I don't think the 2016 election is a good analogy, as both candidates had their share of skeletons in the closet, with the non-winning party arguably having skeletons that were more of a national security risk than a cultural one. People seem to conveniently forget this fact though.
We'll have to agree to disagree on point 1, as there's plenty of common knowledge out there that I don't need to muddy the thread with.
The parent comment was referring to the general election of 49%, and the "grab by the pussy" story broke after the primary was over, so point 3 is a straw man argument.
Edit: Sometimes I underestimate how in the dark people really are on the subject so I did a quick search to find this op ed which shows that, yes, there really were issues that voters were concerned about from a national security perspective, namely the contributions to multiple civil wars. https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_co...
> I want the Iranians to know, if I am the president, we will attack Iran if Iran were to attack Israel -- even if there were no Congressional authorization or a clear and present danger to the U.S
I mean, as a "Clinton is the worse option" quote, that hasn't aged well this week, has it? Mind you, the entire article is just the same old "Trump is visibly awful and we can work with that" many idiots ran with and were completely wrong about.
Just because some right wing opinion piece thinks Hillary Clinton started 4 civil wars doesn't make it true.
she convinced Obama to back military coups against the democratically-elected leaders of Honduras and Egypt.
The Intercept (no friend of the Clintons!) writes:
A retired U.S. military intelligence officer, who helped with the lobbying and the Honduran colonels’ trip, told me on condition of anonymity that the coup supporters debated “how to manage the U.S.” One group, he said, decided to “start using the true and trusted method and say, ‘Here is the bogeyman, it’s communism.’ And who are their allies? The Republicans.”
A network of former Cold Warriors and Republicans in Congress loudly encouraged Honduras’s de facto regime and criticized the newly elected Obama administration’s handling of the crisis.
By the time Clinton got involved the coup was complete.
The others are the same.
Read the US reaction to the Egyptian coup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Egyptian_coup_d%27%C3%A9t.... It's easy to criticise it, but hard to come up with what the reaction should have been. It's worth noting that both parties had fairly similar reactions here.
Does anyone really believe that Clinton and Obama were backing militant Islamists in Syria and Libya? The countries were a mess and they were stuck trying to find a way forward - they didn't (and shouldn't have!) wanted Gaddafi or Assad in power, but both conflicts were multi-sided messes where one group would get taken over by another.
Ignoring USA politics for a moment, can we admit that the current state of Syria is better for both residents and the world than the current state of Libya? I.e., that it's better not to completely destroy society, subjecting everyone who lives there to unrelenting death, violence, poverty, and slave markets?
Yes they both have produced lots of refugees. The Bosporus is easier to cross than the Mediterranean, so more Syrian refugees have ended up in Europe. Lots of people died and had their lives destroyed in both wars. The Syrian conflict, even though it started later than that in Libya, is at this point largely winding down except for one location in which "rebels" still remain. The recognized sovereign government maintains public order and provides life-improving services. Libya OTOH is still entirely a hellscape of violence and privation. They have regular public slave markets, etc.
You'll see occasional media content stressing the horrors of Syria, but there's never anything about Libya. That's because reporters (justifiably) fear to go there.
I'm not trying to underplay the Libyan situation at all, but do you have any evidence that it's worse than Syria?
They both started in 2011. The Syrian conflict maybe winding down, but has started a new phase (in Syrian Kurdistan).
Syria had slave markets too.
The UNHCR data[1][2] shows a lot more refugees from Syria than Libya (don't forget Libya is often used by refugees from other parts of Africa as their outgoing port to Europe, so news reports on refugees arrivals from Libya don't mean the refugees were Libyan).
One source on the Wikipedia article claimed 1/3 of the Libyan population had fled to Tunisia. This seems non-credible: Neither Tunisia nor any refugee agency makes this claim. [3] claims "there are 2 two million Libyans abroad, mostly in Tunisia", but this is still less than half the number of Syrian refugees (over 5 million) and less than the number of registered in Turkey alone (over 3 million).
I think your "That's because reporters (justifiably) fear to go there" statement is also unfounded - in Syria journalists were targets of both ISIS and the Syrian state, and frequently murdered by either of them.
Often bankrupt property tycoon riddled with dubious overseas Russian debt and has historic shady dealings in a number of countries doesn’t have skeletons in his closet that would impact national security?
Right. There was a reason he was Russia’s preferred candidate, and it wasn’t because they had too much kompromat on Hillary to know what to do with.
If Russia had a preference, theories of kompromat look pretty weak compared to theories that maybe Trump just looked less likely to topple regimes basically on Russia's southern border. Hillary was probably going to continue in the same vein as either Bush or Obama, at least Trump would have appeared as a new draw from the deck.
Trumps "peace with Russia" pronouncements are one of his best features. It is a good year when the US president isn't flattening countries a la Bush. If there was a path to swapping out the missiles for insulting tweets that is a big win for everyone. Not to say Trump is particularly good, but really the US has an impact on the world and wide-eyed anti-Russia conspiracy theories help nobody. At least his administration has been better than Bush's for the Middle East.
