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Comment by discodave | Hacker News Reader

> The actual facts aside

I happen to believe that facts are important in a Presidential race.

Essentially your response is repeating talking points of the Trump campaign... which is OK, 1st amendment and all that but to pretend like you're making a constructive addition to the discussion / debate is folly.

Right now America has a choice between Trump, a racist, mysoginist demagogue who has never held a public office and Hillary Clinton. Hillary may have issues but she is also possibly the most experienced presidential candidate of the last couple of decades.

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> the most experienced presidential candidate of the last couple of decades

George H. W. Bush was a two term vice president, director of the CIA, etc.

I've been following this election pretty closely for more than a year, and I seriously couldn't tell you what Clinton's positive message is besides "I'm experienced". Nobody cares. Americans don't elect technocratic planks of wood. This is the worst, most inept presidental campaign I've ever seen. She's very nearly losing to a joke candidate.

It's really interesting to hear you say that, actually, because from my perspective, she had two positive messages:

- "I'm experienced"

- "I'm a woman, and it's high time a woman became President"

It's interesting that her campaign has finally stopped beating us over the head with the latter, at least; it was insultingly sexist.

It's insultingly sexist to suggest that 51% of the population should finally have representation in the highest office in America?

If a man said that he deserved a job over a woman on the basis of gender, it would be sexist (and wrong). The reverse is also true.

He was elected a "couple of decades" ago. Feel old now? :)

HW won in 1988 and lost in 1992. 1996 was two decades ago.

Since when is a long tenancy in a public office a good thing? What happened to strong morality and doing the right thing when nobody is looking? Hillary broke the law [0], plain and simple, and she isn't being punished because well, she is a powerful life-long politician with many friends in high places. At least Nixon had the moral decency to resign when it was clear he wasn't right to lead by example. The simple truth is she is a leftist, a globalist, and for those reason alone she'll get a lot of votes but unfortunately being those things in America today means nothing that else matters. Basic morality? flawed candidate. Broke the law? She had a good reason? Poor health? Doesn't matter, she has a capable leftist/globalist to take her place, we just need to get another D in the white house.

[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/d-c-rutledge/fbi-clinton-was-e...

>At least Nixon had the moral decency to resign when it was clear he wasn't right to lead by example.

Yes, it was because Nixon had moral fiber. Not because he negotiated a deal with Ford to pardon him immediately and preemptively, thus saving him the humiliation of impeachment and legal repercussions.

I'm sure you're absolutely right. If he hadn't been such a snake he would have just fought the system, used his ample government connections to ensure he won't get prosecuted. The people would understand, he was just acting in those good intentions of advancing the desires of the party, after all.

Nixon was 100 percent going to be impeached if he did not resign. He had very little sway in the Republican Party by the time the tapes came out. He ran an incredibly secretive and paranoid White House that was mostly disconnected from the Senate and made many enemies even in his own party.

Globalist? I'm not sure what that means, much less why it earns votes.

"a racist, mysoginist[sic] demagogue"

"Hillary may have issues but she is also possibly the most experienced presidential candidate of the last couple of decades."

s/Trump/Clinton/ and your statement: "Essentially your response is repeating talking points of the Trump campaign."

serves as a valid critique of your own response.

Qualified for not, Clinton's corruption has been confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt over the course of many leaks and scandals. Democrats who continue to support her are just as blindly partisan as Republicans.

The whole system is broken. I won't be voting for anyone.

At least vote. Write in your dog, if you have to. Otherwise future politicians won't aware that you will be at the poll, ready to vote for them, and they'll pander to someone else.

Curious, do you have a handful of racist Trump quotes? Not stuff about illegals, but actual racist stuff (like not wanting to rent to blacks or something)?

Trump aside, electing someone that's openly corrupt (DNC Wikileaks show they went against Bernie, against rules) seems to be far more dangerous to the future of the US and worldwide democracy. Up until now, corruption was sort of assumed, but if a publicly corrupt candidate wins, it just shows "crime pays".

'"Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day." (Trump called the things written about him in the book "probably true.")'

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/8-of-the-sleaziest...

Also Trump was the President of the Trump organization when the DOJ fined the company for illegal housing discrimination, doing things like marking the lease applications of African Americans with a 'C' for 'Colored' so that they would know not to rent to them.

You don't think his rhetoric against undocumented immigrants is racist?

It's not "undocumented immigrants", it's "illegal immigrants".

If you enforce the law, they should be deported. Now they probably have very good reasons for immigrating, but the fact remains that they broke the law and our borders, and the job of the executive branch is to enforce the laws.

Deporting Syrian refugees (the most recent target of Trump's rhetoric) would be breaking a major international law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_Relating_to_the_Sta...

Syrian refugees are not illegal immigrants, which was the topic of conversation of the GP poster.

Last time I checked "undocumented" immigrants aren't a race, and they also broke the law. It's not racist to attack people breaking the law.

This claim cain only be made by somebody ignorant of the history of racism: racism almost always lives with a non-racist pretext. Here are a couple of examples, though many more exist:

Lynchings were instigated by an accusation of a crime - the perpetrators could claim they weren't racist, they were just keeping their communities safe! [1]

Japanese internment too had a non-racist pretext: people of Japanese descent were claimed to be disloyal citizens with greater allegiance to Japan (even after being born in the USA or becoming naturalized) than the USA. [2]

We know that the debate about undocumented immigrants isn't about to Europeans who overstay their tourist visas or Canadians sneaking across the border: it is about a single ethnic group (hispanic) who have come across the Mexican border. This means that 'undocumented' can easily be a euphemism for 'hispanic', allowing people to shift racist statements into ostensibly non-racist ones. While not all discussions of undocumented immigrants are racist, some certainly are a form of dog whistle [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States#...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics#United_St...

You're talking ignorantly right now.

First, the two examples of racism you point out are decades old. Try to pay attention to current events.

We share a long, fairly badly secured land border with a country with significantly worse living and earning conditions than we enjoy. The fact that all those people trying to come to a better life share an ethnicity is not relevant at all.

If you want to see racism, see how British people treat Polish immigrants, even though the Poles have every right in the world to be there.

Are there a ton of EU overstays causing noticeable impact? Do you think if millions of Russians were illegally in the US working low-end jobs (for the most part) and being rather highly visible (flying Russian flags at protests) it'd be waved off?

>“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

It's pretty racist to attack a whole contingent of people and make broad negative generalizations about them and qualify with a half-hearted caveat that 'some' are good people. He's quite clearly drawing a line between "you" (the white audience he was speaking to) and the Other (i.e. the Mexicans) personified as rapists and drug dealers.

Sounded like it was clearly "you" as legal Mexicans and other immigrants. The rest of the sentence is about illegals -- he's not, afaik, made any claims about Mexicans in general. If he was actually making a racist statement, then immigration status wouldn't matter.

"You" clearly haven't even read or seen the speech and are talking completely out of your ass. It was one of his opening talking points in his presidential announcement in New York City to his cronies - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/06...

It's pretty straightforward xenophobic, hyper jingoist nationalist rhetoric. You = us good Americans. They = the Other. He uses the car industry for Japan, a conservative talking point since the 80s. For Mexico he harps on immigration and calls them rapists. It's aggregate and subjectivity-denying. It's racist and dumb.

I saw it, way back when he spoke. "They're not sending you" never occurred to me as "you, Americans". That'd uh, make no sense: Mexico is not a significant source of Americans immigrating to America.

At any rate, it's still besides the point. He's accurate in saying that people coming in illegally aren't "the best". If you're a top professional you're not going to risk illegal immigration anywhere, generally speaking. This lines up with my and others' personal experience (I lived in Central America for nearly 2 decades).

> "They're not sending you" never occurred to me as "you, Americans". That'd uh, make no sense: Mexico is not a significant source of Americans immigrating to America.

He's talking to a roomful of Americans mentioning how America (referred to as us, you) is being beaten by other countries (they). It's pretty obvious. Just because it doesn't make any sense doesn't negate what Trump was implying - it's not like he's known for sound logical reasoning or even being able to approximate a grain of truth. If you seriously think he was referring to "legal Mexicans" in that speech (again, to a roomful of his white cronies in Midtown NYC) then I got a brooklyn bridge to sell you.

>At any rate, it's still besides the point. He's accurate in saying that people coming in illegally aren't "the best".

Is he accurate in saying that Mexicans only care about "beating" us at the border and that they are mostly rapists with only some, he "assumes", are good people? Come on.

Depends a little bit on the law at hand.

Illegal immigration is easy to attack without being racist. Mixed marriage not so much.

I don't think he's said anything about having a problem with legal immigrants.

Incorrect. He wants to end the H1B visa program (despite the fact that he uses for seasonal work at his club in Florida) and he does not want to accept political refugees attempting to come to the US legally.

Correct me if I'm wrong, and I may well be, but I'm under the impression that a significant number of posters on HN have problems with the H1B visa program. I'm not particularly knowledgable on the subject but from the comments I've read most of the concern centers around driving down wages, and thus costs for employers, and shackling H1B visa holders to specific jobs.

Is this an incorrect reading of the sentiment here? And more importantly, should I assume that anyone against the H1B program feels so because of racial animus?

I should have been more clear when I referenced H1B. My personal opinion about the program is that it is deeply flawed, mostly because it is a sort of legalized indentured servitude.

I doubt Trump has those same feelings however, as he hires H1B works at his own club in Palm Beach instead of Americans. If he was morally opposed to the program, I doubt he would do that.

I brought it up because he talks about it in a way to scapegoat foreigners, appealing to the darker angels of people who have racist tendencies and are looking for someone to blame. I find such a tactic reprehensible, and I personally do not draw a distinction between someone who acts on racist feelings and someone who makes racist appeals to those who act on racist feelings.

Thanks for the response. I agree with you that at best Trump seems hypocritical to denounce the H1B visa program after having employed those holding H1B visas, and at worst much more nefarious for using those immigrants as scapegoats. At the same time, my main concern with your original comment was that you used his stance on the H1B program as an example of his racism. Now, in Trump's case that very well may be true, but by using his stand against H1B's as your reasoning you basically imply that anyone against the H1B program is also racist. I understand that wasn't what you meant to imply but it highlights to me one of the dangers of the current political climate. Namely, a person might have a specific stance on an issue based on very legitimate reasoning, in this case the H1B program being indentured servitude, and if someone else comes along who happens to hold those same views for perhaps less legitimate reasons, lets say racism, we tend to automatically discount the stance as being racist or otherwise illegitimate.

Being labelled a racist is a pretty serious charge for most people who don't have wealth or power and actually have to live and work with a diverse group of people. I would hate to be called a racist due to being against the current way the H1B program is administered just because Trump is against it as well.

Again, I'm sure that's not actually what you meant, but it points to the importance of using very clear language when leveling these kind of accusations.

There's a difference between immigration law and immigrants. Your comment doesn't address what the parent commentor said.

Fixing a broken, oft-abused system is contemptible now?

I think the H1B program is terribly flawed and certainly abused. But Trump is not talking about reforming it, he only talks about in the context of "foreigners stealing our jobs" (paraphrase), which I find quite contemptible. And without a meaningful plan to replace it would close an avenue for people to legally immigrate to the US, which makes it seem like he might have a problem with legal immigrants.

Why is "foreigners stealing our jobs" contemptible? Assuming H1B is abused (I understand this can be in dispute), why should a candidate for a country not want to help its own citizens?

I think this is a big part of why the SV powerhouses are mobilizing against Trump. They rally the troops with hyperbole and accusations of racism and sexism, but in private they're afraid of losing their H1B wage slaves and tax havens.

Some of that I suppose. But also, he's an evil man. Doesn't take a conspiracy theory to want to see him defeated.

Hillary is far, far more deserving of that label than Trump. To campaign and donate millions of dollars on her behalf requires ignorance, a seriously twisted moral compass, or some financial and political incentives that you don't want to talk about.

She's spent her life struggling to help children and single parents. Donations fund her charity that has helped millions worldwide. To twist that into something bad is just more of the political smokescreen that plagues any woman in public office.

You're saying this is a sexist thing?

She was linked to Whitewater, was that because she was a woman?

She constantly defended Bill Clinton's sexual indiscretions. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435941/hillary-clinton....

She moved to New York just so she could run for senator.

She and Bill also spent 3 million dollars on her daughter's wedding. Where did she come up with that money, considering that a President's salary is in the mid six figures?

Oh that's right, she (and Bill) get quarter million dollar speaking fees at Goldman Sachs.

What part of all that would not be reprehensible if she were a man, and if she were a man, wouldn't this all be dug up and thrown into his/her face if you were running for president?

How is pointing out moral turpitude a "political smokescreen that plagues every woman in public office"?

Great list: Like any number of men get away with and no comment. None of that is reprehensible; that is all business as usual. A good fraction of our Senators are 'carpet baggers', not been brought up before. Loyalty to a spouse is lauded if its a man being loyal. #2 speaking fees is George Bush but nobody brought him up. And 'linked to' is another smokescreen catchphrase, slings mud without having to show any real problem.

Yes, and none of those men are currently running for president.

If a man did all these things, and were running for POTUS, they'd get raked over the coals, just like Clinton is. What's your point?

Also, Clinton has made it a point to argue for "the right to be believed" for sexual assault victims. And she went to bat for her husband before that statement to cast doubt on his accusers? http://nypost.com/2016/08/15/hillarys-site-edits-sexual-assa...

What a two-faced person who should not be president.

I suspect he might end up sleeping on the couch if he did

Quotes?

Quotes here: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/...

I don't see quotes on that page, just a few opening paragraphs and "Loading..." where I'd expect content to be. The opening paragraph is has a misquote/misstatement of its own so I'm a bit suspicious. The linked articles from the opening are also all-headline, little substance.

I don't mean this as a defence of Trump, but people seem to read into statements to determine his racism/bigotry/whatever. AFAIK he has not technically made a racist statement in any of his campaigning, for instance.

Unfortunately, it's very easy to be both experienced and terrible at your job.

I see that you're having a bit of trouble parsing my statements. Allow me to help.

>but to pretend like you're making a constructive addition to the discussion / debate is folly.

That's silly. I'm just saying that all these things happened. Facts, if you will. These things definitely happened and were reported ad nauseum. The terror attacks, Clinton passing out, her basket of deplorables comment, those actually happened. And now this email thing.

These were Trump talking points long before the events happened.

Now, I think that her campaign staff could somehow spin this so that she comes out relatively unscathed, IF all these things didn't happen within about a week of each other. If this was spaced out over a month or so, we'd forget.

The way the timing is, no spin doctor in the world can buff this out.

I'm not advocating for either candidate, like you are, but I'm pointing out the fact that Clinton has pretty much made herself unelectable.

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