Political Irony

I’m sure everyone heard the news that the FBI is once again looking into Hillary Clinton’s email problems. But the real question is, which news did you hear?

As Wired points out, most of the reporting on this has been misleading at best.

In one huge example, if you believed that the FBI was re-opening their investigation into Clinton’s email you could be excused, because even NBC News got that wrong. The FBI did NOT announce that they were reopening the investigation. NBC changed their story moments later, but on the internet, by then it was too late. Other, more right-wing news sources are still reporting misinformation.

Or you could believe that they found more missing emails. Nope. Or that the emails they found were from Clinton’s private server. No again. Or that the emails contain classified information. Wrong. Or even that the emails are related to the closed Clinton investigation. Negative.

And if you were listening to Donald Trump, you might believe that the FBI was admitting they were wrong when they cleared Clinton of any wrongdoing back in July. But (big surprise), Trump was misrepresenting reality.

In fact, depending on your agenda, you can make of this story almost anything you want:

Are you a Trump supporter looking for a smoking gun? Here you go. Or maybe you’re a different kind of Trump supporter, the kind who thinks this is a conspiracy to distract from the real issues coming out of Wikileaks? Hot-take reactions accept all kinds! Are you a Bernie Sanders-type who’s sick of hearing about her “damn emails?” Well, then you might view this as the FBI being overly cautious.

If you doubt any of this, just read the original (short three-paragraph) letter from James Comey.

My big question is, given that Comey isn’t really saying anything that significant and isn’t offering any details at all, why did he feel the need to reopen this can of worms just 11 days before the election? As Electoral-Vote points out, there is no good answer to this question:

Indeed, it’s difficult to conceive of an explanation here that doesn’t make Comey look at least a little bit bad. He’s Republican, and maybe he’s trying to help the Republican candidate? Or, maybe he’s smarting from the criticism he received when deciding not to prosecute, and is trying to throw a bone to Congressional Republicans? Or maybe he’s trying to prove that he does his job as he sees fit, and politics be damned? In any of these scenarios, he would be giving top priority to his own needs, or to his own image, or to his agency’s image.

And if Comey wasn’t aware that he was throwing a monkey wrench into the presidential election, then he is incompetent.

© Darrin Bell

High-powered lawyers like Lawrence Tribe are stepping up. Tribe and others have offered to defend — for free — anyone who has been threatened with a lawsuit by Donald Trump. This includes the women who have accused Trump of sexually assaulting them (and Trump has said he would sue after the election), but also includes reporters and others. He is even offering to defend the bar association, who was threatened with a lawsuit by Trump and as a result backed down from releasing a report on him.

Retired Supreme Court justice David Souter, back in 2012, reminds us of the biggest danger to democracy. His words are prescient given our current election.

This clip starts near the end of his talk, but the whole talk is very interesting.

Mother Jones came across something that (at least to me) not-so-neatly sums up Donald Trump. The occasion was the 2009 death of Jett Travolta, the 16-year-old son of John Travolta and his wife Kelly Preston, who died of a seizure while on vacation with his parents.

Trump decided to offer his condolences. His first mistake was publishing it on the website of Trump University (which, mercifully is now defunct in a flurry of fraud). His second mistake was publishing it just four days after the tragic death. But the biggest mistake is what Trump wrote. Here’s the first paragraph:

I have always respected people who were loyal and faithful — which brings to mind Kelly Preston. A long time ago, before I was married, I met Kelly Preston at a club and worked like hell to try and pick her up. She was beautiful, personable, and definitely had allure. At the time I had no idea she was married to John Travolta. In any event, my track record on this subject has always been outstanding, but Kelly wouldn’t give me the time of day. She was very nice, very elegant, but I didn’t have a chance with her, and that was that.

Yes, Donald Trump takes the occasion of the tragic death of a child and makes it into an opportunity to reminisce about how he once tried to pick up the dead child’s mother. And because he is Trump, he even throws in some bragging about his track record.

Even the humor website Cracked was gobsmacked. This is (part of) what they wrote:

Alright, do you see what you did there? Instead of telling Kelly you grieve for the loss of her little boy, you mentioned the time you tried to fuck her. This is what most ethicists would call “unspeakably shameful” and most psychiatrists would call “psychopathic.” When us regulars write our condolence letters, we tend to leave out stories about once trying super hard to fuck the mother of the recently departed.

Most people don’t need to be told this, but it’s actually almost never OK to brag about your powers of seduction in a letter about a dead kid. No matter how much you want people to know how much of that sweet poontang you get, the mother and father typically don’t want to hear about it four days after their son’s death.

Donald Trump may be the first major candidate to run for president who could start World War III completely unintentionally, just by saying something really stupid and insulting.

A fascinating article written by the DC correspondent for a Canadian newspaper. On a lark, he spent a month counting how many lies were told by Donald Trump each day.

His point was that while there was fact checking going on for individual statements made by Trump, the missing story was the sheer number of lies coming out of his mouth on a daily basis. His conclusion:

Every politician sometimes gets things wrong about complicated issues, sometimes practices evasive dishonesty. Trump gets things wrong all the time, pointlessly, about almost everything, and almost never corrects himself. Even if he’s not intentionally lying, he’s habitually erring. At very least, it suggests a serial carelessness with facts and a serial resistance to conceding error. Both traits seem relevant to the discussion of who should be commander-in-chief.

The other fascinating thing is the anger that has been thrown at him for fact checking Trump.

They’ve accused me of being controlled by the CIA. They’ve accused me of having a sexual attraction to Clinton’s “colostomy bag.” (Fact check: what is even happening, man.) I’ve been told to “get a life” and, more confusingly, to “get a job.” And, at times, I’ve gained some more insight into the mind of Trump’s unshakable loyalists.