obama’s team who was most eager to intervene in Libya, and it’s left her consistently to Obama’s right in terms of eagerness to be involved in anti-Assad military action in Syria.
But this is a consistent difference in assessment of America’s allies, not a consistent difference in assessment of the merits of regime change. Clinton, for example, was more supportive of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak than Obama was. Her preference for the status quo leaves her somewhat at odds with the inclinations of both Obama and neoconservatives, both of whom in their different ways harbor ambitions to shake things up.
Of course, all of this cannot be evaluated without considering the context of Clinton’s opponent. Donald Trump is not a particularly “dovish” thinker on national security issues. He’s promising a large, unspecified US military buildup, a policy of routine torture, and the use of military force to plunder foreign natural resources. In a sense, he’s clearly well to the right of George W. Bush or any other major contemporary politician in terms of embracing violence as a solution to problems.
But at the same time, his proposal (if you can call it that) to abrogate the terms of NATO and turn it into some kind of money-making scheme is an extreme outlier in the other direction. Neither George Mc Govern nor any other major party nominee of the past 70 years has proposed that the United States simply abandon the defense of European democracies as a core foreign policy commitment.
The fact that stepping completely outside the bounds of longstanding bipartisan US foreign policy consensus would lead some foreign policy–focused Republicans to support Clinton shows that she is broadly inside that consensus, not that she’s some kind of super-hawk.
The consensus itself, of course, is by no means above criticism and has long had its critics on the left. They’ll find plenty of reason to be unhappy with Clinton. But once Trump fades from the scene, so will the conservative hawks who’ve spent the past seven years hammering the Obama administration and are now flocking to Clinton more out of desperation than anything else.
It is hard to bring people to the polls with the battle cry of "Things are mostly okay! Let's not fuck it up!"
Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?Especially when Fox News has been screaming about those evil brown people making things worse for decades.
Writing a post-post apocalypse LitRPG on RR. Also fanfic stuff.Except no. The doublethink in the Republican's case is that they say Obama is sooooooooo weak because "he's lettin' ISIS take over the world!" and that he lets other world leaders mock America to his face; yet at the exact same time, they believe he is so demonically powerful, he can whisk away everyone's guns with a snap of his fingers and can assemble and command an army of LGBT individuals to kill the persecuted Christians.
As for Kim Jong Un-it's not so much that he's a spineless wuss, it's more along the lines of him knowing he has his brainwashed citizens under his thumb and believing he is their god. So he keeps threatening everyone (but especially South Korea and America) to keep them brainwashed, because his life is easy so long as they think he'll eventually pull out a WMD and annihilate SK. And considering how many times he and his father have rattled their saber, I'd bet that they definitely would back up their word if they actually did have a large arsenal of working nukes and a better trained/fed/equipped military.
"Somehow the hated have to walk a tightrope, while those who hate do not."Also, I'm not sure if I'd say a lot of people believe that Obama is an evil genius and an idiot at the exact same time. Basically, it depends on the person's willingness to invoke Hanlon's Razor: Obama's charitable critics usually question his competence, and his uncharitable critics declare him outright malicious.
Leviticus 19:34Gawker link with verifiable information: a pro-Gary Johnson super PAC spent 30,000 USD on "Internet Web memes"
.
No word on how many pepes that's worth, though.
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiotForced memes are the worst kind, right after all of them.
Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?That's why you spend a lot of money on building them, so that they don't feel forced. I don't know a thing about it, but i bet it's an emerging social science just like any other and that there are people out there who do know what buttons get pushed to make a meme succeed.
The question is sorting the consultants who actually know the science from the charlatans who want you to think they know.
My teeth grate when someone talks about "memes" as if it's some kind of new idea. They've been around since the existence of civilization, and people have been trying to "force" them for almost as long. It's just that some come across as more blatant than others, and the scientific approach to memetic marketing is itself fairly recent and tarred by some shadiness.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"@Garcon: Try to step into their shoes, and even if you don't sympathize with them, at least try to understand them. While you may be right about reality (or at least reality as you observe it) being "on your side", simply dismissing people opposed to you as delusional, or worse as evil is an extremely counterproductive, and potentially dangerous.
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Given what
Trump's
base
are
doing
now
and words from the man himself suggests that a fulcrum point is probably coming where they will be incapable of coexisting with American society as we know it today outside the Deep South.
Fresh details of alleged secret payments allocated for Paul Manafort by the pro-Russian party of Ukraine’s former president have emerged after 12 itemised regime accounting entries, totalling $7.61 million, were obtained by The Times
. Since the article is paywalled:
The payments designated for the man who would later become Donald Trump’s campaign chief were detailed in the “black” accounting ledger of Viktor Yanukovych’s ousted regime. The ledger was used to record $2 billion allegedly handed out “under the table” to political consultants, election commissioners, ministers, parliamentarians, judges and journalists from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukrainian investigators. Officers believe the money was taken from a clandestine cash reserve made up of bribes paid to party officials, but have yet to prove their theory.
Some of the entries relating to Paul Manafort taken from the secret ledger of “under the table” payments The entries obtained by The Times were made between 2009 and 2012 and are individually listed as payments for Mr Manafort’s contract or expenses. Detectives from the Ukrainian National Anti-Corruption Bureau have said that a further ten entries bring the total amount of payments designated for Mr Manafort to $12.7 million.
They have yet to confirm that he received the money, and the entries cannot be cross-referenced against bank records. It has approached the FBI for assistance. Mr Manafort did not respond to a request for comment from The Times, but did respond to an article in The New York Times on the issue. He said the suggestion that he had accepted off-the-books payments was “unfounded, silly and nonsensical”. All political payments directed to him were for his entire political team, he said: staff, polling, research and advertising.
Mr Yanukovych, a close ally of President Putin, was forced to flee to Moscow in 2014 after a botched attempt to crush a popular uprising. Protesters ransacked his party’s office, making off with the hand-written ledgers. They were later passed on to the new Anti-Corruption Bureau. Mr Manafort remained a close adviser of the former president to the end, even attending security briefings in an “anti-revolution situation room”. Critics fear that knowledge of Mr Manafort’s financial affairs in Moscow could leave the man steering the Republican campaign at risk of Russian blackmail.
The entries obtained by The Times clearly differentiate between “expenses” and items associated with Mr Manafort labelled “contract”. The largest payments — $3,468,653 in June 2012, $1,075,000 in January 2010, two $750,000 payments in September 2010 and October 2009 and one for $500,000 in November 2010 — are marked “Paul Manafort contract”, “Contract Manafort”, “payment to Manafort” or simply “Manafort”.
Three payments of $6,000 in 2009 as well as $846,000 in April 2010 and $202,250 in September the same year are designated expenses of Manafort. Two smaller entries, for $4,632 and $854, show payments for computers for Mr Manafort’s team and a computer server.
It is not known if Mr Manafort received these payments. He has denied working for the Ukrainian government — baffling former Kiev officials. “We had many meetings in Kiev and Washington,” said Andrei Portnov, the non-partisan former head of Mr Yanukovych’s presidential administration. “Mr Manafort was wise, persuasive and experienced.”
Documents disclosed by the US Department of Justice appear to confirm the Trump campaign leader has never declared his work for the Ukrainian government or Mr Yanukovych’s party, as would be required by US legislation. There is no declaration corresponding to the payments detailed in the ledger. US legislation requires anyone working on behalf of a foreign government or political party to submit a declaration of their activities to the attorney-general.
Hanna Herman, Mr Yanukovych’s former communications adviser and party MP, told The Times that Mr Manafort had helped the government in negotiations with the IMF. She also initially appeared to accept that the accounting book was real — but changed tack when informed that Mr Manafort, a personal friend, was listed in it. “Perhaps you misunderstood me. I don’t deny that such documents may have existed. But I’m definite it does not exist now, right now. All the documents, all the data that was within the Party of Regions office was burnt [during the 2014 uprising].”
She then denied the book existed altogether, claiming no such records had been kept and that financial documents given to investigators had been faked. Her other comments gave an insight into the operations of a party that Mr Manafort worked with for almost a decade. “You’ll do some business for me and I’ll pay you $300,000 — if we had such a conversation, we would have never signed anything,” she smiled and winked. Experts from the Ukrainian Anticorruption Action Centre, a legal NGO, called on Ukrainian and US authorities to investigate.
Inside the account book
Date of payment 26.10 [2009] Name of person withdrawing cash Kozlov, I. B., Amount $854 Signature Kozlov Reason Server for Manafort
Date of payment 08.04.10 Name of person withdrawing cash Kaluzhny V. A. Amount $846,000 Signature Kaluzhny Reason P. Manafort, expenses in Ukraine
Date of payment 21.06.12 Name of person withdrawing cash Morev, A. Z. Amount $3,468,653 Signature Morev Reason Paul Manafort — contract
Paul Manafort ‘plotted protest against Nato’ Donald Trump’s campaign chief sabotaged US interests in Ukraine and encouraged Russian nationalism in Crimea, a prosecutor investigating the Republican strategist alleges in a damning memo written last year (Maxim Tucker writes).
The report, leaked to The Times, sets out legal options for prosecuting Mr Manafort in Ukraine for “conspiring with a criminal organisation” and “inciting ethnic hatred and separatism”.
The senior Ukrainian prosecutor alleges that in 2006 Mr Manafort orchestrated a series of anti-Nato, anti-Kiev protests in Crimea led by Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian Party of Regions — now designated a criminal organisation. The protests forced planned Nato exercises there to be cancelled. No charges were pursued because of a lack of evidence after Crimea was annexed. Mr Manafort did not respond to a request for comment.
The memo says: “It was his political effort to raise the prestige of Yanukovych and his party — the confrontation and division of society on ethnic and linguistic grounds is his trick from the time of the elections in Angola and the Philippines. While I was in the Crimea I constantly saw evidence suggesting that Paul Manafort considered autonomy [from Ukraine] as a tool to enhance the reputation of Yanukovych and win over the local electorate.”
Mr Yanukovych laid the groundwork for Russia’s annexation of the peninsula, which Donald Trump has now suggested he would recognise.
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I "understand" that Donald Trump's hardcore supporters are pulled from the white nationalist, Breitbart/Alex Jones crowd, and that there is unlikely to be anything salvageable as human beings after the rot is cut out. As the movies have taught us, you don't persuade Nazis to stop being Nazis; you kill them painlessly or wait for them to die of natural causes.

edited 17th Aug '16 4:47:11 PM by CaptainCapsase