You got what you deserve, Republican Party...

[Weltall]

What the heck? No, of course not. The party is unifying because parties almost always unify once they have chosen a candidate. Unless something incredibly unlikely happens to split a party (slavery in the 1850s, for the biggest example), parties unify once they choose a candidate. The unification for the Democrats this year is proceeding faster than it did in '08 probably partially thanks to fear of Trump, but it'd happen regardless, it always does.

Something has happened, perhaps not bad enough to physically split the party, definitely bad enough that Clinton polls roughly even with a literal TV character. And that 538 forecast has dropped Clinton's chances from 80% to 60%. What does she do better than start with a huge lead and gradually leak it away throughout a contest?

No, you're missing the point. The Senate, particularly, was lied to by the Bush Administration in order to get that vote through successfully. House members were not pressured nearly as much as Senators, were not shown classified briefings skewed with half-truths (at best) to convince them to support it, etc.

As a defense, Clinton and other Democrats being too gullible and scared to make the right choice is not really that much better than making the wrong choice on purpose.

They absolutely should have known better, but blame the Bush Administration for that, not the Democrats in the Senate who voted for that bill -- which, remember, was not a final "we will go to war with Iraq" bill, just a step towards that that they should have known probably would lead to war. But again, it's the Bush team who are to blame here! I imagine that however that vote had gone Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld would have come up with a way for them to start that war anyway. They REALLY wanted it.

Of course they wanted it and of course they would have gone to any lengths to get that war going. That does not excuse Senate Democrats for making it easier for them.

Again I blame Bush for all this, he and his team initiated these policies. And do you really think that losing that vote would have completely derailed their plans to invade Iraq? They'd have found a way...

Whether they would have defeated the Bush administration in stopping the war is not important. The fact that they gave him what he wanted without a fight speaks terribly of every Democrat who cast votes which did so. That includes your candidate of choice, and it was not an aberration on her part. She is generally pro-war and pro-intervention, cut from the same Cold War stripe most politicians of her era were, and guilty of the same lack of imagination which is necessary to adapt to a world in which America's foreign policy challenges, specifically in regards to the use of military force, do not involve competing superpower states.

And that assessment is the generous one, which assumes that Clinton and like-minded Democrats aren't acting as willing instruments of the military-industrial complex, as they are of the financial industry. Clinton picked my former governor Tim Kaine as VP, a man who is all about deregulating the finance industry. I'm sure that's just because he's getting bad intelligence.

On the subject of crime, she's right on target with where the Democratic Party is now in wanting reforms to do what we can to reduce how much nonwhite people are unfairly penalized by the justice system. She's no "old Democrat" on that, not now anyway.

That's not where the Democratic Party needs to be. It needs to be wanting reforms that reduce how many people of any demographic are unfairly penalized by the justice system, having lives ruined and fortunes destroyed because of non-violent offenses. America has the largest rate of incarceration of any country in the world by a huge measure. Clinton and the Democratic Party do not recognize this fact as problematic and indeed are still, as a party, not yet willing to embrace decriminalization of drugs and the legalization of cannabis in particular. Too many special interests don't want this to happen, from law enforcement to private prison corporations, which all rely on a steady stream of inmates to sustain a business model/funding.

Clinton is right on target for her party, the party is way behind and progressing only because of people like Bernie Sanders making people aware of what's happening.

[/quote]As for foreign policy, America is, like it or not, the most powerful country in the world. If we ignore that and stick our heads in the sand it does nobody any good. You need to use your power wisely, as the disastrous decision to invade Iraq shows, but you can't just stay at home, that helps make things worse.[/quote]

Can you point to any significant foreign intervention America has participated in since the second World War that resulted in a better and more peaceful world? I mean maybe Korea counts.

Note: I don't mean those that saw immediate success, but lasting success. Desert Storm was a walkover that sowed the seeds for global Islamic terror and a badly destabilized region.

... And you've already forgotten that Colin Powell also used private email sometimes while Secretary of State? Come on, she wasn't the only one. And her email server may well have been more secure than the governments', you never know...

This makes it okay?

No underlings are being thrown under any busses because no one broke any laws.

"Several dozen" top Clinton aides may find themselves unable to gain higher security clearance because of their involvement. Clinton herself faces only herself as an obstacle in her pursuit of the ultimate security clearance. The bus has plenty of room underneath.

Well, what is corruption? I guess you think that the regular order of the way politics works is all corrupt, while I'd say that only actual corruption -- that is, people illegally taking money they aren't allowed to -- is corruption, while the rest is the effects of a broken campaign finance system that we need to reform. I know that Washington has an effect on people the longer they are there, as exposure to lots of lobbyists but not so many normal people has its effect, and yes, special interests do have an outsize influence on policy, on a broader level I do not agree with the idea that politicians are all corrupt. I think most are not corrupt, and only the rare exceptions are actually corrupt. Speaking fees and the like are not corruption, it's just a speech. Most people would not change their vote for that "small" an amount of money!

There are people who murder other people over chump change, and $250,000 is not chump change. No one who takes money in that amount from corporations who have vested interests in manipulating the political system should be allowed to participate in it as a public servant. You trust a candidate because they have a D rather than an R, that's folly.

We could do a lot better job than we do, yes -- we need campaign finance reform, to overturn Citizen's United, to require disclosure of where all money is coming from, to crack down on or ban SuperPACs, to make it easier to stop clearly false attack ads (I mean ones based on actual lies -- think Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, etc.), and more -- but in some way, there are going to be people whose job it is to try to influence legislators' votes.

One candidate made this an issue during the primary and one didn't. So yeah, these things need to happen, but the majority of Democratic voters didn't think they were that important. Structural reform of our political process? Nah, I'd rather have a woman president.

We'll see, but I'd hope she would do something, and while politicians do sometimes campaign for something and then do the opposite, it hurts them politically to do so and she knows that.

"I'd love to but republican obstructionism" followed by a wink you can't see but you can almost hear.

It's disappointing that you can't see how much sexism is behind most attacks on Hillary.

As disappointing that you don't see how bad an idea it is to nominate a candidate who is trusted by 33% of Americans whatever the reasons (and it's not because 66% of America is sexist).