Politics, Government & Public Policy: October 2017 Archives
Shoes continue to drop as a result of the "Russia investigation", whatever that actually means these days. It seems like Trump was the only person not colluding with Russia. From my perspective, the Russia angle (whatever it may be) is minor compared to the vast number of shady conspiracies that are emerging in the wake of the elites' slow defenestration from Washington.
Sometime in October 2016 -- that is, at the height of the presidential campaign -- Christopher Steele, the foreign agent hired by Fusion GPS to compile the Trump dossier, approached the FBI with information he had gleaned during the project. According to a February report in the Washington Post, Steele "reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work."It was an astonishing turn: the nation's top federal law enforcement agency agreeing to fund an ongoing opposition research project being conducted by one of the candidates in the midst of a presidential election.
Everyone in D.C. believed that "business as usual" would continue forever, whether Democrat or Republican won the presidency. No one counted on an erratic populist winning and overturning the applecart. Trump is certainly flawed, but I for one am glad to see some positive results from the chaos.
I'm not sure what Hillary Clinton's goal is, but her post-election conspiracy theories are growing increasingly odd. Tim Blair injects his comments into this ABC interview with Clinton by Sarah Ferguson.
CLINTON: I feel really terrible about losing it and I'm very clear in the book that I feel like I let people down, that there was so much at stake in this election. I knew it would be hard, I knew it would be close, but I did not know that I would be running against not only Trump but the FBI Director and Vladimir Putin ...[BLAIR:] The conspiracy count begins!
CLINTON: If you feed false information continuously to people about one candidate versus another, it does have an impact and we now know that the Russians actually paid in rubles for running ads in Facebook and on Twitter making all kinds of accusations against me ...
[BLAIR:] Add Facebook, Twitter and "the Russians" to Hillary's conspiracy count. And all Hillary had at her disposal to counter these social media ads - did anyone actually see them? - was the combined might of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, USA Today, every major television network, all late-night comedy hosts, NPR, CNN, several Fox News presenters, Hollywood stars and music stars, plus tons of Facebook and Twitter content. The poor woman never stood a chance.
And most painfully:
FERGUSON: Are you still angry with the idea that women could hear that tape and hear that language and behaviour and still vote for him?CLINTON: I'm really disappointed. Michelle Obama said something the other day which I thought was, you know, very much on point - why would any woman give up her own self-respect to side with someone who is clearly sexist and misogynistic and by his own words ah guilty of sexual assault?
[BLAIR:] Hillary is married to Bill Clinton.
What is Hillary Clinton trying to accomplish? Just sell some books? Stay in the public eye... for what? To run for president again?
Michael Barone outlines some interesting potential consequences of California's early primary election schedule. It's always fascinating to me how much effect process has on outcome. See also: path dependence.
California doesn't vote much like the rest of the nation any more. It favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by a 30 point margin, the second most Democratic result (after Hawaii) in the nation. California voted 1 to 3 percent more Democratic than the nation in 1988, 1992 and 1996. Since then it has shifted to become more Democratic than the national result: 5 percent more in 2000, 6 percent more in 2004, 8 percent more in 2008, 9 percent more in 2012 and 13 percent more in 2016. This is the first time in American history that our largest state has voted at one end of the partisan spectrum. ...So despite California Democrats' hopes that an early presidential primary date will give the state greater influence in selecting a Democratic nominee, past history suggests that that's not likely -- and that there's a risk that California, newly installed at the left extreme of the political spectrum, will tilt the process toward an unelectable left-wing nominee.
And it seems likely -- at least this is how it's worked out in the recent past -- that an early California primary will be determinative in the Republican nomination race, which may or may not be in Democrats' interests. Politicians fiddling with the presidential primary schedule should always remember that there's no way to repeal the law of unintended consequences.
