@realDonaldTrump: “In fact, that could be a Mexican plane up there, they’re getting ready to attack”
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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
- Start date
Eman
Master
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee and ardent waterboarding https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/02/17/donald-trump-on-waterboarding-torture-works/ (supporter) Donald Trump wants America to be much tougher on suspected terrorists. So tough, in fact, that we must to do “the unthinkable” when it comes to prisoner interrogation, he said Thursday.
Trump, during an interview with New Hampshire’s NH1, was asked about his calls to reinstate waterboarding following Tuesday’s attack on Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport that killed at least 44 people. Trump has enthusiastically endorsed tactics now widely regarded as torture, and has discounted recent criticism from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who said the interrogation technique “was not the American way.“
“Well it’s not the American way to have heads chopped off and have people drowning in steel cages,” Trump said, presumably referring to videos released by the Islamic State that show such execution methods. “And so we can have our disagreements, but we’re going to have to get much tougher as a country. We’re going to have to be a lot sharper and we’re going to have to do things that are unthinkable almost.
“Unthinkable, when you look at what’s happening to us, when you look at what’s going on in this country and throughout the world and we don’t want, you know they’re allowed to cut off heads and they’re allowed to chop off heads, and we can’t waterboard. So people can have disagreements, but I feel we have to get much, much, stronger, tougher and smarter.”
Hours after the Istanbul attack, Trump called for the need to fight “fire with fire“ in the battle against terrorism. On waterboarding, he said, “I like it a lot. I don’t think it’s tough enough.”
Terrorists “probably think we’re weak, we’re stupid, we don’t know what we’re doing, we have no leadership,” he told a crowd in Ohio.
A day later, McCain— a former prisoner of war — said such a position is “not the United States of America. It’s not what we are all about. It’s not what we are.”
The International Red Cross classified waterboarding as torture in 2014 and said the practice violates the Geneva Conventions.
Trump, during an interview with New Hampshire’s NH1, was asked about his calls to reinstate waterboarding following Tuesday’s attack on Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport that killed at least 44 people. Trump has enthusiastically endorsed tactics now widely regarded as torture, and has discounted recent criticism from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who said the interrogation technique “was not the American way.“
“Well it’s not the American way to have heads chopped off and have people drowning in steel cages,” Trump said, presumably referring to videos released by the Islamic State that show such execution methods. “And so we can have our disagreements, but we’re going to have to get much tougher as a country. We’re going to have to be a lot sharper and we’re going to have to do things that are unthinkable almost.
“Unthinkable, when you look at what’s happening to us, when you look at what’s going on in this country and throughout the world and we don’t want, you know they’re allowed to cut off heads and they’re allowed to chop off heads, and we can’t waterboard. So people can have disagreements, but I feel we have to get much, much, stronger, tougher and smarter.”
Hours after the Istanbul attack, Trump called for the need to fight “fire with fire“ in the battle against terrorism. On waterboarding, he said, “I like it a lot. I don’t think it’s tough enough.”
Terrorists “probably think we’re weak, we’re stupid, we don’t know what we’re doing, we have no leadership,” he told a crowd in Ohio.
A day later, McCain— a former prisoner of war — said such a position is “not the United States of America. It’s not what we are all about. It’s not what we are.”
The International Red Cross classified waterboarding as torture in 2014 and said the practice violates the Geneva Conventions.
The torture thing pretty much ruined what little support I had left for him. I'm just going to have to accept the US will have an evil president regardless who wins.
Eman
Master
More than 1 in 10 voters say they'd prefer a giant meteor hitting earth over supportingDonald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
@flenser you can always vote for the meteor. I promise it'll be quicker than the death Trump will cause to this country.
@flenser you can always vote for the meteor. I promise it'll be quicker than the death Trump will cause to this country.
#anybodybutcrookedhillary
Hillarysamericathemovie.com
You can check out the trailer on youtube.
You can check out the trailer on youtube.
CdnGuy
New Member
Or just move up to Canada and get free health care
Eman
Master
Or just move up to Canada and get free health care
If Trump gets the seat, he'll probably turn Canada into one big ski resort...
No escape...
CdnGuy
New Member
Yeah lots of fresh powder today down at kits beach bro. Shred hard 4 life ! 
CdnGuy
New Member
I can respect that...but I like the actionA tad LESS people please.
Eman
Master
Donald Trump’s Trade Plan Will Hurt The Very People He Promises To Help
His agenda is good for the haves, not the have-nots.
Donald Trump’s big speech about trade on Tuesday was relatively free of brazen lies. But the underlying message of the address — a promise that his presidency would work out well for working-class Americans — was as misleading as anything he’s said on the campaign trail.
The setting for the speech was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where employment in the region’s historic steel industry has declined by 44 percent since 1990. As president, Trump vowed, he would stop and even reverse that decline by getting tough with China, Mexico and other trading partners — slapping tariffs on their exports, punishing them with sanctions and rewriting the trade agreements that, according to Trump, have allowed these countries to steal American jobs.
“The error of economic surrender will be over,” the presumptive Republican nominee proclaimed. “A new era of prosperity will finally begin.”
But in making this case, Trump wasn’t simply talking about trade, or even manufacturing more generally. He was also talking about a divide in American politics between the masses and the privileged few — and why he, not presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, is the candidate on the side of the masses.
The claim is totally at odds with what Trump is actually proposing to do as president.
In talking about trade and its impact on areas like western Pennsylvania, Trump has identified a real and serious problem.
In talking about trade and its impact on areas like western Pennsylvania, Trump has identified a real and serious problem. Overall, most economists would agree, trade has been beneficial — by reducing the prices of consumer goods, creating new markets for exports and allowing the economy to grow faster. And that’s to say nothing of the ways economic integration has reduced international conflict.
But that doesn’t mean every individual or every group of people is better off, and recent http://papers.nber.org/tmp/71643-w21906.pdf has confirmed what some trade skeptics and labor advocates have been saying all along: Trade can be absolutely punishing to communities that lose manufacturing jobs to competitors overseas. In those places, cheaper goods and other benefits of trade are small consolation for jobs that no longer exist.
As Brookings economist Henry Aaron put it recently in an interview, “Opening up freer trade is good for the nation…as a whole and in the long run. … But it hurts some American companies, and that means some American workers, too.”
The trouble is that undoing trade’s effects on areas like western Pennsylvania would be a heck of a lot more difficult than Trump makes it sound. Ripping up the old trade agreements and imposing massive new tariffs would likely set off a trade war that would have the precise opposite effect of liberalized trade: Prices would rise and growth would slow.
These kinds of trade-offs in trade policy are by no means hypothetical. In fact, it’s possible to see a miniature version of them playing out right now. Earlier this year, the U.S. slapped tariffs as high as 266 percent on some forms of Chinese steel because of a U.S. government finding that the Chinese were “dumping” their products on the market — in other words, selling steel at unreasonably low prices, well below cost, in order to prop up the Chinese steel industry.
Steelmakers in the U.S. are thrilled but, as the Wall Street Journal reported in June, the tariffs are a “double-edged sword.” Companies that manufacture goods with imported steel say they will have to raise prices and one executive, from a firm that manufacturers school chalkboards, told the Journal that his company might have to shutter a factory because customers would be cutting back on orders.
That’s not an argument against such targeted tariffs, which arguably represent the kind of retaliatory and remedial action necessary to keep a free trade regime functioning. There’s a balance to be struck, between easing restrictions on trade and reinforcing the standards that matter. Even among relatively like-minded economists, there’s a vigorous debate about where exactly that balance should be.
But the very real costs to even this highly defensible tariff on Chinese steel dumping is a reminder that aggressive trade policies have very real downsides — and that an all-out, indiscriminate assault on existing trade arrangements, like the one Trump seems to have in mind, could easily leave working-class Americans much worse off than they are today.
That’s particularly true given the rest of Trump’s agenda. His statements about policy are infrequent, vague and sometimes contradictory, making it difficult to pinpoint exactly what he would do as president. But the one policy proposal he has outlined in detail — his tax cut — reveals quite a lot. He would lower taxes on both corporations and individuals, reducing government revenue by something like $10 trillion over the next 10 years, according to analysis by the Brookings- and Urban Institute-run Tax Policy Center.
That’s a lot of money, even by the standards of Republican tax cuts. And while the wealthiest Americans would get windfalls from Trump’s plan, working-class Americans would get significantly less money, in both absolute and proportional terms.
Of course, Trump claims his tax cut would make the economy grow even faster. But the quick addition of so much new debt, combined with the contractionary effect of Trump’s new tariffs, could lead to a sudden and serious recession, as a recent report from Moody’s Analytics suggested.
And for working-class people, the real cost of the tax cut might come over the longer term, since the loss of so much revenue would almost certainly require massive spending cuts — first to discretionary programs like education, infrastructure maintenance or biomedical research; and later to entitlements, including Medicare and Social Security, even though Trump has pledged to protect those programs.
“It is hard to see how you finance that without decimating defense spending, Social Security, or Medicare,” Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, said. “There’d need to be big cuts to a wide range of services and supports.”
Throw in Trump’s vow to repeal the Affordable Care Act and musings that he might lower the federal minimum wage standard, and the likely end result of Trump’s economic agenda would be an economy providing even fewer well-paying jobs — and a government in an even weaker position to help those struggling to find work.
Cutting taxes on the rich will only hurt working people.Robert Scott, chief economist, Economic Policy Institute
During the Pittsburgh speech, Trump repeatedly cited data from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank that champions working-class Americans and has been among the most critical of free trade agreements. But ever since Trump spoke, EPI’s researchers have also been among the most vocal in pointing out that Trump’s policies, on the whole, would hurt the very people he’s claiming to defend. (See, for example, the interview that EPI president Lawrence Mishel gave to the Washington Post’s https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/06/29/trumps-favorite-new-trade-experts-say-hes-full-of-it-on-globalization/ (Greg Sargent).)
What working-class Americans really need, the folks at EPI say, is a much broader effort to raise their living standards. That effort might start with a more aggressive posture on trade. But it would also include stronger unions, spending on public works, more financial assistance with child care and other necessities — as well as better support for people who lose their jobs.
“Cutting taxes on the rich (another Trump goal) will only hurt working people,” Robert Scott, EPI’s chief economist and a supporter of more aggressive trade policies, told The Huffington Post in an email. “We need to fix the domestic economy — rebuild U.S. infrastructure, which will take lots of public spending and tax revenues, and tax carbon and make the transition to a clean energy economy, which is also not cheap, and invest in rebuilding manufacturing, and invest in the social safety net.”
And Trump, Scott says, “is not the guy to do any of these things.”
His agenda is good for the haves, not the have-nots.
Donald Trump’s big speech about trade on Tuesday was relatively free of brazen lies. But the underlying message of the address — a promise that his presidency would work out well for working-class Americans — was as misleading as anything he’s said on the campaign trail.
The setting for the speech was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where employment in the region’s historic steel industry has declined by 44 percent since 1990. As president, Trump vowed, he would stop and even reverse that decline by getting tough with China, Mexico and other trading partners — slapping tariffs on their exports, punishing them with sanctions and rewriting the trade agreements that, according to Trump, have allowed these countries to steal American jobs.
“The error of economic surrender will be over,” the presumptive Republican nominee proclaimed. “A new era of prosperity will finally begin.”
But in making this case, Trump wasn’t simply talking about trade, or even manufacturing more generally. He was also talking about a divide in American politics between the masses and the privileged few — and why he, not presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, is the candidate on the side of the masses.
The claim is totally at odds with what Trump is actually proposing to do as president.
In talking about trade and its impact on areas like western Pennsylvania, Trump has identified a real and serious problem.
In talking about trade and its impact on areas like western Pennsylvania, Trump has identified a real and serious problem. Overall, most economists would agree, trade has been beneficial — by reducing the prices of consumer goods, creating new markets for exports and allowing the economy to grow faster. And that’s to say nothing of the ways economic integration has reduced international conflict.
But that doesn’t mean every individual or every group of people is better off, and recent http://papers.nber.org/tmp/71643-w21906.pdf has confirmed what some trade skeptics and labor advocates have been saying all along: Trade can be absolutely punishing to communities that lose manufacturing jobs to competitors overseas. In those places, cheaper goods and other benefits of trade are small consolation for jobs that no longer exist.
As Brookings economist Henry Aaron put it recently in an interview, “Opening up freer trade is good for the nation…as a whole and in the long run. … But it hurts some American companies, and that means some American workers, too.”
The trouble is that undoing trade’s effects on areas like western Pennsylvania would be a heck of a lot more difficult than Trump makes it sound. Ripping up the old trade agreements and imposing massive new tariffs would likely set off a trade war that would have the precise opposite effect of liberalized trade: Prices would rise and growth would slow.
These kinds of trade-offs in trade policy are by no means hypothetical. In fact, it’s possible to see a miniature version of them playing out right now. Earlier this year, the U.S. slapped tariffs as high as 266 percent on some forms of Chinese steel because of a U.S. government finding that the Chinese were “dumping” their products on the market — in other words, selling steel at unreasonably low prices, well below cost, in order to prop up the Chinese steel industry.
Steelmakers in the U.S. are thrilled but, as the Wall Street Journal reported in June, the tariffs are a “double-edged sword.” Companies that manufacture goods with imported steel say they will have to raise prices and one executive, from a firm that manufacturers school chalkboards, told the Journal that his company might have to shutter a factory because customers would be cutting back on orders.
That’s not an argument against such targeted tariffs, which arguably represent the kind of retaliatory and remedial action necessary to keep a free trade regime functioning. There’s a balance to be struck, between easing restrictions on trade and reinforcing the standards that matter. Even among relatively like-minded economists, there’s a vigorous debate about where exactly that balance should be.
But the very real costs to even this highly defensible tariff on Chinese steel dumping is a reminder that aggressive trade policies have very real downsides — and that an all-out, indiscriminate assault on existing trade arrangements, like the one Trump seems to have in mind, could easily leave working-class Americans much worse off than they are today.
That’s particularly true given the rest of Trump’s agenda. His statements about policy are infrequent, vague and sometimes contradictory, making it difficult to pinpoint exactly what he would do as president. But the one policy proposal he has outlined in detail — his tax cut — reveals quite a lot. He would lower taxes on both corporations and individuals, reducing government revenue by something like $10 trillion over the next 10 years, according to analysis by the Brookings- and Urban Institute-run Tax Policy Center.
That’s a lot of money, even by the standards of Republican tax cuts. And while the wealthiest Americans would get windfalls from Trump’s plan, working-class Americans would get significantly less money, in both absolute and proportional terms.
Of course, Trump claims his tax cut would make the economy grow even faster. But the quick addition of so much new debt, combined with the contractionary effect of Trump’s new tariffs, could lead to a sudden and serious recession, as a recent report from Moody’s Analytics suggested.
And for working-class people, the real cost of the tax cut might come over the longer term, since the loss of so much revenue would almost certainly require massive spending cuts — first to discretionary programs like education, infrastructure maintenance or biomedical research; and later to entitlements, including Medicare and Social Security, even though Trump has pledged to protect those programs.
“It is hard to see how you finance that without decimating defense spending, Social Security, or Medicare,” Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, said. “There’d need to be big cuts to a wide range of services and supports.”
Throw in Trump’s vow to repeal the Affordable Care Act and musings that he might lower the federal minimum wage standard, and the likely end result of Trump’s economic agenda would be an economy providing even fewer well-paying jobs — and a government in an even weaker position to help those struggling to find work.
Cutting taxes on the rich will only hurt working people.Robert Scott, chief economist, Economic Policy Institute
During the Pittsburgh speech, Trump repeatedly cited data from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank that champions working-class Americans and has been among the most critical of free trade agreements. But ever since Trump spoke, EPI’s researchers have also been among the most vocal in pointing out that Trump’s policies, on the whole, would hurt the very people he’s claiming to defend. (See, for example, the interview that EPI president Lawrence Mishel gave to the Washington Post’s https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/06/29/trumps-favorite-new-trade-experts-say-hes-full-of-it-on-globalization/ (Greg Sargent).)
What working-class Americans really need, the folks at EPI say, is a much broader effort to raise their living standards. That effort might start with a more aggressive posture on trade. But it would also include stronger unions, spending on public works, more financial assistance with child care and other necessities — as well as better support for people who lose their jobs.
“Cutting taxes on the rich (another Trump goal) will only hurt working people,” Robert Scott, EPI’s chief economist and a supporter of more aggressive trade policies, told The Huffington Post in an email. “We need to fix the domestic economy — rebuild U.S. infrastructure, which will take lots of public spending and tax revenues, and tax carbon and make the transition to a clean energy economy, which is also not cheap, and invest in rebuilding manufacturing, and invest in the social safety net.”
And Trump, Scott says, “is not the guy to do any of these things.”
Donald Trump's "Star of David" Hillary Clinton Meme Was Created by White Supremacists
Mic Discovered Who Created Trump's Anti-Semitic Hillary Meme — And It's Disturbing
On Saturday, Donald Trump tweeted a meme that used dog-whistle anti-Semitism to announce that his political rival, "Crooked Hillary", had "made history." The meme Trump tweeted prominently featured the Star of David — a holy symbol of the Jewish religion that Nazis attempted to pervert by forcing Jews over the age of 6 to sew it onto their clothing during Hitler's reign.
Emblazoned onto the Star of David in Trump's meme are the words "Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!" The star lies atop a giant pile of money.
On Sunday, Mic discovered that Donald Trump's Twitter wasn't the first place the meme appeared. The image was first featured on /pol/ — an Internet message board for the alt-right, a digital movement of neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and white supremacists newly emboldened by the success of Donald Trump's rhetoric — as early as June 22, 2016, over a week before Donald Trump's team tweeted it.
...
CdnGuy
New Member
Trump new promise if elected Prez. Once a year....
This star does not have anything to do with the jewish heritage. The star of david is different. It is 2 hollow triangles and is blue, not red. Donald Trumps son-in-law is jewish, his grandchildren, and his daughter converted to their religion as well. Propoganda..and people are outraged.
On a side note,
Social media ruined this country and the millions of people who use it.
DONALD TRUMP’S SOCIAL MEDIA TIES TO WHITE SUPREMACISTS
Donald Trump’s Social Media Ties to White Supremacists
In late January, Donald Trump did something that would have sunk almost any other presidential campaign: He retweeted an anonymous Nazi sympathizer and white supremacist who goes by the not-so-subtle handle @WhiteGenocideTM. Trump neither explained nor apologized for the retweet and then, three weeks later, he did it again. This subsequent retweet was quickly deleted, but just two days later Trump retweeted a different user named @EustaceFash, whose Twitter header image at the time also included the term “white genocide.”
None of this went unnoticed among ardent racists, many of whom believe there is a coordinated effort to eventually eliminate the “white race.”
Trump is “giving us the old wink-wink,” http://www.dailystormer.com/happening-trump-retweets-two-more-white-genocide-accounts-back-to-back/ (wrote) Andrew Anglin, editor of a white supremacist website called The Daily Stormer, after Trump retweeted two other “white genocide” theorists within a single minute. “Whereas the odd White genocide tweet could be a random occurrence, it isn’t statistically possible that two of them back to back could be a random occurrence. It could only be deliberate…Today in America the air is cold and it tastes like victory.”
It is possible that Trump ― who, according to the campaign, does almost all of his own tweeting ― is unfamiliar with the term “white genocide” and doesn’t do even basic vetting of those whose tweets he amplifies to his seven million followers. But the reality is that there are dozens of tweets mentioning @realDonaldTrump each minute, and he has an uncanny ability to surface ones that come from accounts that proudly proclaim their white supremacist leanings.
…
Donald Trump’s Social Media Ties to White Supremacists
In late January, Donald Trump did something that would have sunk almost any other presidential campaign: He retweeted an anonymous Nazi sympathizer and white supremacist who goes by the not-so-subtle handle @WhiteGenocideTM. Trump neither explained nor apologized for the retweet and then, three weeks later, he did it again. This subsequent retweet was quickly deleted, but just two days later Trump retweeted a different user named @EustaceFash, whose Twitter header image at the time also included the term “white genocide.”
None of this went unnoticed among ardent racists, many of whom believe there is a coordinated effort to eventually eliminate the “white race.”
Trump is “giving us the old wink-wink,” http://www.dailystormer.com/happening-trump-retweets-two-more-white-genocide-accounts-back-to-back/ (wrote) Andrew Anglin, editor of a white supremacist website called The Daily Stormer, after Trump retweeted two other “white genocide” theorists within a single minute. “Whereas the odd White genocide tweet could be a random occurrence, it isn’t statistically possible that two of them back to back could be a random occurrence. It could only be deliberate…Today in America the air is cold and it tastes like victory.”
It is possible that Trump ― who, according to the campaign, does almost all of his own tweeting ― is unfamiliar with the term “white genocide” and doesn’t do even basic vetting of those whose tweets he amplifies to his seven million followers. But the reality is that there are dozens of tweets mentioning @realDonaldTrump each minute, and he has an uncanny ability to surface ones that come from accounts that proudly proclaim their white supremacist leanings.
…
CdnGuy
New Member
From Monica To Loretta - The Clintons Corrupt Absolutely
Michael Goodwin, July 2, 2016
She can’t help herself. Even yesterday, with the political world fixated on her meeting with FBI agents, Hillary Clinton had her flack mislead the public.
A spokesman said she gave a “voluntary” interview, which is true only because she agreed to talk instead of waiting to be subpoenaed. The flack also said she was “pleased” to assist the gumshoes.
Who believes she was “pleased” to be interviewed by the FBI in a criminal investigation that could upend her life?
But that’s the way the Clintons roll.
Wherever they go, whatever they do, ethics are trashed and suspicions of criminal conduct follow them like night follows day.
It’s who they are and it’s self-delusional to believe another stint in the White House would make the Clintons better people. Power exacerbates rather than cures an absence of integrity.
Yet there’s another dimension to their chronic crookedness, and it gets insufficient attention even though it might be more important to the nation’s well-being.
It is that, in addition to being personally corrupt, the Clintons are corrupters. They are piggish users, with the people and institutions around them inevitably tarnished and sometimes destroyed even as the Clintons escape to their next scam.
Monica Lewinsky is a prime example, and Loretta Lynch is the latest. The attorney general’s dumbfounding decision to meet privately with Bill Clinton while the FBI investigates Hillary’s handling of national secrets stained Lynch’s reputation and added to public mistrust of the Justice Department.
Lynch didn’t create that mistrust — she was supposed to be the antidote. Her predecessor, Eric Holder, was a left-wing activist who used his role as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer to further his and Obama’s political agenda.
That role earned Holder an undesired distinction. His refusal to cooperate with Congress on the disastrous Fast and Furious gun sting led to a bipartisan vote in the House holding him in criminal contempt, the first time in history a sitting Cabinet member ever faced such a censure.
Lynch, as his successor, was handily confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, with her steady, firm demeanor and solid record as a prosecutor carrying the day.
Yet her lifetime of good work and the hope for a fresh start at Justice are now overshadowed. She acknowledges the meeting with Bill Clinton was a mistake, and pledged to accept the recommendation of FBI agents and career prosecutors on whether Hillary should face charges.
That’s not enough, not nearly enough, given the circumstances and stakes.
While Lynch offers no explanation as to why in the world she agreed to the 30-minute meeting on a plane in Phoenix, perhaps she felt she owed the former president something. Remember, he first nominated her to be the US attorney in Brooklyn in 1999, a promotion that changed her life.
After his presidency, she went to a top private law firm, and became a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Bill Clinton had been very, very good to her, and without his boost, she probably wouldn’t even have been a candidate to replace Holder.
And now her patron wanted a private meeting. Both had to know it was wrong, but he had nothing to lose and didn’t care about her reputation or the Justice Department’s.
That was her responsibility. And it doesn’t really matter if they didn’t discuss the case. Just his being there was reminder enough that she owes him.
Lynch also had to know that an FBI agent who socialized with the spouse of a suspect in a criminal case probably would be investigated and fired. Yet she agreed to the meeting anyway.
Despite Lynch’s vow to let others make the call, her refusal to recuse herself means she will remain in charge. That was never ideal because Obama endorsed Hillary and all but exonerated her, but there seemed no way to argue for a special prosecutor without more evidence that the outcome was rigged. There was also FBI Director James Comey’s reputation as an independent straight shooter to provide some reassurance that the case would be handled on the merits.
Now Lynch has broken that fragile confidence, and the need for a special prosecutor is obvious.
The explosive result shows the Clintons haven’t lost their touch for leaving destruction and chaos in their wake. The remarkable events also serve as a clear reminder that while the Clintons enriched themselves over the years, they were helping to bankrupt the public trust in its government and institutions. And they won’t stop until they’re stopped.
Michael Goodwin, July 2, 2016
She can’t help herself. Even yesterday, with the political world fixated on her meeting with FBI agents, Hillary Clinton had her flack mislead the public.
A spokesman said she gave a “voluntary” interview, which is true only because she agreed to talk instead of waiting to be subpoenaed. The flack also said she was “pleased” to assist the gumshoes.
Who believes she was “pleased” to be interviewed by the FBI in a criminal investigation that could upend her life?
But that’s the way the Clintons roll.
Wherever they go, whatever they do, ethics are trashed and suspicions of criminal conduct follow them like night follows day.
It’s who they are and it’s self-delusional to believe another stint in the White House would make the Clintons better people. Power exacerbates rather than cures an absence of integrity.
Yet there’s another dimension to their chronic crookedness, and it gets insufficient attention even though it might be more important to the nation’s well-being.
It is that, in addition to being personally corrupt, the Clintons are corrupters. They are piggish users, with the people and institutions around them inevitably tarnished and sometimes destroyed even as the Clintons escape to their next scam.
Monica Lewinsky is a prime example, and Loretta Lynch is the latest. The attorney general’s dumbfounding decision to meet privately with Bill Clinton while the FBI investigates Hillary’s handling of national secrets stained Lynch’s reputation and added to public mistrust of the Justice Department.
Lynch didn’t create that mistrust — she was supposed to be the antidote. Her predecessor, Eric Holder, was a left-wing activist who used his role as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer to further his and Obama’s political agenda.
That role earned Holder an undesired distinction. His refusal to cooperate with Congress on the disastrous Fast and Furious gun sting led to a bipartisan vote in the House holding him in criminal contempt, the first time in history a sitting Cabinet member ever faced such a censure.
Lynch, as his successor, was handily confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, with her steady, firm demeanor and solid record as a prosecutor carrying the day.
Yet her lifetime of good work and the hope for a fresh start at Justice are now overshadowed. She acknowledges the meeting with Bill Clinton was a mistake, and pledged to accept the recommendation of FBI agents and career prosecutors on whether Hillary should face charges.
That’s not enough, not nearly enough, given the circumstances and stakes.
While Lynch offers no explanation as to why in the world she agreed to the 30-minute meeting on a plane in Phoenix, perhaps she felt she owed the former president something. Remember, he first nominated her to be the US attorney in Brooklyn in 1999, a promotion that changed her life.
After his presidency, she went to a top private law firm, and became a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Bill Clinton had been very, very good to her, and without his boost, she probably wouldn’t even have been a candidate to replace Holder.
And now her patron wanted a private meeting. Both had to know it was wrong, but he had nothing to lose and didn’t care about her reputation or the Justice Department’s.
That was her responsibility. And it doesn’t really matter if they didn’t discuss the case. Just his being there was reminder enough that she owes him.
Lynch also had to know that an FBI agent who socialized with the spouse of a suspect in a criminal case probably would be investigated and fired. Yet she agreed to the meeting anyway.
Despite Lynch’s vow to let others make the call, her refusal to recuse herself means she will remain in charge. That was never ideal because Obama endorsed Hillary and all but exonerated her, but there seemed no way to argue for a special prosecutor without more evidence that the outcome was rigged. There was also FBI Director James Comey’s reputation as an independent straight shooter to provide some reassurance that the case would be handled on the merits.
Now Lynch has broken that fragile confidence, and the need for a special prosecutor is obvious.
The explosive result shows the Clintons haven’t lost their touch for leaving destruction and chaos in their wake. The remarkable events also serve as a clear reminder that while the Clintons enriched themselves over the years, they were helping to bankrupt the public trust in its government and institutions. And they won’t stop until they’re stopped.
