The Political & Philosophy Thread

Trump's whole appeal is that he can say whatever the fuck he wants and get away with it. The fact that he gets to play by different rules is his strength, so if you deny that then you're also denying him the one thing he actually has going for him.

His strength isn't being able to get away with it, his strength is that he doesn't care about the consequences. Plenty of people don't let him get away with it. There's an entire republican/conservative #NeverTrump movement for this exact reason.

Don't mistake the two.

Especially since he's being killed in the polls, he's doing terribly with people in the under 35's. Hillary is going to decimate him in the primaries.

I'm not trying to elicit your sympathy for Hilary - by all means continue hating her. But when you reflect upon her long list of supposedly heinous crimes, factor into your judgement that we would probably never have known about most of them if she hadn't been such a prominent target for such a long time.

Wrong.

We know about them because a) she has been a major individual in politics forever and b) she doesn't know how to secure her emails and they leaked. Nothing to do with being some target for everybody.
 
His strength isn't being able to get away with it, his strength is that he doesn't care about the consequences. Plenty of people don't let him get away with it. There's an entire republican/conservative #NeverTrump movement for this exact reason.

Don't mistake the two.

He would care about the consequences if it had upset his polling figures until recently. If anything it's worked in his favour due to the amount of coverage he received. It's to be expected that his opponents would kick up a fuss - what no one could predict was that the fuss would have so little impact on his support.

Not sure what you mean by Hilary decimating him in the primaries.

Wrong.

We know about them because a) she has been a major individual in politics forever and b) she doesn't know how to secure her emails and they leaked. Nothing to do with being some target for everybody.

You don't think that the republican party/right wing media have known for the last 8 years that she would likely be running for president, and haven't done everything in their power to discredit her? It's impossible to know what would or wouldn't have gotten out, or what would or wouldn't have been seen as significant, if it weren't for the fact that so many people desperately wanted to see her involved in a career ending scandal. To adapt a popular phrase: if a scandal did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent one.
 
He would care about the consequences if it had upset his polling figures until recently. If anything it's worked in his favour due to the amount of coverage he received. It's to be expected that his opponents would kick up a fuss - what no one could predict was that the fuss would have so little impact on his support.

Not sure what you mean by Hilary decimating him in the primaries.

Bank on it, she's going to annihilate him. Just wait and see.

You don't think that the republican party/right wing media have known for the last 8 years that she would likely be running for president, and haven't done everything in their power to discredit her? It's impossible to know what would or wouldn't have gotten out, or what would or wouldn't have been seen as significant, if it weren't for the fact that so many people desperately wanted to see her involved in a career ending scandal. To adapt a popular phrase: if a scandal did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent one.

Ridiculous, beyond general fair game politics, the right haven't gone overboard in digging up her skeletons, she threw them at us herself.

It's funny that you sneer at me for being what you see as a by default Trump apologist yet you're doing all these mental gymnastics for her.

It's pathetic.
 
Bank on it, she's going to annihilate him. Just wait and see.

The primaries are the process of nomination at the party level is my point. But yeah, I do hope you're right.

Ridiculous, beyond general fair game politics, the right haven't gone overboard in digging up her skeletons, she threw them at us herself.

It's funny that you sneer at me for being what you see as a by default Trump apologist yet you're doing all these mental gymnastics for her.

It's pathetic.

I find it psychologically significant that just because we disagree you feel I must be sneering at you. As to "menal gymnastics", I don't think my point was really complicated enough to qualify. Whether you feel she "threw" her scandals our way, or that they were carefully manufactured/dug up by her opponents, probably comes down to which news sources you're following. All I'm saying is that if she hadn't thrown them our way, it follows that there would be a lot of people very eager to make it look as if she did. Had Trump declared 8 years ago, you could apply exactly the same argument to the left wing media.
 
The fact that Hillary is running for president has definitely contributed to the shitstorm of political controversy that she's had to deal with. There was an email scandal involving the Bush White House in 2007, but nobody really cared back then - because he wasn't running for a third term.

Political campaigns always result in outrageous malformations, amplifications and augmentations by the media from both sides (i.e. left and right). These representations that we're seeing of Hillary's trespasses in the media are by no means "accurate." They're being inflated or deflated, depending from which angle you approach the issue.
 
Hillary's email leaks were investigated by the FBI and resulted in the country being told that basically, if she was anybody other than a major party candidate for president, she'd have a case pursued against her.

I don't really see how that fits into your description of 'team a vs team b' political games, biases and attacks.
 
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Karl Rove's email controversy was investigated as well, but it wasn't as widely reported (and he suffered no consequences, if I recall correctly). The investigation itself isn't really where the attention lies, it's in the media's choice to cover it.

Unless I'm mistaken, nobody here is saying that Hillary wouldn't be investigated had she not run for president; we're saying that the investigation wouldn't be the center of a media frenzy, and that it wouldn't attract the degree of pejorative media analysis that it has.
 
I've seen practically no pejorative coverage from the non-Fox outlets. In fact most of the coverage has been all

Clinton-Benghazi-G1-620x362.jpeg
 
If we're talking cable television news stations, then you're correct - but FOX is huge, and amasses an incredible viewership. I don't really see much disparity between the FOX and non-FOX crowds, although I suppose the non-FOX crowd is slightly larger. It basically breaks down on ideological lines, so you're right that CNN et al don't adopt the same condemnatory language that FOX does. But CNN does still cover the controversy widely, which of course can be as harmful as its rhetorical treatment of the story.

Aside from cable news networks, there are plenty of online news sources that address the issue, either pejoratively or sympathetically, and plenty of people are probably only viewing the issue through these respective lenses, according to their Facebook feeds. The coverage itself, whether on television or online, or in good old-fashioned newspapers, far exceeds the coverage from 2007.
 
Yeah Fox is kind of the only game in town as it were for the Republican side, so they probably do have a larger viewership than any single other cable news platform. There's a larger commercial liberal base, (or at least a larger base of media/journalism majors in television) in addition to varying degrees of "purity" that influences the wider variety of major center-left cable/major news outlets. Even online, for every Breitbart (Really who else is other than Breitbart? The aggregator Drudge Report?) there are a dozen Gawkers. I would imagine that the amount of right and alt-right blogs and leftist blogs is probably equivalent, but who has time to really count those all up?