[Verasev]

Who do you think will win? The bar for Trump is so low all he has to do is show up and hold it in for one night but can he?

[Exophase]

I'll watch it. Should be a real shit show. Might bring popcorn.

I have no idea how a winner can be decided in a presidential debate given this political candidate, so it's kind of hard to answer that question. Surely most will say their preferred candidate won unless they really screw up. That said, even the largely left leaning media may say Trump exceeded expectations, which could end up working in his favor.

I don't like either of them but I'd be really surprised if Trump didn't come off (to me) as his usual rambling mess, making vague and unintelligible claims while steering everything back to how great he is or how badly treated he is. Hillary is extremely prepared for this, having been through about a million debates already and she's going to bring a ton of actual policy points with her. She generally came off as giving sharper and more on-point than Bernie Sanders, and I can admit this even though I vastly preferred him. I can't see Trump faring nearly as well as Sanders. On the other hand, there's a few things Hillary can do that could backfire badly on her:

1) Throw direct insults at Trump. Trading insults is the one area where he has a quicker wit than she does. Eg, her "delete your account" tweet.
2) Say pretty much anything about Trump's supporters (eg, ~40% of the voting population), either the half that she thinks are disgusting people beyond redemption or the half she thinks are helpless idiots whom she can save.
3) Have anything that looks like an episode of poor health. God help her if she has any kind of spasms or long pauses.

[Dr Lancer-X]

If it's being streamed online somewhere and it's at a reasonable time, why not. Chances are I won't be able to and I'll probably just watch highlights after, though.

I don't know what 'winning' a debate means, although I expect the polls will reflect whatever the outcome is- but different people can watch a debate and have a different idea of who won it, and it seems strongly divided along partisan lines.

I'm pretty certain nothing of substance will be discussed during the debate, although I'd be pleasantly surprised if I was proven wrong.

Hillary does appear to be very sick, and that September 11 collapse looked very, very bad. However the pressure of a debate, in an air-conditioned studio, sitting down is very different than that of attending a memorial ceremony - so it wouldn't surprise me if she pulled it off with the help of enough drugs. In fact, if she has no kind of health episode whatsoever it would be very good for her campaign and lend credence to the fact that she's overall pretty healthy and just had some unfortunate recent episodes. On the other hand, a coughing fit could be fatal here.

Trump's usual debate strategy worked really well against his Republican primary opponents, but I wonder if it might come off badly here. If Hillary manages to stay on point and Trump just hurls zingers the whole time it's going to be a win for Hillary - she will look presidential and he'll look like a bully. If she goes off topic, Trump wins.

I think after the 'alt right' speech Hillary's campaign will have learned their lesson and will steer away from any mention of cartoon frogs. It would be hilarious if Trump brought it up though.

[Verasev]

Personally, i would love to see her skewer him on his statements in support of LGBT people versus his choice of running mate and some of the religious freedom policies he has promised to support.

I wish Sanders had pushed the party further his direction. I never felt that he himself would make a good president, just that his ideas were sound. I think we need a female president for a variety of reasons and it's too bad it had to be Clinton.

I get the feeling that, strategically, Hillary Clinton will want to talk substance given her level of experience over his. It'll tempt him to talk in circuitous generalities they way he has always tended to.

[djtiesto]

I'll be watching, of course. The debate is happening not too far from where I live, actually. But there's no way in hell I'd be able to get tickets!

[Dr Lancer-X]

Verasev, on 26 September 2016 - 09:53 AM, said:

Personally, i would love to see her skewer him on his statements in support of LGBT people versus his choice of running mate and some of the religious freedom policies he has promised to support.

I suspect highly interactive strategies like that are exactly the wrong tool to use against Trump - he is very sharp and will deflect and strike back so fast Clinton won't know what hit her. I don't want to call it 'descending to his level', because these are highly legitimate debate tactics - but this is certainly an area where Trump would have a great advantage. Clinton is certainly not immune to accusations of "well, if your policy is X, how can you explain Y" either.

I believe Clinton would be best off making use of her knowledge and experience, and as the moderators are not likely to be trying to score 'gotchas' on her I think deftly answering the debate questions is the way to go, as this will highlight Trump's inexperience. Trump can then take all the shots at her he likes, but, like I said, it will make her look collected and in control while making Trump look like he has no grasp of the issues and his only debating tools are jabs and snappy comebacks.

[Exophase]

Verasev, on 25 September 2016 - 07:53 PM, said:

I think we need a female president for a variety of reasons and it's too bad it had to be Clinton.

I honestly don't understand what this is going to accomplish or change. I don't think there's any special insight that a female or male brings to the office that is that relevant to the job and if this is what it takes to get a president to actually care about a demographic that's a really bad sign.

It might get some idiots who thought a woman is unfit for this job or other leadership positions to change their mind.. but I doubt it. Most of those people are probably the type who would also think that the stack was decked in her favor exactly to prove that point, or to try to counteract their perceived issues of inequality.

I kind of expect that we'll see a lot less enthusiasm the next time a woman is one of the major candidates, especially if Hillary gets a lot of controversy attached to her presidency. And she probably will, whether it's earned or not. Which is really unfortunate.

[Dr Lancer-X]

As some people have pointed out, Hillary Clinton winning the primary and running for the Presidency has already taken care of that particular glass ceiling. Nobody is questioning whether she can become President or not- the only question is whether she does become President or not. Like Exo said, the next time a woman runs for President it will simply be routine.

I personally like Jill Stein more and more each time I see her...

[Verasev]

The controversies Hillary Clinton bring to the office may cause trouble for a future female candidate but I think a woman has to be seen doing the actual job before it can viscerally sink in that one can. Really wish it had been someone besides Clinton but people don't vote for third parties or nature loving hippies in 'murica.

Anyway, it's at 9 pm eastern tonight.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Verasev, on 27 September 2016 - 09:21 AM, said:

The controversies Hillary Clinton bring to the office may cause trouble for a future female candidate

People said things along those lines with respect to Obama - I don't remember exactly what, but Bill Maher said something about how if Obama did a crappy job America might feel like "Oh well, guess that experiment didn't work out" - and I'm not sure that, whether you liked Obama or not (I think a lot of people were a little bit disappointed, but still feel that he managed to accomplish a pretty decent chunk of his agenda) I don't think anyone's thinking of his performance, even sub-consciously, when evaluating other black presidential candidates (I think just Ben Carson this time?) - while Ben Carson obviously didn't win I don't think Republicans, who obviously don't like Obama very much, were holding Obama's performance against him. So I'm not very worried. Even if Hillary gets in and then proceeds to be the horrible Wall Street-pandering TPP-supporting corrupt President people fear she is I don't think this will make it harder for a woman to become President - although it may make it very hard for a Clinton to become President.

[Terryn]

*ENDLESS GORE SIGH*

I... don't really know where to begin about this. Not anymore.

Most of you are old enough to remember the 2000 presidential season. I'm getting a distressing sense of deja vu, myself. At least these days, the ability for a lot more people to instantaneously call out media's Both Sides Do It, Only "Optics" Matter In Politics, and Grading On A Curve tendencies will help (the almost-universal reaction towards Matt Lauer's run at questioning helped demonstrate that, among other things). The head of the debate commission made it clear that anything even remotely considered fact-checking is verboten, so I have pretty low expectations for tonight.

I don't really know what Clinton should do in this debate. All I can say is that the Right Way will be pretty freaking difficult. Standards are such lose-lose scenarios as "Don't call out lies or talk too much about your actual positions, lest you come off as a know-it-all." or "Smile more so people don't see you as cold, but not in a fake way.", in part because she's had constant garbage thrown at her for a quarter of a century, in part because she's a powerful woman, in part because of associations with her husband and his very mixed legacy, in part because she prefers some secrecy (though this doesn't imply lack of transparency, per se) and distrusts the media (with good reason, I think). Trump's standards, on the other hand? Well, they're.............. not quite as stringent. The number of reporters who were looking into the shadows raising clouds over certain connections that are whispering doubts about the Clinton Foundation were numerous. The number of reporters that are doing work on the Trump Foundation's actual issues are... pretty much David Fahrenthold. What does get covered is basically the stuff Trump is saying instead of what he's done, because Optics, and though any number of things he's said would disqualify Mr. Generic Republican, the endless stream of all of them is making it hard for others to care unless it's egregious even for him.

Does Clinton have her issues? Hooo-boy, certainly. But FFS. (And no, none have been shown to be a legal issue.) For those of you who think Clinton's going to make a hard right turn the instant she gets into office, presidents try to keep many of their base-friendly promises after elected (don't look at me like that, I'm not slatepitching here) and Sanders's movement helped push Clinton to have the most liberal (or "progressive", if you prefer) platform in decades. It'll be at least somewhat difficult to fully 180 on it, even with a likely recalcitrant and no-quarter Congress. Do I expect her to stick to everything? pfft, no, especially not TPP, but it's there and people will remember in 2018 if she digresses.

As for Jill Stein, I like her less and less and less as time passes, for such fun things as:
-Courting anti-vaxxers (I doubt she holds this viewpoint herself. but that doesn't make much of a difference)
-Saying wi-fi signals are harmful for children
-Saying that Trump would be preferred over Clinton because Republicans wouldn't pass most of what Trump wants, so she'd be able to do more and that's terrible (I...you....were....this...ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff)

yeaaaaaaah, not too pleased with her or anyone planning on voting for her in a swing state, sry. In an election system that could effectively deal with third-party candidates, I wouldn't mind, but that's not the system we have.

EDIT: Oh yeah, should actually mention this in this topic, but I'm probably not watching the debate. I don't have the stomach for it and doubt I ever will for any of them.

[Dr Lancer-X]

It's on:



EDIT: Hillary Clinton is on point tonight. I'm pretty impressed.

EDIT 2: Donald Trump told me to check out his website but it's down. Oops.

EDIT 3: Hillary needs to get that creepy smiling under control, but it's the only complaint I have about her debate performance right now. Not that Donald is doing too badly here himself - but Hillary's the one that needs this debate to go well.

[Verasev]

Well! That was energizing! Haha, I can't believe Trump said he did a service to the country in getting Barack to release his birth certificate. Hillary's response was priceless. That's all I have for now.

[Exophase]

Terryn, on 26 September 2016 - 09:00 PM, said:

yeaaaaaaah, not too pleased with her or anyone planning on voting for her in a swing state, sry. In an election system that could effectively deal with third-party candidates, I wouldn't mind, but that's not the system we have.

Guess I'll just have to vote for Trump then.

No but seriously. I understand your arguments, agree with some of it.. I could give a long winded rebuttal to the parts I don't but I get the feeling that I'm better off saving it for another year.

Given that, I just want to state this one thing in response to "you can't pretend the system allows for third party candidates just because you want it to" position. Voting third party is the only way I can foresee that system ever changing. If the two party duopoly is so threatened by spoilers then they have it within their power to change the system. Otherwise they won't, because it undermines the level of control they have. So long as they find fearmongering, brow beating or flat out intimidation an effective enough way to prevent people from voting for the disapproved parties they won't ever have to change anything. And I guess for a lot of people this is okay, or at least never going to be a bigger issue than whatever is currently at stake. Maybe things are cyclical and will go back to not being as much of a politically polarized and gridlocked race to the bottom as it is now. Or maybe it'll get worse. Hard to say. But the longer I look at it the more obvious problems I see, and in a lot of cases these are things the majority is even against like the electoral college and lack of congressional term limits. But nothing ever changes and there's no sign anything will ever change, and even the idea of amended the constitution is deemed deeply unpatriotic.

Verasev, on 26 September 2016 - 11:02 PM, said:

Well! That was energizing! Haha, I can't believe Trump said he did a service to the country in getting Barack to release his birth certificate. Hillary's response was priceless. That's all I have for now.

I'm not sure I've ever seen someone as incapable of saying "I was wrong." And I've been on the internet a long time. I did kind of wince at Hillary's portrayal of Obama being so hurt and offended though. He took as long as he did to release the birth certificate exactly so he could let Republicans run their mouths and look worse in the end. You just know he was laughing at them. If Donald did anyone a service it was Obama himself.


Some other fun Trump highlights:

- Brought out that ridiculous assertion of being incapable of releasing transcripts because of the audit, then leaned back on it like it's nothing after it's made obvious to everyone that that's silly
- Despite this clearly being the reason he's hiding the returns he flat out admitted he doesn't pay taxes, saying it's called being smart
- Dismissed claims of racial discrimination by saying he settled without admitting guilt, I guess he settled out of the goodness of his heart and there's no way anyone would ever accept a big cash payout without an "I'm sorry" attached (plus Trump is physically incapable of admitting guilt anyway)

I was kind of hoping he'd bring out the Goldman Sachs transcripts retort. That would have looked really silly coming from him, but it's also true that a lot of what Hillary said about Trump having something to hide applies there too. Too bad no one cares anymore.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Had to stop for a meeting, but it didn't look like I missed out on much. I would call that debate a success for Hillary - overall the debate wasn't going to change anyone's opinions of Trump, so he didn't have much to win or lose here. Hillary had a lot to lose, but she held her own very well and generally played to her strengths. I think her polling will recover a bit in the following weeks unless something else happens.

[Exophase]

Dr Lancer-X, on 27 September 2016 - 12:08 AM, said:

Had to stop for a meeting, but it didn't look like I missed out on much. I would call that debate a success for Hillary - overall the debate wasn't going to change anyone's opinions of Trump, so he didn't have much to win or lose here. Hillary had a lot to lose, but she held her own very well and generally played to her strengths. I think her polling will recover a bit in the following weeks unless something else happens.

Yeah I think this will be a net gain for her. Trump may have swayed some with his passion and picked on a few soundbites that'll reverberate (I'm assuming "you have experience: bad experience" isn't new but I actually hadn't heard it before!) but ultimately he didn't say much of substance while she launched all sorts of things at him that'll be hard for him to refute. And make him look bad not just among the minorities who weren't going to vote for him and the women who mostly weren't going to vote for him, but the poorer working class white males he's appealed to. She painted him as a billionaire who got rich at everyone else's expense and his response was pretty much "yeah, and?" And the man has zero respect for the debate format. I've never seen a political debater so ardently speak over and interrupt their opponent and even the moderator. He seemed determined to prevent her from speaking altogether but it just kept resetting her time allotment so fat lot of good that did. I wonder if that also docked speaking time from him.

That part where Hillary said that he took from the country by not paying taxes and he actually quipped back saying that they wouldn't have spent it well anyway. I couldn't believe he'd actually say that. His ego is so gigantic that he can't keep quiet on things that he knows will hurt him when they're things he's actually proud of.

... but with all of the Trump nonsense, I wish I could say that Hillary said or did anything to actually make me like her more or feel better about her presidency. Because she really didn't.

[Verasev]

Here's a transcript, complete with fact checking:

http://www.npr.org/2...idential-debate

[Exophase]

Verasev, on 27 September 2016 - 09:24 AM, said:

Here's a transcript, complete with fact checking:

http://www.npr.org/2...idential-debate

Thanks.

This seems a little biased (cherry picking sources or focusing on negatives, conflating claims of change with claims of absolute positions, using Bill Clinton's large job numbers during the dot-com boom to justify a claim that was specifically about manufacturing, nit-picking language of things like "just came in" not literally meaning today, etc) but still paints a really, really bad picture for Trump. He clearly has no idea what he's talking about about the stuff he alleges is his expertise. Scary. And this debate didn't really cover his more contentious issues.

[asgromo]

nice takes, good work everyone, hit the showers

[Dr Lancer-X]

Kinda sad really, what's the point of fact checking if even the fact checkers have an ax to grind? I mean, most of this stuff is easily verifiable with a Google search but I shouldn't have to do that.

Even the way they just work some of the fact checking is really suspicious, like:

"Well, it's also fair to say, if we’re going to talk about mayors that under the current mayor crime has continued to drop, including murders. So there is-"

"You're wrong."

"No, I'm not."

"Murders murders are up."

.. followed by a helpful fact checking bubble "Homicides in New York remain low relative to the 1980s and 1990s, according to FBI data and the Brennan Center for Justice."

That's very nice and helpful, but it's not what was asked. Nobody was asking about the 80s and 90s. Hillary Clinton was explicitly referring to the "current mayor", Bill di Blasio, who got into the office in 2014.

So are murders up? I did a quick Google to see that Trump supporters are showing a screencap of the FBI report showing that, on a two-year basis, crime has increased by 7.9%.

The numbers look like:

2013 - 332
2014 - 328
2015 - 352

with all the numbers before 2013 being way higher than those numbers. So Trump is technically right - Murders are up under Bill di Blasio if you compare 2015 to 2014 and 2013. On the other hand NYC had its lowest murder rate since 1928 in 2014, and 2015 isn't exactly a large spike especially came with what happened before, so it's not like there's any kind of Bill di Blasio murder spike, which is clearly what Trump was inferring here - those numbers are still really good. While they haven't really 'continued to drop' they've remained historically low.

This could be room for an interesting discussion but NPR chose to weasel out of it with that phony 1980s/1990s comparison.

EDIT: There's a bunch of other things like this - where NPR 'fact checks' by spitting out an irrelevant piece of information, and often takes uncharitable interpretations of Trump statements and charitable interpretations of Clinton statements. It's not like it's very hard to do this impartially, so it's kind of weird that they've chosen this approach. Anyone here could probably do it - pull up Google and go wild.

[Exophase]

Dr Lancer-X, on 27 September 2016 - 04:54 PM, said:

This could be room for an interesting discussion but NPR chose to weasel out of it with that phony 1980s/1990s comparison.

Trump was technically right, but I think the fact checking should generally go beyond just petty gotchas and reveals of who is technically wrong or not. A trump that NPR did fall into.

You can back up a statement that murders are up by looking at year to year changes but that's not very instructive. The data is just too noisy, which also makes a comparison with some arbitrarily chosen year pretty bad. We really need to look at filtered trend lines.

The bit that got me the most was this rant about birtherism:

Quote

There is no truth to the charge that the Clinton campaign or Hillary Clinton started the birther movement, as we’ve written. Donald Trump, however, for several years was the chief spokesman for it and the principal person pushing the falsehood. And Trump still has not apologized to the president of the United States for an effort that many African-Americans saw as an effort to delegitimize the first black president. Undoubtedly, Clinton and Obama fought a bitter 2008 primary campaign. Fringe supporters and advisers did go after Obama’s “otherness.” One of Clinton’s informal advisers, Sidney Blumenthal, told a McClatchy bureau chief based in Africa to look into Obama’s birthplace, according to that McClatchy bureau chief. But Clinton certainly did not take the show on the road. The false equivalence Trump is trying to draw isn’t even remotely close to the same thing as what Trump did. For the record, once again, Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, something proved over and over again. Here’s his birth certificate, the legitimacy of which Trump called into question explicitly as late as 2014.

That's well and good, but in no terms whatsoever was Trump making a charge that Hillary Clinton or her campaign started the birther movement. He made allegations that they came from a very specific source that's close to Clinton. The only correction has to do with whether or not Blumenthal actually worked for the campaign. It's also pretty disingenuous to then call him a fringe supporter. And using this as a springboard to attack Trump and a false equivalence he never even made is completely inappropriate for this article. Finally he feels the need to reaffirm Obama's birth status as an American, something Trump doesn't come remotely close to challenging in the debate (and pretty much implicitly reaffirms it himself)

[Exophase]

This is all making me reflect more than I thought it would.

As much as I resent the systems that all but guarantee people like Hillary a place in the election, I'm really starting to feel like she would be ridiculously snubbed by a Trump win. I mean, in a way that goes far beyond being appropriately poetic. He is really not the sort of person who should have been nominated to this level. If the electoral system was vastly overhauled it could do a lot more to prevent people like Trump from becoming popular in the first place, and could do something to prevent the next Trump. But at best, this sort of reform would probably either take a long time or a really massive catastrophe.

One of the maybe more petty things I dread about a hypothetical Trump win is the rampant cries that Hillary lost due to sexism. It'll be viewed as a huge setback in equal rights and it'll cause all sorts of bad things to happen.

[Dr Lancer-X]

It was overshadowed by Hillary's ridiculous and idiotic "alt right" speech, but Obama gave a similar sort of speech on his own reflecting on the forces that made Trump popular - and he completely flubbed it, stuttering all over the place in a fashion that was swiftly transformed into a musical parody, but I definitely think he had a couple of good points in there.

America has turned the presidency into a reality TV contest and it's no real surprise that a reality TV star would be really good at that sort of thing. Trump is good at saying outrageous things and getting a lot of attention and it's not immediately clear how well this translates over to the set of skills required by a president, whatever they are. Something needs an overhaul. I'm just glad the presidency is a relatively impotent position.

If/when Trump does win I think I'll laugh uncontrollably for a minute or two, then try not to think about the implications.

[Verasev]

Don't forget about the supreme Court nominations (three of them) and the increasingly overreaching executive orders. It's not as impotent a position as you think it is.

[Verasev]

If Trump loses and they overhaul the presidential election system expect a massive temper tantrum from that segment of the population who will be convinced that any change is designed to disenfranchise them.

[Terryn]

I feel better about things today. That's all I'll say about that here, except that I'll give some kudos to Lester Holt for being a decent moderator.

The major faults in third party performance are systemic, yes. I'm a fan of IRV, myself, but the only structural changes that have happened so far are switches to things such as jungle primaries and trigger-based runoff elections, which have their own baked-in flaws. I wish third parties would think small as well as large and at least make greater attempts to build up a farm system, but a) even at that level, the structural impediments are massive; b) fuck, even Democrats can't manage to do that these days.

Dr Lancer-X, on 28 September 2016 - 12:00 AM, said:

It was overshadowed by Hillary's ridiculous and idiotic "alt right" speech

I'm curious of how you found it that way. I can think of at least three large reasons, but I'd still like to know.

[Exophase]

Verasev, on 28 September 2016 - 12:32 PM, said:

If Trump loses and they overhaul the presidential election system expect a massive temper tantrum from that segment of the population who will be convinced that any change is designed to disenfranchise them.

If Trump loses there won't be an awful lot of incentive to overhaul the electoral systems (which need overhauling far beyond just the presidential election, IMO)

The Republican primary system might change, but that's not really part of the presidential election system, except in so much as that its deficiencies drive it. I'm actually curious if Trump would have failed to secure > 50% of pledged delegates under DNC rules. I was hoping to find a calculation someone already made but nothing's turning up. It's kind of tricky because of the 15% threshold, which would have redistributed a fair number of the delegates won by Kasich, Rubio, and Carson.

There's also a good chance that under a DNC-like system superdelegates would have blocked Trump's win. But I doubt the RNC will add superdelegates now that they're becoming broadly shunned with the Democrats.

But if the electoral systems were changed effectively enough it would greatly reduce the presence of primaries, or even eliminate them altogether.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Terryn, on 29 September 2016 - 06:11 AM, said:

I'm curious of how you found it that way. I can think of at least three large reasons, but I'd still like to know.

Because it's a false and somewhat offensive characterisation of the new shape that US conservatism is taking and the forces that led to Trump's surge in popularity. As though there's something inherently racist / sexist / anti-Semitic about this new "anti-globalism" fad (although it is true that if you replace 'globalists' with 'Jews' the alt-right do start to sound like /pol/). The whole speech is basically a conflation of assorted undesirables with little attempt to make it clear where the boundaries lie, and it's idiotic tactically because it builds on the (not entirely unjustified) stereotype that the left call everyone they don't like racist / sexist / misogynist, then call people who associate or have any relation, past or present, to people they've previously called racist / sexist / misogynist the same.

It's a bad speech for the same reason as the 'basket of deplorables' remark, but less damaging because she didn't give a percentage. However, when connected to the 'basket of deplorables' remark you get a pretty precise figure of exactly how many people Hillary Clinton believes are part of this caricature she has of the alt-right.

Now, I'm not saying that connecting Trump to racists and anti-Semites isn't gold - it absolutely is gold, and one of the best paths to victory for Hillary Clinton - but this is not the way of doing it. I would cut out 90% of that speech and pretty much focus entirely on the "Jews are promoting gender mixing and the genocide of the White race!" camp. And I wouldn't follow it up by saying 50% of Trump's supporters fall under that umbrella. A lot of them are almost certainly anti-globalism, but being against trade deficits doesn't make you a racist.

The difference between a speech of the kind I described and the alt-right speech is that nearly everyone knows a crazy uncle that talks about this sort of thing and listens to Alex Jones and talks about China ripping the US off in trade - but they don't hate that guy, they don't think he's a racist who wants to finish Hitler's work. Hence this introduces a dissonance that then brings the rest of the speech into question. Not the kind of thing you want to do when you want to unite the undecideds against Trump and make sure your base shows up to the polls.

I don't believe it was an accident that the speech preceded Hillary's fall in the polls, although there were other factors at play too.

[Exophase]

I didn't listen to the alt-right speech, but the Pepe article on her campaign site was definitely a low point for me. And made it hard for me to take any of her characterizations seriously.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Exophase, on 29 September 2016 - 10:59 AM, said:

I didn't listen to the alt-right speech, but the Pepe article on her campaign site was definitely a low point for me. And made it hard for me to take any of her characterizations seriously.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing there. I mean, people have theorised for a while that Hillary's online team has a Trump mole somewhere in it making her look bad on Twitter etc. but even that doesn't explain how it managed to get through, I assume, multiple people and find its way up on the official campaign website and STAY there...