Who is going to be most embarrassed by the resurgence of the “birther” story, the canard that President Obama isn’t a U. S. citizen by birth?
- Donald Trump
- Barack Obama
- Hillary Clinton
- The news media
- Other
Who is going to be most embarrassed by the resurgence of the “birther” story, the canard that President Obama isn’t a U. S. citizen by birth?
Donald Trump seems incapable of feeling embarrassment, even if he should be embarrassed.
Since Hillary dispatched the Deplorable Sid Blumenthal to lead a political goon squad to smear Obama in 2008, she can’t use the Birther issue against Trump without some serious political blowback. Larry Johnson was one of those chumped by Blumenthal and he’s spilling.
http://www.noquarterusa.net/blog/79319/confessions-hillary-insider/
It’ll be a big cancel-out.
This goes back to my earlier post on guilt by association. If you rely on guilt by association, as some apparently do, you’re committed to blaming Hillary Clinton for the “birther” story being kept up in the air. Not solely her but you’ve got to blame her. And that’s the kindest interpretation.
Media, but perhaps for different reasons than what appears to be the common one. The common complaint, ala Matt Lauer, is that the media is failing to use the opportunity to expose Trump as the immoral liar his is. Watching this unfold it struck me that if this was the Republican Primary everybody would understand that this 24-36 hours on birtherism was sucking all of the oxygen out of the room.
Clinton had announced following her recovery that she was going to focus on giving people reasons to vote for her. I think that makes a lot of sense, but positives are difficult to put front and center.
Dave:
You’re pretending that it’s either/or, black/white and nothing in between. Association, like all data, has to be judged. Did Hillary get behind the accusation? No. Since we know that fact, we have superior data that should replace the initial suspicion. If one genuinely rejects a subordinate or associate’s actions, and in the absence of evidence of hypocrisy, one can no longer be held accountable for them.
By contrast, Trump lied and pretended not to know who David Duke was, and then had to be pushed over the course of days into reluctantly condemning him in the weakest possible terms, which was immediately accepted by the white supremacists as a necessary ruse.
Meanwhile, no one in the Democratic Party doubts Obama’s birth, no one is exploiting it, no one is profiting from it. It has been completely and thoroughly rejected by HRC and by the party.
But the entirety of the white supremacist movement is described as “ecstatic” at the rise of Trump. And he continues his unsubtle dog-whistles to them. He has not once shown the basic humanity of John McCain, who publicly rejected the support of bigots.
In summary: we quite clearly reject birtherism, while Trump clearly panders to white supremacists. Equating the two and pretending that you’ve supported your odd case for ignoring all the inconvenient elephants in the room, is intellectually dishonest.
Hmm. On one hand we have dozens of quotes directly from Trump about the birther stuff. On the other hand, we have innuendo (not the Italian proctoscope mind you) and vague claims that someone in the Clinton campaign supported the birther effort. In a normal world, we know how that should play out. However, to specifically answer your question, sam has it correct.
OTOH, I am officially switching over to Trump. He is pushing to have all pass through income taxed at 15%. I am going to be paying taxes at a lower rate than everyone else. Hah!__—————————————————————————————————————————————————— OK, just kidding. Still not enough to make me do that.
Steve
@steve: “Still not enough . . .” So we’ve established you have a price, now we’re just haggling on the details. 😉
Nobody’s paying attention yet, some other issue will take it’s place. But Obama himself gave birth to to the birther movement when He used the gambit to gain entrance to Harvard. Doesn’t matter though, He could shit on the Capital steps and my wife would still rave about how elegantly he did it.
Completely OT- The Health Care Cybersecurity Task Force is looking for input from the public. It strikes me as one of those problems that creates so many cross problems that it is not really solvable. Sure, it would help a lot if hospitals got rid of software known to have issues (pretty much anything by Microsoft and Adobe to start), but it seems to me as though efforts to make data more secure will inevitably lead to it being more inaccessible. Finding some way to make the data less valuable or making it easier to catch the bad guys seems like a better long term solution. Thoughts?
http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2016/09/17/closer-to-a-crisis/
steve,
I recently had wrist surgery and my orthopedic surgeon said his computers systems had been hacked or subject to ransomeware several times in the past couple of months. They were always able to restore to backups but it took a lot of digging and a lot of money to find out that their system had an old, forgotten administrator account that was the source of their problems.
I think the main problem though, is people. A lot of people don’t practice basic, much less good, cybersecurity. Emailing malicious files to people still works. I’m not sure how to solve that problem.
Andy- Old software is an issue. You still see documents come across in Word and we know it has major problems. We could make it more difficult if we just used better software but I think you are right. There are so many people with so such varied abilities that it will be very difficult to make these systems secure. Then we will face the same issue that DoD did when they tried to make things more secure, meaning that it gets slower and less usable. The EMR creates daily headaches for me, especially now that I am the operational chair for the network. It takes hours of my time every week. On the upside, we have more and better access to a lot of data, and we are now starting to generate our own internal reports to find out how compliant we are with our own protocols, which used to be very difficult and time consuming to ferret out. Now I give it to my young guys and it is all laid out on my dashboard in a day or two, and they always find extra things we can improve upon at the same time. Quite a conundrum.
I think this may push the industry towards more consolidation. If you can’t afford a security team, you will probably be too vulnerable. OTOH, bigger targets amy mean bigger payouts. Sigh.
Steve