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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Let's not forget the racist pumpkin himself:
- Donald Trump: Half True - True: 30%. Mostly False to Pants on Fire: 70%. 49 Pants on Fire statements out of 285.
Regarding Syria, is there any real expectation that the forces the US are supporting wouldn't be a case of Meet the New Boss?
I can't really support intervention in Syria unless there's a reasonable expectation that we aren't replacing one brutal dictator with another.
The last time I was in California, I was two years old and it was because I was on a flight transfer as I immigrated from Beijing, China. I have lived in Alabama ever since. I think you might be mixing me up with someone else.
Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for youAlright, it seems my list of Clinton's problems has looked worse than I meant for it to look. For instance:
I don't think I said or implied that she had a complete blackout. I said:
She was doing fewer media events than Trump, or at least they weren't reported as often, and I saw various articles talking about how she's staying silent at times, and how that was playing to her advantage because Trump didn't win by being on the headlines.
Answering some of the other comments, mostly in the order they were posted:
That was sort of my point. I was responding to the question of what negatives she has as a Presidential candidate. I think I listed some of the things that American voters have against her, in the way they've been widely reported in American media. I wasn't giving you my own ideas, so much as talking about what I see reported in the news. (I did provide some of my own commentary on some of the items, though - most notably the Kissinger thing.)
That's true for most of her positions, yes. It's remarkable how rarely you have candidates who tick so many boxes the same as more than 50% of people answering polls about those issues - this, probably, comes from the two-party system and its increased emphasis on the power of the primaries, where you have to play to the base even when you know they're not necessarily the most important group you have to win in the election.
Fighteer's post is longer so I thought I'd mention it in this line to highlight that I'll be responding to it for a bit. Also, by now I can tell this will be a mega-mega post, so sorry about that.
Sure, but if certain groups have given you millions over the last couple of years it's a bit rich to say you're not going to make decisions in their favour - especially if those groups represent the wealthiest and most powerful private institutions and individuals in the country. That's quite different from giving a lecture at an educational institute, for instance.
That's because the US is ridiculously right-wing compared to most Western countries. Look at the left in Australia or Western or Central Europe, where it's not even as far left as our left in the Nordic countries, to get an idea of what the left is in most of the West. Even that is nowhere near Mao or Stalin, of course - but I know you were exaggerating for comic effect. I just wanted to point it out, anyway, just so nobody thinks that's really the range we're talking about here.
I had previously seen an analysis of Clinton's tax plan that said people in the top-10% of earners (but not the top-5% or so) would get a tax break. That report must've been bollocks, though, because she did say in the debate she wouldn't increase taxes on people making less than $250k a year (IIRC) and there's actually an analysis of her tax plan
that says she'd almost exclusively tax the top 1%. So obviously I had bad data on that.
I was thinking specifically of Sanders and the massive support he got (including from independents, which undercuts my comment's focus on Democrats in particular) when I said Clinton is to the right of the current mainstream of the party. Apparently she's not. Good for her.
To me her comments in the debates so far have seemed more hawkish than Obama's. She certainly hasn't indicated that she'd reduce the use of drones, and she's talked about the use of special forces and the air force at least in Syria. She's adopted a harder stance on Syria than what has been practiced by the Obama government. This, though, comes with the massive caveat that Obama is nearing the end of his term - which will limit his willingness to burden his successor with an escalated involvement in a conflict - and he's also working against a very resistant Congress.
Obama did go (fairly) hard on Libya, and Clinton was very much in on that - and that wasn't a particularly popular decision in the US. (For the record, I was and still am heavily in favour of the operation in Libya - I certainly don't hold it against Obama or Clinton.)
Obama has also escalated the use of drone strikes, including against civilians. Clinton hasn't opposed this - and it would, of course, be hard to do so against your own President, especially one so close to you. From the way she talks about crises in the Middle East - including her desire to kill Baghdadi (which, again, I agree with) - she seems to position herself on the more hawkish side of the conversation.
Compared to Trump, of course, Clinton isn't hawkish at all. Neither want to put ground forces in Syria but all that talk of killing their enemies' family members and "taking the oil" and so on makes Trump an aspiring war criminal of the sort that has never, as far as I know, been anywhere near the Presidency. I was comparing Clinton to mainstream Democrats, though; not Trump.
Again, I was comparing her to the Democrats, not the Republicans. The Iran deal was a great breakthrough.
100% agreed.
How many thousands of personal emails can you have? I suppose a lot when you're in that position, but thousands upon thousands and then some thousands? The main problem, of course, is the lack of transparency. Now, I take your point (and it was also made by others - I'm also addressing them) that this seems to have been a more widespread problem. Hopefully something will have been learned.
(Incidentally, there's currently a minor scandal in Finland about a government minister using private e-mail accounts to avoid having to release her work emails, and it includes the problem that her own email account isn't as secure as the one the government issues for ministers.)
I know. This whole scandal seems to be more about what could - easily - have happened, rather than what actually did happen. It's a bit like a road that curves rapidly along a cliff, with no railing. You want there to be a fuss about the lack of the railing before someone drives over the cliff.
Her biggest and most important flip-flop, for me (and I assume probably millions of American voters) was about gay marriage. She was first opposed to it, then neutral, and finally in favour. I suspect that she was always in favour, but unwilling to commit until she had the political capital to afford it - the same as Obama, and probably dozens of Republican politicians once their party adopts a more mainstream position.
This, of course, is also one of the times she's said circumstances have changed or she's had more information and that's why she's changed her mind - as she did about the Iraq war and TPP. Thing is, the way she's usually talked about free trade deals I don't believe she's changed her mind about TPP. She's playing politics with it now, and when elected she'll slowly shift back around to supporting it or something like it. I also believe she hasn't really changed her mind about Iraq - but currently her voters are more likely to favour those who are against it. Whether you believe she's sincerely changed her mind is your opinion. I'm more inclined to believe she's playing the game.
I checked an article with other Clinton flip-flops. Keystone came up. I don't actually think she was ever in favour, even though in 2010 she indicated she might be. That was to help Obama float around the issue and see how it plays out.
I'll grant that on some issues she's stood her ground. Health care is the most important among them, and she deserves credit for that.
This is absolutely true. What happened in 2013 was a disaster.
Already replied to this. My bad.
I disagree. She made a show of having Kissinger as a foreign policy adviser, to contrast herself with Trump's non-expert advisers. Kissinger is a war criminal, and Clinton should have known better. It's not as if she didn't have an impressive pool of foreign policy experts with prestige and willingness to advice her and be public about it. This issue was raised most prominently by Sanders, and to be honest if Kissinger had been advising Sanders I don't think it unlikely that Clinton would have given Sanders some pain for it.
(On the more general point of some issues being made a problem for her because she's a Clinton, or because she's a woman, I agree that that's a phenomenon that exists and is disgusting. I just don't think the Kissinger thing is an example of that.)
NativeJovian, I've already replied to most of your points above, if you can be bothered to read through all that. If not, I'm sorry that this became such a mega-post. It's my evil ways. I'll still respond to bits I haven't covered yet.
I suppose that's sort of consistent on their part, in supporting the right of other countries to mind their own business. Of course it's not allowing the victims the right to exist freely because of the local warlords, but that's a compromise that libertarians everywhere seem very willing to make.
I'm sort of in both camps. I approve of humanitarian interventions and wish there were more of them, but I don't approve of military conflicts that are waged for national interests.
I hope what I said came across the same as this. As you said, "Clinton is legit on the hawkish side of the Democratic spectrum".
Alright, I can respect that.
...And now I notice that this is actually the same post that I was replying to at the start of this one. Damn.
EDIT: I'm discovering the sort of spelling errors you'd expect in a post this long. Sorry about those.
edited 10th Oct '16 1:09:29 PM by BestOf
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.Australia looks very unlikely to pass TPP after Labour got a sufficiently good result in this year's elections. Labour are almost completely against TPP, and they demand substatinve changes to it before they'd be willing to agree to it. The ruling coalition in Australia favours the TPP, but their majority is not strong enough to pass it unilaterally. They must get Labour on board, and it looks very unlikely to happen at the moment.
TPP could work without Australia but it would be a massive loss from them to lose Australia, and of course there could be a sort of domino effect, with other countries deciding that without access to Ausralia's market it's just not worth it.
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Challenge accepted. I went to PolitiFact and opened the page for 3 Democrat and 3 Republican politicians, on the basis of whoever I happened to think of first. (I had primed myself a bit by thinking I want mainstream politicians, so you won't get Trump as comparison here - this is about "normal" politicians in the US.) Then I noticed that, if I want to compare, I have to have Clinton, as well - so I took another Republican.
I stand corrected. (With the caveat that fact checkers weren't really around when she got started with politics, so her claims from before might have a different record. The same, of course, applies to everyone who's been in politics for that long.)
Also, while editing I thought I'd check whether there have been any other replies to my post and oh, my. I'll reply to some of them after I'm done reading up to where this post will be.
EDIT: At least one counting error in there. I fixed it. (I must have been counting the statements instead of percentages at least once.)
edited 10th Oct '16 12:05:37 PM by BestOf
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.