Democratic Presidential Candidate Poll [Spring/Summer 2013]

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I had to google fast and furious to find out what you were referring to - other than in reference to the movie, I'd never heard of it before. Is this something that qualifies as a "scandal with teeth", and did Hillary have anything to do with it?

As for the IRS scandal, again, how does this reflect on Hillary?

 

It doesn't. It's just part of a larger problem. We know that all the stuff you hear on Fox News has to be taken with a grain of salt, and they always go after Obama no matter what he does.

The difference here is that the claims are legitimate in the case of the IRS, and the AP records are definite problems for the administration. I still don't think there's going to be any dirty hands on Benghazi, but that just adds fuel to fire.

 

Fast and Furious was an operation conducted by Barack Obama and Eric Holder in which the federal government gave Mexican drug cartels thousands of weapons. They claimed they were going to track where the weapons went, but there was no oversight and no means of tracking the weapons. Eventually some of the weapons did turn up, having been used to kill an American law enforcement officer and hundreds of Mexican civilians.

The United States had conducted a similar operation in the past, Operation Wide Receiver, but Fast and Furious was very different from Wide Receiver.

For instance:
1. Wide Receiver was conducted with the permission and cooperation of the Mexican government. Fast and Furious wasn't.

2. Wide Receiver didn't involve in American deaths. Fast and Furious did.

3. In Wide Receiver we traced where the weapons went using RFID chips and monitored the weapons every step of the way. No such measures were taken in Fast and Furious, with only aerial tracking being involved, which was insufficient in tracking the weapons.

4. Wide Receiver involved a very small number of guns and virtually all of those weapons had been returned. Fast and Furious involved over 2000 weapons, of which only 700 have ever been recovered.

5. Fast and Furious was enacted AFTER the entire justice department ruled Wide Receiver to be a failure. Yet despite knowing that it was a failure, they went ahead with it again, this time taking even fewer safeguards than before.

6. Wide Receiver was a transparent operation, whereas Fast and Furious had been covered up. Barack Obama even used executive privilege to prevent documents regarding the operation from being brought forth in a congressional oversight hearing.

 

Regardless of how much you say is true (and I'm not saying it isn't - I just don't care enough to verify any of it), your response fails utterly to answer my questions, which were:
1. Is this is "scandal with teeth"? In other words, does anyone really care enough about it that the people responsible could be hurt by it?
2. What does it have to do with Hillary?

 

Elizabeth Warren. She's shown time and again that she understands the imbalance of power in America and the injustice it causes, imo. Hilary Clinton isn't all that impressive when it comes to her voting record. It's been a while since I checked, but IIRC though she votes for most bills providing aid to people that need it she seems to like to not vote on most issues that deal with important civil liberties concerns.

 

OK, here's' my two coppers worth on the scandals:

Benghazi - likely not a scandal at all. This one is the weakest of the three that Republicans should be going after. It's not like this is the first time one of our embassies has been hit before. Dating back to the Clinton administration, there have been 17 attacks on embassies that have involved a death of at least one US citizen. (I too have been unable to confirm the 54 or 64 number - perhaps that counts all attacks even if there were no casualties?) Larger point - none of them caused this much fuss.

IRS - definitely a scandal. No matter how you slice it, the IRS specifically targeting a specific group - regardless of the reason why - is inexcusable. I personally don't think any of these organizations - and there are just as many that support the left as support the right - should qualify for tax exempt status. But assuming that such is what is being allowed, all of them should be treated equally. That said, all the information we have up to this point indicates that the IRS wasn't receiving it's orders via the White House, the Black Panthers, ACORN, or anyone else. Surely it must be dealt with, but there's no indication that this should be viewed as an Obama scandal.

The AP records - not a scandal in the traditional sense of the word (it wasn't illegal), but surely one that compromises the long-standing sense of the press being allowed to keep information/sources confidential. And this one certainly COULD reflect poorly on Obama. I'm actually somewhat surprised that the AP stuff isn't getting the most press, because IMO, that's the one that ties back the most.

 

In Benghazi security forces were order to stand down and not intervene. That alone is bad enough, but the fact that the administration lied to the public about the attack and (according to congressional testimonies) tried to cover it up.

The facts are still coming out with this one, but I agree with you. It still remains up in the air whether or not Obama or his administration had anything to do with this. Innocent until proven guilty.

Agreed.


I still think his Fast and Furious scandal and the Solyndra scandal are worth noting.

For those who don't know about Solyndra, it involved Barack Obama giving hundreds of millions of our tax dollars to George Kaiser, a billionaire and one of his most prominent campaign financers. Oddly enough, all of that money disappeared and Obama lost his deposit.

 

One Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah made that claim, Leon Panetta was asked about that, and I've seen the footage before of him saying:

Then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta testified that “unfortunately, there was no specific intelligence or indications of an imminent attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi. And frankly without an adequate warning, there was not enough time given the speed of the attack for armed military assets to respond. That's not just my view or General Dempsey's view. It was the view of the Accountability Review Board that studied what happened on that day. In the months since the tragedy at the temporary mission facility in the nearby annex in Benghazi, we've learned that there were actually two short duration attacks that occurred some six hours apart. And again, there was no specific intelligence that indicated that a second attack would occur at the annex which was located some two miles away.”

Panetta said, “the bottom line is this, that we were not dealing with a prolonged or continuous assault, which could have been brought to an end by a U.S. military response, very simply, although we had forces deployed to the region. Time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response. Despite the uncertainty at the time, the Department of Defense and the rest of the United States government spared no effort to do everything we could to try to save American lives. Before, during, and after the attack, every request the Department of Defense received we did, we accomplished.

Solyndra was a success until market forces (big dive in the price of silicon) wrecked it's business model, the government gave Solyndra a loan of 500mil to try stave off bankruptcy but ultimately went bankrupt anyway. The bankruptcy was conducted in a very traditionally US manner in that it looked after the private investors first and foremost, which the government didn't appreciate.

 

The attack lasted seven hours and requests for assistance were turned down by the administration. We could have done something, but we didn't.

 

There were two attacks, six hours apart, at different locations. Depending on the timeline being referenced, the attack on the compound lasted roughly an hour, the attack on the annex six hours later was over in 11 minutes. In the case of the attack on the compound, it was retaken somewhere around the hour and a quarter mark by CIA and local security forces, and in the case of the annex attack two miles away from the compound, the annex defense held and the attackers retreated.

There are lessons to be learned about beefing up embassy and facility security here, but there is currently no way for the US military to respond and get to a crisis anywhere in the world in under 10 minutes.

 

I was breezing through this and I wanted to point out an inaccuracy or debatable point.

Al Gore likely would have won the FL vote and thus the electoral college in addition to the popular vote had it not been for GOP efforts (at the state government level) putting non-felons on the FL felons list and kept many of them from voting. I've heard a statistical argument that implies a majority of people who were non-felons were likely to vote democratic.

As they numbered in the thousands (at least a thousand and I've seen numbers saying multiple times that) and the FL vote was supposedly decided by 500 some this would have been enough to flip the state to the Gore column.

I know Greg Palast reported on it in the years past.

Here is a more recent article relating to it and more recent politics.:

http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2012/jun/05/bill-nelson/bill-nelson-compares-rick-scotts-voter-purge-2000-/

So it is quite possible Al Gore won in 2000 despite the fact he didn't get the White House

 

Well, there's no doubt that Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000, but it wasn't the first time that the candidate with the most votes didn't go to the White House. See Andrew Jackson. Yes, Jackson eventually became president four year later, but the first time he ran was in 1824. In that election, he carried a plurality of the popular vote, a plurality of the 25 states in the union at the time, and a plurality of the electoral college as well. But he lost in the House of Representatives to John Quncy Adams which decides the election when no candidate receives a majority of the electoral vote.

Like Jackson, Gore received a plurality, not a majority of the popular vote. (Minor candidates like Ralph Nader and and Pat Buchanan also ran, and while neither carried a single state, they did garner enough support to prevent either Gore or Bush from acheiving a majority of the popular vote.)

Jackson's is the most famous because of winning a plurality of everything and yet losing the election, but there have been other presidential winners who won the electoral college but lost the popular vote. Rutherford B. Hayes lost the popular vote to Samuel Tilden in 1876, and Tilden wouldn't ever become president. Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote to Grover Cleveland in 1888, but Cleveland would become president again in 1892. This odd result (being presdient, then losing, then winning again), also makes Cleveland the only person besides FDR to win a pluarality of the popular vote more than twice.

But I don't see the inaccuracy of my previous post. There have been two cases where the incumbent VP ran for president and lost - Nixon and Gore. Yes, Gore had the plurality, but that has happened before. He still lost.

 

My main point wasn't about Al Gore winning the popular vote. It was that he probably would have won the electoral college vote too except that people who should have been allowed to vote were not allowed to.

That is different.

And it arguably makes a discussion of historical trends with VPs running for the White House slightly different in that the 2000 election may be a special case and not used to discuss the success of VPs. Or perhaps it is an argument that they may succeed.