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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Also, has there ever been a time when an incompetent president has faced a real challenger in the primaries? I bring it up because I've seen people suggest that in four years, assuming Hilary wins, with either Sanders or Warren.
Of course, this was also predicated on the assumption that even more "damning evidence" would be found than there is now so...
It's extraordinarily rare for a sitting President to be challenged in their own party's primary for their second term. I don't believe that a successful challenge has ever occurred. The idea that Clinton would be so grossly incompetent as to become the first to whom that happens is a fantasy.
Most likely, should some utterly unforeseen smoking gun emerge that proves she murdered a thousand people or held women down while Bill raped them or something, she'd be impeached and convicted or resign, at which point her VP would take over and would be the party's presumptive nominee in the subsequent election, just as if she fell seriously ill or died in office.
edited 11th Oct '16 6:18:34 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Sanders and Warren wouldn't be stupid enough to challenge Clinton unless her first term is absolutely abysmal. I also doubt anyone else can swoop in and ignite the base enough to take a shot anyway.
edit: I'm kind of wondering who will run in 2024 though. Warren and Sanders are probably too old by then and none of the other challengers in the primary seem like decent candidates. Kaine is always a possibility but I think he might be a bit boring. It would be nice if the Democrats could get a solid enough hold on things that they can risk running a more progressive candidate.
edited 11th Oct '16 6:20:28 PM by Kostya
So, about a couple of Clinton controversies (I'm just reading Wikipedia now - I'm too young to remember stuff like this from the early 90s.
When Bill Clinton was Attorney General at Arkansas, Hillary Rodham - she wasn't using the name Clinton at that time, apparently, although they were already married - started investing in cattle futures. (If you don't know what that means, look up financial derivatives - well, futures, in particular.)
She invested quite a lot, with relatively high risk, because she had a very experienced adviser. She had some success and some losses - sometimes quite serious for her and her husband's combined wealth at the time - but eventually, when she became pregnant, she decided to walk out.
At that time she was $100 000 ahead, which would later be the source of a controversy. It was very unlikely for a novice to make that sort of money in such a short time, but apparently the friend who was making investments on her behalf really was that good. (Well, at the time - he did end up losing quite a lot of his own money later.)
The suspicion was that these were not real investments, but that they were actually disguised bribes. No investigation that has been concluded - there haven't been many - has found that there was anything suspicious about the Clintons' luck in the market.
So that's one Clinton scandal from the 90s. (Well, it broke in the 90s - the events took place earlier.)
The more serious one is Whitewater. It was a real estate development project that the Clintons and another couple started together. That other couple - by the name of MacDougal - also got into banking, and used their bank to make a series of illegal loans to another real estate project to which they were investing. At this time, according to some allegations, Bill Clinton was putting pressure on at least one businessman to give a fairly substatial loan to Susan MacDougal.
The illegal loans were discovered by regulators, and the bank went under during a banking crisis. The government ended up losing a lot of money. The Clintons and everyone else involved also lost their money, but the Clintons didn't end up losing all that much, as they had not invested anywhere near as much as the MacDougals.
There was an investigation into the illegal activities of Jim MacDougal, who ran the bank he had bought that was involved in illegal loans to support the real estate projects. He was found guilty of a whole bunch of felonies. He had used his bank to cover some of the debts Bill Clinton had taken for his campaign for Governor of Arkansas. This, together with the connections to the (ultimately failed) real estate development projects the MacDougals undertook with the Clintons, was the reason people suspected corruption.
Susan MacDougal was supposed to be a key witness in the eventual investigation into the Clintons' involvement with these illegal business activities, but she flat out refused to give testimony. She was given an 18 month sentence for contempt of court, among other sentences. She said she and others involved had been urged to testify against the Clintons to get lighter sentences, but none of the witnesses - except the one who said he'd been pressured to give out that loan to Susan MacDougal - said anything that would implicate the Clintons in any of the crimes. 15 people in total ended up getting convictions.
Bill Clinton, among the last things he did as President, pardoned everyone involved that were still serving a sentence.
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.It kinda happened with Gerald Ford, actually, which might have had something to do with him taking office on the back of Nixon's resignation. He won the primary against Regan then lost the election to Carter.
Only allegations with varying degrees of being suspect. The least suspect are unprovable for lack of evidence/timely reporting.
edited 11th Oct '16 6:22:15 PM by Elle
In regards to Clinton getting a primary challenge...I'm pretty sure that'd be political suicide, to be honest.
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Do you have a clip?
edited 11th Oct '16 6:28:21 PM by KarkatTheDalek
Oh God! Natural light!Primarying against the incumbent comes off like you totally lack party loyalty. While I think the Republicans have gone waaaaay too far when it comes to party loyalty (they seem to think it's more important than the US as a whole), you need some.
I have a feeling that if Trump's a disaster, if he's elected, and he refuses to resign (which, let's be honest, probably would happen) he might get some primary challengers, but no one would challenge Clinton because that would just be a huge waste of time.
edited 11th Oct '16 6:30:30 PM by Zendervai
Just in case anyone read that thing I posted about Whitewater and so on, there's one detail I meant to include but forgot: the Clintons were allegedly very unhelpful when it came to providing documents requested by the investigations, particularly to do with the Whitewater investment.
Apparently, an aide at the White House had been working on the papers for an additional tax the Clintons wanted to pay (as they hadn't paid it at the time even though they were supposed to). That aide ended up committing suicide, though - and the Whitewater papers, which were in his office, were moved and couldn't/wouldn't be found for a while, even when the investigators wanted them. They were discovered and published eventually, but the whole thing slowed the investigation down.
So if you're conspiracy minded you might wonder whether that death was really a suicide (if you believe the official investigation - which, just to be clear, I do - it was a suicide.) You might also wonder why those papers were moved so quickly and reported as lost, before they were found. Did the Clintons try to hide them? Were changes made to the papers? It's impossible to know, but to be honest I don't know of a sufficient reason to think that this was anything other than a series of mistakes that happened because someone in the White House staff had literally died, and others had to quickly get things moving with everything that person had been doing.
The other question, of course, is why the Senate - especially when it changed to Republican control - was willing to undertake such a massive investigation, for several years. Was it a way to attack and try to impeach the Clintons - as Democrats seem to believe - or was it a genuine attempt to get to the truth, as the Republicans would argue? Anyway, the investigation was more elaborate and expensive and time-consuming than the actual deals and loans and everything else that they investigated, by a massive margin. It didn't result in any charge against either of the Clintons.
edited 11th Oct '16 6:35:32 PM by BestOf
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.The thing about Whitewater is that, while there was a lot of smoke, no fire was ever discovered, after countless, enormously expensive investigations. So the Democrats maintain that there was no actual guilty act, and justice was done; while many Republicans insist that the lack of any evidence proves that there was a conspiracy to hide it. /shrug
It's the old "prove you don't beat your wife" conundrum.
The same basic "logic" has been applied to every scandal manufactured by the right for the past 25 years.
edited 11th Oct '16 7:38:40 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
That seems to be the sticking point for a lot of people. A few hours ago I was in a discussion with someone who basically said "Because there has been so much thrown at the Clintons, statistically some of it has to be true, even if there is no proof and you assume the best of them." something this person admitted they don't.
Which I get and at the same time don't get. It's hard for a lot of people to think that if there was nothing to these things nothing would really be there and it's just partisanship.
But then you have to wonder that if they're so well connected that all of these obvious things never amount to anything, why does this stuff keep coming up if they have so much power in the shadows?
Yeah, if the Clintons were conspiring to cover up massive wrongdoing, they were really freaking bad at it.
"We didn't discover a conspiracy, therefore a conspiracy must exist," is logic that only works in Dan Brown novels.
edited 11th Oct '16 7:45:10 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"There was plenty of fire, to be sure - enough for 15 people to get various sentences, most of them including jail time - just not about the Clintons, specifically.
It does seem fishy that they did so well from the brief period that they were trading in the futures market (for the first scandal).
In Whitewater itself, they got certain benefits (such as that basically fake bank paying off Clinton's campaign debts) out of parts of a very dirty bit of business that ended up in all those convictions. When everything went down and the investigations began, the Clintons lost some money, but not a whole lot, while just about everyone else involved lost a lot and got jail time on top of that. The Clinton line is that they really were innocent, and their business dealings with the fradusters were legal and tangential to the actual crimes - and, in case it makes any difference, ultimately unsuccessful, anyway.
So at least their partners were definitely committing crimes and profiting from it for a while, and the Clintons also benefited from it for a while. Whether the Clintons were involved in the crimes, it's still kind of interesting how the people who got convicted and were interrogated about the Clintons said nothing - and got pardoned by Bill Clinton himself, just as he was leaving the Presidency (so there could be no public outcry about the pardons while he was still President). Was he rewarding loyalty, honesty, or both? Chances are, we'll never know.
In any case, if there was something really serious I just can't imagine how that massive investigation could have concluded without finding anything that would stick. In these circumstances I wonder if it would even have made any difference - assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Clintons were guilty - if the others accused had actually told everything. Their testimonies would still have been the only evidence worth anything, and normally that's not enough, when you're dealing with a major political figure and there's a reason to suspect that the witnesses are under pressure to implicate said political figure(s).
edited 11th Oct '16 8:03:59 PM by BestOf
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.Nobody would look good if their lives were investigated under a microscope.
John Oliver had a segment comparing Clinton scandals to Trump scandals. It's got a hilarious visual metaphor at the end that puts things in perspective.
Even if scandals put you off of a POTUS candidate, Trump is way, WAY worse.
edited 11th Oct '16 8:07:48 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedSome clips from the Anderson Cooper interview with Kellyanne Conway mentioned earlier:
I really don't like her.
edited 11th Oct '16 8:24:44 PM by KarkatTheDalek
Oh God! Natural light!Looks like the Clinton campaign is somewhat concerned that Trump going full negative might suppress voter turnout.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/11/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-2016-election-turnout/index.html
However, early voter registration data shows that presumably pro-Clinton demographics are signing up in large numbers.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.Just to assuage any concerns for myself - if you were registered to vote in the primaries, you're good to go here, right?
Oh God! Natural light!

edited 11th Oct '16 6:10:55 PM by Elle