Originally Posted by dok (Post 2109843)

That's very very true. Frankly I find it difficult to blame her for this sort of bunker mentality, when there have been so many purported scandals raised referencing the Clintons over the years, and most of them have turned out to be completely hollow.

There's a conservative media industry that treats Clinton scandals like catnip. At some point, the fact that people keep calling things involving Clinton scandals can't, by itself, be used to justify the idea that they are corrupt. That argument invites the continued ginning up of fake scandals, right?

She's certainly not perfect, and some decisions seem particularly hamhanded. But she's basically a normal politician, and none of her many, many scandals are particularly concerning to me. I have no real concern that she'll be bought and paid for as president.

All? That's a stretch. I agree she has a well-worn distrust of the media, but she's revealed a lot of her private life. She's also far from the most avaricious candidate we've seen in recent cycles.

And then there's the comparison... by any reasonable standard, Hillary Clinton has been drastically more transparent, and drastically less greedy, than Donald Trump.

• Hillary has released, literally, over three consecutive decades of tax records. Trump, none.
• Despite all the current chatter that could suggest otherwise, Hillary has released more detailed medical records than Trump.
• The Clinton Foundation has extensive public records of who it has given money to, and literally nothing it has contributed to has been considered anything but a solid charitable cause. The Trump foundation releases roughly the minimum public records, and has been implicated in a very plausible bribery scandal (not to mention the silly low-grade violations like purchasing a painting of Trump with charitable donations).
• Clinton has explicitly laid out plans for how the charitable foundation will be separated from her when she is in office. Trump has refused to disclose his business ties and has stated that he will let his kids run his businesses if he is President.
• Hillary accepted some expensive speaking fees, and pays a very high tax rate. Trump has a long established track record of stiffing contractors and of using bankruptcy to avoid paying creditors, and in all likelihood uses depreciation to pay little or no income tax.

Uh, Obama hasn't? Seriously, he has not avoided them, in the eyes or many. If you like you can google "Obama scandals" and enjoy spending literally hours treading through an alternative reality where Obama has committed high crimes and somehow avoided justice on multiple occasions.

What someone who dislikes you accuses you of is not meaningful. What a salacious news media deems worthy of reporting is not meaningful. It's unwise to judge Hillary by the volume of accusations that people lob at her. What matters is how meaningful the evidence is.

(Tangential - of all the leaked e-mails from Colin Powell, the most interesting thing to me was his exchange with Condoleeza Rice about Benghazi. They agreed that the person most responsible was actually the ambassador who died - it was his mistake to put himself and his staff in such an insecure location. They also agreed there was plenty of blame to go around, up to and including Hillary, but that there was clearly nothing criminal.)

There's a cultural element but it's easy to overstate. The key factors in why USA politics have become both zero-sum, and very nasty, are:

• The election method itself. Elections in parliamentary democracies, especially those that use proportional representation, reward those who seek to drum up enthusiasm for their causes, and create much less incentive to spend time, money, and effort bringing down one particular foe. The first-past-the-post voting system in the USA, combined with the distinct presidential election, means that a vote taken away from your main rival is as valuable as a vote added to your own total. So negativity is rewarded.
• The simultaneous nationalization of and balkanization of the media. 40 years ago, local news and local papers were much more powerful, making local interests really important in congressional elections. Because of that, a Democrat in one part of the country could be more similar to their Republican opponent than a fellow Democrat from another part of the country. This made cross-party coalitions much more common than they are now. Now, local news is weakened, but media has been divided along ideological lines. This has basically the opposite effect, pushing the parties further apart.
• Gerrymandering has drastically increased polarization in the house, basically exacerbating the above issues. Gerrymandering has always been a problem but it's gotten much more precise in the last 20 years.

Originally Posted by dok (Post 2109885)

Only in the one section where I directly compare them. The rest is more of a comparison of HRC to public figures in general.

Reality is not binary. The e-mail scandal (which certainly contains wrongdoing, but nothing major or malicious) is a good example of this. Hillary has disclosed an enormous amount of personal information, some of it voluntarily, some of it after having it dragged out of her. She resisted revealing some stuff she insisted is entirely personal in nature. Is that opening the doors, is that reasonable? Is that a bunker mentality? It's not really one or the other. It's a person living under a microscope and trying to navigate it in her way, neither perfect nor deplorable.

You realize it's impossible to prove a negative, right? The above statement is literally the best you could hope of any presidential candidate, because literally the only alternative is that they have been proven to break the law. (You know, like Donald Trump has.)

The possible conflict of interest is there, sure. But it's a stretch when the money of the Clinton foundation is so well accounted for, and goes to projects that are very obviously philanthropic.

Buying influence happens all the time in politics - usually by contributing to a politician's campaign, other times by purchasing the services of high-priced lobbyists with access. By contrast, contributing money to a charity associated with someone seems like both an extremely ineffective and almost comically benign way to attempt to purchase influence.

There is a bias towards creating the appearance of parity. There is a bias towards not appearing to take sides. When one candidate is easily the least qualified and most scandal-ridden candidate of my lifetime, attempting to portray the problems each candidate has in the same light amounts to a massive bias. And yes, that's what we're seeing. "He said, she said" reporting only works when there's roughly an equal amount of rightness and wrongness on both sides. And there isn't; not even close.

Donald Trump's "charitable foundation" gave a $25k contribution to the PAC of the Florida attorney general while she was considering whether to press charges against Trump over Trump university. The foundation later claimed this was a clerical error and they had intended to give the money to a charity in Utah with a similar name (one they have never given money to before or since). Riiiiiight.

Go ahead, try to find one story in HRC's history that suggests anything even close to the same level of quid pro quo as that story. And yet, that story has gotten extremely little coverage, because it's lost in the whirlwind of insanity that is the Trump campaign. Meanwhile, the e-mail scandal just keeps coming around and around, largely because there's just not a ton of other questionable stuff to talk about.

A combination of journalistic laziness and journalistic cowardice has led to a false balance that is actually, yes, quite biased.

Of course they're the standard partisan attacks. That's really the same as Hillary's though.

It's hard to remember now, but in 2011 and 2012 every damn story was seen on the right as the scandal that's finally going to bring down the Obama administration. Christ, remember how often we heard the word "Solyndra"? And we now think of Benghazi as a Hillary scandal, but for the two months from when it happened until the 2012 election, it was a 100% Obama scandal.