I'll repeat again: yes, there are alternative explanations, it's circumstantial evidence.

yeah man, being born in Kenya did that

I hate it when you make me go to the Urban Dictionary and I still can't figure out what you said!

I don't think financial incentives so singularly define people's motives, tbh. Not really part of my ideological worldview.

I mean, if you look at public donor lists, you'll find that there are plenty of extraordinarily wealthy Democratic donors who are using their wealth to... try to make it more difficult for extraordinarily wealthy people to use their wealth to influence politics.

*sigh*

yea Locke said something similar.

Fascinating interpretation. Please do the Canadian Liberals next.

Yeah MSNBC, CNN, WashPo and the NYT really ran with that

Alright, I'll check it out. I'm just saying, a comparative analysis is required here, but doing one is way beyond the scope of this thread. I think you're going to struggle to prove Clinton's was worse beyond a reasonable doubt.. and listening to one podcast about Clinton's crimes will make him seem worse if only because you're focusing in on him specifically. I'll give it a listen when I have time though.



..yes? Do you not remember how conservative media treated him?



I wouldn't disagree it may be a cause of their media treatment, sure.

Reid was explicitly talking about the right wing media. But when you exclude all of his predicates yeah I guess you’ve got a solid point there.

Sure, but Clinton was under harsh scrutiny from the so-called liberal media too. You can't attribute it all to right-wing media.

So here’s an example of a mistake leftists make all the time: assuming that there’s only one kind of rich person. A rich businessman donating to the Democratic Party for the purpose of mitigating the pro-rentier policies of their political opponents does not mean they are “good” people, motivated by something other than money, or even that the outcome they want is better for the rest of us than what the pro-rentier party is doing.

Like all liberal parties today, the Democrats are so comprehensively pro-business that it is difficult to imagine earnestly defending their corruption by ultra-wealthy businessmen for positive social progress.

When the Weinstein (ei, ie?) stuff came out wasn't it revealed just how many times various comedians had made jokes about his proclivities? I imagine Epstein's "hobbies" might have been similarly known in elite circles. Don't know but you're comments reminded me of this. No need to reply since it's basically what you already responded to.

Yeah, well that’s why I attribute it to a yacht tax.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Of course. I don't want to do that work.

By the way, if you do listen to that podcast, you'll also hear all about how right-wing operatives did in fact try (and often succeeded) to amplify certain scandals for political gain. It's definitely a part of the story. I just don't think it's the whole story.

Okay, cool. So let's agree not to discuss Clinton anymore or at least not until Trump comes up again.

Sorry man, we like Clinton now.

It doesn't have to be particularly strong evidence to be evidence. Being in the town where a murder happened is circumstantial evidence of your guilt for that murder. Anything which tends to circumstantially rule in favor of that turn of events is circumstantial evidence for it.

This got rather heated overnight (as per my timezone).

I don't care what none of y'all say, I'm still With Her. :'-)

listen her u litle ****

I listened to an episode of Slow Burn. Will listen to more. All I seemed to have learned was the early Clinton days had a few minor scandals, not really worth mentioning, and that Whitewater was the biggest non-scandal ever but was blown out of proportion by conspiracy theory and from private funding by anti-Clinton billionaires, people who would later work for Newsmax. So far not really convincing me of the "scandalous" Clinton admin.

Though I have to say, the conspiracy theories about the deaths of Vince Foster and Seth Rich are eerily similar. It's almost as if the same exact PR people created the conspiracy theories about both.. it's like the exact same playbook.

LOL, if that's what passes for heated now days!

think of how cold it is in their timezone

DAMN IT WOOKIE QUIT BUSTING MY CHOPS JESUS F. CHRIST

I'm sorry. Have we met?

Listen to the second episode, “There There.” You’ll find there a description exactly like what I’ve been talking about. When he considered running in ‘88 Bill ultimately decided not to in part because of all the accusations of infidelity he anticipated would come forward. When he ultimately did run in ‘92, he very quickly developed over the campaign cycle the nickname “slick Willy” because of his evasiveness on questions like dodging the draft and whether he smoke marijuana. His early presidency was mired in a steady drip of low-level scandal. As one Clinton supporter says of the Clintons, they were there own worst enemy when it came to addressing these scandals. They responded to scandals by becoming more secretive (because they assumed that being more forthcoming would essentially amount to giving more ammunition to opponents), which encouraged the press to believe that they had something to hide.

None of these scandals are on their own very bad or important, to my mind. But there was still nonetheless an accumulative effect from the consistency of scandals during the Clinton admin. The frequency of scandal and the way the Clintons’ conducted themselves was corrosive to trust in the presidency. I expect there were many Democrats at the time who felt they could hold their nose and tolerate the presidents’ character flaws because they liked how he ran the country (and of course there were many too who also simply didn’t care about the scandals).

So yeah, i don’t think whining about the “vast right-wing conspiracy” goes quite far enough. It’s true, no doubt, that the Clintons had some very manipulative opponents. But they also did a lot to attract negative attention.

Note: was kind of a substantial edit. Writing with jet lag.

Correct. Money is one of many means to power, and power is one of several motivations we might care about for large socially impactful choices.

From everything I can tell, consumption of wealth is almost never a major motivation for these choices. I can't find hard data, but by causal observation, it's pretty clear that among the very rich, held wealth is at least a couple of orders of magnitude larger than consumed wealth.

Another reason why I find it pretty unpersuasive that taxes on the wealthy can do much to account for how Clinton was portrayed by the media: Obama made the Bush tax cut permanent, except for the income tax on the most wealthy Americans, on whom the highest marginal rate returned to 39%. If raising taxes on the wealthy was really why mainstream liberal media (in addition to conservative media) outlets were so adversarial to the Clintons, they should’ve been just as adversarial towards Obama.

Was the mainstream media really that adversarial to the Clintons? That's been said quite a bit but it's not an obvious claim.

You remember the last 10 years much differently than I do.

Yeah IDK, he's making lots of claims that I think would have to be researched but they're not easy questions to answer. A comparative study of how presidents were treated by the media is no small task, and on top of that one would have to consider how different eras would effect reporting, which can't be made rigorous.

Oh, I did start with the second episode since I wasn't really interested in the Monica Lewinsky stuff. I got the impression that there was less there of substance and more just the impression of stuff.

I guess it depends what you consider a scandal. It seems you don't want to put much distance from actual scandalous activities and simply the perception of scandalous activities, as though both are equally scandalous. I think what I learned from the podcast was that there was little in the way of actual scandalous behavior, but loads in media perception. You could argue that people thought there were scandals and that the Clintons were bad at handling it, sure, but if little of it was of substance, do we still consider his presidency scandalous? I think George W. Bush's was more scandal prone TBH, in terms of actual, concrete, verified, real, not bull**** scandals like Whitewater.

I should add, one should not confuse the prose of a talented writer making implications about things for hard evidence of those things. The podcast writer likes to try and make things sound scandalous, but IMO it sounds more like he's drumming it up a bit. Because if the reality was more mundane and boring, would anyone care to listen? Any good podcaster has to exaggerate a bit for effect.

Conservative media was quite harsh towards Obama, but mainstream media wasn’t at all. It was doting and very charitable, and clearly wanted Obama to succeed in a way that was untrue with any Republican administration during my lifetime (and perhaps even the Clinton administration). At times liberal outlets’ reporting of Obama admin policy, on signature policies such as Obamacare or the JCPOA, was almost full on advocacy. This generosity of the media recognized in the popular imagination, too: there’s a reason why the “tan suit” meme carries such currency, and it’s not just anti-Trump sentiment. It’s a widespread perception that the Obama administration was morally upright and transparent, despite the fact that, according to some objective measures and in the opinion of many journalists, the Obama administration was actually in some regards less forthcoming than the Bush administration.

Sure, I’ll admit that our claims are difficult to adjudicate and our differing views are largely attributable to differing personal impressions.

OK.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-presidency-and-the-press-74832/

Woah, hold the phone. A former assistant press secretary for Obama says that the Obama administration was treated unfairly by the media? That’s truly shocking.

you didn't build that

I think the media's treatment of Obama was exactly one luxury tax better than its treatment of Clinton, one act of revenge for killing bankers worse than their treatment of George W. Bush in his first term, and one Iraq War better than their treatment of George W. Bush in his second.

But if you think it's just the media being the media, going to absolute **** because of business interests... that suits me fine, too.

To the extent that there was conflict between Obama and the media, I don’t think “business interests” played the decisive role in the media’s hostility.

I well, uh, am personally familiar with media, and I don’t see reporters and editors as automatons who slavishly take marching orders/follow the dictates of their corporate overlords. If there was hostility between Obama and the media, it wasn’t because the media led some kind of organized campaign to spin a narrative to serve the interests of big business. It was because reporters and the Obama press team had goals that were broadly conflicting but occasionally overlap. The Obama admin was trying to make itself look as good as possible by making public info that made it look good and suppressing info that made it look bad. The press was trying to extract any information it could that was in the public’s interest to know and that would sell papers. The whole thing is very transactional, sometimes very hostile, and ultimately rests on personal relationships; I think you can imagine how it would be personally frustrating to be a reporter, and to work with people who withhold from you what you need to do your job well, and to work as an Obama spokesperson, and to deal with people who are trying to extract information that’ll make your boss look bad. That, to me, seems like the “conflict” Cherlin writes about in his articles, and I have to say, despite his claims to the contrary, it seems more typical than atypical of media treatment of the president. (And it’s probably more desirable than the alternative. A press secretary may wax nostalgic about “comity” between the media and the administration, but what he really wants is for the media to fall in line and be more credulous.)