As I said above, I'm not a Democrat. I understand that some who identify strongly with one or the other of the two status quo parties care about this concept of "spoilers". Many of the voters they claim to want to reach do not. If HRC had wanted to win Wisconsin, she should have campaigned in Wisconsin. If she had wanted to appeal to the same voters who voted for Obama, she should have been a completely different person for her entire political life. Gary Johnson voters didn't owe her a damn thing.
That's...not what Clinton said, but instead something that seems like a hyperbolic retelling of the initial NYT misreporting that mixed what Clinton said about Russia and Gabbard with what Clinton said about Republicans and Gabbard, and reported the combination as having been said about Russia and Gabbard. (But still, even as misreported, would not fairly be characterized as calling her a Manchurian candidate.)
So, no, agreeing with Clinton on Gabbard’s spoiler role doesn't require believing she is a Russian plant.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/18/politics/hillary-clinton-tuls...
"Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said Thursday the Russians are currently "grooming" a Democrat running in the presidential primary to run as a third-party candidate and champion their interests."
CNN making the same misrepresentation (possibly as an uncredited copy) that NYT originally did, but lacking the integrity (or lacking ever going directly to the original quote because they were plagiarizing something that they didn't realize was wrong) to issue a correction?
The actual quote says the Republicans are grooming her, and that she's the Russians favorite (and implying that that plays a role in Republican calculations), not that the Russians are grooming her.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/turns-out-hillary-clinton-...
[Gabbard is] the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far, and that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up. Which she might not, ‘cause she’s also a Russian asset.
"She" in the final sentence refers to Jill Stein. So, Hillary is at the very least slandering a genuinely good person with a baseless accusation. For shame.
But, there's another word in that sentence, "also". In isolation, we might think it means that Stein is a Russian asset in addition to her other allegedly unsavory qualities. That reading doesn't make sense in light of the previous sentence, however, which is mostly about Gabbard and only introduces Stein at the end as someone who might or might not do something. Might or might not do it, because she's also a Russian asset. In English you don't say "also" about the thing that explains the first thing. You say "also" about some unrelated thing. The only reasonable reading is that Stein is a Russian asset in addition to the only other person under discussion also being a Russian asset.
I can't believe we're trying to steelman something a Clinton said in an edited interview by a loyal Democratic "operative" she has known and worked with for years. Those are the perfect conditions for saying exactly what one intends to say. She wasn't taken out of context. There was no trick question. English is her first language. I really think she thought it was a good idea to make this baseless accusation.
Really, though. I can't believe you've got me suggesting you could trust the media a bit more, if only when it comes to reading transcripts. This whole thing has come under intense scrutiny. If this obscure financial site had unearthed a bombshell, do you really all the big media firms who love to hate on Gabbard would have ignored it?
Yes, the description of “grooming” refers to Republicans, not Russians. The CNN article made a gross error (if not an outright lie) and failed to correct it.
> "She" in the final sentence refers to Jill Stein. So, Hillary is at the very least slandering a genuinely good person with a baseless accusation.
Er, no, there's nothing baseless about Stein being described as a Russian asset; it might be disputable based on the public info, but there was plenty of information from which one could reasonably draw that conclusion that came out publicly during and in the aftermath of the 2016 election; that Russia was directing efforts at boosting her—as well as Trump and Sanders—is pretty much beyond dispute; that she (like Trump and unlike Sanders) failed to acknowledge and repudiate that effort is also beyond dispute.
> But, there's another word in that sentence, "also". In isolation, we might think it means that Stein is a Russian asset in addition to her other allegedly unsavory qualities. That reading doesn't make sense in light of the previous sentence, however, which is mostly about Gabbard and only introduces Stein at the end as someone who might or might not do something. [...] The only reasonable reading is that Stein is a Russian asset in addition to the only other person under discussion also being a Russian asset.
Yes, Clinton described Gabbard and Stein as Russian “assets”. That's she did so is not in dispute. Note that Russia, like the USSR before it, has and recognizes agents/assets with looser relationships that aren't of control the way the US intelligence community aims for in what it describes as it's assets.
An on point discussion, though about the use of similar language about Trump: https://www.justsecurity.org/63660/is-trump-a-russian-agent-...
> Those are the perfect conditions for saying exactly what one intends to say.
She said exactly what she intended to say, which is not what she has been widely characterized in the media (some of which has corrected the error) as saying, nor is it what she was characterized as saying upthread, which is even more extreme than the widely-spread media mischaracterization.
> I can't believe you've got me suggesting you could trust the media a bit more, if only when it comes to reading transcripts.
Since on the point actually in dispute, you've done nothing to actually defend the mischaracterization you say should be more trusted, which literally took what Clinton said Republicans were doing and said she said it about Russians, I can't believe it either, since it is clearly defending the indefensible. Yet here we are.
That was actually a rather disingenuous reply.
A spoiler is by definition any candidate that takes votes away from a possible winner in a close race. That is uncontested. Many consider Ross Perot to be a spoiler.
Regardless of "rumors", there is the fact that she's been the darling of the right wing: Tucker, Karl, David Duke, et. al.
Give me one reason other than spoiler why they would liker her.
We also know that Russia operates disinformation campaigns here and has weaponized social media. There is documented proof of them setting up BLM vs. "All Life Matters" events to intentionally divide us.
They will seize every point of division and amplify it to their best abilities.
Whether or not she actively solicits the KGB's help, they will be helping her.
Tell me where I'm wrong.
I suspect that Carlson isn't actually a Gabbard partisan. He is, however, one of the few people on TV who have interviewed her with an open mind. This tells us more about TV media than about Gabbard.
Even if I believed every single thing I've heard about what Russia supposedly did about our last election (and I don't) I wouldn't care. They haven't been accused of changing votes or stuffing ballot boxes. They have been accused of excessive communication. 1A, dude. If our democracy can't handle speech, it ain't really a democracy. KGB didn't put Trump on all four channels of TV news for 25 hours a day starting in mid-2015. KGB didn't decide we'd waste trillions of dollars and uncounted lives on decades of pointless war. Etc.
Also, living where I live, I've heard a lot of awful shit said about BLM. I don't think any of it was as obnoxious as the idea that they were about the KGB rather than, you know, what their fucking name says.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/us/politics/trump-iran-st...
> If our democracy can't handle speech
Speech or propaganda? An unfortunately high number of our citizens are either too stupid or too uninformed to vote "correctly" (i.e., assess and analyze proposed candidates, laws, etc). I'm not trying to be elitist, just pessimistic about things.
This is all an "Experiment in Democracy", right? We're applying a system developed in the agrarian age that now is suffering from information overload, nationally coordinated disinformation campaigns, and the influx of unlimited money in political campaigns.
We need to rethink how to achieve the original goals without bad guys gaming the system.
Sorry, this is kind of rambling, but HN sucks fluid dialog.
This may have been true decades ago when a different polity existed there and conditions in general were quite different. I see no evidence that this is true today. Occasionally Russian politicians might rattle the saber, but that's mostly for domestic political reasons, like it is in every other nation on Earth including USA. Just as USA society is not a monolith, neither is Russia society. Russian military interests are specific to particular nations like Ukraine and Syria where they also have economic interests. The main thing they want from USA is something they have in common with a number or other nations: please stop the sanctions and related economic aggression.
I'm sure anyone here could come up with a variety of USA war media articles or presentations criticizing the conduct of the Russian state in one way or another. In every such article I've read, Russia is held to a standard that USA hasn't met since the start of the Philippine-American War at the latest, and in some cases since the Pilgrims landed. I'd like to think that such articles insult their readers' intelligence.