Make A Drone Man Cry

at

hillary

Gulp.

Hillary Clinton considered drone attack on Julian Assange – report (RT)

Will WikiLeaks’ Assange delay ‘October surprise’ announcement? (Fox News)

Meanwhile…

pence-kaine

US Vice President candidates Mike Pence left) and Tim Kaine

Election analyst Shane Heneghan ponders the the next week and beyond in the US elections.

Shane writes:

The vice presidential debate is traditionally somewhat of a wild card. This year, both Veep candidates are unmistakably less visible than their running mates.

Tim Kaine who gives off the vibe of a moderately embarrassing suburban dad will probably be seeking to portray himself as having a certain amount of mettle. It remains to be seen how Mike Pence would like to be seen as but he potentially would still like to be regarded as the brains of a potential Trump presidency.

That debate will be swiftly followed by a town hall debate between the main two candidates where questions will be posed by voters. Clinton has strong form in this format.

By contrast, when Trump gets a tough question he’s known to play the ball and not the man. He may get away with that with a Fox news anchor during the primaries but a member of the public during the general election just might prove to be a slightly different matter.

In terms of predictions, at this point I would give Clinton a narrow advantage but I would be nervous about saying that loudly.

Trump and Clinton are easily the two most unpopular candidates either of the two major parties have nominated in living memory. This could lead to many things. Most obviously, a dip in turnout and spike the vote of third party candidates.

The sheer unprecedented nature of the whole thing probably means any dip in turnout could hopefully be kept to a minimum and that the real story here is third party candidates.

The Libertarian ticket has two former Republican governors who are occasionally polling in double digits. Gary Johnson of New Mexico and has considerably more experience at being a Republican than Trump and the more exposure he gets the more of the GOP base he could take away from him.

Jill Stein of the US Green Party may have a similar effect on the Democratic ticket but given her relative obscurity on the national stage, her failure to get above the margin of error in most polls and the surprisingly strong efforts of Bernie Sanders to row in behind Clinton we can expect this to happen to a much smaller degree.

Another thing worth considering on a purely hypothetical basis for the time being is a candidate winning the electoral college without winning the popular vote. This has happened on four separate occasions already- most recently in 2000 when Al Gore garnered half a million more votes than his Republican rival but was denied victory.

Is it possible that if we don’t see the massive double digit margins in formerly solid blue and red states for either candidate, if we see third party candidates eating into base votes that we may have a scenario where the winner gets to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue despite being three million votes or more behind in the popular vote?

If Donald Trump were beaten in this fashion how would he react? More to the point, how would his more rumbustious trigger happy supporters react? It’s a recipe for trouble. If Clinton were beaten in a similar fashion she and the establishment that backs her would feel similarly aggrieved.

In theory, congress should take such a result as a signal to reform the electoral college. What we can be more sure of, however, is that they can use the result and the perceived lack of legitimacy in the short term to ignore the wishes of the President at will. Heck, they do it already to Obama- who is considerably more popular than either of these two.

Another thing that hasn’t been mentioned, and we get way ahead of ourselves when we say this but given the unpopularity of both candidates, it is surely highly unlikely that the winner in 2016 in will win in 2020 or that they will even be reselected to be their party’s candidate. No one has said this out loud that much but you can bet it’s a thought in the back of the heads of some operatives in both parties.

Follow Shane on Twitter: @shanehengehan

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38 thoughts on “Make A Drone Man Cry

  1. Cot

    No surprise. The Obama Administration has murdered thousands of innocent people in the last 8 years.

    1. bisted

      …they have been complicit in the murder of thousands in Gaza alone including over 500 children…the zionists know they can ramp up their genocide under Hilarys watch…

        1. bisted

          ‘…genocide (noun): the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group’…thanks…but genocide seems to be particularly appropriate for the campaign being waged by the zionists in Palestine.

          1. Neilo

            I wouldn’t fully agree with you on that score, bisted, but I respect your consistency. Very boring world if we all thought the same way, I suppose.

    1. Bob

      It’ll be funny to see Trumps supporters bringing up her joking about having someone killed as a reason she shouldn’t be president, but completely ignore Trump “joking” about having Clinton killed.

      Maybe, if we’re lucky, God might strike them both down and save us all a lot of grief. It’s about time he did something divine.

    1. Frunobulax

      See also: “It remains to be seen how Mike Pence would like to be seen as but he potentially would still like to regarded as the brains of a potential Trump presidency.”

      A mangled language fuster cluck.

      1. Frunobulax

        Admin, now that you’ve amended the bad copy of the article and deleted the criticisms herein, you can now delete my comment above. And then this one too. Unless you’d like to repeat the usual error on BS of omitting selected comments. Yours is a free access blog you push but do try pay more attention to your limited readership and proof a bit more.

  2. Brother Barnabas

    When Trump gets a tough question he’s known to play the ball and not the man”

    really?

  3. Sheik Yahbouti

    She is, Harry, immeasureably – but it makes chilling reading indeed. America – under any leadership – has been responsible for some much real and permanent harm in this world.

  4. rory

    Thanks for the links MoyestWithExcitement and Coppélia.
    Thanks for the Wikileaks tweet Broadsheet.

  5. jimmy russell

    ugh these are just lies and slander President Hillary Clinton will be the greatest president ye she is a woman and a democrat he foreign policy record has nothing to do with the president race that was in the past we need to look at the present. donal trump is literally hitler he is responsible for millions of deaths already he needs to be stopped before he starts world war 3 he is a maniac who wants to improve relations with russia how can any sane person do such a thing.

  6. slatterg

    Ye know Truepundit.com is a wacko conspiracy website and this story has no element of truth in it?

    I would have expected better

    1. Frunobulax

      Don’t expect that Slatterg. It’s a dysfunctional place full of nonsense posts on the whims of a few lads having a laugh with clickbaiting liberals. It’s rightly ignored most of the time but it has got some cracking investigative crime timelines, contributors and who doesn’t just come here for the comments anyway (if they don’t delete, back-edit and screw the sense of them up). The rest of it is best forgotten quickly.

    2. rory

      Anyone having trouble accessing the link on the wikileaks tweet?
      Can’t access the True Pundit home page either.

  7. Junkface

    The facts are. Every US Government since WW2 have been involved in international murder campaigns and proxy wars. Not one President is free of the “Murderer” taint, because they are a superpower with a powerful and willfill military chain of command hell bent on “kicking ass” every few years.

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