Then there are consequences
Preening self-admiring piece of shit Julian Assange graces the world with an interview telling us what to think about Donald Trump as president.
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has offered guarded praise of Donald Trump, arguing the president-elect “is not a DC insider” and could mean an opportunity for positive as well as negative change in the US.
Assange described his feelings about the US election results in an interview as “mixed” before going on to sharply criticize Democratic nominee Hillary Clintonand providing a more ambivalent assessment of Trump’s ascent to the White House.
“Hillary Clinton’s election would have been a consolidation of power in the existing ruling class of the United States,” Assange told the Italian newspaper la Repubblica.
Or just a continuation of it, or whatever, but in any case it’s not up to Julian Assange to determine who the US president should be.
In the week leading up to the election, Assange used his whistleblowing website to publish a cascade of emails connected to the Democratic party and the Clinton campaign.
The releases were highly damaging to Clinton, and US intelligence officials now believe they were hacked by Russia and passed to WikiLeaks to boost Trump’s bid for the White House. Assange has repeatedly declined to be drawn on the source of the hacked emails he published.
Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative and associate of Trump, said in August that he had been in communication with Assange over an “October surprise” to foil Clinton. WikiLeaks began publishing emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee and the email account of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, in October.
One guy. One guy with an arrogant messiah complex.
Some of the earliest and most high-profile WikiLeaks revelations, including those based on leaks by Chelsea Manning, occurred when Clinton was secretary of state.
“Hillary Clinton and the network around her imprisoned one of our alleged sources for 35 years, Chelsea Manning, tortured her according to the United Nations, in order to implicate me personally,” Assange claimed in the interview. He went on to accuse Clinton of being the “chief proponent and architect” of the military intervention in Libya, which he claimed had created instability throughout the region and the refugee crisis in Europe.
Appearing to suggest the disclosures in the run-up to the election were a form of payback, he added: “If someone and their network behave like that, then there are consequences. Internal and external opponents are generated. Now there is a separate question on what Donald Trump means.”
Then there are consequences. Spoken like a true bully.
And tragically for the US and the planet, the question of Assange’s revenge on Clinton is not separate from the question of what Donald Trump means. They’re all too inextricable.
Assange, who briefly hosted his own talkshow on the state-owned television network Russia Today, has long had a close relationship with the Putin regime. In his interview with la Repubblica, he said there was no need for WikiLeaks to undertake a whistleblowing role in Russia because of the open and competitive debate he claimed exists there.
“In Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs and Kremlin critics, such as [Alexey] Navalny, are part of that spectrum,” he said. “There are also newspapers like Novaya Gazeta, in which different parts of society in Moscow are permitted to critique each other and it is tolerated, generally, because it isn’t a big TV channel that might have a mass popular effect, its audience is educated people in Moscow. So my interpretation is that in Russia there are competitors to WikiLeaks.”
Tell that to Anna Politkovskaya – oh wait you can’t, she was murdered.
Dozens of journalists have been killed in Russia in the past two decades, and Freedom House considers the Russian press to be “not free” and notes: “The main national news agenda is firmly controlled by the Kremlin. The government sets editorial policy at state-owned television stations, which dominate the media landscape and generate propagandistic content.”
Preening self-admiring narcissistic men ruin everything.
I don’t know what to make of this press release:
Are they just confusingly referring to Jesus as a “new” King? Or comparing Trump to a king and/or their savior?
Are you SERIOUS?
It’s a joke, right? That’s a fake site?
Not to my knowledge, it’s not. Gop.com. Other articles on the site appear to be entirely garden variety press releases and such.
Anna Akhmatova died in 1966. She was a poet. The journalist Putin killed is Anna Politkovskaya.
Argh! [slaps self]
Thank you. Corrected.
I even have a book of hers, dammit. I can see it on the shelf from here.
Screechy – yes apparently so. I saw a headline from Daily Kos.
Unreal.
Why is Colonel Assange getting so much vitriol? His machinations aren’t the reason Saint Hillary isn’t the US president, America’s archaic Electoral College is. When will foreigners ever learn the double standards of hegemony? The US has been interfering in other countries’ politics since the 18th century.
Rather than personalise the cause of the Trump ascendency, it might be more effective if Americans examined their democratic institutions more assiduously.
Re:”Preening self-admiring narcissistic men ruin everything.”
DJT and J.A. both fill the bill; and there are millions more. The Bell Curve has a greed-power tail as well as a voluntary simplicity one. Unfortunately far more are involuntarily simplistic. The fat middle has far more striving to get to the greed-power tail due to massive population overshoot and resulting material scarcities.
RJW @ 8 – DO YOU MIND? When have I ever talked about Clinton as if she were a saint? And yes obviously the Electoral College is an abomination, but that doesn’t mean Wikileaks played no role at all, and yes I know the US has meddled in elections elsewhere but it wasn’t with my consent, and Trump is not deserved or just punishment for the population plus also the whole world. Other than that, brilliant comment.
Projections on the eve of the election – based precisely on EC vote expectations, on district-by-district bases – had about a 90% chance of a Clinton victory. In the event, slim and unexpected majorities in multiple specific swing states (arguably every potential swing state) gave Trump the EC win. The Electoral College isn’t an explanation for those surprise state wins – it’s the explanation for why they make the difference they do.
To explain them, you’ve got to use factors that would surprise those analysts in the last days of the election. (This is, of course, in addition to whatever it takes to explain this preening maniac with vomit for a soul getting within shouting distance in the first place.) Late “news” like the email leaks and James Comey’s baseless hints of Clinton scandals would be one factor with the right timing for that. Another would be people who won’t admit to a pollster to being Trump partisans but will defile a ballot with a vote for him.
Jeff Engel,
Could the explanation for the “preening maniac’s” success be that Clinton was a particularly poor quality candidate?
RJW – it’s hard to see that Clinton was any poorer quality than any other candidate who has won the election in my life, and higher quality than many. She had her failings, yes, but her failings were no greater than those of others that made president, and substantially less than Trump’s. So, no, I don’t think that’s an adequate explanation. Especially since she had one of the highest popularity ratings of any Secretary of State, but the attacks on her led her approval rating to crater, not because anything had changed, but because people began to believe something was wrong with her….it was repeated so intensely in the media, there was no way to ignore the hype.
RJW, the fact that Clinton was a particularly unpopular candidate undoubtedly helped. I actually see scant vidence, popularity aside, that she was a poor candidate. Also, people can discuss a single factor in a multi-factorial event and still be correct about that point.
So through Stone we have a direct link from Trump to the RNC to Assange/Wikileaks, we have a dashed line connecting Trump to Putin and Putin to Assange. Even the hint of collusion between the RNC and people it has described as sworn enemies of the USA makes these surreal times to live in.
Particularly poor quality my ass. Bush junior fits that description, Reagan fits that description, but Clinton not so much. I was never a fan of her candidacy because I detest the dynasty routine, and especially for a woman using her husband as a booster. Politically she’s much too centrist and corporate for me. But “poor quality” no – that’s absolute bullshit.
Ophelia, it was a question, not a statement of opinion.
Rob,
“Also, people can discuss a single factor in a multi-factorial event and still be correct about that point.”
Of course, where did I argue against that principle? My point is that the Electoral College was the sufficient condition for Clinton’s defeat. One could argue that the manipulations of Assange et al narrowed Clinton’s margin so that she couldn’t overcome the College’s gerrymander, I have no idea whether or not that’s plausible.
As others have noted – yeah, certainly a very unpopular candidate: one with the second lowest favorability numbers of a major party presidential candidate on record. But when she lost to the most unpopular candidate on record, there’s only so far to take that factor.
Clinton is as well-qualified as any recent presidential candidate. Politically, she’s the centrist every conventional U.S. presidential candidate strives to be come the general election, and kept up a campaign that was consistent and, if it wasn’t error-free, was as solid as one would expect from any winning campaign. In an ordinary election, political fans could go over it and pick at some bad moves here or there, but it really would be picking.
Strength as a conventional candidate though wouldn’t help if enough people are determined enough to throw out the conventional system. That’s usually a wash, when neither major party puts forth a screw-it-all, break-everything rage candidate and no third party with one has the exposure to offer a serious rival. This time though, the Republicans did offer a nihilist who’d get the rage vote and the usual Republican partisan one, and the rage was running high – likely in large part to the six years of obstruction in Congress to anything out of the Obama White House.
So there’s something to be said for Clinton as the wrong candidate for this election against someone who could sell himself as anti-establishment and a supposed populist. Even then though, I think that would struggle to make the top five reasons for the result.
‘When have I ever talked about Clinton as if she were a saint?’
This kind of conversation has been such an enlightening example about how every woman or black person must be perfect to escape destruction. Trayvon Martin may have smoked pot once–so it’s OK to shoot him. Michael Brown walked in the street–so it’s OK to shoot him. Hillary Clinton made some errors in judgment–so it’s OK to despise her. If you’re female or black and not perfect, you deserve whatever you get (and of course none of us is, so by definition we deserve the consequences of not being perfect).
Re ‘dynasty’–it might have been in comments in this blog, but I remember someone pointing out that that’s not really what happened here. Hillary and Bill are two ambitious middle-class people who formed an early partnership and who, partly due to each other’s help, have both achieved success. We’ve seen a generational dynasty in the Bushes, but not yet in the Clintons.
Also on the dynasty issue: I used to be against Hillary Clinton running for President on those grounds, too; it was one reason I supported Barack Obama over her in 2008. But over the course of this campaign I learned a few salient facts about Hillary. Namely, Hillary Rodham resisted taking the last name ‘Clinton’ until shortly before her husband’s re-election to the governorship of Arkansas, after an interregnum wherein his defeat was partly blamed on her independence and ambition. She eventually caved to the relentless pressure to subsume (rather than simply intwine) her identity to her husband’s.
It was those same forces that would have kept her from doing anything on her own without being married, or instead of her husband. So she *had* to support her husband, she *had* to hitch her wagon to his, or it wouldn’t have gotten as far as it did—it would’ve never gotten out of the barn, in the political climate of the time and place she lived in before. Calling it ‘dynastic’ is simply another way to punish her for not sacrificing her ambition along with her identity, for daring to aspire to high office while in possession of a vagina, especially in a time and place where a vagina was (and apparently is) first on the list of disqualifying criteria. She could have tried—and almost certainly would have failed—to make a name for herself without her husband, but she pursued what seemed at the time the most likely strategy to achieve power and thereby effect her vision. The necessity of that strategy may be distasteful, and the fact that she picked the wrong horse in Bill Clinton is certainly lamentable, but Hillary Rodham did the very best she could with the gauntlet she’d been put against.
Partly through her example of activism (both outside and within the White House), the next woman to credibly run for President won’t have had to marry a man and then put his career and ambitions ahead of her own. If that is her legacy, that she’s the last woman to have to use a man as a shield and a ship, that may be enough; but I no longer hold the necessity of the strategy against her. I cannot imagine any other person withstanding the decades-long campaign of slander and insane conspiracy theories with anything like her grace, and I hope that however much time remains to her, she gets to spend it well.
Thanks for sharing that, Seth–I found it very eloquent.
On a slight tangent, the idea of either perfection or destruction reminds me of a lesson it took me a surprisingly long time to learn. Before I learned it, if I heard someone say, for example, ‘women can’t do math,’ I’d respond ‘of course women can do math.’ Now I’d respond, ‘well women are people, just like men, and we’re all different–some of us can do math, some of us can’t.’
And, of course, the salient part being, the same thing can be said for men. My dad was great at math; my mom, barely average.
I do math very well; my husband, less than average.
I could go on with examples, but they are only anecdotes, so don’t provide any real evidence, but this idea that all men can do math, all women are nurturing, and all people of color have rhythm…they all come from the same place. The lazy thinking processes of generalization that allow us to avoid having to deal with diverse and interesting people by first finding out what they are really like. We can just read their talent set in their most visible characteristics, and that means we don’t really have to think.
Well the lesson I learned is that instead of defending ‘women’ (and sounding, in that example, like I think every women is Emmy Noether), I need to take a step back, reframe, and say ‘women are people’. We don’t have to argue about Hillary as a representative of ‘women’–she doesn’t have to be a ‘saint’, or the ur-woman, or perfect, in order to be permitted to participate in politics without being the most disgusting entity in the universe; she’s a person, and she deserves to be talked about like any other person without the ridiculous black and white hyperbole.