FBI Director Comey Divulged Classified Information to the General Public

The information that Wills laptop contained 1000 unread emails from Clinton's server, like Clinton's "sloppy" treatment of other classified materials, was very definitely (or should have been) classified, and divulging such information to the general public was a very serious violation of trust.

Only in Comey's case, instead of just being sloppy, this classified information was divulged deliberately and intentionally at the behest of Republicans determined to prosecute and embarrass the Clinton campaign for president at the worst possible moment. Disgusting doesn't begin to describe this action. CRIMINAL does. No matter who wins the election, we need to prosecute this FBI director for intentionally and maliciously doing exactly the same thing Clinton's "sloppiness" effected.

Questions?

 

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heh... except rules don't apply to the ruling elite.

 

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True as far as I can see. Can't really feel very good about voting for the Democrat this time, but it still beats voting for a candidate that all the rampant paranoia of being the owner of a chain of gambling casinos entails. That someone like Putin, a former KGB assassin likes him is reason enough to vote the other way.

I don't care about emails or especially the concept that everything a government bureaucrat communicates is subject to classification, but I would agree in principal that any regulation that clamps the security lid on anything someone like Trump might say is a really great idea.

 

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You have evidence for this?
Or is this just another example of our seeming quadrennial mass insanity?

 

I'm going to guess he's referring to this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko

Not sure how that implies Putin was the assassin though...?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko

Tip of the iceberg that is Putin.

How easily the world forgets what happens when a government has a loudmouth rabble rouser as its figurehead and someone like Putin to put his executive orders and paranoia into practice. Trump + Putin = Hitler + Eichmann; Made for each other. A lot of people are going to read this and actually think: "Hey, what a great idea". Live it up, till they come for YOU.

 

Why?

I'm sorry, but why? Democratic supporters are always saying this, no matter who we're sending to the White House. I'm kind of sick of it.

Some weeks ago I asked someone in my family why he loathed Hillary Clinton so much. He's trying to be very, very honest about it, and we're aware, this far in, that he won't actually be giving me an answer.

See, here's the weird thing: Tell some of these people what the liberals are pissed off at her for, and they will feel much better about voting for her.

But we're always apologizing for our candidates, so some of these mitigating platitudes seem absolutely empty.

And if the problem is essentially the same as it ever was, remember the capitalist's smug point about how a socialist will still run a business.

The underlying message is that this is the way society works and anyone who wants to change it for the better should reserve their participation since they don't like society, thus reducing their hope of actually effecting change.

So I'm just curious: Why should Clinton supporters apologize this time? Hillary Clinton is pretty popular↗, and a bunch of the people needing reassurance are people I wouldn't trust with government, and a lot of them simply won't be reconciled; hatred is, after all, an identity in these United States. Facts are not a prerequisite of the American hate affair with the Clinton family. So, seriously, when we actually have to make up themes to apologize for, I'm wondering just what we're actually apologizing for.

Indeed, this time around, I think we're actually apologizing that she's a girl, which in turn seems really, really strange, even problematic.

 

close

no cigar

 

If you're sick of it, quit backing the nominations of douchebags like John Kerry and marginally competent collaborators like Hillary Clinton.

Or the love affair, apparently. In fact, in both cases denial of facts is central.

What you would need to apologize for is frightening people with the delusory state of mind the Clinton crowd seems to be bringing to the White House. She's rightwing authoritarian by nature, and an easily rolled compromiser facing an intransigent and dangerous pack of enemies by circumstance. This could turn out very badly. This is a big risk. It's scary to see this risk unacknowledged, even denied.

Putin rose to head of the KGB while the KGB ran an assassination program - using poison, in particular (heart attacks, suicides by gun, small plane crashes, etc, were features more shared with their competition). Assassinations of the same kinds - in circumstance, method, timing, etc - have continued during his rise to power in post-Soviet Russia and tenure there. His involvement in assassinations would be the presumption, denial of which would require evidence.

Comey is unlikely to face prosecution. The hope here is that he will face severe bureaucratic retaliation, serious damage to his career and prospects, if Clinton is elected President - if he does not, the more pessimistic foreshadowing of Clinton's presidency will deepen in shade.

 

Iceaura, we understand why libertarians like you want liberals to commit political suicide.

As long as you're in denial about the history of the Democratic Party, the rise of the DLC, the lack of the leftist Revolution, and the fact of ever having need of a Blue Dog caucus, there really isn't much for us to discuss about the rest. I mean, I get it, this is a fundamental disagreement we have about history, and how the liberals who came before your (chortle!) "left-libertarianism" are all corrupt because, quite clearly why else would they compromise when they had a majority sufficient to invoke and complete the Revolution.

No, seriously, that's pretty much our point of contention.

And the rest of your need for self-satisfaction in denunciations of douchebaggery and other pointless proclamations of your sanctimony is pretty much the reason you're not worth the time for anything more than these few sentences.

 

Sure and it's me in denial.

Since Clinton's role in all that is something all good liberals apparently agree to pretend never happened, which is not at all the same thing as being in denial, surely.

No, it isn't. It's not even close. That's you, in your little fort, pretending to have the argument with me you had with yourself before you drank the koolaid.

You made up that stupid juvenile crap to put in my mouth because the alternative was confronting the obvious discord between your delusions of Clinton and the plain facts of her career that I keep reminding you about - not to mention current events. Nothing you post is going to make your little self-comforting deception come true for you. You drank the koolaid, is all, and you're going to be babbling along about her masterful competence and her liberal agenda and the stereotypical purity obsession of her ideologically blinkered critics until it wears off.

At which point - say, if she agrees to privatize a good share of Social Security and boost the Medicare age to 70, in return for an agreement to not cut income taxes any more for rich people and not shut down the US government or default on its debt - you wake up, and then the interesting part of all this enters, stage left: how far are you willing to go in defending what is in fact rightwing authoritarian police state expansion in support of a consolidating corporate plutocracy, if it justifies itself as necessary compromise in order to get something done you want done?

 

No, Iceaura, you're complaining because someone survived the obstacle course. That's the fucking problem. You're pissed off that Republicans haven't taken her down, yet.

See, here's the thing: You refuse to account for decisions according to their context. Therefore, when you say uneducated bullshit like, "Since Clinton's role in all that is something all good liberals apparently agree to pretend never happened, which is not at all the same thing as being in denial, surely", you just remind people what a lazy libertarian whiner you are.

I don't have to like all of her decisions. I assess them according to the history in which we found ourselves. You, however, are assessing from some sanctimonious, twenty-first century delusion, and throughout you have refused to demonstrate any grasp of that history. Quite frankly, I'm sick and tired of your ignorance and sloth.

Seriously, dude, you're the one showing all the fatheaded brilliance to argue that the fact of Congress giving a president military authorization is evidence that it would not be extraordinary to refuse.

You need to realize, Iceaura, there are these people out in the country called voters, and politicians are supposed to listen to them from time to time. You need to learn this. I could easily endorse your outlook on Democratic Party history if it was remotely accurate. You can't actually make a proper liberal argument; you use right-wing parodies. We get it.

I'm sorry, Iceaura, I just don't recognize the ignorant, slothful, lardbrained fantasy in lieu of history your incoherence requires. And, seriously, the generations of Democratic voters who have wrestled with these questions over the years deserve better than some two-bit ignoramus libertarian punk badmouthing them for the sake of feeling like he's somebody worth listening to.

You know how you're someone worth listening to? When you actually stop and think, Iceaura.

Look, dude, you have no politicians left to vote for. We get that. And that's fine.

Think about it this way: Bill Weld maybe could have been president. Did you see his Maddow interview? Holy shit.

But you know what that would get us?

A Republican administration with every reason to roll toward the severely conservative sector after winning election.

And that's the other problem. We have a professional political class for a reason. And I get that you despise them. And I get that you don't really care that the Clintons are so careful that if you investigate the rest of them that way they all come out looking even worse. But we have a professional political class for a reason, and that's probably never going to change, so what the hell do you think you're going to do about it?

Call down, what, a liberal revolution? And win in Blue Dog country?

A libertarian revolution? Oh, good, arm the stalkers. That's gonna sell well in liberal quarters.

Seriously, do you realize why the professional political class winnows to two parties?

It's the same reason the rest of us will generally vote that way.

Liberals win slowly. You would know this if you were a liberal.

Conservatives and libertarians win quickly.

Liberals, winning slowly, oversee even slower societal recoveries from conservative and libertarian victories. We're accustomed to taking the blame.

Your idyllic vacuum doesn't seem to account for this.

How do you answer Pankhurst and Lenin?

There are a million better ways to do this; let us pick one, but here's the thing: We need to be able to win.

That's how this happens.

We win slowly, but we have to keep winning in order to do so. People are already trying to forget the Gay Fray, pretend this was all simple. Yeah, I wish it was. I wish the DLC was a liberal triumph, too, but the only reason anyone ever believed the Democrats were at their core a liberal party is that they listened to Republicans. The rest of us have known what we're voting for. It's frustrating, especially when it's dumbassed shit like the FISA buckle. The years of law-and-order bullshit? Hell, from the tower of white privilege the period makes complete sense: Republicans would have won large, and shit would be a hell of a lot worse. Cynicism is as cynicism does, but in the end you need to be in office at all in order to stave off that hell of a lot worse.

It's not much, but, you know, that's the thing: If we had the numbers for something better we would have won it. I can only reiterate there is a reason we ever had a Blue Dog caucus.

(guffaw!)

Holy Christ, dude! I mean, gimme a minute, I need to get higher in order to meet you on that cloud.

Holy shit, that's some variation; the last package of Tahoe OG clocked nineteen percent; this runs twenty-three. Tastes different, too, but, yeah, the view from up here.

Um, okay, so here's the thing: Where's the Left in all of this?

And here's the other thing: When they press, they're not going to do it your way; if they want to succeed, they will need to make sense.

 

I've seen no such information released to the public, though I know he's under a lot of pressure by both democrats and republicans to do just that. My guess is that his feet are over the fire by those within his own agency, which explains his decision to reopen the investigation. It's obvious that something huge is taking place. I think Comey is losing sleep and probably developing an ulcer this week.

 

The TOPIC or even the disposition of some state department emails are, or else SHOULD be as classified a line item as the body or words contained within the body of the text. The only way to fix such a deficiency in security would be to remove subject headings for all email communication and sequentially number them or require or assign code words to such secure or vital communication.

Honestly, the concept of secure communication in the 21st century itself is a bad joke so half-assed and 19th century based, it's the opposite of information containment. That someone like Julian Assange can so easily defeat efforts to keep a tight lid on something as vital to national security and democracy as this is a national disgrace. We probably could learn a thing or two about national security from someone like Vladimir Putin, but in order to do that, a constitutional amendment with much stronger priorities against things like treason for line items as first amendment violations like flying a foreign or a confederate flag on American soil would need to be enforced. Perhaps someone like Trump could do it. Maybe that's the reason Trump is the darling of American intelligence. At least, we are not privy to that juicy bit of intelligence. That's the real problem with someone like Assange. There's no democracy or agenda in Wikileaks. Or is there?

The subject of 1000 more emails is what needed to be classified. Too late. Comey already blew it, and that is a violation of the trust we placed in him and others like him. These are the fruits of intelligence reorganization by the last miscreant Republican administration that happened right after that administration failed to read intelligence about the threat posed by Osama Bin Laden before 9/11.

The constitution was designed to make the government of our democratic republic transparent to its citizens and this is an affront to the spirit if not the letter of those words. And it is too vital a government function to be left to someone like Julian Assange or a foreign power like Putin.

We used to have a functional Supreme Court that undestood the threat in 21st century terms, but that was in the last century before our government and House of Representatives was infiltrated by traitors like Comey

We also need to strike the race or gender or religious or orientation dependencies from its legal wording as well as all subordinate law entirely, but that is beyond the scope of this thread.

 

If you expected me to cite an example of something that directly implicates Putin in a political assassination, I'm sorry to have disappointed you. Assassins are assassins exactly BECAUSE they leave no fingerprints behind.

If you believe the conspiracy theory that the Clintons were implicated in Vincent Foster's death, how is it that you find it so difficult to believe that Trump's Russian bud was a deadly KGB apparatchik?

Have you ever read Clancy's "Hunt for Red October" or seen the movie? Putin was briefly portrayed as the Soviet agent enforcing the orders issued by Moscow before Sean Connery (a Russian submarine commander, not 007) kills him and changes those orders. Such is the legend of the cold war version of Putin.

 

That is certainly true. In fact, the FBI has just opened its own internal investigation to see why government employees are violating the law.

His "decision to reopen the investigation" led to his feet being over the fire; you have cause and effect being reversed here.

Easy enough to fix; once he is out of a job, he will not have the opportunity to cause such problems for himself.

 

That koolaid is powerful stuff.

Look: You don't normally go mentally spla at that level - you're doing that bizarre projection stuff the wingnuts do whenever they reply to my post, telling me what my real attitude and motives and the like are, which is not in any of my posting because - you claim - I am not being honest.

It isn't in any of my actual posting, this stuff you put on me. That is, as I have pointed out before (such as when you disparaged me for "screeching" in "all caps") a fairly significant fact. It should sit you back for a reassessment of what you are doing here, why you are posting like that.

Look, fathead, you're being moronic here. As I have said many times, I have Clinton to vote for. I already did, in fact, vote for her (the polls in my State got too close to allow a protest vote). Does that make me happy? No. So why are you so put out by my dissatisfaction?

Do I not only have to vote for Clinton, argue in favor of other people voting for, swat every bs justification for voting Trump I see, mock and disparage the Trump voters at every opportunity, warn everyone - including you, btw, playing with fire as this Clinton nomination was obviously going to be - about the serious threat that Trump could win this thing, but I have to be happy about the situation, to satisfy you? You're not happy unless everyone has drunk the koolaid?

Look at the record, her entire career - that's what any sane, reasonable person expects from her Presidency. It's not good. Can you at least admit that? She's been rolled by everybody from Newt Gingrich to Dick Cheney, and is one of the people most responsible for everything that's wrong with Obamacare. She has voted and/or acted badly, been dead wrong, in every single major, high-pressure, gut check political issue she has faced. It's a bad track record.

From a lefty pov, anyway - from a moderate Republican pov she's standard responsibility in office. From an authoritarian pov she's been right on the money. From a rightwing pov she's been ok - not a serious enemy of the corporate power structure, but a bit too strident on the helping children and families end of things. They can live with that, it's cheap and doesn't impinge too much. And they appreciate the prospect of some sanity on the Supreme Court - there's a downside to Trump, and Clinton isn't so bad.

This is the central problem: You don't. You have chosen to ignore the actual historical circumstances that actually obtained, you have adopted a deliberate amnesia, and replaced the actual history with a fictional revision in which Clinton's very, very bad decisions are somehow justified as responsible or professional or whatever. Why?

That's not called "get". That's called "invent". Also "lie", "slander", "troll" and so forth. "Provoke".

Quit making shit up, you fool - it doesn't help you in dealing with someone like me. I don't despise the professional political class, at all. I welcome the competence, courage, and good judgment they so often display. So what?

Dude, that's what Clinton is: An Eisenhower Republican with a track record of rolling toward the severely "conservative" sector under all circumstances of conflict. That's what you're advocating as "winning slow".

The Left will be telling you that you can't say you weren't warned. Just as they did with NAFTA, CAFTA, "welfare reform", and the other manifestations of slow losing that has been the reality of Clinton administration, rather than this:

Because you haven't seen a left libertarian victory in your lifetime, doesn't mean you didn't miss the chance once in a while. I know the very concept of a left libertarian is a joke to the koolaid crowd, but it wasn't a joke to Paul Wellstone trying to flog sensible and feasible universal health care (as favored by a majority of the voters allowed to see his proposed legislation), and it wasn't a joke to Bernie Sanders voting against granting W&Cheney blank check permission to invade Iraq (as would be favored by a majority of the voters as soon as they saw what it meant), and so forth over the many years.

 

Everyone on both political sides seems to understand what a better candidate would have looked and acted like. Why neither party seems to be able to offer one of those is exactly what has turned this election year into slow torture. At least, it is concluding, and that is about the only less painful thing anyone has to look forward to.

In your mind, pick the perfect candidate from your own party and replace the choices you were given and imagine them running against Kennedy or Lincoln. Is that better or worse? Remember, the pressident elect is just a single member of government and while the constitution gives the executive great power, it also sets limits. Thank the founders, there are constitutional contingencies and balances to a president, or at least there USED TO BE. The pledge of allegiance originally did not contain the words "under God". I still remember when it was altered under the Eisenhower administration. And which party was responsible for that idea?

Executive orders are really what's so scary to consider in 2016. Which party originated that brilliant master stoke idea of constitutionality? What if Reagan's line item veto had also passed congressional muster? The constitution only works the way it should if we allow it and enforce our will by voting against a party that unilaterally alters it without our consent.

If you really wanted a monarchy, this isn't the country where you should be trying to bring back "the good old days". Monarchies only respect the will of the people when it agrees with their own political agendas. Which party is it that believes that freedom of religion or gun ownership is not balanced against rights belonging to other citizens? If this sounds like your party, please do the rest of the country a favor and go somewhere you are wanted after this defeat and never come back, or volunteer to disenfranchise yourselves if you really don't know any better. Let us know how that immigrant thing works out for you.

 

Because you run around like a petulant puppy begging for attention by piddling on discussions in order to support Donald Trump by making up insupportable bullshit about how strong a campaigner he is and just cross your fingers and oh, poor fucking you.

I don't trust a libertarian who can't make a leftist argument when he tries to describe a "lefty pov".

Why do you make stuff up? See, I tried for months to consider history, and all you ever do is just make stuff up like that. Seriously, you have no argument. It's why you're left with examples like authorization approved as evidence that it would not have ben extraordinary to refuse.

Yes, you're very anxious to try to do those things.

Yeah, there really isn't much to help anyone in dealing with someone like you.

See, I don't believe you because you have shown yourself, for months, utterly incapable of discussing those aspects.

Dude, you're sick. Poor you. You don't get anything you want, so she must be just like Republicans.

Yeah. Uh huh. I don't get everything I want from the Democrats, but they make a pretty important difference in my quality of life. When you say there is no difference, you are simply lying in order to keep pitching your slothful tantrum.

The portion of the left that chose to not participate then doesn't get to hound anyone about saying they weren't warned. The portion of the left that chose to participate made their bargains with their consciences or not. That's one of the giveaways; you have no idea what you're on about.

The big problem with your argument is that your petulant need to use terms like "koolaid" while refusing to put up any useful argument is that people see through you.

You're a libertarian. That's not necessarily anything to be ashamed of. But this bit of trying to posture yourself as something you're not in order to boost your assertion of credibility just doesn't work.

The simple fact is that even in the days of NAFTA there wasn't going to be any liberal revolution because we didn't have the numbers.

Say what you want about the cynicism of politicians trying to stay in office, but if it's your civil rights―if it's your quality of life―yeah, you want some people in office, full stop.

Your insistence on a libertarian critique is useless. You can't possibly convince me the Blue Dog caucus was just some lark emblematic of Democratic corruption.

We get it. You're an opponent of Hillary Clinton with no place left to go. Don't worry, Iceaura; you might not give a damn about anyone else, but there are plenty of people who inherently give a damn about you whether they know you or not, or even like you or not.

The thing is that your clueless caricature of liberalism is pretty much unacceptable.

It's more annoying than anything else; you so badly want Trump to win so you can tell people you told them so. Yeah, there really isn't much for dealing with people like you.

 

I would contest this part.

• See also: "Trump is a 'clear and present danger'" #433↗, "What is your solution?" #28↗​

Paul Rosenberg↱ argues, "We don't have 'two historically unpopular candidates'", and makes a pretty convincing case

There are at least three main problems with this meme. First, it's a recent snapshot view, which clearly reverses cause and effect. Running for president has severely eroded Hillary Clinton's popularity, due to the combination of intense political polarization and partisanship. On the other hand, becoming first the Republican front-runner and then the nominee has elevated Trump, bringing him in early September to his highest-ever level of national popularity.

Second, it ignores how popular Clinton was as secretary of state―much more popular than Vice President Joe Biden, her only "credible" competitor in elite circles at the time. Third, Clinton is not unpopular with nonwhite voters: African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans all have favorable views of her, at least in broad strokes. The meme thus obscures the racialized nature of Trump's and Clinton's respective popularity problems ....

.... There's another way that the "unpopular candidates" meme gets things wrong and that's when it comes to race and ethnicity. As reported by Becky Hofstein Grady, a SurveyMonkey election tracking poll of more than 91,000 registered voters in August clearly showed that Clinton was not unpopular with nonwhite voters ....

.... In short, Clinton is only unpopular with whites, more unpopular than Trump by a good margin, in fact. So the meme is also a way of cloaking unacknowledged racial animus, a sentiment that Bill Clinton famously co-opted with his "Sister Souljah moment," but that Hillary apparently can't avoid.​

Hillary Clinton is historically unpopular in the context of her powerful negatives, but neither do those surveys assess whether or not any respondent gives a damn about whether or not their loathing is legitimate. Here's a fun bit of memory that not everyone shares: When I was a kid, conservatives mocked liberals by pretending that everything would lead to anchorless relativism; these days, the idea seems to have set and concretized; conservatives today rely on an unfounded but customary presumption of legitimacy, knowing that whatever they say will automatically be given competitive legitimacy to the truth―theirs is the anchorless relativism they were telling us to guard against, and that sort of thing keeps happening in various politically conservative circles.

What happens now is a form of squeaky-wheel messaging. If I slander you for a quarter-century, exactly none of it has to be true in order for people to generally view you suspiciously.

There really isn't any ambivalence about her, as a result, and the people who just plain don't like her don't seem to care whether or not their reasons have anything to do with reality. They can even be told, by the people trying to discredit her, that it's a hit job, and they still just tally up another negative.

And what pisses those people off even more is that after all this, her skill and stamina, enduring and overcoming all of this, means those negatives eventually start to speak to her credit.

We are using a white, male, Christian narrative, as is American custom, in order to establish Hillary Clinton's historic unpopularity; that is to say, she's historically unpopular among the only people who really matter to the people who say she's historically unpopular.

It won't be long before, "We've done this to ourselves", gives way to its historical reality: White Christians did this, and everyone else either took part, let it happen, or failed to stop it; we say we've done this to ourselves in order to preserve the proposition of an American endeavor. I can cry all I want about who taught me what when I was whenever, but in the end it seems the point is to find a way to move forward usefully.

Executive orders, for instance, depend on an executive having a legislature and judiciary that will allow whatever the executive wants. The asymmetric polarization, escalation, and resulting decay of our political discourse, culture, and credibility is problematic because enough people choose to dissent from any solution that does not meet every one of their demands and expectations. There was the great bit where the Speaker of the House saw his own caucus sink his immigration bill, told the president to use his executive authority, and then sued the president for doing so. Honestly, we could have avoided that ugly episode if, well, Republicans hadn't demanded it.

To the other, think of what doesn't get an executive order. Maybe someone is alarmed because an executive deprioritizes a particular aspect of law enforcement, like maybe it's time to stop shaking down suspected potheads and focus on methamphetamine and heroin, instead. Or maybe it's time to stop shaking down prostitutes and focus on the providers, procurers, and customers. I remember a time the police had a known violent offender in their custody and didn't bother calling immigration on his violation because he was British, and not a priority, and that's why they released him and that's why he killed his pregnant ex-girlfriend seventeen hours after he was arrested.

Yeah, Reagan's order on Cuba? It's one thing to wonder about Obama's order on immigration, but while we often argue the scale, it would seem the fundamental issue really is whether, say, what we compare to―e.g., Reagan―was proper in the first place.

Functionally, the boundaries are each to their own: If we dive into the long history of executive orders, what do we expect to find? Here, I'll even propose one since we don't have another starting point: Within the government versus applied in the larger sphere of jurisdiction.

Even that is too vague; an executive can try ordering quite a bit within the larger sphere of jurisdiction, including non-enforcement.

What the executive can't do, however, is invent objects of enforcement. Bobby Jindal tried; that was rather quite funny and would have been scandalous except this is the year of the Trump, so among news consumers only the armchair wonks noticed. But, yeah, after seeing what happened to Pence, the legislature in Alabama looked to Gov. Bentley and said they didn't think a RFRA bill was a good idea. When the Louisiana legislature followed suit, Gov. Jindal decided to try to enact the bill by executive order.

It's like the Rove idea of reassigning strengths and weaknesses has become the foundation for an argumentative delusion.

To wit, I don't contest the proposition that we ought to keep a concerned eye on executive orders and their functions and rationales. But I'm always at least a bit wary when the discourse comes 'round to issues like this. Republicans complaining of the scale of Obama's immigration orders had every chance to pass a bill, and when they scuttled it, instead, they then told the president to use his executive authority. That's the thing; when they talk about lawless executive orders they're also criticizing themselves. In a way, it reminds me of the time Mitch McConnell filibustered himself.

The Republican collapse suggests some manner of historical cycle is coming 'round to a closure point. There are, in considering Hillary Clinton's high negatives, any number of aggravations; setting aside the more common laments about negative attitudes toward women or a quarter-century muckraking and scandalmongering campaign, there is also the fact that people do perceive a transition in effect.

For many liberals who have engaged and endured various political compromises over the years―(What do you mean, "How'd they work out?" We knew they were bad ideas at the time, which was part of the compromise, because if the liberal platform had won enough votes the compromises would have been more favorable)―this is an important opportunity. There are also plenty of liberals who want to scrap that and forge a new, untested, undefined Democratic Party social contract. The election of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump essentially establishes whether the old bargain remains in effect or is officially abandoned.

And if we're pushing forward with the former for one more Democratic presidency, it will be interesting to see whether the leftish roar we heard in the primary will keep echoing, or if the movement will sit back and remind us they told us so every time they think they're not getting everything they want.
____________________

Notes:

Rosenberg, Paul. "We don't have 'two historically unpopular candidates': What the media gets wrong about candidate popularity". Salon. 16 October 2016. Salon.com. 5 November 2016. http://bit.ly/2e19pGd