2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumJohn Dean, GOP Watergate truth-teller, says GOP leaders are trying to frame Hillary.
Last edited Mon Aug 22, 2016, 08:30 PM - Edit history (3)
The attorney who was White House Counsel for Nixon, John Dean gives a detailed account of the false charges against Hillary and the distortions and lies they have been spreading to make them. And he did use the phrase "frame her." As in: "It is pretty ugly stuff, made even uglier because it is being promoted by two high ranking Republican chairmen who are, the facts show, trying to frame her.
http://www.newsweek.com/squalid-case-against-hillary-and-her-emails-492017
Unfortunately, to explain these seamy tactics takes a bit more space than the normal column, but the facts need to be placed on the record.
Without understanding the underlying testimony involved, it is not possible to appreciate the falsity and absurdity of the charges against Mrs. Clinton. It is easy to call someone a liar or a perjurer. Not so easy to unpack the charges.
A smear like thisand Hillary has had a career of themtakes space to address and debunk, which is why it probably has not been done. I really undertook this drill for myself because I wanted to see what was going on. I believe Hillary Clinton is far too savvy and smart to lie to Congress. And as the following information shows, I am correct, and she has not done so.
That two of the most powerful committee chairs in the House of Representatives have trumped up these bogus charges is stunning to me. This is not the way mature democracies like ours are supposed to operate. These menalong with their staff and the Republican leadership that are part of this ployare blatantly abusing congressional powers.
elleng
(130,156 posts)malthaussen
(17,066 posts)But I wonder what happens when a democracy enters its dotage.
-- Mal
elleng
(130,156 posts)Too bad we 'live in interesting times.'
misterhighwasted
(9,148 posts)What is the legal & successful recourse?
Cal33
(7,018 posts)Va Lefty
(6,252 posts)"Ironically, there are more false statements in the letter from chairmen Goodlatte and Chaffetz to the Department of Justice, which are clearly intentional, than the hours upon hours of testimony given by Secretary Clinton.
If these men were ordinary citizens, they could be arrested for making false statements to law enforcement. They lied and played it for a one-day headline, and in doing so performed at the level of banana-republic legislators, if not lower."
Orsino
(37,428 posts)duh.
PJMcK
(21,921 posts)They are using all of their stupid tricks to try- somehow!- to find something to hang Mrs. Clinton with. It illustrates their fear that when she wins the election, and Democrats regain control of at least one House of Congress, she'll have the opportunity to implement many of the policies that the Republicans hate and she'll appoint judges who follow the rules of law and legal precedents.
The Republicans must know by now that Mrs. Clinton is smarter than they are and that she's not guilty of their phony charges.
The GOP is pathetic.
King_Klonopin
(1,305 posts)I think they are seething and desperate to get their guy into that Office
because a Dem president can veto any bullshit legislation they try to
shove down our throats. They need someone with the rubber stamp of
approval.
They will go to any length and sink to any depth in order to seize the Exec. Office.
The thought of another 4 - 8 years of a Dem President makes them turn into
beasts and froth at the mouth.
demigoddess
(6,640 posts)CrispyQ
(36,231 posts)Molly Ivins hit the nail on the head with that statement!
SharonAnn
(13,767 posts)They have always been terrified of her. I've been watching their behavior for many years and they are definitely terrified of her.
demigoddess
(6,640 posts)away from women, and that would kill that plan right there. We actually had republican right wing radio programs right after Bush was selected, the topic was 'should women give up the right to vote?'. If men only voted, they think the repubs would win every time.
Gothmog
(144,005 posts)Hortensis
(58,785 posts)through legal and media manipulation, and what does Judicial Watch have to show for it? Nothing but over 25 years of good-paying jobs, a career which some should be starting to retire from before long.
Billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife (who apparently had approximately the intellectual and political sophistication of the typical right-wing yahoo) gave them a mandate to drive Bill and Hillary out of the Arkansas governor's office and preferably into prison. He died about 4 years ago but the mandate and the cushy incomes live on.
Whatever it's cost Bill and Hillary, though, emotionally and in legal fees, apparently long ago just became part of the job.
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)Hortensis
(58,785 posts)Andrea and the rest assumed she'd be gone years ago, destroyed, but here she is!
Thanks for posting this article. I've read a few of John Dean's books, including Conservatives without Conscience, which I really recommend for understanding who and what many of these people corrupting and trying to subvert our nation are. With the extremist turn the GOP has taken its analyses have only become more significant over the years.
calimary
(80,700 posts)Me TOO!
Where there's smoke, in Hillary's case, there's no fire whatsoever. There's just a smoke machine!
FOUND THE QUOTE - from Melissa McEwen's work on Blue Nation Review:
"But they are endlessly repeated nonetheless, in order to create enough smoke that some voters reflexively assume there must be a fire.
But there is no fire. There is only a smoke machine."
http://bluenationreview.com/hillarycoverageiscrap/
She targets Andrea Mitchell, among others. Andrea Mitchell DESERVES to be targeted. I'm utterly DELIGHTED to see this! (Shit! It ain't just me!) I think I've sent dozens of tweets by now, targeting her fucking GOP bias and questioning her "journalistic" integrity and credibility (um... WHAT credibility?) and more. I've seen some of those tweets retweeted and earning likes. What's good about that is what this suggests - that others feel the same way, but maybe they didn't think there was any point in bringing it up.
Well, maybe not. But WTF? Maybe SO! WHY NOT? Why SHOULDN'T it be said? Or asked? Or questioned? Or brought up? WHY NOT? Should we just remain silent and grumbling to ourselves? I don't think we should. I think instead of Hillary constantly being persecuted, maybe Andrea Mitchell should maybe do what Bob Shrum just suggested a few moments ago. Treat what the RNC/Trump says with suspicion. Lead with THAT mentality. NOT the "Hillary must be guilty of something" mentality. Wonder if she ever really embraced the notion that one is innocent til proven guilty, and NOT the other way around. American system of justice. Seems to apply to everyone but Hillary, and as an absolute with anything from the CONS.
So here I sit, peppering Mitchell's twitter page with criticism. It's a shame that's the only blowback she gets...
calimary
(80,700 posts)Edited - I started over and rewrote it. It DID go through.
PLEASE understand. With Hillary: Where there's smoke, it's not fire. There's merely a GOP smoke machine.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)Lots of info and links to more in this, more of a history summary, but a good start. What a nasty, nasty group. Note that Trump's perky Kellyanne Conway is tied to Judicial Watch (ALSO! Is there no end to the shady people she's connected to?) through her husband.
Back in the 1990s the political establishment made fun of Hillary Clinton for her comment that the press was missing the real story of the vast right-wing conspiracy that had been dogging her family throughout her husbands presidency. Any mention of it provoked eye-rolls and knowing smirks among the cognoscenti, who were all absolutely sure that it was just more evidence of Clintons guilty conscience over something.
But she was right. And there was some real reporting on it even at the time although, as it was revealed, the Republicans would throw out another shiny object and the press pack would go running in the opposite direction like a herd of gazelles. So it was very difficult to get a handle on the whole story. For instance, this 1999 article by Jill Abramson and Don Van Natta in the New York Times laid out the previously untold story story of the small group of conservative lawyers who concocted the Paula Jones lawsuit and were instrumental in pushing the Monica Lewinsky matter, among other things. As it happens one of those lawyers was a fellow named George Conway, who was not yet married to Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, who is now Donald Trumps latest campaign manager. The Drudge Report drove much of the scandal, and George Conway was believed to have been Drudges main source, most memorably the story about President Clintons alleged distinguishing characteristic which pundits and commentators gleefully discussed on television for months. Its a small right-wing world after all.
The book The Hunting of the President and the new e-book The Hunting of Hillary, both by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, finally put together the overall narrative of what happened. But even at the time, it was obvious that there was a concerted effort, funded by millionaire GOP donors, to throw mud on the Clinton administration in an attempt to either get the president impeached or force him to resign. We all know how that ended.
One of the biggest players in the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy was an outfit called Judicial Watch, formed in the early 90s by a conservative gadfly named Larry Klayman. Klayman was a one-man wrecking crew who filed more than 18 lawsuits against members of the Clinton administration costing them millions of dollars in legal fees. The most notable of these was a $90 million invasion of privacy suit filed against Hillary Clinton and others on behalf of the victims of Filegate, one of the many scandals for which both Bill and Hillary Clinton were completely exonerated by two different independent counsels. The lawsuit was colorfully described at the time by Jacob Weisberg of Slate ... That was just one of many Judicial Watch lawsuits, including one in which Klayman sued his own mother for $50,000, that went nowhere. But they did achieve their true purpose, which was to damage reputations, smear political opponents and inflict huge legal fees on anyone who happened to be in the administration.
Thanks for Melissa McEwen's analogy also. Judicial Watch, a smoke machine turned on and never turned off. Agree entirely about Deceitful Andrea. She may someday retire with honors, but, who knows? Being caught up in some media scandal, spotlighting her behavior among others, could end her career unpleasantly, maybe even bump her from the DC A list. It happens sometimes, and she's been pushing it a long time.
calimary
(80,700 posts)The minute they open their yaps about ANYTHING, the immediate response from broadcast journalism is to go back and put it in context, ACTUALLY REPORT that these people have been attacking her relentlessly, for a whole lotta NOTHING, for more than a generation. Larry Klayman?? Oh for the Love of God - he is nothing more than a partisan shit-stirrer! STILL stirring shit up in the veiled, and in-vain hopes of finding SOMETHING.
It's like the scenario of piles of horse shit around the Christmas tree. There MUST be a pony under all that horse shit! There MUST be a pony!!!!! Well, sorry, folks, you can keep on digging and sifting all that horse shit. But there IS NO pony underneath. There's nothing to "get to the bottom of". There's NOTHING there. NOTHING.
The collective effect of all this, though, has been rather effective. TOO MUCH of the nation is now negatively predisposed toward both the Clintons. Because, well, there are all these investigations... so there MUST be something to it, n'est-ce pas? Where there's smoke, there MUST BE fire, shouldn't there be? Doesn't it makes sense? NO! There's NOTHING there. There's NOTHING. NOTHING has turned up. NOTHING! No pony. No truth. No illegalities. No conspiracies. No fishy stuff under there anywhere. Get used to it. And GET OVER IT. And stop wasting years' worth of time and what's now hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers' money by now, on these lame-ass "investigations" and "special committees" and other assorted crap - because you're just gonna keep coming up with NOTHINGBURGERS.
The answer is a big fat NO!!!
calimary
(80,700 posts)THANK GOD!!!
Because the worst part of this is how relentlessly the media seems to want to keep carrying the ball on this, carrying water for these liars, and not just buying into it but freakin' OBSESSING on it!
http://www.salon.com/2016/08/22/judicial-watch-vs-hillary-the-conservative-group-has-a-long-history-of-spreading-clinton-lies/
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)is very longstanding and very strong. A big factor in their codependence is the development of the 24/7/365 programming that has to be filled with something. Judicial Watch has been right there from the beginning of cable and quickly developed the technique of feeding controversial audience-grabbing swill in news-cycle bites, carefully broken up to string their nothing stories out and keep the audience too confused to realize they're nothing but smoke and lies.
Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)going to be sh*t storm of false equivalencies and out right lies. The Rethugs will never forgive Hillary's participation in the Nixon Impeachment hearings and trial,as a Senate Investigative assistant.
The RNC Chairman at the time,made a statement about if they take one of ours,we will take one of theirs. And it is still true today. Nancy Pelosi referenced this when she was elected Speaker of the House. Impeachment is off the table. That was sure a mistake,we lost the House anyway.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)Very interesting.
Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)the threat in a interview many years ago,and that was after a coming to what ever moment.
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)impeachments that wouldn't have survived a Senate vote (requiring a 2/3 vote majority).
If she had made that choice, the GOP would certainly have found some spurious basis to impeach Obama, and we would have been on a continuous impeachment cycle, every time opposing parties held the Presidency and the House.
Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)Pelosi mentioned the Rethug threat in her remarks and she also said that Impeachment would not pass the Senate at that time and would leave any Democrat open to Impeachment by the Rethugs on baseless grounds if they held the Majorities to do such a thing. We now know it is all about the Politics of winning the next election cycle.
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)in the Senate -- it would soon lose any sting. No one would take it seriously anymore; it would just be "politics as usual."
Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)And with the TeaBaggers there would be no end to their mischief.
calimary
(80,700 posts)No wonder their symbol is an elephant. They never forget, either. I remember reading during the whole Clinton impeachment crap - that this was little more than "payback for Nixon." It was something quoted from an admission by one of the CONS, as I recall. But that was a long time ago, and I don't remember who said it. I just remember what was said.
These assholes hold grudges. Take that to the bank. And they hold those grudges with an on-going, scorched-earth, single-minded determination to seek revenge.
napi21
(45,806 posts)It also covers a law that make false accusations, if proven intentional, is a felony! I HOPE Hillary will pursue prosecution of all the Pugs who are guilty of that felony. Let's see some perp walks!
NewJeffCT
(56,827 posts)the GOP led house would have a boatload of charges filed in less time than it takes Rudy Giuliani to mention 9/11.
calimary
(80,700 posts)From just days ago, August 16th:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/aug/16/rudy-giuliani/aside-from-911-rudy-giuliani-wrong-about-no-terr/
AND from January 8, 2010!!!
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jan/08/rudy-giuliani/giuliani-says-there-were-no-domestic-attacks-durin/
Ccarmona
(1,180 posts)HRC should keep him on retainer, because once she's sworn in, this behavior will be the norm if the Repugs keep a majority in either the House or Senate.
Cosmocat
(14,543 posts)They LONG ago, LONG ago jumped the shark and completely rejected doing their actual jobs, and have 100 percent viewed their elected positions as political jobs where their only focus is destroying democrats and accruing power.
BECAUSE OF THIS and the endless right wing echo chamber, the drones who they have culled into their hate filled bubble view everything in the same way.
In this cesspool what they are doing is not just acceptable, it is viewed as a righteous and moral endeavor.
barbtries
(28,702 posts)they should dissolve already.
maddiemom
(5,106 posts)Coyotl
(15,262 posts)tonyt53
(5,737 posts)When he speaks, it is clear that his conscience is now clear.
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)a jail term.
RapSoDee
(421 posts)The Repubes Against America have earned themselves a massive crapload of karma.
asiliveandbreathe
(8,203 posts)disgusting liars that they are - for a day of media attention - our tax dollars..when we have so many other pressing issues to fund...
I have no way of putting in print how I feel about Badlatte - and shittfitz...
SunSeeker
(51,377 posts)geretogo
(1,281 posts)as practiced in their right wing churches and by the street thugs and gangsters that make up the GOP .
They need to be purged from our society as we did with Al Capone , Hitler , and the rest .
allan01
(1,950 posts)playing games rather than helping solve the nations ills . somone once told me that after the election of kennedy , the rs are doing their best to prevent a populist prez like obama to ever come to office. the rs feel that they own the house and senate and are do nothings and hevean help you if a d comes along and upsurps their reign , espicaly a black man and now pos a woman, how dare they is their mentality
Thinkingabout
(30,058 posts)It is easy to fool the true believers of FOX, doesn't fool the rest of us.
BlueStateLib
(937 posts)Sugarcoated
(7,707 posts)she's winning and he's losing
Bill USA
(6,436 posts)recommended!
hope the clinton camp is aware of all of this.
Martin Eden
(12,803 posts)fleabiscuit
(4,542 posts)pansypoo53219
(20,906 posts)weasel words. guess she likes tax cuts.
Jnew28
(931 posts)drm604
(16,230 posts)They've only been doing this since the 90s.
toddwv
(2,830 posts)Hekate
(90,202 posts)Divine Discontent
(21,056 posts)Because if you take out that tough equation, then you'd see narrow Dem wins in off year elections and landslides every presidential race. Then we wouldn't have these criminals trying to destroy their political enemies, and oh I don't know, working to solve America's problems...
http://cafepress.com/hillaryforamerica2016
Fast Walker 52
(7,723 posts)Dems seem to have more diverse concerns.
Divine Discontent
(21,056 posts)In our thinking. They're simple minded single-issue voters.
Botany
(70,291 posts)"There is absolutely no evidence at all that Clinton willfully and knowingly provided false information
to Congress."
I have heard the figure that the GOP has spent $400,000,000 going after the Clintons ... Whitewater,
Benghazi, Vince Foster, ....
Fast Walker 52
(7,723 posts)NastyRiffraff
(12,448 posts)but in the meantime, K&R!
Buckeye_Democrat
(14,847 posts)... they're basically anti-government and don't keep it a secret.
It would be like hiring various construction workers to build housing for the poor, with some of them telling management upfront that they're opposed to it! As they're being paid, these opposition workers would naturally make little effort to build. They would also report every little rule that the busy workers violate to get them fired, or they'd simply make accusations and hope for the same effect.
To complete the analogy, they would also steal the construction materials for other building endeavors that they prefer, such as luxury resorts.