I think it is stupid to whine about the email leaks "unfairly" damaging Hillary's campaign.

The DNC could have easily avoided the fallout / resignations / etc. by simply not doing shady, underhanded shit. When you get caught with your hand in the cookie jar, don't bitch about who snitched on you -- a better response would be to learn that you can't get caught if you don't do anything wrong.


Sorta reminds me of earlier in the campaign when Hillary complained that it was unfair for people to want to see her transcripts of paid speeches given to Wall Street banks. She said that other candidates weren't expected to do that, so it was an unfair double standard. Bernie Sanders response was great -- he said he'd be 100% willing to hand over any of his transcripts, except for one minor problem: he never made any paid speeches to Wall Street banks.


With regards to Wikileaks, I have zero problems with how they handled things and don't care at all who their source was -- Russia, some other very biased source with a clear agenda to damage Hillary, whatever. The only thing that matters is, are the emails true / legit? I haven't heard anyone suggest that they aren't; just bitching about it being "unfair" that all the dirt is on Hillary and the DNC.

Wikileaks relies on sources. You know, leakers. I'm confident that if they had dirt on Trump or any other candidate, they'd put it out there. But Wikileaks can't make candidates or parties do questionable shit, and even when candidates or parties do do questionable shit, they still need someone to catch them and then leak the information to Wikileaks.

Sometimes, if they don't have any dirt on somebody, it might be because there isn't any dirt to be had... Just like Sanders' transcripts of Wall Street speeches.

This need for folks to be squeaky clean is, excuse me, childish.

Good lord. Look at all the cliches there are around politics. It's a dirty business. Has been forever.

What HAS been said repeatedly, including in this clip, is that THERE IS NOTHING THERE.

I LOVED seeing asshat WikiLeak McFuckface squirm when Maher asked him to discuss the difference between transparency and privacy.

So many "let the system blow up" people are often fierce about privacy issues -- until it suits them to not care about it.

Those emails had nothing. People being people in private convos between co-workers.

For me, the difference between transparency and privacy is relevance to whatever issue is being discussed. Publishing emails where they were discussing their private lives with each other or just shooting the shit in general would be a breach of privacy. Publishing emails where people discussed the day to day operations of the DNC and revealed possible bias in an organization that was supposed to be unbiased about candidates is relevant, and therefore is fair game.

As for hacking Trump, I'd be all for it except that I wonder if there would be anything you could reveal about him that would really surprise people at this point.

I don't know what folks you mean or how squeaky clean you mean, but I think if you search the internet long enough, you'll find someone childish enough to accuse Hilary of corruption for, say, cutting the queue at Burger King. I agree that you can't expect people to be perfect since birth, do people really ask for that?

I look at the world around us: unbelievable wealth inequality, global warming, oil wars, illegal invasions, the hijacking of Greek democracy, the great bankers bailout swindle, austerity politics, the pay gap.... I won't go on. The world has not been well managed for a long time now. A national leader represents a fuck-ton of people and their decisions can literally lead to the slow or immediate death of all of us, either by inaction or incompetence or mistake....etc. Honesty and integrity have got to be important now, even if the old ways seem familiar and comfortable. I would argue it's childish (naive) to say let's ignore those things.

Golden quote from McFuckface Wikileak rapist who is hiding from the law:

But there is a responsible tradition of redacting potentially harmful private information. In 2010, just before publishing the first Afghan war logs provided to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, Mr. Assange and a group of journalists from The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel were engaged in a tussle over redacting the names of Afghan informants. The three publications all decided to do so, but Mr. Assange disagreed. As he told Nick Davies of The Guardian, “If an Afghan civilian helps coalition forces, he deserves to die.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opinion/can-we-trust-julian-assange-and-wikileaks.html?emc=edit_ty_20160808&nl=opinion&nlid=40977923

How about if an American citizen helps Daesh? Do they deserve to be outed? If so, you have no argument, just anger. (to clarify, I think it's bad that some names of American sympathizers/informants were released, but keep in mind that WikiLeaks is not American, so has no obligation to capitulate to our wishes or to put our interests above those of the Afghanis)

The rape claim is clearly false and a purely political ploy to put him in jail for a false charge because they can't put him in jail for what he's actually done to the governments that created the charge. Repeating it as if it were a fact instead of a blatant lie is bullshit and is a big slap in the face of all those who've actually been raped.

I wonder if Bill Maher realizes he's the Democratic version of Bill O'Reilly. Was he always this pathetic?