If you want to hear Colin Powell unplugged, you can now read his private emails, thanks to some hackers at an outfit called DC Leaks.
He’s not a fan of either of the two presidential candidates and likes to use the word ‘dick’ a lot, which kind of surprised me for some reason.
I’m amazed that people still care what Powell thinks and have any respect for him after he went to the United Nations and delivered the most dishonest and discredited case in the history of that organization. It’s definitely grading on a ludicrous curve to say, “yeah, well, he was the reasonable one.”
Maybe it helps that he’s done with the GOP now. He did endorse Barack Obama and he explained in one email last month that he wasn’t in any hurry to endorse Clinton because Trump was doing a fine job of it himself: “I try not to bother someone who is beating himself and the GOP up.”
So, apparently, his beef isn’t just with Trump but also with the Republican Party. He enjoys seeing them “beat up” and had no inclination to break up the fight.
Most of the focus has been on Powell and Condoleezza Rice’s shared opinion that Benghazi “is a stupid witch hunt.” But, again, I don’t know why anyone should care what Powell thinks.
Apparently, he’s done with his tiff with the Clintons over the whole email flap, possibly because he got exposed as a liar. But everyone who’s paid any attention and has an iota of long-term memory, including (at one time) Saddam, already knew that.
I think we’ll look back on this as the Hacker’s Election. I’m sure we’ll be reading some more personal emails before it’s over.
colons’ veracity has long been questionable, going all the way back to the my lai massacre in vietnam in 1968. perhaps it could best be described as situational, imnsho
ergo: old news.
Powell uses the term ‘dick’ a lot because it’s something he knows how to do, repetitively.
He’s an opportunist but it’s good to see him finally performing a public service at long last – even if he did it involuntarily.
I’ve never had any respect for Powell. But I’m a harsher critic of those that mislead, lie, fail to do due diligence when making momentous decisions than most people. If it were up to me, the whole lot of Iraq War promoters and enablers would have been tossed out and denied any future public office or forum.
Based on Powell’s email to HRC, she wasn’t telling the truth either when she told the FBI that Powell advised her to use private email. It was also sort of irrelevant because that communication was several months after she’d set up her private system.
wrt his use of dick, it occurs to me that for a man of his age, that was a more socially acceptable term in his time to the alternatives. Straddled the line between jerk (which isn’t loaded enough with disgust) and SOB (too sexist), asshole, shit-heel.
I am so sick of this crap. It never ends.
Oh, good. She called her dad and she’s alive.
I am so happy for (especially) her son.
My goodness, I have the same exact feeling and I was beginning to feel lonely. I’m glad I’m not the only one that despises this guy.
The trouble with emails (and Booman Tribune comments for that matter) is that they never go away and what you say when you’re being frank is enough to get you disqualified from any election. The real world is a hell of lot closer to Veep than it is the way politicians speak in public (when they’re not messing up).
Beginning this year, it will be educational malpractice for every college course designed for future public servants to not include major sections that advise the student to never type anything, anywhere, that they don’t want to see on CNN’s chyron, taken out of context, ten years from now.
It’s well beyond frightening that Trump’s support is over 40%, but most of it comes from people who (while coincidentally racist pigs with double digit IQs) are sick and tired of hearing politicians talk one way when they know for a fact that they talk a different way normally.
Whenever I hear a politician now, I imagine the scenes from Veep the precede and follow that public utterance.
Powell, yeah, he’s the last of the liberal Republicans – infinitely better than the hard right, but at the end of the day, simply a lesser monster.
Look – I just called 40% of the population racist pigs with double digit IQs – that’s gonna come back to hurt me big time in the “Obsessed in 2024” campaign. Of course, with demographics, it’ll only be 30% by then, but still.
There are certain disgraces so profound that their perpetrator forfeits the right to ever be considered in any other respect.
This was one of them.
Sigh. This is as reprehensible as the hack of the DNC and Clinton’s emails, regardless of your opinion of Powell.
What’s going on this year is just as criminal as Watergate. Just because we’re used to these crimes being committed does not mean that it’s ok.
People should have their right to privacy even when they’re people we don’t like.
When they stop spying on our communications, I’ll feel bad about it happening to them.
It’s not a matter of feeling bad for those organizations and people who are hacked. It’s a matter of understanding that these hacks provide unknown people, organizations and governments the opportunity to manipulate the electorate in extremely dangerous ways, and provide unknown people, organizations and governments the opportunity to assassinate people’s characters and destroy people’s lives thru the selective release of info they gain thru their hacks.
There is also the opportunity to mix fabricated information with real information in these unauthorized and illegal releases.
I agree that it is not a matter of feeling bad.
However, the US government has created the conditions for wide-spread hacking in order to be able to do mass surveilliance. NSA both collects exploits – ie security flaws – and actively inserts backdoors – more security flaws – in order to use these. But anyone who comes across them can do the same.
So hopefully, the hacking of leading politicians in the US will lead to less support from leading US politicians when it comes to creating an security flaws on the internet.
But more likely, it will be used as second amendment proponents uses gun crimes: Look how unsafe it is, we must have more guns/surveilliance!
Like this:
With Rule 41, Little-Known Committee Proposes to Grant New Hacking Powers to the Government | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Which always leads to stuff like this:
CCC | Chaos Computer Club analyzes government malware
Yes, chalk this up to (another) unintended consequence of the glorious new Digital Age and the Holy Internet. At least it is providing an entire new field of endeavor and expertise—digital security. Although with every passing week methinks this field is pretty much in its infancy, ha-ha. But jobs, jobs, jobs…and think of the “retraining” possibilities!
We’ll be needing many more highly trained specialists to protect gub’mint digital communications from hostile domestic and foreign hacks in future, and they’ll all have to be classed as just more money for “national security”. Of course, “conservative” religion demands that the gub’mint cannot be properly funded, so we’ll just need to have less folks at EPA and SEC and anything else that feebly regulates the corpocracy. In the words of Beckett in his inconceivable masterpiece: Nothing to be done!
It seems a hopeless endeavor to try to balance the gains and losses arising from our new digital age. With every week there’s news of a massive new hack of personal info from some giant database one never knew one was in, or that even existed. And now we have the plainly timed releases of hacked emails as a way to manipulate elections, another new virus for (already wheezing) democratic systems. It will make for some fine October Surprises, and I daresay Colin’s penchant for “dick” likely is gonna be pretty small potatoes…Onward Internet Soldiers!
Powell came to prominence doing the daily briefing for the First Gulf War as Bush’s Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff. In that role he impressed people by faking candor and by Powell’s law of engagement.
After his stunt at the UN, people eventually remembered that Powell was the point in the chain of command that tried to hush up the My Lai massacre.
We lost so much to the Vietnam-era officer corps who just could not come to terms with the war of choice they were sent to fight and continue to have wars of choice to justify their original sin.
The fact that the executive branch treated email cavalierly until someone wanted to gig Hillary Clinton is very interesting history. Glad Powell got caught in the crossfire although he was not the worst offender in the Bush administration.
Wasn’t he caught up in something Iran/Contra-related too? Always assumed that + My Lai was why he never ran for Prez.
He couldn’t remember. But no way in hell he didn’t know that BushI was engaged in propaganda lies to get his war on.
The fact that the executive branch treated email cavalierly until someone wanted to gig Hillary Clinton…
Yeah, because nobody went after Rove in 2007 when his email shenanigans were exposed. And he didn’t resign shortly after that.
Had it never been revealed that Rove (or some other high government official) skirted FOIA by using a non-government email server before Clinton took office or if it had been revealed and Democrats and the public not been outraged and furious, you might have a case. As it is, your position holds no water (and you’re lying as well to advance your position). For shame.
I don’t think so. This truly terrible scandal, in which virtually all intragovernmental communication was conducted through a miachine-political private organization to avoid scrutiny, never had any legs at all, though it certainly should have, and Rove was hardly punished, but simply exited the administration and started cashing in royally a year earlier than he might otherwise have done.
Where did you get the which virtually all intragovernmental communication? Even Rove had a WH email address and used it and there was no indication that this communication method was outside Rove’s shop or that of other GOP political operatives.
A guess is that the GOP server was used for communications that more specifically related to elections, including dirty tricks and how to smear opponents. But we don’t know for two reasons. The RNC claimed to have erased the emails. Democrats didn’t push to hard on that because since Watergate, both parties have agreed that the RNC and DNC headquarters are off limits to the opposition. Clinton would have be better off using the DNC server; except for the small matter of the DNC’s computer security personnel and apps. The latest Guccifer 2.0 hack is claimed to be on NGP-VAN and I’m sure you recall what the entity is.
Yes, that was completely wrong. Nevertheless it was 88 senior White House officials that used the gwb43.com accounts, and the number of missing emails, 22 million, suggests the scale of it.
Clinton’s server wasn’t hacked, the DNC was. Do you mean “small matter” sarcastically?
I’m one more person who has no respect at all for Colin Powell for lying to the whole world in front of the UN, but I know any number of people who get upset when I express this opinion. Oh, they say, he was really one of the good guys. He was just doing his job representing the Bush Jr administration…to which I reply, if he thought it was all a lie, he could have resigned, but he didn’t.
The personal emails (to date) have been pretty damn mundane, as most emails tend to be. I think people are generally pretty guarded in written communication, emails included.
all this hacking is going to make it even more so, the hacking may be a real blow to transparency