Colin Powell's Private Email Account Has Been Hacked (theverge.com) 248
According to The New York Times, Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has been hacked and a password-protected archive of his personal emails has been published by DC Leaks. The Verge reports: DC Leaks is the same site that first published emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, which many took as an explicit effort to influence the U.S. election process. Many experts in the U.S. intelligence apparatus have attributed that attack to the Russian government, although no public attribution has been made. Thus far, there's no evidence tying Powell's hack to Russia, and similar hacks have been carried out by mischievous teens without government affiliation. The immediate result of the hack has been political fallout for Powell himself. Last night, BuzzFeed News reported on an email in which Powell called Republican nominee Donald Trump a "national disgrace," and another in which he said the candidate was "in the process of destroying himself."
Powell can't bring himself to vote for Hillary (Score:4, Interesting)
Even though he was an enthusiastic supporter of Obama.
This does not bode well.
Re:Powell can't bring himself to vote for Hillary (Score:4, Insightful)
Even though he was an enthusiastic supporter of Obama.
This does not bode well.
One thing that's never made sense to me was his claim of being a Republican. He had very few Republican positions, and as Secretary of State, he was one of the most Left Wing members of the administration. The reason Iraq (and Afghanistan) went to hell in a handbasket was his influence - the idea of making nation-building a part of the mission was his idea, not just W's. Also, the Valerie Plame leaks - which Scooter Libby was convicted for - was the doings of his deputy Dick Armitage, who now supports HRC. All the things that Libby was accused of - endangering a CIA desk agent - was something that Armitage actually did, and for which paid NO price!
It's funny how Hilary's minions (to steal Powell's phrase) have totally pissed off Powell from being a never-Trumper to a Hilary-neither voter. Sit at home, Colin!
The problem w/ nation building (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason nation building worked post WWII was that the countries involved already had democratic traditions, and self criticism, while somewhat new, was something those countries were capable of. The US didn't sit down to write constitutions from scratch - as far as West Germany went, they sat down and put together the list of things that Germans could not do. Things like putting together a constitution was something that the West Germans did, and it was nothing similar to the Third Reich. Same w/ Italy - no semblance to the Mussolini regime that had been overthrown.
That's a totally different situation from Afghanistan and Iraq. Like the mission of Operation Enduring Freedom was to topple the Taliban. What followed? The creation of a constitution in Afghanistan that states that no law shall contravene the rules of Sharia. So the same issues that one had in Afghanistan w/ the Taliban are just bound to return, and the only thing there is that the regime is not anti-US as the Taliban was. Spending billions on the reconstruction of Afghanistan to win 'hearts & minds' has bombed. How do you win the hearts & minds of people who have neither?
In Iraq, Saddam was toppled, w/ the naïve assumption that the replacement regime would be a Jeffersonian democracy, w/ Shi'ites and Sunnites singing Kumbaya. It never happened, and the reason it can't happen is that those 2 have a historical rivalry dating back to after the death of Mohammed. Like the fable of the 4 geniuses who put together a lion w/o stopping to think that the revived lion would eat them (or Trump's narration of Al Wilson's song 'The Snake' at his rallies), none of the geniuses in either the State Department or outside it stopped to consider that if the Shi'ites came to power in Baghdad, you'd have a Shi'ite Crescent of Teheran, Baghdad, Damascus and partially Beirut (w/ Hizbullah).
Allying w/ either side in this conflict - Shi'ite or Sunnite - is idiotic. None of them are our allies. While Obama deserves to be faulted for the Iran deal and a restrained policy towards Iranian boats taunting US Navy vessels in the Gulf, Bush too deserves to be faulted for regarding Saudi Arabia and Qatar as allies. The issue w/ Bush/Powell/Rice was that he saw them as 'people of faith', even though the faith in question is a barbaric one. Obama/Clinton/Kerry's problem is that when the Arab Spring started, they continued the Bush doctrine policies of 'promoting democracy' by supporting the Arab Spring, w/ disastrous results.
What was worse was letting Qatar and Saudi Arabia guide their policy on Syria. Granted - Bashar al Assad was no saint, but he wasn't running a genocide in his country when it all started. If anything, he was trying to reform things so that opposition to his regime from the Sunnis would decrease. However, the Saudis and Qataris wanted to replace his regime w/ a Sunni one in Damascus, and tried to first get the US to agree, and then used the Arab Spring as a pretext to support it. It's not like they were clean either - Bahrein too wanted democracy, and Saudi troops marched in to prop up the Hanafas. Anyway, they all started supporting their own favorite factions - be it the Free Syrian Army, Khorasan, and so on, and plunged that country into civil war.
The point I was making was that everyone who supported nation building, as well as getting rid of dictators and replacing them w/ whoever the people wanted, turned out to be wrong. The intervention in Libya, which was supported not just by Hilary & Obama but also by McCain and a whole bunch of Republicans across the board: they only turned on that policy once it turned south. This despite the fact that one of the few benefits of the Iraq war was Gadaffi voluntarily ending his WMD program, and doing what he could to restore relations w/ the West. Yeah, he was evil, but there was no reason to support his ouster when he was on a reformation trajectory. Now, Cyrenaica is completely under the control of ISIS, and Tripoli has a regim
Re:Powell can't bring himself to vote for Hillary (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, what he specifically said is "I would rather not have to vote for her, although she is a friend I respect". He then refers to her age, her ambition, and her inflexibility.
I feel the same way as Powell does. I would rather not have to vote for her - but the Republican Party left me with no choice.
Re:Powell can't bring himself to vote for Hillary (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense, you've got all kinds of choice: Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, Darrell Castle, write in somebody else, or just leave that space on the ballot blank.
People who insist on holding their nose and voting for whichever of the two major party candidates they dislike least because they don't want to "waste their vote" are part of the problem -- and are wasting their votes.
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Nonsense, you've got all kinds of choice: Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, Darrell Castle, write in somebody else, or just leave that space on the ballot blank.
People who insist on holding their nose and voting for whichever of the two major party candidates they dislike least because they don't want to "waste their vote" are part of the problem -- and are wasting their votes.
Under normal circumstances I would have agreed (and I have had voted for 3rd party candidates in the past.) But not now.
See, I'm a naturalized US citizen that looks Mexican and who has had to face racism in more than one occasion, married to a permanent resident of Japanese origin, with a Muslim brother-in-law and many friends who are either Muslim or Muslim-looking as per the logic of angry wretches.
And I'm staring at a vulgarian reincarnation of George Wallace promising religious tests, who claims an
Re:Powell can't bring himself to vote for Hillary (Score:4, Informative)
I disagree. In most of the previous recent elections, there was an okay candidate and a bad candidate. This time, there are two very bad candidates. Trump is probably slightly less bad in practice, because he has fewer Washington connections and most of Congress hates him, so he'll have worse policies but less chance of getting them through. Clinton has marginally less bad policies, but is sufficiently familiar with the Washington machine that she'll probably pass a lot of them.
W wouldn't have been so bad if he hadn't been a Bush. If he'd not had the family connections with experience to help get things done, he'd probably have been an ineffectual and unmemorable president.
Given that it's going to be bad whoever wins, you may as well vote for someone you actually want to win, in the hope that next time they'll seem electable enough that people will vote for them thinking that they might actually stand a chance.
Re:Powell can't bring himself to vote for Hillary (Score:4, Insightful)
If Trump gets in it will result in a lurch to the right, and the GOP will support the worst if his polices. He will screw things up internationally too.
Hilary may not be great, but the potential for catastrophe is much lower.
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Not necessarily. The right wing of the GOP might support him, though many of them hate him for other reasons (especially the Christian Right), but the moderates and the democrats won't. He doesn't have the diplomatic skills to persuade people who don't like him to go along with his policies. The rest of the world pretty much hates you anyway, so he can't make things much worse there.
A few commentators have argued that Trump getting in would be better for the left, because it's likely to result in a ba
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Interesting theory, but it's still one hell of a risk. What's the absolute worst that could happen under Clinton?
Re:Powell can't bring himself to vote for Hillary (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not necessarily. The right wing of the GOP might support him, though many of them hate him for other reasons (especially the Christian Right), but the moderates and the democrats won't. He doesn't have the diplomatic skills to persuade people who don't like him to go along with his policies. The rest of the world pretty much hates you anyway, so he can't make things much worse there.
A few commentators have argued that Trump getting in would be better for the left, because it's likely to result in a backlash from the electorate and a swing back to an actual left-wing candidate, rather than a slightly-less-right candidate like Hilary next time around. In contrast, a successful Clinton presidency would just provide more support for the Democrat's slide to the right.
Trump's opposition in the party has come not from the Christian Right or any Right, but from the Liberal Establishment types within the party. People like the Bushes, Powell, McCain, Graham, Whitman, Fiorina and so on. Like if you look at the 16 guys who opposed him, who were the ones who happily went on to support him? Guys like Huckabee, Carson, Santorum, Walker and from the moderates, Christie & Rubio. The ones who opposed him - Bush, Graham, Kasich, Fiorina - none of them Right Wing. Cruz was s
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There is an excellent discussion on how to choose between Clinton and Trump on here http://scotthorton.org/intervi... [scotthorton.org] . Both Horton and Gitlin think they're two bad choices but their conclusions are opposite. Their interpretation of what is the least evil choice is different. For Horton the belligerence of the mainstream establishment, and certainly of its right wing to which Clinton belongs, is the most pressing problem, for Gitlin the erratic and unstable behavior of Trump is the biggest danger.
Powell did not say who he was voting for (Score:3)
Your comment has a false subject. Powell has said he will not yet say who he is voting for.
Your body is also highly questionable. I remember watching at least one speech in which Powell endorsed then-Senator Obama, but I don't remember anything that approximated "enthusiastic supporter". Nor do I recall any of the marks of enthusiasm such as actively campaigning for Obama or speaking at the Democratic convention. According to my research just now, Powell only made his endorsement two weeks before the electi
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It's a pity really since he's a better person than most in Washington from both parties, but as it stands his endorsement or not will mean exactly zero for the rest of his life.
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I don't think his attitude on the WMD lie story has been well understood. He must have known perfectly well all the public reasons for going to war were just an alibi. The painful thing was that even the alibi didn't hold up which damaged him. I can appreciate Powell as a person but politically he hasn't much to offer.
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I didn't say this was weird, I said it does not bode well [for Democrats].
The forces that lifted Obama to the Presidency do not seem to be present for Hillary.
Re:Powell can't bring himself to vote for Hillary (Score:5, Insightful)
They are two completely different people. The things that made people want to vote for Obama aren't necessarily present in Hillary, and the reasons why people don't want to vote for Hillary weren't necessarily a factor for Obama. Hillary has a lot more baggage than Obama ever did.
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Obama really had virtually no history. He never really did anything special in the Senate. It seems that more and more having actually worked in Washington is not a good thing to brag about on the campaign trail.
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Most recent Presidents (Carter, Reagan, Bill Clinton, GW Bush) had a background as a state Governor before becoming President. Makes sense, that's an executive position rather than a legislative one, just like the presidency.
While Obama was a less-than-one-term US senator when elected President, he was running against McCain who had 3+ terms as a senator and two as a representative, which seems to have put McCain at a disadvantage. Second time around, Romney had been a Governor, but Obama had the incumbe
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This is the most negative campaign I have ever observed. Nothing compares. The vast majority seem to be voting against a candidate instead of for one. It's reaching hysterical proportions as we get closer to November.
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That's because by and large Obama has failed many of the forces that lifted him to the presidency.
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...except that Trump will win because it will become known that
Hillary is suffering from a serious, untreatable neurological condition
(some suggest Parkinson's) and will be unable to perform the duties
the Office of President of The United States requires. The large
meds she's on to appear healthy during her campaign are going
to cause her to crash and burn really bad (I don't wish her harm).
She can't continue at the level of meds she's on for any period of
time - Sunday was just the tip of the ice berg of wha
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Hillary is suffering from a serious, untreatable neurological condition (some suggest Parkinson's) and will be unable to perform the duties the Office of President of The United States requires.
Even if that's true, it won't change how the vast majority of people vote.
Most vote for a party, a platform, an ideology, or a pet policy issue - not for a person. If Hillary wins and cannot serve, she will be replaced by her Vice President. Since her VP is also a Democrat, it would make little difference to most voters which one actually ends up in power.
If anything, I think Trump's campaign would lose ground if it were to become known that Hillary could not serve, since there is a sizeable chunk of voters
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The polls disagree with you. Since the incident where she was dragged away into her getaway van, her numbers dropped and Trump's went up.
Guess it's time for Reuters to "tweak" their polling algorithms again so that Hillary appears ahead. Wouldn't want voters to get the wrong idea now, would we?
Re:Lifting candidates (Score:5, Insightful)
Well he's not wrong, about a month and a half ago Reuters changed their polling method because it was showing 3rd party candidates taking more from Hillary than Trump.
The problem with polling in general is it is often used to influence the way people think rather than report on how they think. Many of the polling firms are marketing groups, not political scientists.
The problem with polling this election is that every poll I've seen relies on the assumption that the turnout demographics in 2016 will be the same as they were in 2012 or 2008, but no one justifies this assumption. I find it hard to believe that blacks will come out for Hillary the way they came out for Obama. On the other hand the white working class hasn't had anyone speak to them about trade and immigration like Trump has in pretty much forever.
I don't know what the turnout will be in November, so I can't "unskew" the polls. But since the pollsters never justify the fundamental premise of the polls, I can't trust them either. I would just take any poll numbers you see with a massive grain of salt.
Re:Lifting candidates (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't found many people that really like Hilliary although I have heard from a lot of people that say they will vote for her. I've heard more people that like Trump but there are still more that don't but say they will vote for him. So far it seems to me the one thing going for Trump is that he's not Hilliary. The number one thing going for Hilliary is that she's a Democrat. I know tons of people that would vote for Satan himself if he ran on the Democratic ticket.
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I know tons of people that would vote for Satan himself if he ran on the Democratic ticket.
This is not unique to the Democrats. The exact same statement is certainly true of most Republican voters. I'd go so far as to suggest that Trump could have anal sex with Satan on TV and pledge his eternal allegiance to ISIS/Daesh/ISIL and he'd still win Texas. I can imagine Texas voters saying "I don't like it that he had sex with Satan and supports ISIS but I'm not voting for a Democrat". I've been to Texas recently. I have family that lives there. Yes, it really is like that. I estimate that as ma
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I don't particularly like Clinton. I don't think she's a crook or a serial murderer or any of the other crazy conspiracy theories, I just think she's a bit more conservative than i'd really like. But there's no way i'm going to help throw the election to Trump by voting for anyone other than the person who is most likely to defeat Trump.
Until we get rid of the firs
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I'm voting for Johnson.
His campaign has basically become: Not Trump *or* Clinton
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My main problem with Johnson is he's pro-TPP.
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I agree. I recall everyone making fun of him about his not knowing what Aleppo was. If you pay attention his attitude was that he could get by on general doctrinal thinking and didn't need the details: what would a libertarian think, and that happened not to be half bad (stay out), much better than most experts in my view.
Of course the attitude of going on general principles and not requiring specifics has its problems, but also libertarian thinking is often isolationist and then one doesn't need to know m
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Nope. Not knowing a key battleground indicates lack of knowledge of a subject so well, one could say he doesn't know what ISIS is, since he doesn't know where it operates, and doesn't follow the most basic news about it.
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I have seen no indication that independents are leaning Trumpward.
None are so blind as those who will not see.
Latest Quinnipiac poll [qu.edu] has Independents going for Trump 45-40.
Latest Reuters poll [realclearpolitics.com] has Independents going for Trump 30-22.
As a reminder, Romney won the independent vote in 2012 50-45. Boring, milquetoast Mitt. Independents were 29% of the electorate that year. Do you really think that the number of independents will go DOWN this year? After Trump won more primary votes than any other Republican in history? After the kind of excitement and craziness we've seen on bo
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Well, that will be very interesting if it happens. Tune in in mid-November, and we'll talk about it then.
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Establishment cronies, globalists, oligarchs, and sketchy millionaire career politicians are the ones coming out against him in droves and using their money to influence this election as hard as they can. Why do you think there's so many news outlets that act as cover for Hillary's crimes, failings, faux pas, and issues while at the same time mustering everything they've got against Trump for every insignificant issue under the sun, taking things out of context or just outright lying about him? We always th
I'd have more sympathy if... (Score:2)
People stopped annoyingly pronouncing his name as Co-lon instead of Colin.
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He chose that pronunciation after a WW2 B-17 pilot [wikipedia.org]. His parents pronounced it the other way.
It's his own fault (Score:2)
Colin Powell never should have talked shit about Donald Trump. You mess with the bear and you get the h4xx0rs.
http://www.nbcnews.com/politic... [nbcnews.com]
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Am I the only one concerned about Trump's Russian mob connections?
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Pretty much. Jethro Clampett was concerned early on but he's gone along with the rest of the Republican party and replaced his backbone with an overcooked spaghetti noodle.
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If somebody had written a novel about this election a few years ago the editor would have thrown it at a wall and told the author never to darken the door again. A million unlikely things before breakfast. At least he's ditched the PR guy who also did the work for Russian fighters in Ukraine - hard to get a positive spin on shooting down civilian air
What mail servers? (Score:2)
I'd be interested to know what mail servers all these hacks have been against. Are they all private servers that someone has left unmaintained in a basement for years? Are they big online servers? Are they well maintained private servers? I know some of the e-mail leaks have been social engineered but, if any weren't, it would be interesting to know how they were hacked.
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In this case, it was Powell's g-mail account. His login credentials may have been reused on some other site that had their data stolen. In that case it would not be a hack so much as a stolen password.
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Or he could have been phished. (still a stolen password, but not via one of the various big leaks.)
It could also be a remote attack vs his desktop
(teamviewer/gotomypc/rdp/etc/etc...) If someone has gotten remote access to his desktop then it may be as simple as launching chrome from his PC at 3am...
or someone got their hands on a device like an ipad or something that he used that wasn't properly/sufficiently locked down.
or he foolishly checked his gmail from a computer someone else uses or belongs to, and d
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If I was General Powell, I would not reuse the same password from my e-mail on ANY site... and it would be complex and random...
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According to the article, this was a gmail account.
Summary Incomplete (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary totally ignores Powell's extremely critical remarks about Hillary, her lies, manipulation, and the public exploitation of his name against his wishes.
A lie of omission is still a lie, and that you choose to ignore these facts makes them all the more critical to examine.
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The summary totally ignores Powell's extremely critical remarks about Hillary, her lies, manipulation, and the public exploitation of his name against his wishes.
The summary does not mention this, because the article is about Colin Powell's emails, and no such email exists. If such an email does exist, please link to it. Otherwise, it is the AC who is lying. That post should not have been modded up without a citation to an email from Powell regarding Clinton. It was just troll/flamebait.
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Are you f-ing kidding? Just go to Google News and search for "Colin Powell Hillary". CNN, The Wall Street Journal, etc are all reporting it. The problem is they are trumpeting his comments about Trump and doing everything can to bury his comments about Hillary while "documenting" them so they can fight off accusations of bias.
Both candidates suck, terribly. But Hillary is "just" a walking summary of everything that's wrong with politics in the US. Trump, Trump is the kid from school that never realized t
Re:Summary Incomplete (Score:4, Informative)
The summary totally ignores Powell's extremely critical remarks about Hillary, her lies, manipulation, and the public exploitation of his name against his wishes.
A lie of omission is still a lie, and that you choose to ignore these facts makes them all the more critical to examine.
Funny, I didn't see him call her a liar. Here's the most critical remarks I found about her from the article:
Mr. Powell lamented that while he respected Mrs. Clinton, he would “rather not have to vote for her,” describing the Democratic presidential nominee as having “a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational.”
“H.R.C. could have killed this two years ago by merely telling everyone honestly what she had done and not tie me into it,” Mr. Powell wrote late last month, referring to Mrs. Clinton by her initials. “I told her staff three times not to try that gambit. I had to throw a mini-tantrum at a Hamptons party to get their attention. She keeps tripping into these ‘character’ minefields.”
In December 2015, he told Condoleezza Rice, his successor at the State Department, that the Republican political attacks on Benghazi were “a stupid witch hunt” and wrote that “basic fault falls on a courageous ambassador who thought Libyans now love me and I am O.K. in this very vulnerable place.” He added that “blame also rests on his leaders and supporters back here,” including Mrs. Clinton.
A few months later, in a discussion about Mrs. Clinton’s email scandal, Mr. Powell lamented that “everything H.R.C. touches she kind of screws up with hubris.”
Oh, and of course his most critical remarks about Trump:
Mr. Powell wrote last month that Mr. Trump is “his own best enemy” and added: “I will speak out when I feel it appropriate and not after every idiot thing he says.”
“No need to debate it with you now, but Trump is a national disgrace and an international pariah,” Mr. Powell wrote in June, noting the criticism of Mr. Trump by several prominent conservatives. “He is in the process of destroying himself, no need for Dems to attack him.”
“Yup, the whole birther movement was racist,” Mr. Powell wrote. “That’s what the 99% believe. When Trump couldn’t keep that up he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim. As I have said before, ‘What if he was?’ Muslims are born as Americans everyday.”
Mr. Powell dismissed as completely ineffective Mr. Trump’s recent attempts to reach out to black voters, saying that the Republican nominee “takes us for idiots.”
“He can never overcome what he tried to do to Obama with his search for the birth certificate hoping to force Obama out of the presidency,” Mr. Powell wrote, saying to his aide, “You don’t fall for his false sincerity, I hope.”
“He appeals to the worst angels of the G.O.P. nature and poor white folks,”
So... are you sure you want the summary to go into his opinions on the candidates?
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Thanks for compiling all of that in one place, and I'd give you an "informative" mod point if I ever got one to give.
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Really? I see it.
"H.R.C. could have killed this two years ago by merely telling everyone honestly what she had done and not tie me into it," Mr. Powell wrote late last month, referring to Mrs. Clinton by her initials. "I told her staff three times not to try that gambit. I had to throw a mini-tantrum at a Hamptons party to get their attention. She keeps tripping into these 'character' minefields."
That last part is important. The first bold part, he says the she lie
Anthrax (Score:2)
I guess she should have waved around a bottle of 'anthrax' to justify all that bullshit.
Our special of the day Ambasador to France 3mil (Score:2)
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US Ambassadorships have always been rewards for loyalty... both parties do it and it dates back to the 1800's. Ambassador's don't make policies or laws, they are generally just mouth pieces. Well educated, rich mouth pieces but mouthpieces. If you look at the list you'll notice something important, the awarded ambassadorships were for the UK, Sweden, Spain, etc. You won't find any countries we have serious political problems with on that list. Russia? John Teft whose been a foreign service officer since 1972 and was pulled out of retirement specifically to be posted in Russia. Afghanistan, P. Michael McKinley... a foreign service officer since 1982. Columbia? Kevin Whitaker, career foreign service officer. See the pattern here? For countries we're friends with... the ambassador is a "host". For countries we have an issue with they're always career politicians who know WTF is going on.
That's nice Chairman of the FCC and Secretary of the Treasury were there as well.
The guy who.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The immediate result of the hack has been political fallout for Powell himself.
The guy who has no political aspirations? Nah, he's untouchable politically because he has no ambition. He is like the Buddha of US politics: having no desires, he feels no pain at loss.
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He was pissed at Hilliary about cutting him out of a paid speaking gig. He felt the pain of that.
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Wait for it (Score:2)
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Hey, everybody's doing it.
Good (Score:2, Insightful)
Couldn't happen to a more deserving person. I hope every single Washington gang criminal has every secret they ever had leaked.
Re:They're boring in a good way (Score:5, Informative)
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All his comments look relatively restrained and not particularly "juicy," but that never stopped a good news story before.
He refers to Hillary as "unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still dicking bimbos at home." That didn't bore me at all!
chispito said "juicy" not "what everybody already suspected/knew".
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He refers to Hillary as "unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still dicking bimbos at home." That didn't bore me at all!
Really? For a candid, off the record appraisal of Hillary Clinton, by a Republican-aligned former official, that doesn't seem tame?
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Re: They're boring in a good way (Score:5, Insightful)
I would be comfortable with Powell in charge. He always preferred diplomacy over a military solution, and he was not in favor of any military action that didn't serve the interests of the US. We could do a lot worse than that.
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You may want to read some more of his emails. He's just another elitist poo-pooing the concerns and desires of the common people.
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I would expect and hope that anyone elected to be president is someone that we would refer to as an elite American. Colin Powell would be one of them, yes. I don't want a plumber or electrician or carpenter getting thrust into a job like that, no disrespect meant to those professions. I consider myself to be unqualified as well.
Powell is a 4 star army general (there was pressure by the public and Congress to award him a fifth star, the sixth person who would hold the modern rank, but Clinton's team shut
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I am unable to understand how Powell can still identify himself as a member of today's so-called Republican Party. How can Con Man Donald pretend to lead the party originally led by Honest Abe? Even more distance between the pragmatic governing GOP of Teddy and Ike and the absolute obstructionists claiming the label today. As proven again by his email, Powell is pretty realistic, and yet he evidently cannot accept the reality that it's just a brand hijack and his principles have no place in that party.
Oh, a
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He lied to the UN about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. His presentation is the image always used to illustrate the deception, especially that notorious sketch of an extremely dubious mobile chemical weapons facility.
At the very least, he lacks international credibility.
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Quit confusing the issue with facts.
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I don't think he knew anything was a fraud. In fact, I also think that Bush didn't even know the intelligence was wrong (more accurately: Bush was not told that he was being lied to and didn't bother to try to find out by other means). If you have statements made by either of them to that affect I would be interested though. I think that Cheney was the architect of the entire thing. Cui Bono, and all that. Cheney got to make a lot of money while Bush and Powell looked bad.
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That's some mighty huge wishful thinking there Tex.
As more information comes to light every day it's looking less and less that Bush was some poor sap dragged around by a guy in a position that typically has very little power but that Bush did what he did for his own reason
Re: They're boring in a good way (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: They're boring in a good way (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you watch it? His best evidence was a satellite picture of trucks leaving a building. He had no evidence, and he presented no evidence. To his credit, he at least didn't try to show any fake evidence. To his everlasting shame, he did make it sound like the evidence was damning. Your horse shit is just more on the pile.
Saddam and WMDs (Score:3, Interesting)
A lot of countries opposed toppling Saddam - Russia, France, Saudi Arabia, et al. Why didn't they produce evidence that Iraq did not have WMDs? Truth is that Iraq wanted to put out the impression that it had WMDs as a deterrence to Iran, w/o having them. Instead, the US took those hints and took out their regime.
FWIW, my only opposition to Saddam Hussein was his support to Hamas against Israel, and his $25k reward for each suicide bomber in Israel. I had nothing against his having WMDs or even using t
Re:Saddam and WMDs (Score:5, Informative)
They did produce evidence. The UN inspectors had free run of the country for several months prior to the war. In their own words, the US evidence was "shit". Of course they found no evidence of an ongoing weapons program, because there was none.
In any case, the US never has produced any real evidence, before or after for their WMD claims.
They had cryptic radio intercepts.
They had satellite pictures of trucks leaving buildings.
They had unknown chemical processing trucks (turned out to be hydrogen production. The design was known, but not by Powell.).
They had aluminum tubes.
For hard evidence, that's all they had.
Re:Saddam and WMDs (Score:5, Informative)
Many did.
One from Australia quit his intelligence job (preparing reports on Iraq) and ran for the Senate with the argument that Iraq did not have WMDs and the war was based on a lie. He was not just some Snowden but had served for twenty years reached the rank of lieutenant colonel and had also worked for Raytheon.
He was in the Australian Senate for a few years and is in now Member of the Australian Parliament for Denison and his name is Andrew Wilkie.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
To be fair, what evidence we do have suggests that intelligence services genuinely believed that at the time. They were wrong, but it was an honest mistake on their part.
Saddam himself went far out of his way to make it look as if he had the weapons. It was his way of discouraging conflict - not only from the US, but also from the Kurds, the Iranians, and every other local faction that hated his guts (which was most of them). In the end it backfired spectacularly, but it might still have been his best chanc
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Re: They're boring in a good way (Score:5, Informative)
You asked "why?"
why did UK, run by a Left wing government run by Tony Blair, back that?
1. Because warhawks are warhawks, and allies are allies, regardless of party affiliation. After 9/11, Europe sympathized with the US.
everybody's intelligence agencies seemed to suggest that Saddam had chemical and/or biological weapons
2. Actually, the intelligence agencies didn't suggest this. The politicians claimed that the intelligence agencies said this, but they really didn't. The agencies don't really speak publicly, they speak through the elected officials that they report to. We now know that what they told the president and prime minister isn't the same as what the president and prime minister said publicly.
For example: We now know that for example, at the time that George W. Bush gave a speech about the supposed "yellow cake uranium," that he knew it was falsified evidence but proceeded with the speech anyway. The UK did the same thing, leading up to the invasion, asking BBC reporters to basically make-up phony facts. [pbs.org]
If you look back at the evidence, it was clear that the evidence was being used to justify an already decided-upon conclusion. For example: The UK and US cited a shipment of aluminum tubes as evidence that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. It turns out that the tubes were used for the much more mundane purpose of rockets. If you saw an aluminum tube that could be used for rockets or nuclear weapons, and you knew the country was developing rockets, why would you assert that these tubes are evidence of nuclear weapons? Certainly, it is possible. But they didn't present it as "well, it was probably used for rockets, but maybe it is for nukes (shrug)." It was presented as "OMG This is proof that they are developing nukes!" A lie of omission is still a lie.
You asked "Why?" It is important to understand why. It is because well-intentioned people can sometimes lie to support what they believe is right. The populus and the media in particular, must be vigilant against such things. The New York times, has since, apologized for being the white house's mouthpiece.
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Re: They're boring in a good way (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it was wrong intelligence. Or else, why did UK, run by a Left wing government run by Tony Blair, back that? They could easily have told the US that Iraq had nothing, and that would have worked, but everybody's intelligence agencies seemed to suggest that Saddam had chemical and/or biological weapons
Read the damned Downing Street Memos
The policy is to invade, and the intel is being fixed around the policy
That's 2002. Seriously, brownnosing Bush won't help change the war crimes committed in our name.
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No, it was wrong intelligence. Or else, why did UK, run by a Left wing government run by Tony Blair, back that? They could easily have told the US that Iraq had nothing, and that would have worked, but everybody's intelligence agencies seemed to suggest that Saddam had chemical and/or biological weapons
Because Blair had already agreed to go along with whatever Bush did [time.com].
Sure, everybody thought Saddam had WMDs, but none of the intelligence agencies were certain and they didn't believe he was a threat.
I don't know how dubious Powell was of the evidence at the time, but the intelligence agents who produced it were very dubious. Powell gave the presentation he did because it was his job to push the administrations agenda and the administration really wanted war.
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No one in Germany thought so, and they actually HAD curveball and said he was both unreliable and most likely a fraud
Meanwhile, Blix and Ritter BOTH told us the stories were a lie.
Powell, like any apparatchnik, protected the boss and lied.
They knew individual parts of the puzzle were a lie, they may not have realized the conclusion was also wrong.
Saddam having an active WMD program (at least wrt chemical weapons) made a lot of sense. He'd used them before to protect himself from Iran and suppress internal dissident. He even hinted that he did have WMDs since he wanted to scare away the Iranians.
My opinion at the time was three things.
1) Saddam probably had a WMD program.
2) Saddam was content to stay in Iraq and was not an imminent threat.
3)
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Saddam was broke and had killed off the weapons programs and in some cases literally killed off the people running them.
The intelligence agencies knew this. Some people quit their intelligence jobs and said so.
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No, it was wrong intelligence. Or else, why did UK, run by a Left wing government run by Tony Blair, back that?
Are you seriously asking that question?
Tony Blair has already answered that himself. He had a man crush on the American Cowboy and blindly bought into his bullshit.
The intelligence was always flakey, but weak minds were easily led.
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It was a downright Soviet way to massage information and something to make us all hang our heads in shame.
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There was an inquiry in the UK into that which published it's findings just a few months ago. It appears that the only reason was to support what Bush was doing whether it was based on truth or not.
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Blair wanted a legacy and a nice easy victory to his name. Always makes you seem more statesman like after you liberated some dictatorship. Instead he gets to go down in history as a war criminal.
Re:They're boring in a good way (Score:5, Interesting)
That's more than just tabloid material. It's indicative of the type of characters making decisions and taking actions on behalf of you and me. Guess who gets to pay the bill and clean up the mess when these types are done feeding their egos and wallets?
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Corrupt means disobeying Colin Powell? Weird.
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Does he still have his AOL account?
These stupid people (add to them, the Director of TSA and the Director of the CIA) all have/had AOL ISPs.
My Grandma had one (RIP).