Jorge Stolfi
My recent poll " Who bears the largest slice of responsibility for the Donald Trump catastrophe" gave 47% "GOP as a whole", 44% "FOX News", 6% "Merrick Garland", and 3% "Hillary Clinton" (of 64 respondents).
My own choice would be "Hillary Clinton". Right-wing entities like the GOP and FOX News were of course the direct agents, but they were doing what they were supposed to do. They were the adversary team. The question is, why did THAT team win? 🧵>
Jorge Stolfi
🧵> IMHO, Hillary is guilty of letting Trump win in 2016, by imposing herself as the Dem candidate -- largely by internal Dem party politicking, rather than by her charisma, ideology, or merits. She comes out as a member "right faction" inside the Dem party, as compromised by big money as any GOP candidate.
That was already case already in 2008, when she ran against Obama for the Dem nomination. 🧵>
Jorge Stolfi
🧵> Obama made a big mistake when he nominated her as Secretary of State. Naively, one may think that it is gentlemanly and democratic for the winner X of an election to invite the second most voted competitor Y to join his team. In fact that is a big mistake (as I learned myself, years ago). Because, for Y, supporting X is only second priority, at best; the first priority is to build up support for him/herself in the next election, possibly stealing support from X. 🧵>
Jorge Stolfi
🧵> Maybe Hillary had some positive achievements in her tenure as Secretary of State; I don't know. Maybe she did not deserve blame for the Benghazi affair. But she is responsible for a HUGE fail: the leaking of the "diplomatic cables" -- all the messages from embassies around the world, going back to the 1970s. 🧵>
Xenotar
@JorgeStolfi Agree
Jorge Stolfi
🧵> As Secretary of State, she -- not the CIA, not the President -- was the custodian of those "cables". So it was by her decision that, in the panic after 9/11, those files were made available to all "intelligence analysts", presumably to help them identify members of Al-Qaida etc. But those "analysts" included people like Bradley/Chelsea Manning, then a troubled kid working at an insecure location in Iraq. 🧵>
Jorge Stolfi
🧵> Assange is not a very likable character, but he did nothing wrong in that case. As a foreign national living abroad, he had absolutely no obligation to preserve US secrets. If anything, he had an obligation to send them to the Australian government. Yet the US waged a ferocious war against him, intending to bury him alive in solitary for the rest of his life; and arranged for trumped-up charges of rape to get that. Which caused him to spend 14 years essentially in prison. 🧵>
Jorge Stolfi
🧵> I am convinced that the war against Assange was largely pushed by Hillary, in order to divert the blame of the leak away from her. It would fit with my impression of her character... 🧵>
Jorge Stolfi
🧵> Anyway, her nomination by the Dem in 2020 was again mostly due to internal politicking. While she did get more votes than Trump, it was not enough to defeat him. Surely there were many other possible candidates who could have won...
Fuck Elon :mastodon:
Honestly, you should examine your own biases. The American public did not give a shit about cables. Nobody cared about Assange at all.
Whose fault is it for Trump? The systematic destruction of education and teaching of critical thinking in this country, the greed and the racism of many, the utter immoral stance of most religious institutions, and the proven methods that work throughout history to blame agroup of people for the majority's "distress".
It is on us.
Jorge Stolfi
I did not mean that Assange and the cables directly helped Trump. I mentioned them only to show Hilary's incompetence
as Secretary of State.
The American people may not have cared about the leaking of the cables, but they were disastrous for US diplomacy and US friends in other countries.🧵>
Jorge Stolfi
🧵> For instance, we learned that a right-wing candidate for Brazilian president had told the US Ambassador not to fret about the terms of Dilma's oilfield concessions since, once elected, he would change them way Chevron wanted. (He narrowly lost the election to Dilma. Not necessarily for that reason, but it can only have helped.) Since that leak, people like him must think twice before talking to US Ambassadors.
Fuck Elon :mastodon:
Her incompetence? Clinton was not responsible for these documents being in that database. The sharing of documents more widely were a response to 9/11 attacks and started before Obama.
Clinton was also not responsible for Chelsea Manning having access to that database. She was an intelligence analyst, that is what they do.
These documents could have been leaked at any time since the databases existed. the fact a rogue agent decided to leak them then is not Clinton's fault.
Jorge Stolfi
US Embassies report directly to the Secretary of State, not to the CIA or whatever. So it was ultimately her decision to add them to that "9/11 Panic Database", with no filters or redactions.
By the way, one of the damning revelations in the cables were orders *from Hillary* that Ambassadors should seek to acquire private data from foreign leaders, including mobile apps and passwords and biometric data. That alone caused irate responses from many foreign governments.
Jorge Stolfi
While spies of any country may secretly use Embassies as base of operations, the Ambassadors themselves and other diplomatic personnel are explicitly prohibited from spying. They are supposed to negotiate etc in name of their government, and report back to it only what they get told. Ambassadors who are caught spying are normally expelled.
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