Vanity Fair - Is Donald Trump a Manchurian Candidate?

[TomCADem]

The FBI looked into both Trump and Hillary Clinton. Yet, the fact that the FBI has not found evidence of a direct collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Russians is seen as vindication, yet the equally inconclusive letter to Congress regarding Weiner's laptop is sold as a validation of various conspiracy theories regarding Hillary Clinton.

Also, why is it with Trump, he is given the benefit of the doubt notwithstanding the clear facts that he pushes amazingly pro-Russian policies, surrounds himself with Russian sympathizers, and (most importantly) Russia has been interfering in the U.S. election in his favor, which the NY Times laughingly dismisses as not necessarily intended to get Trump elected, since the real goal is to create instability. What? There's a difference?

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/is-donald-trump-a-manchurian-candidate

There are plenty of reasons to doubt or withhold judgment on a report credited to a single, anonymous source. For one, its findings conflict with a separate New York Times article, published the same day, which reports that the F.B.I. found no “conclusive or direct link” between Trump and the Kremlin in its investigation. According to the Times, the agency does not dispute that Russian hackers were behind the cyberattacks on the Democratic National Convention and the Clinton campaign, which have yielded a steady drip of damaging headlines via Wikileaks. But “even the hacking into Democratic e-mails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump,” the paper reports, and that “no evidence has emerged that would link Trump or anyone else in his business or political circle directly to Russia’s election operations.” (How the Russian government is not taking sides by allegedly targeting only the Democratic candidate is not explained.) The Times article also contradicts the Slate report, noting that F.B.I. officials spent “weeks” examining the electronic channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, but concluded that there was likely an innocuous explanation for the connection.

Still, the latest allegations facing Donald Trump and his presidential campaign fit a longstanding pattern that has rightfully raised serious questions. Trump’s foreign policy agenda is a near mirror-image of Russia’s, right down to the rhetoric he has used about Ukraine and Syria. At the end of July, Trump threatened the 67-year-old NATO alliance when he suggested that, if elected president, he might not come to the aid of the Baltic States in the event of a Russian invasion, and later seemed to support Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea. “You know, the people of Crimea, from what I've heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were,” he remarked over the summer. He has repeatedly defended thawing relations with Putin and even called on Russia to hack Clinton’s e-mails. (Trump later characterized the statement as a joke.) More recently, he has adopted Russian propaganda on the campaign trail, describing Putin’s military intervention in Syria as a war against ISIS, rather than an effort to prop up the Bashar al-Assad regime. And while Trump has vehemently denied any link to Russian interests, he has never kept his admiration of Putin a secret. The former reality-TV star has routinely praised the Russian president for his leadership. (Putin, for his part, has denied that Russia was behind the cyberattack on the D.N.C., but did characterize it as a public service to American voters. “Listen, does it even matter who hacked this data?” he said during an interview with Bloomberg in September. “The important thing is that the content was given to the public.”)

Throughout his campaign, Trump has also surrounded himself with advisers friendly with the Russian regime. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort resigned after The New York Times reported that he was allegedly designated to receive $12.7 million in off-the-books cash payments from former Ukrainian president and Russian ally Viktor Yanukovych for work he did in that country. (Manafort, who has denied any wrongdoing, was recently reported to be the subject of a “preliminary inquiry” by the F.B.I.) Another Trump adviser, Carter Page, has also been linked to Russian interests, a charge he has denied. U.S. intelligence officials have reportedly investigated whether Page held talks with senior Russian officials about potentially lifting economic sanctions on the country if Trump is elected president. Longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone has also been a source of troubling optics for the Republican nominee. Last month, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta accused Stone of having “advance knowledge” of document dumps by Wikileaks, including e-mails stolen from Podesta by alleged Russian hackers. (Stone has dismissed the allegations against him as “the new McCarthyism.”)

[orwell]

1. I read the Slate article...

...and I work in networking.

The article is very convincing. I don't know what the FBI is smoking but you do not set up a server that only communicates with one other host and say there is an innocuous explanation. They analyzed the DNS records which are very difficult to fake. This is a network level trace of DNS. A server within the Trump organization was only talking to a server at Alfa Bank, whose principals are directly associated with Putin.

This is a smoking gun with no clear explanation. When the DNS records were traced and reported, the server was immediately shut down!

This whole thing doesn't pass the smell test.

[NoGoodNamesLeft]

2. Trump gets a pass because he has a penis

Women are always held to a far higher set of expectations than men are and I for one am about sick of it.