Australia may rethink the nuances of the American political calendar

Sure, sure… Julian Assange really brought out the goods with that last email dump…

“The difficulty that WikiLeaks has, of course, is that we can’t go around speculating on who our sources are. That would be irresponsible,” Assange said in an interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I do think it’s an interesting question, of course, as to who our sources are. But as a source protection organization that many sources from across the world of many different types rely on to protect their identity, and their rights, to communicate the truth to the public. And that’s what we’re talking about here, communicating the truth.”
“What I can say categorically is that we have published proof that the election campaign of Bernie Sanders was sabotaged in a corrupt manner by [former DNC Chair] Debbie Wasserman Schultz and others within the DNC,” he added. “We can say that categorically. We have published proof. But as for anything else, we can only speculate.” […]
“In order to divert attention from proof that we published that the Sanders campaign was subverted within the DNC,” Assange said on NBC, “the Clinton campaign tries to take attention away from a very serious domestic allegation about election interference and try and bring in foreign policy.”

Actually, if you want to know the brutal truth, I think this email dump would have been much more effective at the end of the convention than at the start of the convention.  Then the big “reach out” from Team Clinton to Team Sanders on all things personal politics and all things domestic policy would have been less so, and the make nice from Team Sanders to herd his supporters behind the Clinton banner would unravel with the new information.
Or, to put it another way… a larger bloc unable to stand the situation.

I’m struck by the banality of everything here.  Like, yes — Sanders was toiling against the Democratic Establishment (as he’s done his political life), and yes, the DNC was scheduling as few debates as they could get away with, and, yes, low level staff suggested questioning Sanders’ religion so all the Southerners who weren’t voting for Sanders would now doubly not vote for him…  AND–?

Maybe he can do better than this, and maybe the fact that Hillary Clinton used a server more hack-able than gmail is more than enough.  And Assange does state here he has no preference for Trump, and then again over there he has some preference for Trump.   And I suppose it is worth more than reading the news reports coming out of the private email correspondence reported over the year in such places as the New York Times where we mostly just end up with a humanized Hillary Clinton sweating out her Senate Benghazi Testimony, a net gain (I suppose)…

“Mr. Gorbachev.  Release naked photographs of Walter Mondale” — (Stephen Colbert parody imagining Trump’s reaction as fitting previous eras.)

And somewhere as things get… stupid.

Khan pushed back on Trump’s suggestion that his wife, who was also on stage at the DNC, was not allowed to speak. He said she has high blood pressure and didn’t want to speak for fear she wouldn’t be able to hold herself together discussing her Gold Star son on stage.
“For this candidate for presidency to not be aware of the respect of a Gold Star mother standing there, and he had to take that shot at her, this is height of ignorance,” Khan said. “This is why I showed him (the) Constitution. Had he read that, he would know the status a Gold Star mother holds in this nation.”
Trump had first suggested Khan’s wife was not allowed to speak in an interview with The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, saying: “I’d like to hear his wife say something.”
Something along the lines of …
Mr. Trump’s comments, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News that will air on Sunday, drew quick and widespread condemnation and amplified calls for Republican leaders to distance themselves from their presidential nominee. With his implication that the soldier’s mother had not spoken because of female subservience expected in some traditional strains of Islam, his comments also inflamed his hostilities with American Muslims.
I suppose the theory of the campaign lies in the “Telling it like it is” meme: we’re standing up to the Patriarchy inherent in Islam — finally, multiculturalism be damned.  I can’t parse this out fully, sometimes out of touch here “in a world” where a Mosque being built within earshot of “Ground Zero” lands a wave of laws and bills to ban Sharia Law — but I imagine most of America assumes even if she’s piously a shirking violet — a “Who Cares?” is in order.
And we await the next email dump.  And see if it somehow counteracts the antics of Donald Trump.

Leave a Reply