Bruh...the fuck you talking about? Seriously, what is this even based on? McCabe worked for 20 years in the FBI and up until 2016 was an apolitical nobody. Amazing how in this climate everyone is suddenly assumed dirty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_McCabe Maybe this was just a busy week in the shitshow on Pennsylvania Ave, but it feels like things are heating up. I'm sick of our politics feeling like a venomous episode of reality tv, and I can't imagine things looking better for Trump as the year goes on. Which begs the question: who still supports him? Based on what? What hope for an agenda could you possibly have now?
The people that support him are those with a lot of money in the stock market and people that hate liberals. I have a feeling if he would keep doing the same things and shut the fuck up once in a while that group would be larger.
Now Trumps attorney is publicly asking them to end the Mueller probe. Because yup, nothing to see here!!
Lawfare blog does a very fair breakdown of McCabe's firing, and points out that the process by which he was fired is detrimental to the country regardless of the merits of the firing itself.
It's very clear where conservatives stand on the FBI. But what about this: Well, let's be reasonable here. You don't rise to be Deputy Director of the FBI by being "just the facts ma'am" Joe Friday. In this day and age, you don't really believe that do you? You do recall that McCabe's wife was running for office as a Democrat in Virginia in 2016 and took a $500k contribution from one of Clinton's most well-known surrogates, right? I don't think Sessions is done with Justice by a long shot. Has a special counsel been appointed to review the FBI and the weaponization of the FISA court system yet? If not, it's coming. Just like the past administration's weaponization of the Treasury for political reasons, it appears that it has occurred at Justice now too, though we won't know until it is investigated.
That's your takeaway from the situation? For someone who appears to deep dive into the details of political minutiae relative to investigating conservatives, it seems odd that this is your takeaway.
I don't even understand what the alleged wrong doing is. His wife lawfully ran for office and her campaign, amongst many others, received a legal campaign contribution from a PAC run by the governor of the state she was running in, who happened to be a Clinton ally.
I can't see the logic behind: 20 year government employee gets promoted to director, therefore must be guilty of something and doesn't deserve pension. Sure, someone in his office thinks he's a prick. But precisely what did he do to warrant being fired literally hours from retirement, fucking him over? And for 20 fucking years, again....politically non-entity. So, aside from the collective tv fantasies about how the FBI works, I'm not seeing anything that makes him so guilty he deserved to be fucked over by our government. To put it another way, if he was a veteran retiring from the military, there would be more outrage. But because the FBI is politicized (Perhaps because a certain political figure is flouting the fucking law), they can be abused. Enough with the "whataboutism". What does that actually contribute, other than to pointlessly muddy the waters?
He wasn’t even in charge of the Clinton email investigation at the time his wife was running for office. That investigation doesn’t even report to him until 2/1/16 when he was promoted to deputy director. Her election was in November of 2015.
So... McCabe has memos, and has already sat down with Meuller. I think this is a pretty big deal, and that the memos are real. How do I know that? Spoiler Spent very little time with Andrew McCabe, but he never took notes when he was with me. I don’t believe he made memos except to help his own agenda, probably at a later date. Same with lying James Comey. Can we call them Fake Memos? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2018 The dude is nothing if not pathologically predictable.
This firing *feels* different, right? I'm not a political scientist or a legal expert, but this just *feels* like it's a smoking gun, a clear violation of..... something? Just like how, even though a lot of us here aren't engineers, that bridge that collapsed just *looked* too long and thin to be unsupported.
I think this is actually the biggest point of them all. I don't think muddying the waters is going to be the correct analogy by the time this whole thing is done. I think we are tumbling down the rabbit hole. Specific to the McCabe situation: either McCabe lied or Comey lied in direct testimony and during statements made: http://thehill.com/opinion/judiciar...-life-tough-for-comey-and-the-special-counsel Why the OPR came out and recommended the firing is beyond me at this point but I would say that at some point it will become clear. Right now we are getting drips of information that are just data points but we can't see the whole picture yet because the information is not being presented in any discernable order. I look back at the memo Susan Rice wrote to herself on election night about meetings with Obama relative to interference in the election, the FISA warrant abuse, Steele Dossier, the firings and cannot place them all together in a bigger context yet but now I'm really curious where this is all going. Additionally, now we are learning that social media has been weaponized by all sides to impact public opinion and try to sway the election in one direction or another and the water doesn't seem muddy, it is starting to seem as though up is down and down is up. If now isn't the time to take a long sober look at campaign financing and clean election laws then I really don't know how much lower we could possibly go?
Really interesting piece about this in The Guardian related to Cambridge Analytica: https://www.theguardian.com/news/20...er-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump I'm having trouble reaching any conclusion other than "our understanding of human psychology, aided by big data processing, has eclipsed our ability to guard against propaganda." If that's true, then democracy no longer works, which is a bit of a terrifying concept. The industry is obsessed with "personalization features," which is fine to the degree that it involves customizing a video game experience, but participating in and advancing a society is something altogether different. It requires communal and universal experiences, which an overly personalized social media experience undermines. I think Facebook, largely without realizing it, built a massive weapon of modern information warfare, and is doing a really poor job of coming to grips with what they built.
This is a good example of what Elon Musk was talking about when he said that AI is what scares him the most. Not that Facebook = AI, of course, but we certainly have reached a point as a society where some of the technology we have built and use has capabilities beyond what we are currently able to protect against.
Or legislate. The law books will need to be rewritten, or we are doomed to a million different on- the-spot statutes varying by state, county, parish, whatever. Long live the republic.
Add in this: https://ijr.com/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-fb/ I think we are going to need to remind ourselves exactly what positive value is coming out of social media. Is there one? I know my feed was full of people who claim to be "friends" arguing with each other and calling each other names all the time; that was until I pulled the plug.
I reconnected with probably the hottest girl I met in college thanks to Facebook, so... yeah, that's an even trade for American Democracy in my opinion.
I mean who doesn’t have a spank bank filled with spring break shots of girls they hooked up with in college thanks to Facebook? Worth it.
The Facebook story also shines the light on our seedy media as well. It's pretty clear that this is standard operating procedure for political campaigns at this point. Though the media couches the issue as Democracy-breaking now and requires immediate action because Trump won but when Obama used the same tactics it didn't move the needle. Bias, bias everywhere. There is just so much wrong with our society now, I don't even know where the right place to start is to fix it.