Kevin Drum writes here in Mother Jones about the celebrated Hillary Clinton emails.
Unlike most of us, he actually read the full report.
He identifies the most interesting of the emails. One of them is an email to Colin Powell on her second day in office as Secretary of State, where she asks him about using his personal email for State Department business. He responds and warns her to be careful and not to talk about it.
Page 11: On January 23, 2009, Clinton contacted former Secretary of State Colin Powell via e-mail to inquire about his use of a BlackBerry while he was Secretary of State (January 2001 to January 2005). In his e-mail reply, Powell warned Clinton that if it became “public” that Clinton had a BlackBerry, and she used it to “do business,” her e-mails could become “official record[s] and subject to the law.” Powell further advised Clinton, “Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.”
[Drum writes:] This is important. First, it makes clear that Hillary conversed with Colin Powell two days after becoming Secretary of State, not “a year later,” as Powell has claimed. Second, Powell essentially told her that he had just gone ahead and broken the law by “not using systems that captured the data.” Hillary, by contrast, chose instead to retain everything as the law required.
Drum concludes there is nothing in the report to warrant the wild claims made by Trump and the rightwing talkshow hosts.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
LOL. This is the most childish form of defense for illegal behavior: “He did it too.”
If this is the kind of thing that justifies the mishandling of government information, classified or not, then we should just stop pretending that we value an accountable government. Oh, that is already the case when it comes to the left.
Yep. People will go through mindbending feats of mental gymnastics to avoid confronting reality, an unfortunate consequence of which is … a crappier reality which they have, by their delusion, helped sustain.
But, hey, if you don’t confront it, it isn’t real. *plugs ears and hums really, really loud*
“……..when it comes to the left.” Spoken like a true rightist ideologue with no margin for the daylight of truth or truthiness to expose the rightist fantasies. And things of that nature.
Fl Teacher, shame on you.
Imagine if your predecessor as a teacher told you that she always let the kids start putting their material away one minute early so that they could make it to the bus in time. That sounded like a good idea so you did it. But someone decided you stink as a teacher because you gave their child a D and got you fired for doing what every single other teacher did. Because there is a rule that no other teacher has ever followed but they decided to get you.
But getting you wasn’t enough. They decided to publicly announce that Fl Teacher was a lazy bum who doesn’t care about the kids and she blatantly disregarded the rules in order to help herself. She is evil and awful and needs to be in jail for taking a salary on false pretenses.
After all, you dared to do what your predecessor and everyone else who ever had your job did. You are an evil person.
^^By the way, no doubt you are demanding that Colin Powell and Condeleeza Rice be jailed immediately. Or, typical of the right, do you give passes for missing e-mails when they involve firing US Attorneys who won’t do Karl Rove’s bidding, even if they are Republicans?
Oh Joe, I am no ideologue – right or left. I was just referring to the double standard employed to evaluate/criticize Republicans vs. Democrats. If you don’t think there is a double standard, it is because you are an ideologue.
NYC public school parent, that was a great lesson in moral inequality. I would be VERY happy if the misnamed “Department of Justice” started pursuing “justice for all.” If I were fired for allowing students to pack up a little early, I wouldn’t want to work for that school system anyway. So I would happily pack my things and move on.
By the way, if you read the e-mail from Colin Powell cited in the post, you will see that HRC did not follow his advise. And “C” is used to mark the 3rd paragraph even though there is no A or B on the 1st or 2nd paragraph, and HRC used only one devise, which she happened to lose regularly and simply replace with a new devise of the same type. And after all green is blue; it’s just a different hue.
Colin Powell’s exact words: ” “Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.”
And he forgot to add: And I erased everything!
Funny how Colin Powell lied and claimed he said that a year later so that he could pretend Hillary did it without his advice when the truth is that he told her during her first days in office. Uh oh. Who is the big liar here? Not Hillary. Only one person lied about this incident, and it was Colin Powell.
^^^”If I were fired for allowing students to pack up a little early, I wouldn’t want to work for that school system anyway.” says FLteacher.
That’s good, FLteacher, because you aren’t working anywhere ever again. The press just wrote an article about how you deliberately broke the rules due to your extreme laziness and the corrupt nature you have that leads you to steal money from the school system for work you don’t do, you lazy bum. Your name is mud and no school or any other place of employment will touch you with a ten-foot pole.
Now that your pension is gone, you are in debt from lawyers’ fees, and your kids’ college funds are depleted, you have hopefully learned your lesson and promise never to work anywhere near children again. Or anywhere because you are an embarrassment to your family and friends.
All because you had an enemy who didn’t like the grade you gave her kid and had the money and power to destroy you. And if it wasn’t allowing the kids to pack up early, it is one of a million other little actions you take every day that will be placed in the worst possible light because we all know you did them because you are corrupt. Your enemy told us that was why you did it and we believe them since of course, the fact that everyone else does exactly the same thing is no excuse that you want us to believe.
NYC public school parent, you are quite faithful that Hillary did nothing wrong in the email case, or on virtually any other occasion. At least you seem to present it that way.
No doubt that politics is ugly, and many attacks on Hillary are merely sexist, slander, libel. That doesn’t mean all the criticism on her is unfounded. Hillary Clinton is criticized by the left as much as by the right. Most of the left is committed to feminism. What the left don’t like about Hillary, aside from her dishonesty and triangulation, is that she is not really for the poor, the working class, the middle class, and fairness of human rights among all nations. If she is in her “heart,” she often isn’t with her “policy.”
Ed,
I love you for your voice on the blog. Please stay engaged.
But I remind you that whatever negative things you may say about Hillary, even if you are 100% accurate, pale in comparison to Trump’s ignorance, lies, racism, duplicity, and bluster. Do you hate her so much that you would step away and let this buffoon become president?
I would rather have Hillary Clinton as president than Donald Trump. I’ve said that to you many times, Diane. But I hate both of them. I think they would both be horrible for this country and the world. The American electorate also views both of them very unfavorably. The world laughs at both of them and fears both of them. My choice of Hillary would very much be on the grounds of lesser evil.
But of course, it’s not up to me who becomes president. I would rather pick neither if we could. So would, probably, America.
My audience knows that Donald Trump is a joke. His idiocy speaks for itself. Hillary fools people not with direct lies, but more subtle and complex and veiled lies. Trump is the logical conclusion of the American businessman, Hillary is the logical conclusion of American politics. Saying Hillary Clinton is OK is saying that establishment politics and economics is OK. It’s not. It is very, very harmful. Even if under the banner of caring and equality.
Ed Detective, I don’t have a problem with you criticizing Hillary based on her policies. Ever since the health care debacle, she seems less inclined to go out on a limb. I voted for Obama 8 years ago (bad mistake!) and Bernie this year for that reason. I am absolutely not arguing that she is perfect.
However, what I object to is the characterization that she is corrupt. I don’t see evidence of that. I see a woman who took advantage of the big bucks people were willing to spend to hear her speak when she stepped down as Sec’y of State. Pretty much every big time official did the same thing. She didn’t come from money and she and Bill took advantage of people willing to pay them to speak. But I don’t believe for a minute that she sold out US interests in her role as Sec’y of State for money. And that’s what she is being accused of. Rich John Kerry didn’t come in and do different things because his policies weren’t tainted by bribes from foreign countries. But Hillary haters have convinced many members of the public that she sold out US interests for her own financial gain.
I don’t like all of Hillary’s decisions, but I understand them. I trust that she is looking out for the country and not herself. Trump is not. And his supporters are desperate to paint Hillary in a similar light so that she is just as corrupt and money-driven as Trump. It’s right out of the Karl Rove playbook — pretend your candidates’ terrible flaws are your opponents. And people bought it! I can’t believe any right thinking people are falling for it, and I admit, I probably get too upset when I read posts like yours. I don’t understand how you can fall for it!
If anything, I suspect Hillary could be a better President than Obama, who didn’t seem to believe in many things that Democrats used to hold dear. Public Education. Social Security. Even the health care fight was tainted by his unwillingness to first make clear what the Dems wanted.
Never would I argue that Hillary is perfect. But she isn’t what she has been painted to be. And she is far more likely to be more liberal than Obama. I get that may not be enough for you, but in a choice between that and Trump, how can you possibly not want a more liberal President than Obama?
So many people being fooled, just like what happened to Al Gore. Bush was the “honest” one! Gore the liar. And I see it happening all over again with Hillary the liar and Trump the straight talker.
All I can say is please try not to be fooled by the people who want you to think Hillary is significant worse than any other politician who ran for President. She isn’t. Even Bernie had issues. That didn’t stop me from voting for him and working to convince others to vote for him. And preferring Bernie does not mean that I can’t see how Hillary can still be very, very good for this country. Even if her opponent was Olympia Snowe or John Kasich. I’d be voting for Hillary. And I would feel good about it.
NYC public school parent said,
“However, what I object to is the characterization that she is corrupt. I don’t see evidence of that.”
Well if that’s the case, then I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree, and not much point carrying on this conversation.
I respect your right to disagree, but it’s a shame you can’t point to any evidence of your belief that Hillary is more corrupt than Barack Obama except linking to articles that signify nothing.
If you really believe she is corrupt, you should be able to state in simple terms what she did. Did the Obama Administration approve arms sales to people who donated to the Clinton Foundation? Yes. Did the Obama do this because Hillary Clinton corrupted the process and insisted on providing arms to dangerous regimes over the protests of everyone else? Did she blackmail Obama into agreeing to it? And did John Kerry continue the process because he liked Hillary so much he was happy to commit treason to make her rich?
You agree that the Benghazi corruption was trumped up. But you are certain that because she used her own e-mail server instead of the blackberry — exactly as Colin Powell advised her to do although he lied about it we now know — it was all for corrupt reasons. But yet you can’t say what the corruption was. Or why Obama and Kerry continued to approve the corruption and commit treason because they wanted the Clintons to get richer.
I don’t have a problem with you saying Hillary Clinton is a neocon and you disagree with her views. But you insist she is corrupt without providing any rational argument.
” She broke the law and endangered national security by storing extremely sensitive data on a fully unsecure personal server. She then broke the law again (obstruction of justice) when she tried covering it all up, succeeding only in permanently deleting -some- of the emails, including the likely physical destruction of multiple electronic devices.”
What you posted is an out and out lie. She didn’t break the law as there was no “law”. State Dept. sent a memo requiring using the blackberry AFTER she left office! She was careless. So why are you posting the same kinds of things that Karl Rove delights in lying about?
America used to have real debates about issues in the past. Now we have people characterizing their opponents as evil because they don’t want to discuss the issues.
NYC public school parent, you long for the good ol’ days when people would debate about the issues (sounds like some wishful nostalgia), but you are hardly debating the issues yourself. You are misrepresenting my positions and making lots of gross assumptions about me and everyone who criticizes Hillary.
I have posted plenty of “evidence” in the past and will continue to do so. The problem regarding Hillary is not that I don’t have “evidence,” it’s that I have so much I am yet to properly sort it — and retrieving bits on request for people like you, who insinuated that I’m sexist and Republican from the beginning, and who appears to neither understand the severity of allegations on Hillary nor be aware of her major past misdeeds, is a waste of my time.
On the chance you actually wanted to see the other, not-so-good side of Hillary, and wanted to get an idea of why she is so heavily disliked on the left, not just the right, I’d recommend the book <a href=”https://www.amazon.com/Hillary-Clinton-Decades-Answers-Left-ebook/dp/B01AX7CMZA#nav-subnav>Who is Hillary Clinton? Two Decades of Answers from the Left, a compilation of journalism over the decades by The Nation. And remember, not everyone who criticizes Hillary is doing it as a political attack, like Trump or Rove. I am but a citizen who is concerned with the future of my society. Calling Hillary “corrupt” and “dishonest” will not get me in office, and that is not the point.
I am done responding to you.
Who is Hillary Clinton? Two Decades of Answers from the Left
“” She broke the law and endangered national security by storing extremely sensitive data on a fully unsecure personal server. She then broke the law again (obstruction of justice) when she tried covering it all up, succeeding only in permanently deleting -some- of the emails, including the likely physical destruction of multiple electronic devices.”
You aren’t interested in an honest debate. You have said Hillary Clinton “broke the law”. And yet you can’t provide a shred of evidence for it. Carry on. But I will call out every dishonest statement you make.
It is one thing to criticize the policies she supports. I want you to do that. I do that myself.
It is another thing to claim she is a criminal without a shred of evidence except what you “know” is true.
Recent (9/4/16) links on Drudge are fairly damaging.
Drudge?! He’s less fair and balanced than Fox News.
Joe, as compared to? What? CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC? They are all fair and objective, right?
Hillary’s case is clear regarding the emails. She broke the law and endangered national security by storing extremely sensitive data on a fully unsecure personal server. She then broke the law again (obstruction of justice) when she tried covering it all up, succeeding only in permanently deleting -some- of the emails, including the likely physical destruction of multiple electronic devices.
Hillary defenders have swarmed the media telling us that this is only about “emails,” but it’s not. It’s an issue of national security and accountability protocol, not simply “emails.”
The question is what’s worse: the negligence of her state dept communications and its attempted cover up, or that Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department, as David Sirota reports.
Still better than Trump? Probably. Bernie Sanders thinks so. But, better than the worst does not mean good. The two-candidate choice we’ve been so graciously given is between ‘corrupt and negligent’ and ‘insane and openly bigoted.’
The two-party system does not work. Our government does not represent us. Never lose your sense of outrage.
Ed,
Still one million times better than Trump. The email server was a stupid mistake, which she regrets.
Trump denies climate change.
Trump insists he will deport 11 million undocumented immigrants and create a huge deportation force to round them up.
Trump will appoint hard-right justices to the courts who will roll back abortion rights, gay rights, civil rights, environmental regulations, and every other kind of restraint on corporations.
Trump will eliminate or block any gun controls.
Trump will encourage nuclear proliferation.
Trump will destroy NATO.
Hillary is smart, experienced, knowledgable.
I will vote for her with enthusiasm.
The slurs on her character and now her health are right wing attacks, which she has endured for 25 years. She’s still standing. She has fought for women’s rights, children’s rights, and every issue that matters to the fate of the nation. She may or may not be good on education, I don’t know. But the fate of the world is the issue here.
Exactly what part of Trump’s life experience qualifies him to be President? Trump University? Trump housing? Trump steaks? Trump golf courses? Trump wines? Trump bankruptcies? Three wives? Mar-a-Lago? He would not only make us an international laughing stock, he would pit group against group, thrill white nationalists, and revive nativism, jingoism, and every dark instinct in our national history.
Much of what you say is quite true. But I think Trump is corrupt and negligent as well as insane and openly bigoted. Not to mention that his economic policies are just more of the GOP trickle down voodoo economics.
Ed Detective,
I’d believe you if you attacked Colin Powell the same way. And now we have incontrovertible proof that Colin Powell lied. He claimed he never advised Hillary to do this, but in fact, he did.
Did Powell blatantly break the law because he decided he was better than anyone else? Is he as evil as Hillary? Or worse, because he continued to lie when Hillary told the truth?
So Comey is ineffectual? If she role the law he would have charged her.
Is it perhaps we are holding Hillary to a higher standard because she is a woman? The press and public ignore Trump’s continuous lies and crass language. They won’t let go of the Clinton Foundation which, by the way, has an A rating from an independent rating service. The Trump University scandal, legitimate red flag, gets lost in all the insinuations about the Clinton Foundation. BTW, I am not Hillary’s biggest fan; I just see a double standard at play. https://thinkprogress.org/a-tale-of-two-foundations-7035dc7cabd5#.y3kxgmc93
Whatever the press does, is what the press does. I have, as a voter, my personal responsibility to check facts.
Diane, I respect you of course, but I’m done arguing with you about Hillary Clinton. You are unable to critique her fairly due to a fear of Trump (as are most Hillary defenders), and your rose colored glasses about her personally.
—
Joe said:
“Much of what you say is quite true. But I think Trump is corrupt and negligent as well as insane and openly bigoted. Not to mention that his economic policies are just more of the GOP trickle down voodoo economics.
I agree, Joe. But I’m not under the illusion that a Hillary Clinton administration will be a victory for the poor, working class, or even the middle class all that much. Hillary may very well oversee an economic recession or worse. Potentially as bad or worse than 2007/2008. We are at the point socially, environmentally, and economically where small course corrections around the edges will not be enough.
—
NYC public school parent said:
“I’d believe you if you attacked Colin Powell the same way.
…
Did Powell blatantly break the law because he decided he was better than anyone else? Is he as evil as Hillary? Or worse, because he continued to lie when Hillary told the truth?”
If Colin Powell broke the law and acted irresponsibly, that’s exactly what he did. Hillary also did it. Doesn’t make it suddenly legal or responsible when Hilary does the same. Doesn’t speak well of Hillary’s judgment as SoS.
Colin Powell may or may not be as reckless, deceitful, and irresponsible as Hillary Clinton, but I am not nearly so concerned with him right now since he is not the person who will likely be the next President Of The United States. The idea that we must critique every other person strongly if we’re going to critique Hillary strongly is ridiculous. To say that you’d “believe me” only if I attacked Colin Powell as well, is also ridiculous.
—
Jennifer Lee said:
“So Comey is ineffectual? If she role the law he would have charged her.”
It’s clear to anyone who has spent a modest amount of time reviewing the case that Hillary broke the law. James Comey did not say “Hillary did not break the law,” he said no reasonable prosecutor would pursue the case. He has also described Hillary as extremely reckless and irresponsible in what she did, and though he did not directly use the term “negligent,” he has said the same thing with different wording (euphemism) on multiple occasions. Comey and the FBI are not responsible for “charging” Hillary Clinton, by the way, they were responsible for investigating and recommending whether a case should be pursued. To say that the outcome of this recommendation was not affected by Clinton’s massive political machine and law defense team would be a fallacy. James Comey and the FBI are not God, they are not isolated from politics or Hillary Clinton’s best team of defense lawyers that money can buy, and they were not the ones who would declare guilty or not guilty.
—
retired teacher said:
Is it perhaps we are holding Hillary to a higher standard because she is a woman?
Sure, I don’t doubt that is the case for some people. Sexism still exists. But you would all have to admit that our presidential candidates should all be held to a “high standard.” In a democratic society, it’s the responsibility of the press and the citizenry itself to hold our leaders accountable. Otherwise, they shouldn’t be leading. They shouldn’t be making the decisions that affect millions or billions if they cannot make good decisions. Nobody ‘deserves’ to be president. Nobody ‘deserves’ to have so much power, especially if they don’t seem to use it wisely.
Last word: as Bernie said today, one of two people running for president will be elected. The choice is between Trump and Hillary, not Hillary and Bernie. That’s why he is campaigning for her.
Rudy said:
“Whatever the press does, is what the press does. I have, as a voter, my personal responsibility to check facts.”
As a voter, it’s a good start to do your own research, but we also have the responsibility to challenge the press. Because most people aren’t doing a deep level of research, or even much research at all. They will believe the press.
But that is changing with the internet. Young people voted for Bernie Sanders more than they voted for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump combined. Why? Mostly because the internet made “research” much more possible.
Ed Detective,
Some of us can read the actual report. We understand that your characterization of what she did and what Colin Powell did are what the far right wing want you to believe. You seem really gullible.
Colin Powell used an AOL account and then erased all the e-mails instead of saving them. All the correspondence he received about how Iraq did (wink wink) have WMD, all the correspondence about how (wink wink) we were invading Iraq as revenge for 9/11, all that is gone. Illegal. Erased permanently, or more likely in the hands of the Russians who obviously blackmailed him into lying straight out last week when he denied sending the very e-mail that the FBI shows he sent. Since you seem to believe that any misstatement by a politician is proof positive of their lying nature and corruption, it is obvious you think Colin Powell is far more corrupt than Hillary, who hasn’t been caught out in nearly as much of an outright lie as Colin Powell just told the American people.
“I did NOT tell Hillary not to use the state department server” says Powell. Oops. Maybe I did but I wasn’t a corrupt lying crook like Hillary, I’m not a Clinton so surely you must consider my misstatement as people who aren’t suffering from Clinton derangement syndrome do.
I get it. Hillary is hard to take. Every woman I know who gets things done and doesn’t suffer fools gladly is hard to take. George Stephanopolous and other men from the Clinton era despised her. Tough. Those are the women who get things done. We have a shot at electing someone who will make this country better and people are acting like she is a criminal almost as corrupt (but not quite) as Colin Powell, who Ed Detective knows should have been imprisoned long ago.
NYC public school parent said: “Some of us can read the actual report. We understand that your characterization of what she did and what Colin Powell did are what the far right wing want you to believe. You seem really gullible. ”
Quite the contrary. It is rare for me to believe something, and form a strong opinion on an issue, without strong evidence to back it up. Few people have done more research into Hillary Clinton than I have.
I have no concern or appreciation for the right wing. I am a leftist, quite far left of Hillary Clinton.
Your assumption that I am simply gullible, and your implications that I am sexist, have no basis in reality. It is more “gullible” to believe that experience alone in politics is good, and anyone who critiques an “experienced” candidate is simply out to get them. It is gullible to think that Hillary Clinton has done a lot of good for this country, and will continue to do so. It is gullible to equate “feminism” with the mere gender of a president.
“Few people have done more research into Hillary Clinton than I have,” Ed Detective says.
I think that is an arrogant statement, because there is no way to know who else has researched HRC.
Have you written your book about Hillary yet? You sound like you might be Donald Trump.
Lloyd, it’s a good assumption that most people have not spent hundreds of hours researching Hillary Clinton. You tell me. I have. I have also posted numerous links in the past, and my own analysis.
Your statement that I “might be Donald Trump” has removed any benefit of the doubt I’ve given you. If you really think I’m anything close to Donald Trump after visiting this blog for so long, you are simply delusional. Otherwise, you are just speaking emotionally. Either way, I will not forget it. You are not my friend, and I will deconstruct your arguments as such. Only when I feel like it. You aren’t really worth that much to me.
Like the Benghazi hearings: Benghazi by the Numbers. If HRC is so guilty how did the GOP come up with zero convictions.
Check the info-graphic.
http://benghazicommittee.com/benghazi-by-the-numbers/
You make claims just like Donald Trump does, but you never provide the evidence with links so others can check the veracity of your boasting. You only claim you have that info.
I’m sure that Donald Trump’s followers will have no problems swallowing every claim you make, but most of the people who follow this sight actually think for themselves.
I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned Benghazi, nor do I really care about Benghazi. Some claims from some people being false does not mean all claims from all people are false. This is basic logic.
I have provided links to you directly in the past, on several occasions. You ignoring them is not the same as me not providing them.
On the topic of Hillary Clinton, I have frequently linked directly to substantive articles that support my arguments. I have also linked videos that illustrate Hillary Clinton’s incessant dishonesty. They’re all over youtube, if you cared. They are often in her very own words.
It’s also strange that many of the commenters here agree with me on many issues, and post similar arguments and links to evidence. Do these other articulate posters also not think for themselves, or is it just me and the Trump-esque things I say? Does everyone side with you here, Lloyd?
Thinking for yourself would mean not believing that Hillary Clinton is what she says she is. Just because GOP insults her, doesn’t make all critiques of her “paranoid,” or sexist, or false. Will you ignore my basic reasoning that the left also attacks her on policy and character? And many of those severe critiques come from women, feminists, civil rights and labor leaders? Or is that too hard to believe, Lloyd? Maybe you need to pay more attention to the critiques instead of assuming everyone who opposes your idea of Hillary Clinton is a wacko.
Just because you think does not mean you are right.
Never did I believe that I am right simply because I think.
You blather. Critiques are nothing more than opinion pieces. They prove nothing. That is why there is a legal system and “innocent until proven guilty without a doubt” is the foundation of justice in this country.
Yeah, Lloyd, and the legal system is always right. Critiques can include opinions, but are often much more than mere opinions. You seem to prefer your own type of “facts” to sound reasoning and other peoples’ facts. You also suggest that the judicial process is always “right,” and that is how we should determine character and facts and policy and ability to lead.
I find it interesting how easy you define me. You know who I am because I don’t hide behind an anonymous name. You claim to have done more research on HRC than anyone on earth but don’t share your real name and a link to your Blog and/or website if you have one.
To me, that means you have no credibility at all.
This much I do know. You do not know very much at all about me. And as long as you hide behind an anonymous name making outrages opinionated claims, to me you will always be a troll.
And I’m not going to click any links you share. Since you are anonymous, there is no way to tell where those links lead. They could be Trojan horse traps. Trolls do crap like that.
The David Sirota article is extremely incriminating. The Saudis have gotten special treatment from every administration going back decades. They gave money to UCSB about 20 years ago to establish an Ibn Saud Chair of political science, and some professors there use maps that do not show Israel…whores for Saudi cash, yet true believers . These Saudis are most dangerous Islamists but they curry Western good will for their oil. That is what is most disgusting. They peddle wahabi theology and Sharia Law, support madrassas world wide which teach young boys to hate America, yet they are our allies….what crap.
The Clinton Foundation took multi millions from them and also from UAR.
This behavior compares to Trump University like a bowling ball to a marble. I have NO enthusiasm for the Clintons…and wish it would all disappear. And Bernie just gave the same vacuous words today on Meet the Press, but he looked better than he did when campaigning…he actually combed his hair. but we will never see free college and universal health care. It is all smoke and mirrors.
For me, it is a season of despair. Sorry Diane…I cannot agree about Hillary. I feel that we are in disaster mode in the US. Either candidate will not serve us well. We are on the verge of anarchy and civil altercations.
I agree that the David Sirota article is interesting, but it isn’t incriminating in the way people want it to be.
Lots of governments gave huge amounts of money. Some also got excellent arms or otherwise helpful deals and some didn’t. The ones who got the best deals were sometimes getting them as part of the huge agreements that had been approved by Congress the year before. Some governments who gave the most didn’t get any arms. Some who gave very little did.
President Obama approved those arms deals. Unless you think he said “well suddenly my Secy of State wants to sell billions in arms to our enemies but I won’t ask any questions as to why”, you have to think that President Obama is either the stupidest man in the world or perhaps getting paid off himself? Corrupt?
Do I wish the US didn’t sell arms to anyone? Yes. Do I wish the Obama regime had stopped arms sales — Yes. Do I blame Hillary Clinton for President Obama’s decision to keep selling arms because he was obviously controlled by her and would do anything she said without question. No.
Do I think this is the press continuing to attack a Clinton until they find something? Of course. Remember when Bernie Sanders stole public money? You don’t? Here it is: ” Rep. Bernard Sanders’ wife Jane was paid about $30,000 from 2002 to 2004 for work on his campaigns, while his stepdaughter Carina Driscoll got about $65,000 over a five-year period ending last year, a Sanders aide said Wednesday.”
What? Instead of volunteering for him his own family demanded payment to work for him? What is wrong with them that they had to be bribed? They are money grubbing people who should be drummed out of politics.
I don’t believe that, but that’s the kind of characterization every Hillary Clinton action gets. And the good work she does is constantly ignored. People who buy into the hype from the right wing noise machine are going to be sadly disappointed when it is their beloved candidate who feels it next. And if you think the right wouldn’t have turned Bernie into a criminal by now had he won the nomination, you are more naive than I. Remember Obama getting his fancy Chicago house via some connection by that sleazy Chicago operative?
Curiosity will kill me, but what good things did Ms Clinton do?
Do you realize that when she was publicly demonized after the health care debacle (how dare she fight for universal health care!), she quietly went to work to put in the Children’s Health Plus program that provided low cost health insurance. No press. No acclaim. Just quietly working to get something in place that would help people.
FYI — maybe I am biased because I know a number of families who have used their program for their kids. Parents with good jobs who suddenly get laid off and can’t afford $1,000/month to continue their family coverage. Thanks to Hillary, their kids could get low cost health insurance and were able to get their annual visits and immunizations and could see a doctor if they got sick. (Of course, the parents just went without, but the enemy of perfect isn’t nothing.)
John Kerry is continuing the policies of Hillary Clinton. Is it because of donors? Or is it because it the policies of Obama?
These e mails are of course NOT unimportant but the media strains at a gnat and swallows a camel. When life on our planet is at stake, when a president who must be considered unstable has his hand on our atomic weapons ad nauseum. for me the choice is clear.
I’d hate to have to pass that semi-digested camel!
Ah so….you Parent, come off like an angry and rude ideologue, and not a ‘careful reader’….but rather you prefer to insult us because we do not jump on your personal, somewhat distorted, bandwagon. Pity, since you are an activist it would seem…wonder how many folks you are turning off with your harsh attitude and denigration of those of us who have the temerity to not fall lockstep into your mold?
Hi Diane,
I appreciate your support for Clinton over Herr Drumpf, but this is inexcusable: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/02/hillary-clinton-emails-laptop-thumb-drive-archive-missing
As a former Army officer, had I or my subordinates done this, I would be in Leavenworth right now. I wish she’d step aside for Biden or Sanders or Kaine to run instead…
As a former Army officer, you no doubt know that General Petraus is serving a long, long sentence in Leavenworth right now.
David…I agree with you that any of those choices you mention would be better than Hillary…and I would prefer Russ Feingold who has proven himself. And for Repub, let’s get tRump off and have Olympia Snow run.
Olympia Snowe is awful.
She is personally responsible for the health care debacle (along with Obama himself). The ONLY plan she agreed not to filibuster (not to vote for) was one without a public option that was basically Romneycare. And then she had the chutzpah to vote against it.
When push comes to shove, she wants her job more than anything. She is terrified that the right would run a candidate in the primary to oppose her just like they did to every other Republican with any bit of ethics. Unlike most of the others, Snowe couldn’t kowtow to the far right fast enough. Anything to keep her job. And what’s worse is that she obviously knows better but doesn’t care.
It’s shocking that people on here think a complete sell out to the right like Olympia Snowe would be better than someone who spent her entire life fighting for the right things.
Hillary didn’t have some ultimate power as Secy of State to control President Obama. And yet she is blamed for every bad decision and given credit for no good ones. Why anyone would want a complete sell out to Karl Rove like Snowe instead of Clinton is truly beyond my understanding.
Petraus got an extremely generous deal and should be serving a long sentence. He did have to resign his position and did lose his security clearance, and can not be given access to classified information.
In other words, saying that army officers would be in Leavenworth is a lie.
Petraus was punished because he specifically gave his mistress access to classified material to help her. Did Hillary do that?
No, what Hillary did was what Colin Powell did, Rice did, and what is clear is not something she invented. Just think how different it might have been if Colin Powell’s e-mail had said simply ” you MUST use the blackberry, it is the law”.
He didn’t. Everything else is the typical stuff where if it is done by a Clinton, it is evil. “Hillary should have known that Colin Powell was an evil corrupt lawbreaking Secy of State and ignored his advice”. “But she used her own server instead of using AOL so that’s more dangerous!” And if she had used AOL and Powell had her own server, the criticism would be “but at least Powell knew about security and wasn’t stupid enough to think that AOL was secure! How can we ever have a President who is stupid enough to put their correspondence on AOL where everyone at the company has access? Why wasn’t she smart like Colin Powell and used a secure server.”
Hillary can’t win. I saw it with Bill during the Starr investigation. Every action is made to look corrupt even if every person in their job before them did the same thing. It is an impossible standard.
Anyone who thinks this is any different from the Benghazi investigation is naive and playing right into the hands of the right wing. It will be investigated and if the first, second, third, 10th and 15th investigation don’t prove something, we need to have another. Surely something bad will show up in the meantime.
I mean, look at Starr! Remember that Republican Robert B. Fiske just didn’t do a good job and we needed another 8 years of Ken Starr to stop the corruption of oral sex in the white house. Let’s get Ken Starr back to turn over every leaf for the next 8 years to find something — anything! — on Hillary.
Repying to NYC Parent (not sure why there is not reply button there): I’m sorry, but you are comparing apples to oranges. Petraeus (who ahd his career ruined by his misdeeds, btw), did give classified material to his mistress. However, Clinton and her subordinates mislaid, inexcusably lost and further utilized compromised systems (Gmail of all things) to handle material they knew was classified. Losing a laptop and a thumbdrive with everything on them–by sending through the US Mail (and not even registered or certified mail!) by itself is enough to lose one’s security clearance.
And what what was the motive? Or the reason for the “oh shit” moment described by her IT contractor when he saw the NY Times article?
FInally, as for the military, look up the case of Navy Chief Petty Officer McGuinness:
Navy Chief Petty Officer James F. McGuiness was found in 1989 to have accumulated more than 300 classified documents at his home during his 16 years as an intelligence operations specialist. At his trial, he said he had used the documents as reference material when he worked at night. Although there was no evidence that any secrets had been lost or stolen, McGuiness was sentenced to two years in prison. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/03/18/us-inconsistent-when-secrets-are-loose/6a928f72-d79b-430d-9c0b-93c67af05568/
David,
Again, according to you Colin Powell should be in jail. Instead of just advising Hillary Clinton that her legal obligation was to use the blackberry only, he explained what he had done and why.
According to you, Hillary Clinton should have known that Colin Powell was a criminal advising her to break the law. Instead of offering his best advice as to how to be a good Secy of State. Because whenever Colin Powell says something, we should expect that he is a criminal and his advice is illegal.
You are trying to make something that Rice and Powell did that they were not criticized for into a crime because Hillary Clinton did it. It’s pretty appalling – especially because Colin Powell’s e-mails were completely erased purposely. And he STILL told Clinton not to use the blackberry. Why?
Until you tell me why you think Colin Powell is a corrupt, law-breaking, unethical terrible man who should have been in jail, I don’t believe for a minute that you think Hillary did something bad.
By the way, Hillary “accumulated” 3 classified documents that were not even really classified by the state department. Her e-mail was safer than the many Republicans who have been caught with classified documents that are unheard of. And safer than Colin Powell’s AOL account. But if you want to criticize Hillary for not using AOL because you feel that would have been “safer” please make your case now.
But if not, quit holding her to a ridiculous standard. Quit saying that because she was stupid enough not to suspect that Colin Powell was traitorous evil man as you keep insisting he was that she lacks judgement. If you want every Presidential candidate to go on record saying that they know Colin Powell is a traitorous evil person who offers treasonous advice in order to make them eligible for President, then you will have a very long wait.
Which candidate do you think will say that? Trump? Bernie?
NYC PSP….you seem to have forgotten that it was Colin Powell who told the UN the huge lie about the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that were going to destroy the world, and sold them on the Cheney/Bush/Rice/Powell invasion of Iraq…the wrong country…but that too was all about appropriating their oil….Shell and Exxon made out very well. BTW, the oil companies are also donors to the Clinton Foundation.
I am back to wondering who I could possibly vote for…..
Ellen, read this and think again:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/opinion/hillary-clinton-gets-gored.html?ribbon-ad-idx=5&rref=opinion&module=Ribbon&version=context®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&pgtype=article
A number of INDEPENT organizations have recounted the 2000 votes, and ALL of them show that bush did come out ahead.
So perpetuating this story makes no sense.
I had just moved here, was a proud green card carrier – and not allowed to vote. No dog in that fight.
That Krugman article says it all.
The people on here who are falling for this are the same ones who decided Al Gore was too dishonest to be President, a serial liar and exaggerator (sound familiar?)
I can’t believe that this is 2000 all over again and that people who read this blog have such short term memories that they don’t realize they are being played for fools.
Played for fools. It’s shocking that it still works with some people.
NYC parent…you comments make so little sense and you jump from distilled issue in your own mind, to more of the same. You conflate so many issues into a pilel of cow dung that you lose all credibility. Al Gore now??? And to we, who do not think as you who are so distorted with emotion, you hurl epithets of nonsense and say we all are under the thumb of Karl Rove, we are naïve, we are just plain stupid….what comes next? Give it a rest.
Ellen Lubic,
I thought you were the person who supported Rafe Esquith. I apologize if I am wrong about that. You must have been like the others and decided that there was so much evidence of his sexual abuse of children and financial corruption in the LAUSD investigation report that of course he is guilty as sin. Just like Hillary.
There is as much evidence of Rafe’s corruption as there is of Hillary’s. Maybe they are both corrupt. I prefer to give them both the benefit of the doubt and not base my opinion on innuendo. 1 + 1 doesn’t equal 5. But that is what people say about Hillary. And Rafe. If you think they are both guilty as charged because the evidence “proves” it, then I disagree. But you won’t be alone in your certainly that Rafe and Hillary are terrible, corrupt people.
Even with proof that Trump and right wing hate media is wrong won’t stop them from repeating their misinformation and lies for the rest of HRC’s life.
And even with strong evidence of HRC’s major flaws and misdeeds, you won’t see her defenders stop deflecting the facts and reasons that are real, and defending her regardless.
Yes, it’s hard when a candidate isn’t perfect, but her smallest flaws are made into crimes while the real crimes her opponent does are considered business as usual.
Just like Bill Clinton was “guilty” of getting oral sex in the White House! That justified 6 years of Ken Starr’s investigation to you. You were so certain he was guilty of so much while Cheney/Bush were upright and honest, just like Trump.
“Her smallest flaws”….????? What do you teach your children in NY? I hope it is of small consequence…maybe like cooking or sewing. Oral sex showed what a narcissist Bill is and also many other things far worse that he did that you seem not to know about like NAFTA and Welfare to Work, but Hillary did incalculable potential damage to our national security….which she admitted to Congress repeatedly and which she has said herself was wrong.
Tonight on 60 Minutes there was a deep look into hacking. You should watch that and then tell us again if this was a “small flaw” of her’s to have many tens of thousands of government emails on her personal server in her basement, to have multiple phones, and then to have some smashed to smithereens.
We have two charlatans running for President…each day I find it harder the decide who is worse. I wish that they would both just disappear and we could start over. Out system is rotten…Dems are crooks…Reps are crooks…elections are shams.
Nothing new. For as long as I have voted, it has always been a choice between bad and badder. I measure by degree and not by black and white with no other choice allowed. To me, there are shades of grey and Donald Trump is completely rotten to his moldy, greedy, fraudulent heartless heart. I wouldn’t be surprised if his heart didn’t beat.
But Hillary does have a history that is not all rotten.
Daily Kos writes about her history of “A Passion for Children”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/1/26/1475685/-Hillary-Clinton-Ad-A-Passion-for-Children
And The Atlantic reports that HRC is more than just a symbol
“For decades, Clinton has prioritized bills and policies promoting reproductive rights, equal pay, and family leave, — far more so than Sanders.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/more-than-just-a-symbol/476490/
Ellen Lubic, I hate to say this, but you are being played for a fool.
HRC did what every other Secy of State did, under the express advisement of Colin Powell. Powell had every opportunity to warn her not to communicate via anything but the state issued blackberry and instead he warned her and told her he didn’t use it. And instead of using AOL like that treasonous Secy of State Powell, Hillary used a secure server that turned out not be hacked like the state’ department’s server was. She didn’t trust AOL like Powell and getting her own secure one was more intelligent than using AOL. And if she had done what Powell did and Powell had done what she did, you’d be attacking her for not be smart enough to set up her own secure server. She can’t win.
Just like Al Gore couldn’t win. Every action was a lie. Remember Love Story? He lied. Gore was a serial liar unlike the magical and honest George W. Bush and it’s sure good that the American people recognized an evil liar when they see one.
FYI — Bernie lies too. Bernie directed campaign funds directly to his family as “payment” for work on the campaign that should have been volunteer. $100,000 total over a number of years. Corrupt? I don’t think so, but unlike you, I can understand the difference between real corruption and what a Bernie-hating media would tell you to believe.
Think. Examine. Weigh. Quit believing there is something there because you just “know it” and if 7 investigations don’t prove it, surely the 20th will come up with something. You are better than that. Voters like you thought Al Gore was a crook. And voted for Bush. Or Nader. Because Gore was far too crooked to be President. Just like Hillary. Just like Obama.
There are no “saints” when it comes to politics. In fact, there are no “saints” when it comes to real life. Ever look closely at Mother Theresa?
If Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and Barack Obama — all of whom are “corrupt” by your standards — are’t good enough to be President, who is? Bernie? We already know he directed $100,000 to his own family as payment for campaign work. Say what? I voted for Bernie but I am under no illusion that any investigator given free reign to paw thorough every e-mail and action he ever took could drum out some that “appear” (as Ed Detective says) corrupt.
The problem is that good people like you have been fooled by the right. You hold more liberal candidates to an unreasonable standard and they know it. They use it. They play you and you say “do it again”.
Don’t vote for Gore! He is an evil liar. Don’t vote for Hillary! She is a traitor who happily sells out US interests for some donations to her foundation. It’s always been about money for Hillary, you say, so you gotta make sure Trump gets into office. So absurd and yet that’s what I see from your posts.
I don’t think Hillary is perfect. But her bio at the convention reminded me what she was always about. And I’m old enough to remember when she was attacked precisely for those far left socialist/commie views – she wanted the US to become a far left socialist nation! Now she is a crazy money-hungry traitor. It’s sad that people buy into that. Played for fools with Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch laughing at people like you all the way. You make their day. You keep them going because now they know it works.
The media are interested only on finding scandals that they can play with to lure readers. Our country faces serious problems. We should be talking issues, and the media should be reporting on issues.
Every biography of every President has exposed their flaws. JFK was a serial, almost obsessive womanizer. When FDR was elected and served, he fooled the public into believing he was able-bodied. Other than those close to him, no one knew he was paralyzed. He kept a mistress so he wasn’t completely paralyzed. Apparently, Eisenhower had a mistress. Truman was alleged to be part of a corrupt political machine. Somehow all those scandals are irrelevant when judging what these presidents did to help the country.
NY Parent…you jump to many conclusions about me, and about those of us here who are not Hillary lovers, but were avid Bernie supporters.
I have been writing on this blog for almost as long as Diane has had it up for educators to communicate (and she has also chosen to post various of my articles which are also published in LA Progressive, City Watch Today, Schools Matter, Solidaridad, Down with Tyranny, California Political Review, Op Ed, and many other online news sources). And as the old timers here know, I am from the perspective of the LEFT.
Most of the educators here, for the past year, have been Bernie followers, and most of us said ‘NEVER Hillary’ for many reasons which we carefully studied about her performance over her entire adult lifetime. So you need not insult my, and our, ability to learn and reason about politics with educated critical thinking skills. FERP gets an opening here….since my field of study is public policy which I have been writing about and teaching in higher ed for over 45 years. I do not think mass media, and hysterical commentators, have ever influenced my vote.
It is interesting, and sad, IMO, to have voices who see neither the shades of gray, the dichotomy, that Lloyd mentioned above, nor the sincere and studied positions of others like Ed Det, but rather jump to conclusions about our intelligence and ability to make our own decisions. You, Parent, refuse to identify yourself so you cannot be googled…most of the teachers and others however, do identify themselves, so it is possible to find their longer and broader views online.
I was going to apologize for my remarks yesterday when I inferred you should stick to cooking and sewing to teach your own children, but have changed my mind with your continued rants. You seem to know very little about how the Clintons (in his first term Bill repeatedly said we got “a twofer” with Hillary) shaped policy that increased homeless families in America with Welfare to Work, and also increased lousy health care services for many, and helped destroy our country as a manufacturer of products…. by encouraging off shoring, see NAFTA, (insuring job loss and low wages here), and also caused the world’s economic collapse by colluding to deregulate with Rubin, Summers, Gramm, etc, and Wall Street, to kill Glass Steagall. Before you point fingers at others, it might be a good idea for you to expand your knowledge about Hillary, and Bill, and their actual history.
And you are also full of misinformation about Petraeus…he is not wasting away in Leavenworth.
Ellen Lubic,
I apologize for my tone. I respect the work you do very much. I think that is why I am so frustrated that if someone like you has been convinced by the right wing noise machine, what hope do we have? Trump has an excellent chance of winning.
I voted for Bernie in the primary. Please be under no illusions that I am a knee-jerk Hillary supporter because she is a woman.
I also voted for Barack Obama when he ran in the primary against Hillary in 2008. I remember thinking back then that Hillary was going to be attacked by the media and she couldn’t win and she shouldn’t be the candidate. The intervening years — when she was a respected Secy of State — made me hopeful. Until the right wing scandal machine started up again.
I voted against Jimmy Carter in 1980 because I thought he was “too conservative”. Sound familiar? I supported Ted Kennedy in the primary and in the general election happily voted for John Anderson. I still recall not understanding why my friend was so angry at me. I was doing the right thing! I knew Jimmy Carter was a corrupt man who shouldn’t get a 2nd term.
Then came 2000. Al Gore was given the Hillary treatment — we were all supposed to think he was the world’s biggest liar. Helped by an angry left and a delighted right wing noise machine, people who should have been more suspicious of the characterization didn’t support him. They believed there was something so fundamentally hateful about Al Gore that anyone else was better. Just like my opinion of Jimmy Carter was shaped by a similar belief that he was fundamentally so corrupt that anyone was better.
Now we see otherwise intelligent people buying into the falsehood that there is something fundamentally so corrupt about Hillary Clinton that they just can’t support her. You sound just like me when I thought Jimmy Carter was that corrupt. I was certain I was right and nothing would convince me otherwise. Hello President Reagan! At least he wasn’t Jimmy Carter, corrupt to the bone.
I am under no illusions that Hillary Clinton is perfect. You are the one who seems to be under the illusion that she is corrupt to the bone. If you want to not vote for her based on her positions on NAFTA or welfare or something else, I respect that. I voted against Carter for very similar reasons as did many others (and he probably would not have won anyway). But I realize now that my search for the perfect liberal and rejection of Carter gave us Reagan.
Where I object is the lie that she is especially corrupt and sold the office of Secy of State to the highest bidder. It is outrageous. And if it were true, then John Kerry and Barack Obama are apparently in on the crime.
Answer me this: how did the policies of the state dept. change when John Kerry took over. Did he stop the corruption you are so certain the Hillary made sure happened to enrich her personal bank account? Because either Kerry is corrupt, or he took action to make sure the corruption that you are so certain Hillary caused was ended.
From vanity fair in 2007
As he was running for president, Al Gore said he’d invented the Internet; announced that he had personally discovered Love Canal, the most infamous toxic-waste site in the country; and bragged that he and Tipper had been the sole inspiration for the golden couple in Erich Segal’s best-selling novel Love Story (made into a hit movie with Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal). He also invented the dog, joked David Letterman, and gave mankind fire.
Could such an obviously intelligent man have been so megalomaniacal and self-deluded to have actually said such things? Well, that’s what the news media told us, anyway. And on top of his supposed pomposity and elitism, he was a calculating dork: unable to get dressed in the morning without the advice of a prominent feminist (Naomi Wolf).
Today, by contrast, Gore is “the Goreacle,” the elder statesman of global activism, and something of a media darling. He is the Bono of the environment, the Cassandra of Iraq, the star of an Oscar-winning film, and a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. To the amusement of his kids, some people now actually consider him cool. “If you had told me 10 years ago that people were going to be appealing to me for tickets to a hot rock concert through my parents, I would have fallen over,” says his daughter Karenna Gore Schiff, 34, referring to the Live Earth 24-hour extravaganza in July.
What happened to Gore? The story promoted by much of the media today is that we’re looking at a “new Gore,” who has undergone a radical transformation since 2000—he is now passionate and honest and devoted to issues he actually cares about. If only the old Gore could have been the new Gore, the pundits say, history might have been different.
But is it really possible for a person—even a Goreacle—to transform himself so radically? There’s no doubt that some things have changed about Al Gore since 2000. He has demonstrated inner strength, rising from an excruciating defeat that would have crushed many men. Beyond that, what has changed is that he now speaks directly to the public; he has neither the patience nor the need to go through the media.
Eight years ago, in the bastions of the “liberal media” that were supposed to love Gore—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, CNN—he was variously described as “repellent,” “delusional,” a vote-rigger, a man who “lies like a rug,” “Pinocchio.” Eric Pooley, who covered him for Time magazine, says, “He brought out the creative-writing student in so many reporters.… Everybody kind of let loose on the guy.”
How did this happen? Was the right-wing attack machine so effective that it overwhelmed all competing messages? Was Gore’s communications team outrageously inept? Were the liberal elite bending over backward to prove they weren’t so liberal?
Eight years later, journalists, at the prompting of Vanity Fair, are engaging in some self-examination over how they treated Gore. As for Gore himself, for the first time, in this article, he talks about the 2000 campaign and the effect the press had on him and the election. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that my father, Martin Peretz, was his teacher at Harvard and is an ardent, vocal Gore backer. I contributed to his campaign in February 1999. Before reporting this article, however, I’d had maybe two passing exchanges with Gore in my life.) Gore wasn’t eager to talk about this. He doesn’t blame the media for his loss in 2000. Yet he does believe that his words were distorted and that certain major reporters and outlets were often unfair.
How does he feel about it all? “I feel fine,” he says, “but, when I say that, I’m reminded of a story that Cousin Minnie Pearl used to tell about a farmer who was involved in an accident and sued for damages.” To paraphrase, at the trial the lawyer for the driver of the other car cross-examined the farmer, saying, “Isn’t it true that right after the accident, you said, ‘I feel fine’?” The farmer said, “Well, it’s not the simple,” before going on to explain that the other car rammed into him, throwing both him and his cow from his car. When a highway patrolman came by and saw the cow struggling, he shot him between the eyes. The farmer continued, “The patrolman then came to my side and said, ‘How do you feel?’… so I said, ‘I feel fine.'”
THE WONK VERSUS THE FRAT BOY
The media began the coverage of the 2000 election with an inclination not so different from that demonstrated in other recent elections—they were eager for simple, character-driven narratives that would sell papers and get ratings. “Particularly in presidential elections … we in the press tend to deal in caricatures,” says Dan Rather, who was then anchoring for CBS. “Someone draws a caricature, and it’s funny and at least whimsical. And at first you sort of say, ‘Aw shucks, that’s too simple.’ In the course of the campaign, that becomes accepted wisdom.” He notes, “I do not except myself from this criticism.”
In 2000, the media seemed to focus on a personality contest between Bush, the folksy Texas rogue, and, as The New York Times referred to Gore, “Eddie Haskell,” the insincere brownnoser from Leave It to Beaver. ABC anchor Claire Shipman, who covered the 2000 campaign for NBC, says, “It was almost a drama that was cast before anyone even took a good look at who the candidates were.”
George Bush made it easy—he handed them a character on a plate. He had one slogan—compassionate conservatism—and one promise aimed squarely at denigrating Bill Clinton: to restore honor and integrity to the White House. He was also perceived to be fun to be with. For 18 months, he pinched cheeks, bowled with oranges in the aisles of his campaign plane, and playacted flight attendant. Frank Bruni, now the restaurant critic for The New York Times but then a novice national political-beat reporter for the same newspaper, wrote affectionately of Bush’s “folksy affability,” “distinctive charm,” “effortless banter,” and the feather pillow that he traveled with.
But Gore couldn’t turn on such charm on cue. “He doesn’t pinch cheeks,” says Tipper. “Al’s not that kind of guy.” With Gore still vice president, there was a certain built-in formality and distance that reporters had to endure. Having served the public for nearly 25 years in different roles—from congressman legislating the toxic-waste Superfund to vice president leading the charge to go into Bosnia—Gore could not be reduced to a sound bite. As one reporter put it, they were stuck with “the government nerd.” “The reality is,” says Eli Attie, who was Gore’s chief speechwriter and traveled with him, “very few reporters covering the 2000 campaign had much interest in what really motivated Gore and the way he spent most of his time as vice president: the complexities of government and policy, and not just the raw calculus of the campaign trail.”
Muddying the waters further was the fact that the Gore campaign early on was in a state of disarray—with a revolving door of staffers who didn’t particularly see the value in happy chitchat. “We basically treated the press with a whip and a chair … and made no real effort to schmooze at all,” says Gore strategist Carter Eskew. “I fault myself.” It was plain to the reporters that this was not the tight ship of Bush’s campaign, led by the “iron triangle” of Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and Joe Allbaugh.
“The campaign went through several official slogans,” says The New York Times’s Katharine Seelye, who would become one of the more critical reporters who covered Gore. “They had a hard time latching onto a clear idea of what the campaign was about. [Democratic strategist] James Carville once said to me that if you want reporters to write about hamburger, you give them hamburger. You don’t give them French fries and ice cream.”
Gore needed to give them hamburger, as Carville put it—a simple, dramatic character; a simple, dramatic story line; a 10-word slogan. If Gore couldn’t provide it, the press would. As the campaign wore on, the media found a groove they could settle into: wonk so desperate to become president he’ll do or say anything, even make stuff up. It complemented perfectly the other son of a politician running for president: irresistible frat boy who, when it came to the presidency, could take it or leave it.
The seeds of Gore’s caricature had been planted in 1997 when he, the presumptive candidate for 2000, made a passing comment about Erich Segal’s Love Story, over the course of a two-hour interview with Time’s Karen Tumulty and The New York Times’s Richard Berke, for profiles they were writing. Tumulty recounts today that, while casually reminiscing about his days at Harvard and his roommate, the future actor Tommy Lee Jones, Gore said, It’s funny—he and Tipper had been models for the couple in his friend Erich Segal’s Love Story, which was Jones’s first film. Tumulty followed up, “Love Story was based on you and Tipper?” Gore responded, “Well, that’s what Erich Segal told reporters down in Tennessee.”
As it turned out, The Nashville Tennessean, the paper Gore was referring to, had said Gore was the model for the character of Oliver Barrett. But the paper made a small mistake. There was some Tommy Lee Jones thrown in, too. “The Tennessean reporter just exaggerated,” Segal has said. And Tipper was not the model for Jenny.
In her story, Tumulty and co-author Eric Pooley treated the anecdote as an offhand comment. But political opinion writers at The New York Times, it seems, interpreted the remark as a calculated political move on Gore’s part. “It’s somewhat suspicious that Mr. Gore has chosen this moment to drop the news—unknown even to many close friends and aides,” wrote Times columnist Maureen Dowd. “Does he think, going into 2000, that this will give him a romantic glow, or a romantic afterglow?” Times columnist Frank Rich followed it up. “What’s bizarre,” he wrote, “if all too revealing … is not that he inflated his past but that he would think that being likened to the insufferable preppy Harvard hockey player Oliver Barrett 4th was something to brag about in the first place.”
Tumulty says she was stunned at seeing Gore’s remark being turned into a “window onto his soul” in the pages of The New York Times and elsewhere: “I’m in the middle of this gigantic media frenzy. It had truly, truly been an offhanded comment by Gore. And it suddenly turns into this big thing that probably continues to dog him for the rest of the campaign.”
CAUGHT IN THE WEB
The Love Story distortion set the stage for the “I Invented the Internet” distortion, a devastating piece of propaganda that damaged Gore at the starting gate of his run. On March 9, 1999, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer conducted an interview with Gore shortly before he officially announced his candidacy. In answer to a question about why Democrats should support him, Gore spoke about his record. “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative”—politico-speak for leadership—”in creating the Internet,” he said, before going on to describe other accomplishments. It was true. In the 1970s, the Internet was a limited tool used by the Pentagon and universities for research. As a senator in the 80s, Gore sponsored two bills that turned this government program into an “information superhighway,” a term Gore popularized, and made it accessible to all. Vinton Cerf, often called the father of the Internet, has claimed that the Internet would not be where it was without Gore’s leadership on the issue. Even former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich has said that “Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet.”
The press didn’t object to Gore’s statement until Texas Republican congressman Dick Armey led the charge, saying, “If the vice president created the Internet, then I created the interstate highway system.” Republican congressman James Sensenbrenner released a statement with the headline, delusions of grandeur: vice president gore takes credit for creating the internet. CNN’s Lou Dobbs was soon calling Gore’s remark “a case study … in delusions of grandeur.” A few days later the word “invented” entered the narrative. On March 15, a USA Today headline about Gore read, inventing the internet; March 16 on Hardball, Chris Matthews derided Gore for his claim that he “invented the Internet.” Soon the distorted assertion was in the pages of the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, and on the A.P. wire service. By early June, the word “invented” was actually being put in quotation marks, as though that were Gore’s word of choice. Here’s how Mimi Hall put it in USA Today: “A couple of Gore gaffes, including his assertion that he ‘invented’ the Internet, didn’t help.” And Newsday’s Elaine Povich ridiculed “Gore’s widely mocked assertion that he ‘invented’ the Internet.” (Thanks to the Web site the Daily Howler, the creation of Bob Somerby, a college roommate of Gore’s, we have a chronicle of how the Internet story spiraled out of control.)
Belatedly attempting to defuse the situation, Gore joked about it on Imus in the Morning, saying that he “was up late the night before … inventing the camcorder.” But it was too late—the damage had been done.
THE BEAT GOES ON
As with all campaigns, the coverage of the 2000 election would be driven by a small number of beat reporters. In this case, two women at the most influential newspapers in the country: Seelye from The New York Times and Ceci Connolly from The Washington Post.
A prominent Washington journalist describes them as “edgy, competitive, wanting to make their mark,” and adds that they “reinforced each other’s prejudices.”
“It was like they’d been locked in a room, and they were just pumping each other up,” says Gore strategist Carter Eskew.
“They just wanted to tear Gore apart,” says a major network correspondent on the trail. (Both refute such characterizations of themselves. “Why would reporters [from] major news organizations confer with the competition on such a fiercely competitive story?” asks Connolly.)
Building on the narrative established by the Love Story and Internet episodes, Seelye, her critics charge, repeatedly tinged what should have been straight reporting with attitude or hints at Gore’s insincerity. Describing a stump speech in Tennessee, she wrote, “He also made an appeal based on what he described as his hard work for the state—as if a debt were owed in return for years of service.” Writing how he encouraged an audience to get out and vote at the primary, she said, “Vice President Al Gore may have questioned the effects of the internal combustion engine, but not when it comes to transportation to the polls. Today he exhorted a union audience in Knoxville, Iowa, to pile into vans—not cars, but gas-guzzling vans—and haul friends to the Iowa caucuses on January 24.” She would not just say that he was simply fund-raising. “Vice President Al Gore was back to business as usual today—trolling for money,” she wrote. In another piece, he was “ever on the prowl for money.”
The disparity between her reporting and Bruni’s coverage of Bush for the Times was particularly galling to the Gore camp. “It’s one thing if the coverage is equal—equally tough or equally soft,” says Gore press secretary Chris Lehane. “In 2000, we would get stories where if Gore walked in and said the room was gray we’d be beaten up because in fact the room was an off-white. They would get stories about how George Bush’s wing tips looked as he strode across the stage.” Melinda Henneberger, then a political writer at the Times, says that such attitudes went all the way up to the top of the newspaper. “Some of it was a self-loathing liberal thing,” she says, “disdaining the candidate who would have fit right into the newsroom, and giving all sorts of extra time on tests to the conservative from Texas. Al Gore was a laughline at the paper, while where Bush was concerned we seemed to suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations.” (Seelye’s and Bruni’s then editors declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Connolly, too, at The Washington Post, wrote about Gore’s “grubbing for dollars inside a monastery,” and “stretching the [fund-raising] rules as far as he can.” Her stories about the distortions extended the life of the distortions themselves. In one article, she knocked Gore for “the hullabaloo over the Internet—from [his] inflated claim to his slowness to tamp out the publicity brush fire.” In another, co-written with David Von Drehle, she claimed, “From conservative talk radio titan Rush Limbaugh and the New York Post (headline: ‘Liar, Liar’) to neutral papers across the country, the attack on Gore’s credibility is resonating.”
When Lehane and his communications partner, Mark Fabiani, selectively granted access, Connolly, for reasons Gore staffers say are obvious, was rarely favored and experienced it as an attack. “The ‘Masters of Disaster,’ as [Lehane and Fabiani] like to be called, spent an inordinate amount of time attacking various reporters and pitting journalists against each other and generally trying to steer the subject away from a troubled campaign,” Connolly says today. (Lehane had no comment.)
But eventually, Gore staffers came to feel that if Connolly was denied the access or information she wanted there would be a price to pay in terms of her coverage. In one of her pieces Carter Eskew, a former tobacco-industry adviser, was described in a quote as being “single-handedly accountable for addicting another whole generation of American kids” to smoking. When asked about the article, Eskew recalls how Connolly had called him the day before for a comment about an environmental group’s endorsement of Bill Bradley. After he gave her something perfunctory, he says, she went after him. “She goes, ‘That’s all you’re going to say?'” recalls Eskew. “And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s all we’re going to say.’ And she goes, ‘Do you know how stupid that is, Carter?’ And then she threatened me, ‘Well, if that’s the kind of relationship you want to have with me, then you’ll find out the kind of relationship we’re going to have’—something to that effect.” (“I never threatened Carter Eskew,” says Connolly. “It’s possible I pressed him for something more than a ‘perfunctory’ answer.… It’s odd that he would think my story was journalistically out of bounds or retribution for something as trivial as a mediocre quote.”)
TOXIC COVERAGE
On December 1, 1999, Connolly—and Seelye—misquoted Gore in a damning way. Their error was picked up elsewhere and repeated, and snowballed into a political nightmare. Gore was speaking to a group of students at Concord High School, in New Hampshire, about how young people could effect change. He described a letter he had received as a congressman in 1978 from a girl in Toone, Tennessee, about how her father and grandfather had gotten mysteriously ill. He had looked into the matter and found that the town was a toxic-waste site. He went on:
“I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue and Toone, Tennessee. That was the one you didn’t hear of, but that was the one that started it all.… We passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dumpsites, and we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country.… It all happened because one high-school student got involved.”
Jill Hoffman, a high-school senior in the audience who was helping to film the event, says, “I remember thinking, I really, really like what he has to say.” But what Seelye and Connolly zeroed in on was Gore yet again claiming credit for something he didn’t do—”discovering” Love Canal (which was, in fact, discovered by the people who lived there). In addition to mischaracterizing his somewhat ambiguous statement, they misquoted him, claiming he said, “I was the one that started it all,” instead of “that was the one that started it all.” The next day, Seelye offered a friendlier account of Gore’s visit to the school. Connolly repeated the misquote. In an article titled “First ‘Love Story,’ Now Love Canal,” she wrote:
The man who mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie “Love Story” and to have invented the Internet says he didn’t quite mean to say he discovered a toxic waste site when he said at a high school forum Tuesday in New Hampshire: “I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal.” Gore went on to brag about holding the “first hearing on that issue” and said “I was the one that started it all.”
The story picked up steam. “I was the one that started it all” became a quote featured in U.S. News & World Report and was repeated on the chat shows. On ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos said, “Gore, again, revealed his Pinocchio problem. Says he was the model for Love Story, created the Internet. And this time he sort of discovered Love Canal.” On two consecutive nights of Hardball, Chris Matthews brought up this same trio as examples of Gore’s “delusionary” thinking. “What is it, the Zelig guy who keeps saying, ‘I was the main character in Love Story. I invented the Internet. I invented Love Canal.…’ It reminds me of Snoopy thinking he’s the Red Baron.” “It became part of the vocabulary,” Matthews says today. “I don’t think it had a thunderous impact on the voters.” He concedes, however, that such stories were repeated too many times in the media.
Seelye would later write a story with John Broder under the headline questions of veracity have long dogged gore and provided “familiar and fairly trivial examples,” including his “taking credit for inventing the Internet or being the model for … Love Story.” Asked today why those discredited allegations of misstatements were included, Seelye says, “Probably because they were ones that everyone had heard of. We did write that they were ‘trivial,’ but if that was the case, we should have left them out or debunked them.”
Perhaps reporting in this vein was just too gratifying to the press for it to stop. As Time magazine’s Margaret Carlson admitted to Don Imus at the time, “You can actually disprove some of what Bush is saying if you really get into the weeds and get out your calculator, or look at his record in Texas. But it’s really easy, and it’s fun to disprove Al Gore. As sport, and as our enterprise, Gore coming up with another whopper is greatly entertaining to us.”
A study conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 76 percent of stories about Gore in early 2000 focused on either the theme of his alleged lying or that he was marred by scandal, while the most common theme about Bush was that he was “a different kind of Republican.”
At the time, the only people seeming to notice the media’s missteps were journalists at the fringes or out of the mainstream, including Somerby of the Daily Howler, Robert Parry on consortiumnews.com, and Eric Boehlert on Salon, as well as mere citizens who had no outlet but the telephone. These last included the Concord High students, who were trying to correct the record on Love Canal. The footage was reviewed by a teacher, Joanne McGlynn, the day after the initial Love Canal stories ran. McGlynn spotted the discrepancy between Gore’s actual words and what was being reported, and phoned the relevant news outlets to alert them. The Times and the Post printed the correction … about a week later. But by that time the story had been echoed widely and was accepted as fact.
Connolly contends that the misquote “did not dramatically change the point he was trying to make” and that “the Love Canal reference was near the end of a story that ran deep inside the paper.” (Page A-10.)
At least one reporter who either made or repeated the misquote was not thrilled to have been corrected by high-school students and their teacher. Sometime after the Love Canal stories came out, Hoffman, the high-school senior, went to see Gore speak again at an event in New Hampshire. There she was introduced to one of the reporters who’d gotten it wrong. The reporter, Hoffman said, made it clear her help in fixing the misquote was not appreciated, and said that the article was written very fast, while riding in a van. “It’s amazing what one word can do to a person’s integrity,” says Hoffman today.
Gore responded to episodes like these by distancing himself from the beat reporters, which puzzled them. “Some of these reporters would write ruthlessly unfair pieces about him and then come complain to me in private, ‘Gore could’ve been friendlier to me at that cocktail party,'” recalls Gore speechwriter Eli Attie. To this day, Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz, who spent time traveling with both candidates, wonders why Gore remained “secluded in the front cabin [of the plane]” and didn’t engage in chitchat. “Everything is fair game in a presidential campaign,” says Kurtz, “and part of the test of any candidate is how he deals with an often skeptical press corps.… The press sets up a series of obstacle courses … and if you are Al Gore and considered to be super-smart, yet not particularly gregarious, it’s the moments of awkwardness or misstatements that are going to get media attention. If Gore had had a lighter touch, he probably could have overcome that.”
RUNNING THE GAUNTLET
One obstacle course the press set up was which candidate would lure voters to have a beer with them at the local bar. “Journalists made it seem like that was a legitimate way of choosing a president,” says Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter. “They also wrongly presumed, based on nothing, that somehow Bush was more likable.” Chris Matthews contends that “the likability issue was something decided by the viewers of the debates, not by the commentators,” but adds, “The last six years have been a powerful bit of evidence that we have to judge candidates for president on their preparation for the office with the same relish that we assess their personalities.”
Maureen Dowd boiled the choice between Gore and Bush down to that between the “pious smarty-pants” and the “amiable idler,” and made it perfectly clear which of the presidential candidates had a better chance of getting a date. “Al Gore is desperate to get chicks,” she said in her column. “Married chicks. Single chicks. Old chicks. Young chicks. If he doesn’t stop turning off women, he’ll never be president.”
“I bet he is in a room somewhere right now playing Barry White CDs and struggling to get mellow,” she wrote in another.
Meanwhile, though Dowd certainly questioned Bush’s intellect in some columns, she seemed to be charmed by him—one of the “bad boys,” “rascals,” and a “rapscallion.” She shared with the world a charged moment between them. “‘You’re so much more mature now,’ I remarked to the Texas Governor. ‘So are you,’ he replied saucily.” And in another column: “You don’t often get to see a Presidential candidate bloom right before your eyes.”
As the Daily Howler noted, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams went after Gore’s clothes at least five times in one week. “Here is a guy taking off his suits.… This is the casual sweater look—what’s going on here?” … “He would have been in a suit a month ago.” … “He’s wearing these polo shirts that don’t always look natural on him.” Williams’s frequent guest Newsweek’s Howard Fineman later chimed in: “I covered his last presidential campaign, in 1988. One day he was in the conservative blue suit, the next he was playing lumberjack at the V.F.W. hall in New Hampshire.”
Maureen Dowd’s June 16, 1999, New York Times column.
And Gore just kept going on about issues. Alluding to five speeches he made in two months on education, crime, the economy, faith-based organizations, and cancer research, Seelye wrote, “Mr. Gore becomes almost indignant when asked if his avalanche of positions might overwhelm voters.” The Washington Post’s David Broder later found Gore too focused in his convention speech on what he’d do as president. “But, my, how he went on about what he wants to do as president,” wrote Broder. “I almost nodded off.” As for the environment, while Gore was persuaded by his consultants not to talk about it as much as he would have liked, whenever he did, many in the media ignored it or treated it as comedy. Dowd wrote in one column that “Al Gore is so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct, he’s practically lactating.” In another, referring to his consideration of putting a Webcam in the Oval Office, she wrote, “I have zero desire to see President Gore round the clock, putting comely interns to sleep with charts and lectures on gaseous reduction.”
The trivial continued to dominate during the postmortem following Gore and Bush’s first debate, on October 3, 2000. The television media were sure Gore won—at first. But then Republican operatives promptly spliced together a reel of Gore sighing, which was then sent to right-wing radio outlets. Eighteen hours later, the pundits could talk of little else. “They could hear you audibly sighing or sounding exasperated as Governor Bush was answering questions,” Katie Couric scolded him the next day on the Today show. “Do you think that’s presidential behavior?” For the Times’s Frank Bruni, the sighs weren’t as galling as Gore’s familiarity with the names of foreign leaders. “It was not enough for Vice President Al Gore to venture a crisp pronunciation of Milosevic, as in Slobodan,” he wrote. “Mr. Gore had to go a step further, volunteering the name of Mr. Milosevic’s challenger Vojislav Kostunica.”
As Jonathan Alter points out, “Overall, the press was harder on Gore than it was on Bush.… The consequences of [that] in such a close election were terrifying.”
Gore couldn’t believe his eyes when he read distortions about him printed in the country’s most respected newspapers, say those in his inner circle. “It stung to have the political media, the elite political media, buy into this crap,” says Roy Neel, his close friend and adviser of 30 years, about the press coverage. “But I don’t recall him ever blaming the media for the problems he was having.”
Indeed, Gore accepts responsibility for not being able to communicate more clearly with the public. He admits, however, that the tendency of the press to twist his words encumbered his ability to speak freely. “I tried not to let it [affect my behavior],” Gore says. “But if you know that day after day the filter is going to be so distorted, inevitably that has an impact on the kinds of messages that you try and force through the filter. Anything that involves subtlety or involves trusting the reporters in their good sense and sense of fairness in interpretation, you’re just not going to take a risk with something that could be easily distorted and used against you.… You’re reduced to saying, ‘Today, here’s the message: reduce pollution,’ and not necessarily by XYZ out of fear that it will be, well, ‘Today he talked about belching cows!'”
According to Gore, bringing up the Internet again in public was like stepping on a verbal land mine. “If I had tried in the wake of that to put expressions about the Internet in campaign speeches, it would have been difficult,” he says. “I did, of course, from time to time. But I remember many occasions where I would say something about the Internet, and as soon as the word ‘Internet’ came from my lips, the press would be snickering and relishing the mention. Not everybody in the press, but the Zeitgeist was polluted, and it never dissipated, because the stream of pollution coming into it was constant, constant.”
The notion that he was prickly or unpleasant to reporters doesn’t jibe with what Tipper witnessed. From her viewpoint, he remained gracious with the reporters—even at an event during the campaign, when Maureen Dowd sidled up in the middle of a conversation he was having with two other reporters. “He stood up and got her a chair and said, ‘Please, join us.'” After Dowd had written about him “lactating,” he agreed to an interview with her, answering questions about his favorite this, his favorite that. According to his staffers, she was a fact of life that would have to be endured.
The Gores, a famously close-knit family, could laugh at the coverage some. They joked around at the nonstop talk about which president you’d want to have a beer with. The Gore’s middle daughter, Kristin, pointed out, “Gee, I want the designated driver as my president.” But down deep they weren’t laughing. “The sighs, the sighs, the sighs,” says Gore, of the debate coverage. “Within 18 hours, they had turned perception around to where the entire story was about me sighing. And that’s scary. That’s scary.”
THE COMEBACK
After the election the Gores, heartbroken, traveled in Europe for two months. “We were roadkill,” admits Tipper. “It took a long time to pick ourselves up from what happened.” Gore grew a beard while he was there. After he stepped back onto U.S. soil, the press began knocking him around again for his latest “re-invention.” Ceci Connolly, who had become a contributor on Fox News in 2000, said, “Looks like he’s ready to go, but go where? Back to Europe with his backpack?” Later, in the Los Angeles Times, Jack Germond wrote, “He should have shed the beard before coming back. Instead, he continues to wear it in what is being interpreted as a signal of another ‘new’ Gore.”
Over the course of Bush’s early months in office, the Gores watched in profound disappointment as Bush rolled back many important environmental regulations of the Clinton-Gore years. But, as Karenna says, “my father set the tone for our whole family in not dwelling. The way he publicly put his weight behind George Bush in the beginning, did not fan the flames, did not cause division—and there was every opportunity to do that—sent a very strong message to all of us to not be dragged down into anger and sadness about it but just to try to make the best of it.” After September 11, Gore stood by Bush, saying, “George Bush is my commander in chief.”
By September 2002, the country was on the march to war. Against the advice of some confidants, who suggested he might turn out to be on the wrong side of history, Gore spoke out against the invasion—fervently. On September 23, 2002, he articulated all the dangers that have now come to pass. The Washington Post’s Michael Kelly wrote about the speech, “It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible.” (Kelly was killed on April 3, 2003, in Iraq when his Humvee crashed while trying to evade enemy fire.) Fineman didn’t hold back in describing how the “Beltway/Broadway clan” now regarded Gore: “as an annoying and ungracious bore who should have the decency to get lost.”
In order to diversify and open up the messages coming out of the news media, Gore helped launch Current TV, an alternative channel that features viewer-generated content, thereby providing a dialogue with the medium. He also taught journalism, began working with Apple, and co-founded a business called Generation Investment Management. And, with the encouragement of Tipper, he dusted off the global-warming slide show in the attic of their Arlington, Virginia, home, the one that he had been delivering for 25 years to audiences as small as 10 and as large as 10,000. The first time he showed it, at Middle Tennessee State University, the slides were in backward and upside down. It would be turned into An Inconvenient Truth, win an Oscar, and help wake up the world to a global crisis.
Over the years since 2000, some journalists have attempted to reach out to the Gores. At a pro-choice event a few years ago, Time’s Karen Tumulty gave Tipper her card and asked her if she would ever want to talk. “When I saw her that night, she looked as though a gigantic weight had been lifted,” recalls Tumulty, who’d recently seen the couple agonizing over Gore’s political future. At the East Coast premiere of An Inconvenient Truth, the Gores bumped into Fineman, who recalls, “I said to [Gore], on a personal level, I want you to know that I admire you for the way you have stayed in the game and taken the mess of a few years ago and turned it around and become such a leader in this debate.” At the time, Tipper just said thanks and moved on, thinking to herself, Too little, too late, buddy. In retrospect, she appreciates the gesture.
Katharine Seelye, who still writes about national politics for The New York Times, has had time to reflect on her work: “I’m sure there were times my phrasing could have been better—you’re doing this on the fly. Sometimes you’re just looking for a different way to describe something that you have to write about over and over again,” she says. “But I think overall my coverage was tough-minded. A presidential campaign is for the most important, hardest job in the world. Shouldn’t the coverage be tough?” Connolly, still a staff writer at the Post but on a leave of absence, maintains that “the Washington Post political team, myself and a dozen other journalists, approached the Gore campaign no differently than any other—with aggressive, thorough, objective reporting.”
As for Dowd, a Democratic operative recalls running into her and having an argument with her about her columns on the 2000 debates, in which, he felt, she devoted as much attention to Gore’s sighing as she did to Bush’s not knowing that Social Security was a federal program. “I basically said, ‘How could you equate the two?'” he recalls. “‘How could Gore’s personal tics deserve as many column inches as the other guy being an idiot?’ And her defense was ‘Well, I voted for Gore.’ I thought, Well, that’s great. But hundreds of thousands of people who read your column probably didn’t.” (A source close to Dowd says that she does not write a partisan column, keeps her votes private, and certainly would not have disclosed that information to a political aide.)
Thanks to his newfound status, speculation about Gore’s entering the presidential race has refused to die down. Alas, he’s not going to announce his candidacy in the last paragraphs of a Vanity Fair article. “Modern politics seems to require and reward some capacities that I don’t think I have in abundance,” says Gore, “such as a tolerance for … spin rather than an honest discussion of substance.… Apparently, it comes easily for some people, but not for me.”
Tipper says he has made zero moves that would suggest a run for the presidency, but adds that if he turned to her one night and said he had to run, she’d get on board, and they’d discuss how to approach it this time around, given what they’ve learned.
The reporters and opinion-makers have eagerly chewed over the possibility. After all, he’s now a star. In step with the new enthusiasm for Gore, Dowd, in a February 2007 column, described him as “a man who was prescient on climate change, the Internet, terrorism, and Iraq,” a sentiment echoed by many. The pundits, however, invariably come around to the same question: “But if he ran, would he revert to the ‘old Gore’?” Another question—in light of countless recent stories about John Edwards’s haircut—might be: Would the media revert to the old media?
^^^by the way, my comment about Petraus was snarky. I replied to someone who insisted that every soldier would be in Leavenworth. The general did something far worse than Hillary — he purposely gave classified information to his mistress. Hillary didn’t leak classified material to anyone. And if 3 unmarked low-classified out of 30,0000 somehow got sent accidentally, it does not even come close to intentionally giving information to a mistress. If it did, almost every Congressmen and past Sec’y of State would be in Leavenworth now. Compared to them, Clinton’s security was pretty good.
I want to focus on Petraus’s mistress.
Paula Dean Broadwell was a former military officer in the U.S. Army as a military intelligence officer. She was approved for promotion to lieutenant colonel in the Reserves of August 2012. Her promotion and security clearance was revoked do to being under investigation by the army for the Petraus affair scandal.
AT the time of the affair, Broadwell was still a military officer in the reserves. She also applied for the FBI and was accepted but changed her mind to go to Harvard instead.
Petraus leaking classified information during bedroom talk between the sheets to another army officer who was cleared for and worked in military intelligence and had been accepted for a position in the FBI, after a scrutiny background check, is hardly a risk to national security.
If Petraus was going to have an affair, he couldn’t have made a better choice when it comes to national security.
Have you compared Holly to Paula? Petraus was a man before he was a general. I don’t blame him at all for having an affair with Paula.
He was talking about personal business because it will become freedom of information. Which is exactly what he said to the press. Amazing how twisted people make things. She is a liar in the past present and future. Leopards don’t change their spots.
Trump is a fraud, a liar and a bully.
How do you think he will deport 11 million people? Will we use Nazi tactics to drag them out of their apartments and homes? Will we have huge detention camps? Will we sew yellow stars on their jackets? This is the closest we have come to Fascism in my lifetime and you say Hillary is a liar. Compared to Trump, she is a saint.
Find me an elected representative that hasn’t lied. Even Bernie Sanders has been caught by fact checkers uttering a few false and misleading claims.
But when it comes to HRC, her haters ignore all that. She has to be judged separately as if there is no one else but her.
I’ve read that fact checkers, when they rated the lies of this election’s presidential candidates, almost every candidate beats HRC for the number of lies they tell, and Trump is the emperor of lies. But HRC haters seldom if ever mention that when they are slamming Hillary exclusively as if she is a skunk among cute kitties.
Joanne, was Trump telling the truth when he said Ted Cruz’ dad killed JFK?
Was Trump telling the truth when he said Obama was born in Kenya? (never mind, you probably believe that one)
If you believe that Ted Cruz’ dad killed JFK — and no doubt you do, Joanne — then I am sure that Donald Trump is your ideal of the kind of honest and trustworthy man you want your children to grow up being.
“. . . is a skunk among cute kitties.”
Gonna have to use that one Lloyd!!
Lloyd Lofthouse said:
Find me an elected representative that hasn’t lied.
This is the definition of a strawman argument, and it’s a shame to see you and even Diane using it so often to defend Hillary Clinton. It’s also a false dichotomy, since we’re not concerned with lying or not lying, but how often one lies, and the actions those lies have translated into. Lies are not all the same as each other.
I’ve read that fact checkers, when they rated the lies of this election’s presidential candidates, almost every candidate beats HRC for the number of lies they tell, and Trump is the emperor of lies. But HRC haters seldom if ever mention that when they are slamming Hillary exclusively as if she is a skunk among cute kitties.
Politicians lie more than most people, and their lies have worse consequences than most peoples’ lies. Republicans especially lie a lot, and so does Hillary Clinton. In the past I have called out your method of using Politifact as the arbiter of who is most truthful, several times, but you continue to use this bad argument. I guess there’s no point in explaining it for a third or fourth time. It appears you will continue to falsely believe that Hillary Clinton is equally as honest and sincere as someone like Bernie Sanders, which is what Politifact would tell us. Absurd! That result should debunk Polifact instantly.
Ed,
The issue is not which politician tells the truth most often, but which of the candidates will address the serious problems that our nation and our world faces.
Climate change is #1. Trump says it doesn’t exist.
Immigration reform is another. Trump promises to round up and deport 11 million people. I live in a semi-rural area where agriculture and construction would collapse without the people Trump wants to deport.
Working with our allies to secure peace is another. Trump is best at insulting people and frightening our allies with his irresponsible statements.
Appointing Supreme Court justices who will protect us and the Constitution is critical. Trump has promised to appoint only super conservative judges to please his white nationalist base.
I could go on but you know who he is: a bully, a misogynist, a serial liar, a phony who has never sacrificed anything for anyone.
I shouldn’t wade in here, but if you think Hillary is going to address climate change and if that’s your reason to vote for her, you might as well stay home. Hillary supports fracking, Keystone and TPP. All of those things will make climate change worse. It doesn’t matter whether Trump denies it or Hillary “believes in” it, their actions will be roughly the same.
Dienne, climate change is one issue. Trump has said it is not an issue because it’s a hoax. Abortion is an issue. Gay rights is an issue. Immigration reform and minimum wage are issues. On which of these issues do you trust Trump?
With many others in the nation, I don’t trust Clinton to do much about these issues either.
One thing I have learned about American politics: I’ll promise you anything you want. Don’t expect me to fulfill my promises (Obama made over 600 promises, kept about 16% – and speaker pelosi said “he’s kept all the promises he intended to keep).
Trump promised the members of the black church in Detroit that he would bring back manufacturing to Detroit and make it a thriving city. He promised to deport 11 million immigrants. He promised to ban Muslims. Now he promises to ban people from countries where there is terrorist activity–I assume that includes France. Promises, promises. Hillary’s promises bear some relationship to reality; Trump’s are sheer fantasy or lies.
‘s
“Hillary supports fracking, Keystone and TPP”.
Since President Obama had 8 years to do something about those and in fact, didn’t, would it have been better to elect John McCain/Sarah Palin? Or Mitt Romney?
Are we supposed to think Trump will be the friend to the environment that Hillary isn’t?
Ed Detective says:
“It appears you will continue to falsely believe that Hillary Clinton is equally as honest and sincere as someone like Bernie Sanders, which is what Politifact would tell us. Absurd! That result should debunk Polifact instantly.”
If Bernie Sanders is so “honest and sincere”, why don’t you believe him when he says that the e-mail is a non-issue? Why don’t you believe him when he says that you should support Hillary?
Are you saying that Bernie Sanders is LYING about that?
Ed Detective, are you a Trump supporter? Because if you really had any faith in Bernie, you would believe him when he endorsed Hillary. You seem to think Bernie is the biggest liar around! You don’t trust his word one bit.
Why do you think Bernie is such a big liar? Are you really a Trump fan who thinks that the epitome of honesty is Donald J. Trump?
Jeez…Lloyd and Diane and NY parent….it is ‘et tu Brutus’ time here. Don’t you have any compunctions drawing such moral relevancy/irrelevancy?
Yes, Trump is a total liar, a demented person with past ties to the mob who cheats his workers, and now even cheats his campaign workers, and has NO judgement and NO understanding of how the country or the world works..
But does that mean Hillary has become Little Orphan Annie “with no flaws”? All three women who were Sects. of State are tough people who did some things right and some things very wrong. All were far better educated that the moron who is Donald Trump. But I wouldn’t have chosen for any of them for President of the US. And then there is Kissinger, the original Dr. Strangelove who ran State…and he is Hillary’s advisor.
I am probably going to be asked to leave here, or to quiet down, but too much of this conversation is political hyperbole, not facts…all emotion. And too much is puffery. I can despise Trump, which I do, but that does mean I can whore for Hillary. Neither of these people should be elected to run the world.
Ed says: “It appears you will continue to falsely believe that Hillary Clinton is equally as honest and sincere as someone like Bernie Sanders, which is what Politifact would tell us. Absurd! That result should debunk Polifact instantly.”
That explains Ed’s positions better than anything I’ve read from him. In the span of three sentences, he goes from from “It appears…” to “should debunk Politifact instantly”. In other words, appearances are proof to Ed. That explains a lot of what he has said above.
But Ellen, I’m not sure anyone is saying that either of the two candidates are saints. Neither is perfect. We’ve never had a perfect President or a perfect Presidential candidate. Never will either. So it does come down to, which human’s flawed judgement do we trust more. Not just “trust”, but trust more than the other one.I believe that’s been Diane’s argument all along; she trusts Hillary more than Donald.
Others say, this is no way to elect a President. But it is, and it’s how we’ve been doing it since the beginning. Who do we trust more?
There are no saints in politics.
I am not sure who would fit the bill. We already know about Obama and Tony Rezko, who helped him buy his very nice home. Bernie directed campaign donations as “payment” to his family members totally nearly $100,000. If you dig through anyone’s life — including your own and your loved ones, there is always something. No one is that much of a saint.
I think it’s best to wait and see. Assange is our only hope now. Hopefully, he has what he says he does, and it will allow Trump to win. This is a critical election, and Hillary must be stopped. Of course the liberal media will try to stop it, but the “truth” will get out.
John Miller,
Assange will try to manipulate the election to support Trump and Putin.
I hope the American public sees through him and sees through the racist ignorant bully Trump.
Are you going to help him round up and deport 11 million men, women, and children? What color star will you pin on them?
Trump does business with Mafia. That’s reckless. Comey is charged “with
investigating and recommending whether a case should be pursued” and he didn’t pursue it. Is she held to a higher standard? Yes. Hillary is held to the highest standard of anyone running for President. She is also the most experienced. She is a woman. And she has spent her career fighting for all people and putting children at the top of her agenda. Men are very used to having the Oval Office 100% male, that’s why this is a tough fight. It is a tough power place for men to willingly let go of. It’s like the priesthood. Someday that will change too. For those of us who do want change, we fight on. I’m With Her. She’s with America.
I agree. If you watched Hillary’s bio, she chose to work for good right out of college. She spent her LIFE working to make things better for the people that most politicians don’t care about. She was willing to compromise as all politicians are, but I trust that her ultimate goal is not to compromise to make herself rich but to make this country better and not just for the rich.
She is one of the first candidates where I think it is possible that things will get better. Obama proved that ultimately, his goals were not as much about the dispossessed as about keeping things calm and cool. He wouldn’t rock the boat because rocking the boat and pushing for something beyond what is possible is not really in his DNA. Witness how he had to be pushed even on gay marriage. He was a perfectly fine President in some respects, and in others a bitter disappointment to people who thought he might show the public what the Democratic Party was really about.
I believe Hillary Clinton will do good things as President. She may very well compromise and do things I despise, but they will be in service to the larger goal she has of helping this country — including the poorest inhabitants. And I believe she will fight much harder than President Obama did for the poorest inhabitants.
So I’m with her. And I am disgusted that people are making her out to be the most corrupt politician since Spiro Agnew.
OMG…Hillary and the DNC produced that bio. Do some independent reading of real history. Read about her close association with Monsanto and other damaging corporations, her history as Eli Broad’s lawyer….wedge open your minds with information from the past 30 years…not from her college days.
Diane…I am NOT saying that Trump is good…I am saying they both are terrible candidates.
Ellen,
The top lawyers in the country have represented corporations and, yes, criminals.
But, dear Diane…they have not all chosen to be a candidate for POTUS.
I completely agree with Ellen, but what real choice does America have? A vote for Stein is pure and honest, but is it a vote for Trump in terms of “throwaway” votes?
I suppose it all depends on what one considers the high stakes to be.
This is worth reading: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/opinion/hillary-clinton-gets-gored.html?ribbon-ad-idx=5&rref=opinion&module=Ribbon&version=context®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&pgtype=article
I know that the DNC made that bio, but I also LIVED while Hillary was first lady and I remember how she was considered to be a socialist.
Yes, she has made deals I haven’t liked. So has Obama. The difference is how they are perceived by people like you.
When Hillary does what Obama does, she is considered to be so corrupt and awful that even Trump might be okay compared to her. It is about as absurd as I have ever heard.
You have idealized Bernie Sanders and he doesn’t fit the bill. He has also done things that I don’t like but his constituents do. His stance on gun control has not helped — he opposed certain waiting periods and the Brady Bill. Not because he liked guns so much, but purely for politics. He votes for laws that protect gun manufacturers from liability. A unique provision that only applies to them.
Again, I voted for Bernie because overall I like his stances. Just like I am voting for Hillary because overall I like her stances. In my opinion, she is MORE liberal than President Obama. So it disgusts me that we have a chance to finally have a more liberal Dem and people who should know better are parroting Karl Rove lies to elect one of the most dangerous men in history.
You, Parent, just keep “parroting” the same false premise that many of us here (who see clearly how dangerous both candidates are) must now lie to ourselves and others to make Hillary a Golden Girl.
You insult our intelligence by writing we are “influenced by Karl Rove.” What narrow minded thinking that is…and I am relieved to know you identify as a parent, not an educator. You are mired in insults and sexism rather than using reason and critical thinking, and you avoid showing us all ‘positives’ in Hillary’s long career as a Senator and as Secretary of State that prove she is a viable candidate and should win our votes. The bio of her girlhood with months of working with children should only be the beginning….where is the rest? Why are her expensive ads not producing her accomplishments in DC since the 1990s, not her girlhood bio?
I do not see this as a vote for a woman at any cost issue, as you do.. I always try to vote for the the better candidate (in California I am supporting and voting for Kamala Harris for Senator, and John Chiang for Governor), and I do not vote as to color, religion, or genitals.
Johnson and Weld are rising in the polls for this very reason. People recognize that Stein cannot win and has no experience in governing even though she stands for many of my issues. But two former Governors are tempting despite that they are running as Libertarians. Yes, Diane, I know the history of libertarians and denounce it, but many American voters are sick of all this phony pandering to the lesser of evils.
Ellen Lubic,
I like evidence. You might recall that when people were jumping on the Rafe Esquith is evil bandwagon, I was defending him. Not because I knew anything about whether or not he was a serial abuser of young girls as he was accused of being. But because I looked at the entirety of the evidence and said “what is going on that things that would be overlooked or that are done by many very respected people are characterized in a way to make Rafe Esquith seem like a serial abuser of children as dishonest as a wooden nickel.” If I had done what the anti-Hillary folks had done, I would have jumped on the same anti-Rafe bandwagon as everyone else — remember all the “evidence”. So many people were certain it must be true.
If I defend Hillary it is not because I agree with all her policies. That’s why I voted for Bernie. But that doesn’t mean I can’t step back and see that the characterization of her that the right wing has presented is wrong. It does what the media did to Rafe and turn every action into something nefarious. Hillary isn’t perfect, and no doubt neither is Rafe. But they are both being targeted by people who aren’t interested in presenting an honest picture.
If this were about her positions on NAFTA, welfare, and fracking, etc., I agree with you that she is conservative there. We aren’t having that debate. We are having a debate about whether she is selling the state department and US interests for financial gain. Just like we didn’t have a discussion about whether Rafe should stop communicating with former students in a too friendly way. We had a conversation about what kind of serial abuser of young children he was and how corrupt he was to embezzle money. That’s not right. And that is what is happening with Hillary. I hope you will re-think how you are approaching this discussion. Because the same people jumping to condemn Rafe are jumping to condemn Hillary and they are just as certain as you are that they are doing it for moral reasons.
Rudy Schellekens said: “(Obama made over 600 promises, kept about 16% – and speaker pelosi said “he’s kept all the promises he intended to keep).”
I voted for Obama twice and yes I was bitterly disappointed with his education policies which were a continuation of Bush’s NCLB and even worse. But the other alternatives would have been McCain/Palin and Romney/Ryan. Blechhhh! Thanks to Obama, we have Sotomayor and Kagan on the supreme court instead of a couple of right wingers in the style of a Scalia. We still have Social Security and Medicare, they were not privatized or voucherized (the dream of the GOP).
FACT: social security was never intended to be privatized. There was an idea to allow people to VOLUNTEER to use a maximum of TWENTY % in the market. Many people tell you that if you actually do this, over the 45 years most people work, you WILL end up with better results.
FACT: Social Security is going to be privatized if the Republicans have their way. That is their goal. Not any “20%” — all of it. No guarantee.
President Obama seemed to like that 20% idea that you like Rudy. That’s why I found him to be far more conservative than Hillary. President Obama came an inch from privatizing social security and believe me, the only reason he didn’t was not because he believed in the program.
Hillary is far more likely to protect social security than Obama ever was.
Obama was quite willing to undercut Social Security via his “Grand Bargain” (a concoction first proposed by The Peterson Foundation, which has long salivated over privatizing Social Security), but the Republicans were too deranged to seize the opportunity.
Sometimes political gridlock is the best you can hope for, when the other alternatives are worse, and we should be more inclined to consider a “Don’t just do something: stand there!” approach on occasion.
Reblogged this on Mister Journalism: "Reading, Sharing, Discussing, Learning".
I have slept on it…fitfully…and rereading all this, I agree that I must vote for Hillary. But in good conscience, I could never laud her behavior, and now pointing to her assistants to take the fall for her. However….
Thank you Diane, Lloyd, Mathics, Joe, and Norwegian Filmmaker for the links you posted (read them all), and your words to me about once again, choosing the lesser of the evils. Especially Joe, reminding me about our failed Obama votes which at least gave us Sotomayor and Kagan (though her cousin Robert, with whom she grew up, is as neo-lib as Wolfowitz).
As with most American voters this election season, I cannot remember any prior election so filled with angst….though I am sure I must have said the same thing about Bush v. Gore….it just keeps getting worse. That Bush win (Rehnquist and SCOTUS handing him the Presidency), which turned the world upside down, and caused so much death and destruction, forces me to reevaluate, yet again.
Diane mentioned Gore being excoriated by media for his “trivial anecdotes’ re inventing the internet….but that does not equate with Hillary who had the most prestigious role in our government and chose to behave as an entitled loose canon. And I find it interesting that media has not reported on Bill’s partnership with Papa Bush (and the old CIA director’s ties with the Saudis). It is a real pain to remember history, and to question the decisions and outcomes caused by our representatives. But through it all, I find I am more worried about Trump.
That ex presidents work together is nothing new. Suggest you read “The Presidents Club”. An amazing book on how former presidents work together once out of office.
Modern version started with Truman and Hoover at the end of WW II.
Perhaps we could all agree that this election for President is not how we would like it to be. I would love to have good-hearted honest candidates with integrity and leadership experience (of some kind) and maturity, with a vision for our country and our fellow Americans.
To borrow a phrase I didn’t care for back then, I would like a President for which I could say, after he leaves office, that indeed we were ALL better off than when that person started in office.
I don’t know if that is possible, but I can always hope.
… after he/she leaves office…
You are a rock, Ellen.
” that does not equate with Hillary who had the most prestigious role in our government and chose to behave as an entitled loose canon…”
Ellen, that sounds like the excuse people gave when they already had Rafe Esquith tried and convicted for serial child abusing and embezzling money.
I find it odd that someone who saw through the bias in the Rafe investigation could so easily miss the bias in the Hillary Clinton investigation.
No one is saying Hillary Clinton is a saint. They are saying that the things being made into crimes are trumped up descriptions of actions that are cast in the worst possible and evil light.
Just like I don’t believe Rafe is a saint. But I can look at a badly written and biased report and understand that little things are being characterized in the worst possible light to convince people that he was an evil child abuser. Remember how many people on here agreed he was a terrible person? I do. I defended him because the report I saw was dishonest. Just like the characterization of Hillary is.
I hope you won’t fall into the trap that the Rafe haters fell into. Hillary isn’t perfect and she may not be nearly as liberal as I wish she was. But that is a far different thing from being corrupt and doing wrong. I didn’t have to know that Rafe was perfect to understand how the report I read convinced people of facts not in evidence.
Question:
If Hillary sold out the state department in exchange for Clinton Foundation donations as people claim, then what changes did John Kerry make that stopped all that corrupt action that Hillary Clinton demanded state department employees do in order to get money into her foundation?
What big policy changes? I suppose not one of the big donors to the Clinton Foundation has gotten arms deals? They’ve been cancelled?
A little common sense would tell you that both Clinton and Kerry are following the desires of President Obama. If you don’t like the foreign policy, there is one man in charge. If you think Obama is a corrupt President, then I respect your right to think so. But quit pretending every action taken by Hillary is somehow corrupt even when it is the same as every other Democrat.
A woman on the verge of the Presidency brings out strong emotions….Fear.
Maybe that’s not all what this is about, Jennifer. Maybe lots of people have legitimate concerns about Hillary that are not based on her gender. Just maybe.
Sorry but you are wrong about “a woman…brings out fear”….I was 100% behind Elizabeth Warren should she have run for the Presidency. Preferred her to Bernie. It is not “a woman”, but rather which woman. ‘Women’ are not monolithic.
But it seems that Elizabeth Warren is now off the table for you, as is Bernie. They both strongly endorsed Hillary Clinton and show the very bad judgement to endorse someone who is, to you, a criminal lawbreaker.
Either they are too stupid to know what a lawbreaker she is, or they are just as corrupt themselves. It may be a long time before you find a politician worthy of your vote.
Where, NY parent, in any of this long stream of much garbage, did you read at any time that I said “Hillary is a lawbreaker”? You claim that you like evidence. Prove that I said this…or shut up.