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No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

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Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#661

Post by abrahamepton »

nerdponx wrote: post #595
danhak wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really puts this tweet from POTUS last month in a crazy new context: "So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post. Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!" https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/10846274519830732... Stran…

The only thing strange about it is how much easier it is to learn about these conspiracies now that we have the Internet. People are acting all shocked like this is a new state of affairs. It's not. We are just far more empowered now to actually learn about these things.

No, that's not "the only thing strange" about this. Perhaps you're unfamiliar with American history, but this is wildly without any remote precedent.

Not to say that previous Presidents haven't done bad things, abused laws, etc, (shit, even launched disinfo campaigns, used the press to attack enemies, etc) but this is just gobsmackingly different from what has come before.

Obviously caveat "if this is true" blah blah blah because my Lord who knows what's true anymore. But knock off the jaded pseudo-educated bs; this is radically fucking strange and a departure from history up until this point.

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#662

Post by rdiddly »

mc32 wrote: post #530
brisance wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He solicited a hostile foreign power to interfere in the 2016 elections. In many countries this would be equivalent to treason. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2016/jul/27/donald...

I think he’s just implying they have more competence than the FBI in finding alleged missing emails. His comms is very non literal -and people take him literally. His whole campaign was off hand blue collar jokey remarks. Pundits understood him literally, so they failed to understand him at all. His nomination competitors also saw him in this light and ultimately failed. Mostly, J think they failed to understand his…

This analysis has some merit if you don't jump to the conclusion that it's praise. The presumed reason for the downvotes is the issue of accountability. A President who can't be taken literally isn't viable. Oh and the part about Kerry and Bolton is nonsense. But other than that, it seems like obvious stuff.

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#663

Post by jessaustin »

ncmncm wrote: post #574
ethbro wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watergate wasn't exactly a professional job. Or the Saudi murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Government dirty tricks rarely involve their A team, because when doing something illegal loyalty is even more important than competence.

The ones with self respect decline. Cf. "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?"

Those with self-respect don't last long in murderous Middle Eastern dictatorships. Why would they even want someone like that around?

Of course, one doesn't detect a great deal of self-respect in the upper echelons of power in more "democratic" nations, either.

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#664

Post by MattSayar »

lucasverra wrote: post #638
slg wrote: post #285

It seems like a lot of people are not reading between the lines of this post. Bezos apparently believes that he was hacked by either the US or Saudi government and that now one or both of those governments are using the National Enquirer as an attack dog against him. That accusation is much bigger than any other piece of this story. EDIT: Here [1] is a reporter from the Washington Post backing that up. The Bezos' cam…

news flash : - https://www.nationalenquirer.com is hosted in AWS - https://www.nationalenquirer.com is down

It's up for me

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#665

Post by jessaustin »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #658
MaupitiBlue wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many articles have you read about rogue Stingrays around DC? If the FCC wanted to take these down it would take 45 minutes of triangulation, but they never do it. Instead we get vague statements about the devious Chinese. It’s hard to conclude that five eyes isn’t a domestic spying proxy program.

There are many reasons why these devices persist not only in DC but all across the country. One is resource management and risk evaluation (aka, there are bigger problems), another is knowledge of FIS operations and many others...

We got from "total fabrication" to "resource management" pretty quickly...

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#666

Post by abrahamepton »

malvosenior wrote: post #657
matthewdgreen wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be clear here: I'm the last person to defend the NSA, but there are huge differences in the restrictions placed on official US spying agencies and foreign ones. If a sitting President used his office to demand that the NSA spy on a US citizen for political reasons, it would be a huge scandal. When foreign governments like the Russians or Saudis do it, it's unprosecutable and "deniable", even if the President hi…

Sadly the era we're living in is that which blames Trump for every thing that goes wrong with no evidence whatsoever and many, many people cheer. That is dangerous as hell. I'm happy to be proven wrong but to also be clear: there is zero evidence that Trump had anything to do with this.

Zero evidence, sure. But a pattern of behavior that is deeply, deeply troubling and suspicious.

As others have pointed out, he tweet-taunted Bezos a few weeks ago in a way that seems rather connected to this recent revelation.

Joe Scarborough and Mike Brzezinski wrote an op-ed (in the Post!!) about having been threatened with blackmail by AMI, seemingly in direct connection to the White House's desires. Ronan Farrow came forward yesterday to say that AMI tried something similar with him.

Sure, Trump may have nothing to do with it. But you and I aren't courts of law; we're people, and we're allowed to look at the evidence and come to our own conclusions.

If your conclusion is that this is an "era ... which blames Trump for every thing that goes wrong with no evidence whatsoever" then you're just doing a bad job of evaluating evidence.

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#668

Post by awb »

malvosenior wrote: post #657
matthewdgreen wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be clear here: I'm the last person to defend the NSA, but there are huge differences in the restrictions placed on official US spying agencies and foreign ones. If a sitting President used his office to demand that the NSA spy on a US citizen for political reasons, it would be a huge scandal. When foreign governments like the Russians or Saudis do it, it's unprosecutable and "deniable", even if the President hi…

Sadly the era we're living in is that which blames Trump for every thing that goes wrong with no evidence whatsoever and many, many people cheer. That is dangerous as hell. I'm happy to be proven wrong but to also be clear: there is zero evidence that Trump had anything to do with this.

> Sadly the era we're living in is that which blames Trump for every thing that goes wrong with no evidence whatsoever

Before a crime is proven, there's usually speculation. Just like people suspected Nixon of being involved in Watergate before there was actual proof. The truth can come slowly.

I agree that we need to follow due process, but it's just as dangerous to categorize any suspicion of criminal activity as "blaming Trump for everything". You're just on the opposite end of the spectrum as people who thinks he's guilty before we have proof.

Evidence takes time, especially with plea bargains where there's incentive to hold out until the evidence against you is overwhelming.

It's best to be somewhere in the middle where you're equally skeptical and open to whatever news and evidence comes out.

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#669

Post by ggdG »

pergadad wrote: post #650
pylus wrote: post #642

Not surprised the whole mainstream media attacks him recently. This guy doesn't agree with them, so he gets consequences. The left has a vast corrupt media support it. I wonder which one is the next victim of this party. Apple and Walmart have been consistently threatened, and the past year has been Facebook (the left likes FB a lot and even not disclosing some bad things of this company until 2017 ).

Uhh are you so deep in your conspiracy theories that you missed the whole fox news complex? There's no left wing equivalent to that.

> [...]the whole fox news complex? There's no left wing equivalent to that.

CNN and MSNBC easily fit that bill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_iXfbxfwDA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgBxfHdb4OU

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#670

Post by cstross »

ncmncm wrote: post #626
cstross wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UKUSA treaty: goes back to 1945, GCHQ is used by the NSA as a convenient work-around for restrictions on domestic surveillance. This was all documented by James Bamford in his histories of the NSA, "Inside the Puzzle Palace" and "Body of Secrets". (You're looking at the present-day for context, but these agencies run on protocols that have built up over many decades, dating back to the Cold War.)

Hi Charlie! It's getting increasing difficult for fiction to stay ahead of reality. I would welcome your conjectures on how the spooks controlled Obama. His enduring legacy may be heavy use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, and a radical expansion of "death from the sky", which seem incompatible with his personality, creating a mystery: What leverage did/do the spooks have on him?

I'm pretty sure they didn't need it.

My read on BHO is that as a non-white guy super-achieving in a quietly racist political climate (we've subsequently had a refresher course in American racial politics: it never went away) he was at pains to avoid alienating factions that might work against him.

He was also a lawyer: not just any lawyer, but a former editor of the Harvard Law Review (a plum niche reserved for star pupils at the #1 law school in the United States, often an early sign that the individual is on the road to the Supreme Court). Instead of heading for the bench Obama went into politics, but he is above all else a legalist (and a constitutional expert). As such, he worked only within the established legal frameworks, carefully trying to build a platform for incremental adjustments.

The Espionage Age was already a feature of the system before he arrived in the Oval Office: he continued to use it as it was designed. He didn't rock the boat or try to impose a radical agenda on the DoJ. He wouldn't do anything that might give his enemies a lever against him. He was, in fact, a conservative politician: not "conservative" in the sense of Movement Conservativism (which is actually a very radical political platform), but a Burkean conservative.

The spooks didn't need leverage on him: he was theirs from the outset.

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