The writer is an unapologetic shill.
(07-26-2016 03:29 PM)fsquid Wrote: For your consumption and rebuttals.
Quote:A foreign government has hacked a political party’s computers—and possibly an election. It has stolen documents and timed their release to explode with maximum damage. It is a strike against our civic infrastructure. And though nobody died—and there was no economic toll exacted—the Russians were aiming for a tender spot, a central node of our democracy.
No evidence I've seen of Russian
government involvement... but to that end, is it any worse than us bugging the German Chancellor's phone? I'd say they were more like Woodward and Bernstien in the Watergate comparison than the RNC.
Quote:This is trespassing, it’s thievery, it’s a breathtaking transgression of privacy.
oh, but demanding tax returns is fine, right? the 'right to privacy' in this day and age stops when it is being used to cover up collusion and unethical, if not illegal acts.
Quote:But this document dump wasn’t a high-minded act of transparency. To state the obvious, only one political party has been exposed. (Selectively exposed: Many emails were culled from the abridged dump.)
Are you suggesting that other emails would 'reverse' the appearance? That's like suggesting that a cop who shoots an unarmed person should be allowed to present as evidence all the times he didn't.... or that the 58,000 emails that DIDN'T contain top secret information somehow excuse the 100 that did.
Quote:And it’s not really even the inner workings of the Democrats that have been revealed; the documents don’t suggest new layers of corruption or detail any new conspiracies. They’re something closer to the embarrassing emails that fly across every office in America—griping, the testing of stupid ideas, the banal musings that take place in private correspondence. The emails don’t get us much beyond a fact every sentient political observer could already see: Officials at the DNC, hired to work hand in glove with a seemingly inevitable nominee, were actively making life easier for Hillary Clinton.It didn’t take these leaks to understand that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a hack and that the DNC should be far more neutral in presidential primaries.
Yet the DNC didn't seem to think she was doing anything wrong until they were forced to, and then Hillary immediately hires her back. I can't think of a more obvious example of 'rigging' the system... and rewarding rather than punishing those who do. She was rewarded until she was caught, and once caught, she was bailed out.
Quote:What’s galling about the WikiLeaks dump is the way in which the organization has blurred the distinction between leaks and hacks. Leaks are an important tool of journalism and accountability. When an insider uncovers malfeasance, he brings information to the public in order to stop the wrongdoing. That’s not what happened here. The better analogy for these hacks is Watergate. To help win an election, the Russians broke into the virtual headquarters of the Democratic Party. The hackers installed the cyber-version of the bugging equipment that Nixon’s goons used—sitting on the DNC computers for a year, eavesdropping on everything, collecting as many scraps as possible. This is trespassing, it’s thievery, it’s a breathtaking transgression of privacy. It falls into that classic genre, the dirty trick. Yet that term feels too innocent to describe the offense. Nixon’s dirty tricksters didn’t mindlessly expose the private data of low-level staff.
to quote Morkai, whatabut, whatabout, whatabout.
How is this anything but a deflection? If you want to assess criminal charges to Wikileaks, go ahead. I'd expect we do the same of any other whistleblower though..,. since they DID uncover 'unethical' if not illegal things.
Quote:We should be appalled at the public broadcast of this minutiae. It will have a chilling effect—campaign staffers will now assume they no longer have the space to communicate honestly. This honest communication—even if it’s often trivial or dumb—is important for the process of arriving at sound strategy and sound ideas. (To be sure, the DNC shouldn’t need privacy to know that attacking a man for his faith is just plain gross.) Open conversation, conducted with the expectation of privacy, is the necessary precondition for the formation of collective wisdom and consensus. If we eviscerate the possibility of privacy in politics, we increase the likelihood of poor decision-making.
So it's okay to make fun of someone's ethnic name, as long as advancing your goals is important enough? I'm trying to figure out where he is trying to go here. Yes, much of it is trivial... but much of it isn't. If it were trivial, they wouldn't have apologized to Bernie and fired DWS and nobody, not even the media would care beyond a day.... you know, like the Melania plagiarism.
The possibility of privacy shouldn't include lying to the American Public's face.
Quote:It is possible to argue that Russia is just behaving as great powers often do. States try to manipulate opinion beyond their borders. Barack Obama recently attempted to sway the British public to reject Brexit; we don’t just broadcast the Voice of America to expose the world to jazz. Russia does this, too. It has a website and television network, Russia Today. We might not care for Russia Today and its propagandistic coverage, but it operates in the open. It uses reporting and opinion to sway hearts and minds. The interconnected nature of the world means that it would be malpractice for states not to make the best case for its policies to enemy and ally alike. The United States is better when it understands the world and argues with it.
Still, we have a clear set of rules designed to limit foreign interference in our elections, to protect our sovereignty. We should be open to rational arguments from abroad but terrified about states playing a larger role than that. This is why we don’t let foreign entities make campaign contributions. We don’t allow noncitizens to vote. Consider our reaction, if an American political leader had pulled this stunt: He would be prosecuted, and drummed from political life. These are unacceptable tactics for an American; they can hardly be more tolerable when executed by a foreign power that wishes us ill.
ooh, wow... go USA. Does this apply to bugging our allies phones?
Now the guy has me literally laughing at him trying to sound so altruistic while getting caught masturbating in the public toilet.
Do you REALLY think the Russian government was more interested in hacking the DNC than the State Department? THAT is the irony of this to me.
Quote:The DNC dump may not have revealed a conspiracy that could end a candidacy, but it succeeded in casting a pall of anxiety over this election. We know that the Russians have a further stash of documents from the DNC and another set of document purloined from the Clinton Foundation. In other words, Vladimir Putin is now treating American democracy with the same respect he accords his own. The best retaliation isn’t a military one, or to respond in kind. It’s to defeat his pet candidate and to force him to watch the inauguration of the woman he so abhors.
Simple solution... don't rig the system and act like it's fair and 'the other guys' are the problem.
Take your lumps dems... Say 'it's not a big deal' all you want... just as the right would and may still... but the more you say it, the more you prove it actually is.
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Is the DNC hack worse than Watergate?
![[Image: mrrobot-key-art.jpg]](https://pmcdeadline2.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/mrrobot-key-art.jpg)