Trump Impeachment

WolfeTone said:
If Biden is the Dem candidate, Trump will demolish him.
Click to expand...

I don't think Biden would be strong enough against him. I also don't think Biden will end up being selected - even though the odds have him favourite.

January / February will give a good indication.
 
EmmDee said:
I don't think Biden would be strong enough against him. I also don't think Biden will end up being selected - even though the odds have him favourite.

January / February will give a good indication.
Click to expand...

Indeed. I have a nice bet on Hillary Clinton making a late charge into the race but she needs to decide pretty quickly....

Also looking for odds on Chelsea Clinton in 2028 but probably a bit early since she has ruled out Congress in 2020. She is a guaranteed runner for office though.
 

Thanks @Firefly but all of that has been in the public domain for a long time. My skepticism surrounding the whole affair arises from the lack of hard factual evidence. Simply stating that Russian trolls set up FB pages in the year running up the campaign in favour of Trump and against Clinton is no evidence at all, its only an allegation, along with the rest of it.
The hard evidence is mostly 'classified' - how unfortunate.

But dont mind my skepticism, as much as I cant stand Trump and hope he is beaten in 2020, its the skepticism of his fellow Republicans, as demonstrated in this hearing with Mueller himself that prompts me to think that the whole affair is a flimsy circus at best.

Mueller testimony

You might want something stronger than tea!
 
Last edited:
Sunny said:
Indeed. I have a nice bet on Hillary Clinton making a late charge into the race but she needs to decide pretty quickly....
Click to expand...

If hillary clinton runs again then I will definitely believe in the russian interference. I bet the democrats will be feverishly working to get her to forget that.
 

The evidence on the social media targeting came out a long time ago - so much has happened that I suspect most people have forgotten about it. But the targeted adds and the organisations that published and promoted them and the target markets were published in a report about a year after the election. There was a huge amount of detail and actually really interesting. That report was actually used as a template to counteract the same happening during our recent referendum

As for the GOP - I really fear for the direction of it. Before Trump, there was essentially a bit of a takeover of much of the Republican party at grass roots level - the Tea Party. That has morphed into a hardline base (which is Trump's base). It's now at a stage where even moderate Republicans are completely towing the line as they fear being "Primaried" more than they fear re-election. It is noteworthy that those who have broken ranks have either announced they won't be re-running or got kicked out of the party. Many of the GOP leaders now defending Trump's actions have historically held very different views.

It's not dissimilar to how Corbyn won the leadership (Momentum activists gaining control of local party organisations) or what has happened with the Tory's (ex-UKIP pushing out moderate candidates) - so-called "entryism". Same is happening in the US - a swing to the extremes
 
EmmDee said:
.. so-called "entryism". Same is happening in the US - a swing to the extremes
Click to expand...

Agree. And I believe it is naive to assume this could not happen in Ireland. With recent events, namely Peter Casey, Verona Murphy, Lorraine Clifford-Lee, and well as that Voldemort who picketed the Google offices, it's creeping in.
 
EmmDee said:
But the targeted adds and the organisations that published and promoted them and the target markets were published in a report about a year after the election.
Click to expand...

I would genuinely be interested in specific examples of these FB ads. My own searches havent yielded very much.
There was one site that offered to downloads of block amounts of adds, with the warning that it could take a long time. But I may have to resort to block download, if supposedly widespread targeted FB ads cant be identified easily.
I would have thought, with these FB ads targeting millions of US voters that it would be easy to come across specific examples.
And aside from all that, there appears to be little to none analysis done showing to what extent these ads actually influenced voters.
 

Below is a good basic intro article from the time which gives an overview of the tactics - it has links to the actual report issued by the Senate and the full library of ads. It is a starting point though - there were academic studies and deeper analysis of the information dump over the following months.

The key point, of course, is that very few ads were specifically mentioning candidates. What they were doing was looking to cause chaos - the same tactic as with Brexit (actually they probably used Brexit to fine tune the tactics)

Most Russian Facebook ads sought to divide Americans on race

According to a new analysis, most Russian-linked Facebook ads before and after the 2016 election were tied to race, crime, and policing.
www.vox.com

Edit : there is virtually no way of measuring what specific effect this type of campaign has. But bear in mind it was a total of about 80k votes in three states that put Trump in the Whitehouse, the effect doesn't need to be large
 
Thanks for that, much appreciated.

There is little than can established in forum like this one way or the other, but what I will say is I agree

EmmDee said:
there is virtually no way of measuring what specific effect this type of campaign has.
Click to expand...

...and while the difference was around 80K votes in three States in favour of Trump, would we be having this conversation if the effect had resulted in 80k votes in favour of Clinton?

I did download one of those ads purporting to be from Russian troll farm and like you said, it doesn't reference any candidate. It does spew homophobic bile against gay people in the military.
But its impossible to measure the effect, if any, on voting intentions. It may embolden some people to vote with the candidate they think is most likely to share such views, or in equal measure, it may embolden some people to vote with the candidate who is most likely to stand against such views.

So Russia interfering in the election is one thing (if you can call this interference), but associating Trump as the beneficiary of this interference is wholly disingenuous in the absence of being able to measure the effect of such interference.
Combined with Muellers awful performances in testimony, and the quite obvious glaring flaws in his report, I remain every bit skeptical about the truth of this whole affair.
The final nail in the coffin for me was when Hilary Clinton tried to smear a serving Democratic congresswoman, a candidate for Presidential nominee, Tulsi Gabbard, a serving member of the military who volunteered to serve as a medic in the US invasion of Iraq, treating injured US soldiers - as a Russian agent.

There appears little room for HC to go any lower. She is toxic to many in Democratic party now, let alone how much Republicans despise her.
If she runs, she will lose to Trump.
 
Surely HC needs to move on for the betterment of the US. She couldnt win against the worst candidate in living memory, the patriotic thing would be to let someone else have a go. I've no major axe to grind with her but she's just not a winner it seems and the world cannot afford another 4 years of Trump (or the world would be much better if it didnt have to suffer another 4).
 

If that is the final nail in the coffin of Hillary Clinton, then Trump must be nailed in the coffin, covered in cement and buried two miles underground.

For the record, she didn't say that she was a 'Russian Agent'. She said she was a favourite of the Russians which has also been identified elsewhere by people who monitor that stuff. There are plenty of stories about it. Also Tulsi Gabbard is not some sort of innocent heroine Florence nightingale figure who can't stand up for herself. There are enough things in the past to show why she will never get the democratic nomination hence the rumours that she will run as third party candidate.

I am not a fan of Hillary Clinton but she has favourable rating among democrats of nearly 70% . She is probably the only candidate that can attract the campaign funding that the democrats will need unless Bloomberg is willing to pay his way. Can she beat Trump? She has as a good a chance as any. Sanders, Bloomberg, Biden are not exactly star candidates. At the moment, the polls say they would all beat Trump but as the last election showed, the polls mean nothing when elections start and the Trump campaign goes to war. Clintons problem is still the same though. For some reason and I have never fully understand why, people have a strange dislike towards her. I think she is as ambitious, ruthless and as untrustworthy of any male politician but she always seems to get held to different standards.... Like she was beaten by a sexist, racist, stupid man with orange hair and orange skin.....Just weird.
 
Sunny said:
For the record, she didn't say that she was a 'Russian Agent'.
Click to expand...

Correct, my bad. Here is the text of what she actually said,

"They're also going to do third party. I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who's currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She's the favorite of the Russians, they have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far, and that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she's also a Russian asset. Yeah, she's a Russian asset, I mean totally. They know they can't win without a third party candidate."

Completely despicable.
 

I think you're missing the point. They aren't trying to pick a winning candidate. They are trying to get Western Democracies to turn in on each other. They are also moving the "Overton window" - what is acceptable political discourse. So by running ads like the above (and other extreme topics), it allows a candidate such as Trump to come out with what would have previously been considered unacceptable policies and statements.

Famously, the Internet Research Agency (the Russians) arranged a Pro "Black Lives Matters" rally and a counter "Stand by our Police" rally for the same time - which ended up in violence. All from St Petersburg

WolfeTone said:
... Tulsi Gabbard ...
Click to expand...

And now I'm interested where you are sourcing - first of all Clinton won't be the nominee. Not a chance. But neither will Gabbard. She is very problematic from a DNC point of view and just won't get much primary support. The only area where she has significant support is the alt right, 4Chan discussion boards, libertarians and white nationalists - the Daily Stormer ran a campaign to get her qualified for the initial Democratic debates.
 
EmmDee said:
They aren't trying to pick a winning candidate.
Click to expand...

Im sorry, but Putin is on record as saying his preferred candidate was Trump. Also, from page 1 of the Mueller report;

"As set forth in detail in this report, the Special Counsel’s investigation established that
Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election principally through two operations. First, a
Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J.
Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Second, a Russian intelligence
service conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers
working on the Clinton Campaign and then released stolen documents. The investigation also
identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign. Although
the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump
presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit
electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not
establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian
government in its election interference activities."

Its clear to my mind that the investigation established, in their minds at least, that Russia has a clear and preferred candidate that it wanted to win.

As for Tulsi, a typo on my part. She is a prospective Presidential nominee. I don't think she will get it either, but to label as an 'asset' for a foreign country, whilst a serving member of Congress and of the US military, is really low-brow stuff.
It just points further to this Russia conspiracy stuff being overblown and wholly unsubstantiated.
 

How is it despicable to state that Russia might be interfering with elections? Other independent observers have said the same about Russian coverage of Gabbard who has shown support for Assad, is against military intervention etc etc which is music to Russian ears..... Nobody is accusing her of Treason but it is hardly despicable to suggest that Russia might be interfering again....But then I suppose it is all fake news
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register