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Comment by WallWextra | Hacker News Reader

Here is, roughly, the media's playbook:

1. Never stop talking about Trump. Mention his name 300 times an hour on CNN. He's not a serious candidate, but he is entertaining so they give him free publicity until he is a serious candidate.

2. Start blathering about Hillary's emails, as if that were somehow important.

3. Now Trump is elected. In these tough times, it is more important than ever to support high-quality independent journalism. Subscription numbers swell.

4. We need someone to blame for the outcome of this election. Obviously it is the fault of Facebook, Google, etc, who have been taking the media's ad revenue. Not the fault of the media who would never shut up about Trump.

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>2. Start blathering about Hillary's emails, as if that were somehow important.

I am really tired of this twisted version of the relative privation fallacy.

Trump is worse != Hillary was good

Her email situation was, in fact, an issue. Worse than Trump? Absolutely not. But even in context it doesn't belong in "as if that were somehow important" territory. Under normal circumstances (had she been elected) we'd probably still be talking about it.

We are still talking about it and she wasn't even elected. The emails should definitely have been a scandal. Being the leading story for a few weeks seems reasonable, but its being treated as a massive, important scandal years later.

How is it being treated as a massive important scandal? I can dig up mainstream articles that denounce the importance placed on it. Can you point me to a mainstream article of any recent origin that makes a big deal out of it?

Flip on fox. someone mentions it basically everyday. Fox is the most watched cable news channel.

The "We" above is rather inclusive then, isn't it? The only time I see Fox is when I visit my grandmother.

"We", as in discourse in the mainstream media, which includes fox and others who overplayed the story.

If her emails were such an issue why have multiple members of the Trump Cabinet and House and Senate members been found to do the same thing and continue to do the same thing. Objectively: voters don't care.

Mentioning it at this point is sheer deflection. If you need a go-to example, pick someone in power like Kushner or Pence.

Did you expect no one to google it? Pence had private email while governor of Indiana. Through August 2017, Nepotistic Adviser (perhaps not his official title? I don't know) Kushner had had fewer than 100 emails sent from or to his server from official accounts, all of which are saved and can be produced.

Meanwhile many tens of thousands (no way to know how many) of classified messages of the Secretary of State where available to any hacker but not to the oversight of the people and their Congress. It's no mystery why Comey said the stupid shit he said; if he had said nothing he would have had a mutiny on his hands.

Pence literally fought in court to keep his private election emails private and won.

I was sort of hoping you'd Google that too.

OK now I have. Google recommended an article [0] which starts with the following:

Vice President Mike Pence reportedly used a private email account to conduct public business, including homeland security matters, while he was governor of Indiana. Records of the emails were obtained by IndyStar through a public records request.

See, in the second sentence, we learn how this was different from the Secretary's emails! On top of which, this is Indiana we're talking about. Not much of geopolitical import there. I certainly hope that VP has learned proper email discipline at this point.

[0] https://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2017/03/02/penc...

Yeah, he should talk to Cambridge Analytica about getting an email there where every email isn't backed up and there is a timed erase function.

It works wonders for their human trafficking work

But sure. What about her emails. What about indeed. Kushner only had 100! We should do another investigation.

Those examples are issues too. Voters should care.

Not too long ago I would have whole-heartedly agreed with you, but I've since accepted that my opinion on her was strongly swayed by social media (specifically on Reddit) campaigns lead by Russian entities.

How much do the e-mails matter? I don't know, it's hard for there to be an objective answer since these things matter as much as everyone talks about them. Everyone talked about the e-mails, but did that conversation cross the threshold from factoid to scandal due to malicious acts by Russia?

Do the e-mails matter less than things happening in the Trump campaign at the time? It certainly seems that way, especially since there have been stories about Trump administration private e-mail servers that have barely made it into the news cycle (that's from memory, apologies if I'm not remembering that properly).

1. Look at the playbook from an agnostic position instead. The reason the media gave candidate Trump the press was because, just like candidate Obama, sold eyeballs; Trump more so because he got both sides mad. Recall the puff pieces and the discussion of Michelle Obama's fantastic arms, that is nothing but puff and she moved the papers, so they covered the candidate more; to Hilary's detriment.

2. You need to think about the emails as compromised material and a failure to secure information. If you are an IT person that circumvents security protocols that then end up with trade secrets being exposed, would you be in trouble. The reason this was covered in the press was that it was classified information on an unsecured server.

4. I shake my head at this, Obama for America was doing the exact same thing in previous elections and no one batted an eye. Now that the people who were okay see that detrimental effects could happen there is concern. The simple thing to do would be to delete / minimize the information on your account.

Just remember, the media is horrible at their job; you have people who do not have the time to dig into a story, are influenced by their editors to drop stories if they attack a major sponsor, and then write stories that are stacked with grammatical mistakes.

So the use of Facebook data was lauded as genius and now isn't. [1] Now you got me curious if the media would be saying all the same things if Cambridge helped the other candidate get elected.

[1] http://thehill.com/opinion/technology/379245-whats-genius-fo...

My opinion is that they would not.

Ben Shapiro is disingenuous by isolating Facebook data only. It's the combination of illicit Facebook data + fake news + Russia's APT that is at the heart of the problem. The fact that Facebook was warned about this and didn't work to solve their share of the problem is why they are criticized.

Where did the fake news come from, if not from Facebook?

From Russia with love?

Disinformation of the public and spreading antagonizing rumor as fact was not invented yesterday. Assume all allegations and rumors are true, ride with it and see who looks more genuine.

Trump was destined for winning. His allure is not based on respect but grandiose dreams embedded in a nostalgic slogan. Without a politically-loaded surname he took the media by the balls and rode with it.

My best guess as an outsider is that he found people apt at selling stuff and sold to the public he was. Personal defamation ("grab them by the", buffoon, meme-made-president) is a minuscule issue in the eye of the public compared to a classified information leak scandal, "Don't forget Benghazi" and poor health rumors.

Hillary IMHO was counting on an idealistic, emancipated America when the people were rather leaning towards isolationism and making America greater than the competition.

You're mostly right, I think, but I never actually heard Clinton articulate a theory of why someone would vote for her. Everyone had their own personal reason to vote for (or against) her, which one supposes is emblematic of our long-tail data-driven time, but did she ever come out and say e.g. "this is my vision of an idealist, emancipated America"?

I agree with you that such a vision is kind of a hard sell when compared with "Build the Wall!", "Lock her Up", and "Jobs!". Only the last of those base slogans ever appealed to me (not enough to make me vote for the cretin!), so I'm not disappointed that it's the only one that has happened so far.

Everybody aptly forgets that Eric Schmidt's company was helping Clinton run digital ads in "novel ways".

Obama for America was upfront about what they were doing, and the user initiated the action willingly. Cambridge Analytics was not, and people had no idea what their data was being used for. This is not some capricious delineation.

Not an accurate summation: https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975565844632821760

"The entire social graph" did not agree to be used by the Obama campaign. What the Obama campaign did was worse that what CA could have done because by the time CA rolled around the API holes had been closed. (As I said yesterday, CA was deceptive and the Obama campaign wasn't, sure, because the Obama campaign didn't have to ask at all. This is not an improvement.) And they knew it was sketchy, too.

CA used data that was collected for research purposes only. OfA didn't violate any rules.

> CA used data that was collected for research purposes only. OfA didn't violate any rules.

Facebook may view its internal policies as akin to the law, but I don't. The fact that CA violated some Facebook policy and OfA didn't is a distinction without difference. Facebook let both pull friends' personal information without consent, which people probably didn't realize they were sharing because Facebook has a history of obscuring sharing like that.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/facebooks-heading-towar...:

> Facebook is so accustomed to treating its ‘internal policies’ as though they were something like laws that they appear to have a sort of blind spot that prevents them from seeing how ridiculous their resistance sounds. To use the cliche, it feels like a real shark jumping moment. As someone recently observed, Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ are crafted to create the appearance of civic concerns for privacy, free speech, and other similar concerns. But they’re actually just a business model. Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ amount to a kind of Stepford Wives version of civic liberalism and speech and privacy rights, the outward form of the things preserved while the innards have been gutted and replaced by something entirely different, an aggressive and totalizing business model which in many ways turns these norms and values on their heads. More to the point, most people have the experience of Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ being meaningless in terms of protecting their speech or privacy or whatever as soon as they bump up against Facebook’s business model.

Not violating rules because there were no rules is also not an impressive defense. Plus, again, I'd say reading the first-hand source I linked shows that yes, they knew they were doing something skeevy.

You would not approve if Trump did the exact same thing. That is not a question, because it doesn't need to be, and please don't insult anybody's intelligence by trying to claim otherwise. Either apply the standards evenly, or don't be shocked when the world turns on Silicon Valley for its unwillingness to apply the standards evenly.

Facebook suggests that CA did in fact "violate rules."

But then CA got caught in a video sting talking about illegal and frankly horrifying tactics to compromise elections globally by attacking and comprimising politicians.

Users' Friend data, which was used by OfA, was not explicitly given by those Friends.

Yes, Facebook's user agreement allowed them to do that. But I'd bet most people didn't consider that by signing up for Facebook, their personal profile data could be given to political campaigns without their knowledge, if any of their friends consented to it.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5520303/Obama-campai...

By their own admission.

If useful, I wrote a media literacy guide for engineers that touches on a lot of things discussed in this thread:

Hacking Engineers and Engineering Media

https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer

I realize that this is tangential to what you're talking about but your comment reminded me of it strongly: As much as it's clear that there was some funny business with trump's people and russia, the way liberals are salivating over mueller's investigation makes me uncomfortable. they need the legal system to pronounce in some way that trump and his people broke the rules, in order to avoid acknowledging that the general thrust of all of this is the system working as it was designed.

It's like how the 2008 election didn't count, because Obama is actually a Kenyan. People can't just lose an election anymore.

I like to talk about social issues and politics and stuff but the more I do it in public the more I run into what feels like "politics-as-basketball." It's really begun to feel like team sports as opposed to a critical analysis of conditions and power analysis.

As someone in their mid-twenties, I have to ask the older HNers: has it always been this "stupid," so vitriolic and hateful? If not, when did it become this way?

The Revolutionary War era was as bad or worse than it is today. [1] They spit about as much venom at each other as you possibly could. They said arguably far worse things about each other than have been said about Trump or Obama.

There was a bit of comparative calm that settled in, from the immediate time after the Civil War, until the late 1960s. The level of ugliness of ideological attacks that Franklin Roosevelt saw, for example, were nowhere near what Obama & Trump have seen. That century was a far calmer era for political vitriol, than the 1780-1860 time frame, or since the late 1960s.

A not amusing Civil War era example:

"In 1856, U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts gave a speech criticizing pro-slavery southerners. Three days later, he was beaten so badly - on the Senate floor - by U.S. Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina that he didn’t return to the Senate for three years."

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/the-ori...

It has, but it's never been so easy to spout off to the world before, or be instantly informed about what other people are thinking.

In the 1980s the media hated Reagan about as much as they hated Bush or Trump. Before that it was Nixon. But you really only heard about it if you watched the evening news, and that was 30 minutes of the day. It wasn't being fed to you continuously like an intravenous drip on your phone.

It's the speed and pervasiveness that have increased, not so much the partisanship.

I'd disagree and say through the Bush Clinton Bush Obama period it wasn't as bad. I guess the levels of stupid vitriolic and hateful come and go. The world has definitely gone through worse phases as well, see the 1930s for example.

They probably would have been worse to Bush up front had 9/11 not happened. Blasting the President in the year(s) after 9/11 would have probably been in poor taste through the eyes of the public.

> In the 1980s the media hated Reagan about as much as they hated Bush or Trump. Before that it was Nixon. But you really only heard about it if you watched the evening news, and that was 30 minutes of the day. It wasn't being fed to you continuously like an intravenous drip on your phone.

While I wasn't mature enough then to form my own opinion about it, I'm under the impression that the media was also more restrained and professional back then. Now it seems a lot more tabloid, generally. There also seems to be a burring between "opinion/editorial" and reporting, especially online, which fuels the polarization.

I think maybe it has, and each of us doesn't notice it when we're younger and we think that we're really arguing about principles. Before Trump Derangement Syndrome (Russia!) there was Obama Derangement Syndrome (Kenya!); before that there was Bush Derangement Syndrome; before that there was Clinton Derangement Syndrome; before that Reagan Derangement Syndrome (Oliver Sacks even included a bit in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat which alleged that there are people with a neurological condition which causes them to detect lies, who couldn't watch Mr. Reagan speak because everything he said was a lie; if true this would have been quite an amazing discovery …), and so on & so forth.

And of course a lot of this wasn't entirely unfounded. Mr. Obama really was the first anti-American president; Mr. Bush really was incompetent; Mr. Clinton really was a perjurer, philanderer, power-abuser & possible rapist; Mr. Reagan really did lie a lot (e.g. Iran-Contra); Mr. Carter really was incompetent; Mr. Nixon really was a crook; Mr. Johnson really was a crook &c. &c. &c.

The fact that we keep on electing compromised, power-hungry people to a position of extreme power is no doubt part of the problem, but even back when the presidency was far weaker you had the partisans of Jefferson & Adams maligning one another with language we would be shocked at today.

The only recent American president I can think of who was mostly decent was probably Gerald Ford, who never ran for the position. Maybe that's the secret.

No it was never this vitriolic or hateful

It goes in cycles, but anyone who imagines that e.g. the Civil War wasn't preceded by strong feelings has no sense of history. Keep in mind that decorum and conduct are different things. Since the 1950s, USA has done some awful things, with inconsistent discussion, heated or otherwise. As someone who regrets that history and takes Orwell seriously, I'm glad there are now some cracks in the consensus.

As I've gotten older and have seen enough side switches, I've found it increasingly astounding to watch how predictably the partisans memory wipe themselves about XYZ terrible thing that their side did. Now that the bad side - the side they're not on - is in power, they must protest that same XYZ thing.

It's said that Trump is terrible with journalists (he is). And there's Obama's quiet, terrifying war on journalists with the Espionage Act, that the partisans on that side almost entirely ignored.

Assisting in the destruction of Syria and Libya is a fine thing to ignore (one should perhaps get a nobel peace prize for it). Destroying Iraq is genocide and a war crime. Or vice versa, depending on which side you're on.

The sides just flip flop, memory wipe past misdeeds, and then resume the perpetual partisan war. I think it works to assist them in staying in power, maintaining the always conflict. Oceania is always at war with Eastasia.

> Assisting in the destruction of Syria and Libya is a fine thing to ignore

Will the US agression ever end? It is sickening.

This is not a defense of the behavior - but it's been strongly asserted that Obama's crackdown on whistleblowers and journalists has more to do with improved abilities to track document access and sharing than it does the explicit desire to confront whistleblowers and journalists. All presidents have wanted to minimize whistleblowing and critical journalism, we just have better tools to understand just who, exactly, accessed that version of the 'secret prison memo' on Feb. 23.

The investigations are more successful so more leakers and whistleblowers get caught.

Yeah that sounds like everything else we've heard from NSA: "We can, so we will."

Dialectic Materialism has been Weaponised.

People think that because they are capable of pitching an anti-synthesis against a synthesis, they are intelligent - whereas nothing could be further from the truth. If you can't get out of the pro-vs-con mindset you are stuck in a trap designed to ensure you don't think beyond the curve, outside the event horizon of 'generally approved thought-process' society.

People need to be given uncomfortable positions to evaluate. Just maybe, its important to not discount the conspiracies and realise that in fact truth is stranger than fiction ..

This is interesting. Right now I'm of the mind that the best I can do is to continue to press on the inherent contradictions.

...which is ironic, since due to that same polarization, Presidents in general seem to have less ability (or maybe it's inclination) than ever, to effect any meaningful change about anything that matters.

It doesn't matter who's President.

Arguably that's how the U.S. government was designed to function. The new (well, the recurring thing) is that Congress, White House, and even the judiciary get more political capital from inaction and blame than they get from cooperation.

> It doesn't matter who's President.

It absolutely matters when something goes wrong outside our borders.

If, hypothetically speaking, a small NATO country on Russia's border devolves into chaos thanks to, say, a massive power grid failure combined with agitation from Russian nationalists, and Russia then intervenes to "stabilize" the situation, the temperament of the president and coherence of the White House as a whole would make a great deal of difference in how the crisis evolves.

Purely hypothetical, of course.

Why does this sound like Ukraine

Ukraine is neither small nor NATO, but...yeah.

Estonia are cool, but they know they need to stay on good terms with their neighbors. John McCain doesn't run things anymore.

Sure, it's just like that, because all that hacking of Democratic databases didn't happen.

I think the assumption that the wrongdoing was a conspiracy to get Trump elected gets far too much attention and is a secondary issue, but unlike the birther issue, there was quite a bit of funny business in general. The birther issue was just made up a priori.

The funny business, regardless of whether it benefited anyone, needs to be investigated. Once we understand what happened, then we can worry about whether it was an effort to swing the election or just a tactic for creating chaos.

As evidenced by the gerrymandered districts intended to do things like sway presidential elections. Clearly the system is working as designed and not being cheated...

That's kinda what I'm getting at: gerrymandering is the implementation. Our legislatures need to specify and clarify rules to stop those kind of abuses, but I don't think anyone is going to jail for gerrymandering a district. My point was simply that these are the rules of the game but people seem to believe someone is cheating.

It's generally the legislators that are drawing the districts.

In Michigan there is a constitutional referendum coming up that will take that power away from them if it passes.

How does one use gerrymandering to sway a presidential election?

Nothing in the short run, but I think an argument could be made that gerrymandering in the age when digital technology has enabled very precise calculations to be made has engendered a completely dysfunctional political system.

And that completely dysfunctional political system certainly played a role in the last election.

Gerrymandering sways House and state-level elections. It doesn't have a direct impact on Senate and Presidential elections.

NE-02 sent an electoral vote to Obama in 2008, whereas the other 4 NE votes went to McCain. In 2010, NE-02 was gerrymandered (arguably) and all 5 votes have gone to Romney (2012) and Trump (2016) since then.

Admittedly, that's sort of an exception that proves the rule. Only NE and ME don't operate under a winner-takes-all, they've so far only split their votes once each (2008 in NE and 2016 in ME), and their votes -- certainly splitting their votes -- has never impacted the result of a Presidential election.

I find it strange you’re made uncomfortable by this as opposed to a president privately profiting off the White House, actively courting a foreign power for his own gain in the election, empowering his own family like banana republic dictator, wantonly obstructing the investigation like a petty child, and being surrounded by incompetents and shady characters who keep dropping like flies for actually breaking the law and getting caught for it.

If this were Nixon, wouldn’t it be an appropriate response to hope that all involved were caught?

If wanting to see this kind of criminality be ended is “salivating” call me Mr. Drooly.

Maybe this was a reasonable stance if you were a hardliner skeptic.

But it's March 2018. 5 of Trump's senior campaign staff are indicted. Multiple Russian actors are indicted. The Russian government doesn't even deny it, Putin literally blamed Jewish people. CA's c staff was just on video talking about using human trafficking to compromise politicians and their CEO just disclosed that some state governments were cooperating with the Trump campaign.

All this is astride the long understood fact that American election security is so bad that there aren't reliable records to disprove a machine that's been tampered with. What's more, the we've also seen corroborated evidence that the machines election officials in some swing States we're compromised by sophisticated actors. These machines aren't just where emails happen, they're the machines where the software that configures the voting machines runs (for some models).

None of what I've said is even an uncharitable reading of the facts. The final statement might be surprising but it's well supported in security literature.

But sure, you be skeptical as a well-measured and coldly logical citizen.

All this is astride the long understood fact that American election security is so bad that there aren't reliable records to disprove a machine that's been tampered with.

In this context, is it curious that no one has signed on to co-sponsor the following bill?

https://congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/5147/tex...

People could kick up a big stink about it, but the reason it won't go anywhere is that Ryan can hold it in committee in perpetutity. , isn't it?

The voting machine observations aren't new. They're old, some dating back to Bush-era elections.

I think technological illiteracy and States refusing to replace costly machines represent the bulk of the opposition.

I thought they were trying to win back the House? One couldn't imagine a more evocative campaign issue, for independents suspicious of both parties like me. "We care about democracy and Paul Ryan doesn't! Tell Paul Ryan to restore trust to democracy!" OK, tell me that and I'll vote Democrat. Crickets.

You probably won't, but I'm not going to engage an obvious troll any further.

Is it the fact that I like Gabbard, or the fact that I voted for Bernie, which earns me such a commendation from such a valiant defender of the status quo (war) machine?

> I thought they were trying to win back the House? One couldn't imagine a more evocative campaign issue, for independents suspicious of both parties like me. "We care about democracy and Paul Ryan doesn't! Tell Paul Ryan to restore trust to democracy!"

And that’s the electoral (as opposed to policy) side of why 84 of them are cosponsoring a much broader election security bill than Gabbard’s HR 5147 (and, to be clear, one that was introduced before Gabbard’s “me too” bill.)

> In this context, is it curious that no one has signed on to co-sponsor the following bill?

No one has signed on to HR 5147 because everyone (84 members, all Democrats) who cares enough about election security to cosponsor a bill on it has instead signed on to cosponsor HR 5011 [0], which is a much broader election security bill; to the extent the specific requirements in HR 5147 are desirable and not address by HR 5011, they probably make more sense as an amendment to HR 5011.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/5011...

Terms that don't appear in everyone's favorite bill: "voter-verified", "open-source" (not sure why Gabbard has that hyphen), "preservation". On the other hand, it does begin with "It is the sense of Congress that, in light of the lessons learned from Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election..." so it ought to play well with the military-intelligence-enforcement-industrial-media complex. If Gabbard somehow got all those important things amended into this most favored bill, it would lose all its co-sponsors. Democrats and Republicans are like Coke and Pepsi. If we had actual democracy we might end up with something palatable.

> Terms that don't appear in everyone's favorite bill: "voter-verified", "open-source" (not sure why Gabbard has that hyphen), "preservation".

HR 5011, rather than trying to cobble together a bandaid over hackable electronic voting systems, has its central mitigation the voting system problem (it addresses more election infrastructure than just ballot-casting) incentives and grants to get rid of electronic voting altogether in favor of the proven system of voter-marked paper ballots. Voter-marked ballots that are the thing that is counted in the normal case is much better than voter-verified receipts that are selectively or conditionally used to audit counts, and open source is irrelevant when there is no software, and the idea that open source is somehow equivalent to secure has been refuted time and again.

Now, sure, it arguably [0] wouldn't be bad to add something like HR 5147s requirements for hold-outs that aren't going to abandon electronic voting into HR 5011, and that would be a very good debate to have when HR 5011 (or, more realistically, the similar bill introduced in the next Congress) is heard in committee.

[0] Arguably not, though, because that could encourage people to see electronic voting as safer than it is; maybe better would be to amend in a hard deadline requirement for abandoning electronic voting in favor of voter-marked paper ballots, a stick to go along with the grant-money carrot.

Gabbard's bill is also about paper ballots, only it says "shall require" rather than "here are some grants if you want them". Also, the popular bill says nothing about voter verification or ballot preservation, so it brings us back to Florida 2000 all over again. Love those hangin' chads!

> Start blathering about Hillary's emails, as if that were somehow important.

Well, it was certainly an incident of corruption and/or incompetence. People do (and should) get fired for mishandling sensitive information.

Maybe the HN community in general wants to give Clinton a pass on it, but investigating facts that illustrate the character and competence of presidential candidates is certainly newsworthy.

There was plenty of similar corruption and incompetence to report on for Trump, but its generally easier and more salacious to report on his Cinco de Mayo taco salad.

I yearn for the Obama days when this and Beghasi were the biggest scandals that anyone could come up with. Now it’s collusion, financial opacity in business dealings, sex with playmates, etc... it really is too much.

I thought it was kind of scandalous that Guantanamo never closed, contrary to campaign promises...

Isn't "not keeping campaign promises" in a different league from "not using email correctly", which in turn is in a different league from colluding with Russia and using government office for personal gain?

Certainly. The first scandal was easy for voters to see: closing Gitmo was kind of Obama's thing, from the very beginning of the primaries. The second scandal required a fair amount of investigation, but that investigation was fairly legible to voters. The third requires voters to believe what they're told by unnamed sources: thus far no one will go on the record with any proof of anything. The fourth should be easy to see, so I look forward to hearing more about it. I would love to see a precedent set that corruption leads to impeachment; I'm not holding my breath.

> The first scandal was easy for voters to see: closing Gitmo was kind of Obama's thing, from the very beginning of the primaries.

Campaign promises are usually seen as best effort. Are we still waiting for Mexico to pay for that wall?

> The second scandal required a fair amount of investigation, but that investigation was fairly legible to voters.

Yes, it is very straight forward and the FBI went over it multiple times, to the point that Comey had to be extra diligent in reporting the investigation's progress to avoid a tinge of bias in the FBI.

> The third requires voters to believe what they're told by unnamed sources:

There has been plenty of "coincidences" thus presented so far. I for one would apply Hanlon's razor: Trump and his advisers were just being very stupid and don't think any malice was involved, though breaking the law is breaking the law regardless (see their opinion on stupidity and Hillary's emails). Besides, thou dost protest too much, so maybe there is more to this than we can see right now.

I don't think any of this leads to impeachment, which really isn't in anyone's interests anyways (Pence?). Instead, Trump will be a two year lame duck after the midterms with little public support left.

That's an interesting corollary... Hanlon's razor applies to sentencing, but not to guilt.

"It depends", some offenses require malice, some can driven by negligence and ignorance alone. I'm not sure what category the Hatch Act is in.

I suppose I should say, "Hanlon's Razor often applies to sentencing, only occasionally to guilt"

I don't really disagree with any of that, with the exception of the wishful thinking about the next two elections. It just seems that this whole thing was conjured up to explain an event that didn't need explaining. It isn't surprising that one unpopular candidate beat some other unpopular candidate, when the winner was on TV all the time. The surprising thing was that he didn't win by more, but that may be because people pay less attention to TV news than they used to.

==It just seems that this whole thing was conjured up to explain an event that didn't need explaining.==

It might seem like this if you ignore lots of facts. Comey started the investigation into the Trump campaign in July 2016. Hillary point-blank called Trump a Russian puppet during a debate in October 2016. Both of these events happened before the election, your assertion doesn't match the history.

Edit: It was also big news when the RNC platformed changed to a more pro-Russia stance. Again, before the election. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trum...

Wasn't the first FISA request in June '16? Much earlier than most wiretapping of presidential candidates by administrations of the other wing of the status quo party!

Can you explain your false equivalency a little better, I'm not sure I follow?

It's a simple question. When Trump complained that his campaign had been wiretapped, was he correct or was he incorrect?

We don't know if Trump himself was wiretapped, as he claimed. We do know that at least one of his campaign advisors had a FISA warrant approved by a federal judge.

I'm not sure what relation this has to the fact that Trump-Russia connections were being investigated prior to the election. That fact is contrary to the comment you made that it only started in order to explain why Hillary lost. Have you ceded that false premise yet or are we just moving on to the next deflection?

Never mind; you're better at this game than I am. b^)

I found the "one bomb dropped every twenty minutes, mostly on innocent people" statistic to be the most scandalous issue of Obama's presidency, personally ..

Well, Obama's policies were plenty controversial if people wanted to fight about politics.

You're also leaving out Guantanamo, assassination of American citizens without a trial, and the Fast and the Furious scandal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal).

Don't forget conjuring up an external enemy to distract the public and get the population riled up.

5. Russia and Hackers and Collusion Oh My!

> Not the fault of the media who would never shut up about Trump.

But look at the ratings and the ad money they are getting? It's the same thing with school shootings. Massive 24/7 coverage turning the shooter into a celebrity. Then they wonder why shootings happen. Oh it couldn't be the media. They can't blame themselves. It must be guns. Another gem is "why is society so divided"? Could it be the media playing population/groups off each other to create drama and make more money? Of course not. They can't blame themselves. So it must be social media and the internet.

Nobody will talk about "common sense media control" for some reason. It's common sense!

Uh oh, you suggested "Russian collusion" might be a load of crap. Good thing people are here to "downvote" and silence you.

We're literally in the middle of yet another Red Scare. You can speak out against such nonsense without being a Trump supporter.

You can also note that "the heads of the top six American intelligence agencies unanimously reaffirmed Russian interference" without being a conspiracy nut.

Facebook is actually bad for you, and a bad actor in society. If we can't see that because we're addicted to it, maybe it's worth turning a blind eye to just a little more bullshit; whatever it takes to get us out of social networks.

That's why we used to have regulation of media; the pursuit of attention is always more profitable for any mass media endeavor.

Facebook and Google are media. They are just more effective at engagement than TV. The CNN stuff is particularly telling there as their reach is very low. More people are watching baseball on a given day than CNN. Shows like "Pawn Stars" can attract more viewship than all cable news combined.

The news media is at best entertainment, but mostly it's just straight up propaganda. Even the BBC is like that now.

The media gives politicians more credit than they deserve. More like “politicians are America’s scapegoat du jour”.

So the media should have just said nothing about a candidate who is clearly a danger to the country? How does ignoring problems work out for you in your life?

How does doing exactly the thing that leads to all your problems, over and over again, work out for you in your life? From the middle of 2015, Trump was on every channel of TV, all the time. If he is indeed such a threat, it is because the news media made him that. Without the news media giving Trump thousands of hours of free and unregulated TV ads, Clinton would have defeated Cruz by a somewhat narrow margin. Discouraged Republicans would have said, "Well, that's what happens when the opponent is the second-least-popular candidate in history, and you nominate the first-least-popular candidate in history..."

Since I am a cynic, I see that despite their professed political allegiances, the news media are quite pleased by the prospect of seven more years of political insanity. Every USA president from now until the breakup on will be a veteran of reality TV.

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