When some of us were accused of being paid Obama shills too?

to save the nomination four years later for Hillary.

No WONDER we Clarkies heard that DU was an unwelcome place (and I didn't 'join' til later.)

I'm still waiting for my check. That and my George Soros check.

how many times I answered those stupid accusations.

Aloha, PLD

There's no value to making that sort of accusation unless you genuinely want DU to be more of an "Agreement Board" than a "Discussion Board."

Bryant

Those words are not insinuated, they are the words used.
So pot, kettle, etc.

"haters". One of my personal favorites.

But frankly I agree with the OP. Although I'd like to actually see who is running before I decide who I would support in the primaries.

is automatically a hater.

I don't like some of her policies.

Don't like what Bill Clinton did to weaken Democratic infrastructure across the entire country.

There probably are a few thin-skinned Hillary supporters who call everyone who point out their problems w/her record "haters".

But that clearly isn't prevalent in GD.

a right wing operative or troll. Already happened in this thread.

to hi-jack this one. The OP made a point. Instead of responding to it, you went for the deflection via the "Oh yeah? But other people do THIS!" route.
Shit, for a moment I thought I was at Discussionist.

Why is that?

How is that unrelated to what this thread is about?

And how soon would someone in this other thread point out that some people call pro-Hillary folks "operatives"?

Says more about your own inability to distinguish between cookware.

I feel that labeling anything negative as right wing garbage is/was supposed to get us all to circle our wagons around Hillary. Too early in the game for that.
Still waiting for her to clarify what, exactly, her positions and policies ARE. Looks to me like this was supposed to be a done deal with no messy positions and policies, just her turn, and SCOTUS!!!!! and lists of things she has said over the years.

And I've seen other posters say same.

And I'm still waiting for her to state her positions too. The primary hasn't started yet. Here on DU, Hillary is no favorite.

or policy statements. So I decided to enumerate the different types of comments which may or may not, constitute this anti-hillary garbage.

Questions about "emailgate" may or may not be anti-hillary garbage.

Questions about her vote for the IWR definitely are not.

Questions or comments about the thinly disguised racist primary campaign the clintons waged in 2008 are not.

References to her disloyalty to President Obama over Syria are not.

Comments regarding her personal veracity ("I came under sniper fire in Bosnia" "We were dead broke when we left the white house&quot aren't anti-Hillary garbage.

Comments about her expressed admiration for war criminals (Kissinger) and regular criminals (Goldman Sachs et al) are not.

Comments about Monica Lewinsky, Vince Foster, Whitewater, or any other scandals from the Clinton presidential era are probably anti-Hillary garbage. Unless they are true, in which case they may not be.


If she wants to be defined by her own words and/or actions, she should announce her candidacy and tell us in very specific terms, why she wants to be POTUS and what she proposes to accomplish if elected. And deal with the criticism that follows. Otherwise, she is going to continue to be defined by others. And those others may not always be so kind as we here on DU are so she needs to toughen up.

(and she has quite a public record for all to fact check against) are being mischaracterized and exaggerated beyond recognition! Its unbelievable how many downright myths and distortions are allowed to stand when they are so easily proven false with FACTS! I read a lot of rhetoric and read a lot of bullshit that is allowed to stand...but do not see a lot of backing that shit up with EVIDENCE! We are all just supposed to ACCEPT it because they say so! As if repetition is how you create perception...if people just get worn down..having to prove things a myth or urban legend often enough and over and over and over over "it do get tiresome after a while". So when people just stop opposing that because they are just bored with doing so ...it means that now everyone just accepts it as reality! Afterall "no one's complaining anymore" so it must be true! The old George Bush "we have to catapult the propaganda" technique of "politickin'"

times. I am against the TPP, because it is a corporate takeover. Is that plain enough for you?

what I am talking about....Because YOU say so! Is that plain enough for you???

By the way...all that proves is she is no worse than President Obama....like I said..."exaggerated beyond recognition"!

Fast Track and the TPP or TTIP. My evidence? We go through this once a week, it seems, and there have been links posted to Hillary's speeches about how great the TPP and how proud she is of helping architect it. Not playing this game with you.
Oh, and I do not like it that Obama is pushing the TPP, either.

Q: What would you do differently than a Pres. Obama would when it comes to the economy?

A: I would agree with Obama a lot, because it is the Democratic agenda. We are going to rid the tax code of these loopholes & giveaways. We’re going to stop giving penny of your money to anybody who ships a job out to another country. We’re going to begin to get the tax code to reflect what the needs of middle class families are so we can rebuild a strong & prosperous middle class. The wealthy & the well-connected have had a president the last 7 years, and it’s time that the rest of the US had a president to work for you every single day. We will have a different approach toward trade. We’re going to start having trade agreements that not only have strong environmental and labor standards, but also a trade time-out. We’re going to look and see what’s working & what’s not working. I’d like to have a trade prosecutor to actually enforce the trade agreements that we have before we enter into any others.

Source: 2008 Democratic debate at University of Texas in Austin , Feb 21, 2008

That all sounds like campaign blather, when what has been leaked about the TPP says that corporations can sue if environmental laws hamper profits. Special prosecutor? The ISDS will be in charge of prosecution - corporations against sovereign countries and municipalities. No appeal. Secret corporate courts. What was said in 2008 does not hold true in 2015. But I am eagerly awaiting Hillary's platform.

do things, right?

...should we care for it?

TPP, does that mean I need to be FOR the TPP? I don't like the TPP. I don't care about Clinton gossip or any of that other crap. I was for Hillary her first shot at this, and voted for her in Florida. Pointless vote, but I was happy to do so.

Now, I am looking more closely at things, and Corporatism and Third Way policies are things I do not like. How Fox or Limbaugh feels about them is totally irrelevant.

You can be against something but not running the right wing narrative of the day. How about waiting to talk about it until another day? It's certain that the TPP has been talked about a lot here. Why must the right wing be allowed to run a given narrative on a given day?

If they are running a narrative on their sites and it shows up here I have no problem considering it ratfucking. I can't prove the people posting the information is a ratfucker themselves, but somehow the media narrative is making its way to a liberal site and the only conclusion I can have is that some astroturfer somewhere somehow is pushing a narrative to come here. It's not necessarily a conspiracy, but just people being exposed to media PR dissemination (it could be three ways removed from the original post; literally a fox news article, posted on fb, edited and changed, posted as a graphic on a liberal fb picture posting page, then picked up and posted here).

I get so tired of our crappy, shitty, checkbook, clickbait journalism in this country that is literally causes me to zone out and completely ignore it. It's beyond tiresome.

with Obama on. And NOW is the time to speak out against Fast Track. Obama is running around pushing it.
Better tell the liberal Dems in Congress to sit down and shut up too, you know.
And I do not ever click on RW sites. I have no idea what their narrative is about the TPP, and I see no reason to care.

What right wing narrative, exactly, am I running? Or anyone is running? Are her corporate ties, for example, a right wing invention? Are we supposed to shut up during the primaries?

The very day that the revelations came out, leaked by Wikileaks, Fox News was running a story about how it would let foreign companies sue the US, etc.

Now, Elizabeth Warren had wrote about ISDS a few weeks prior, and it garnered a whole one thread. One thread! Like a half dozen of responses. Most of which were me even!

Fast forward to the "revelations." Same exact information, absolutely identical information. "TPP uses ISDS." Dozens of threads spawned. Dozens.

This is just the first page of Google:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026440549
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026415083
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026357276
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026417822
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026422709

We are driven by mainstream media, not by civics, not by duty, but by a media environment that literally motivates our own actions. It is beyond incredible how easily fooled human beings can be when they drive into these mass mainstream narratives.

about it.
Oh, and I posted in that thread.

Not MSM driven. At all.

Really some HRV supporters (not all) cant stand any dissent

Or is anything not for her classified as garbage?

like Washington Examiner, Fox News, The Daily Tucker Carlson etc it is right wing garbage. It isn't that hard to understand.

the Benghazi crap. And I have never quoted any right wing stuff - I merely do not like the corporate ties, the trade agreements, fracking. In fact, the things that I am against, I think the GOP like.

used here.

Are the RW smears used, or just brought over and quoted?

There are plenty of right wing trolls here who hate Hillary as much as the far left. Fortunately DU is only an echo chamber and their efforts are pretty much wasted.

Ratfucking is using dirty tricks, right wing sources, to spread hate and lies. If you search "FOX News" and "news story" and there is a crossover, it's likely ratfucking or someone being mislead (perhaps posting something from FB over here without knowing that they're being manipulated by some media PR astroturfer somewhere).

Here's a good definition of what it looks like: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ratfucking

It is a very real phenomena and it is almost always targeted at the left. The reason it is still used is it is very very effective. The Democratic Party is not a unity party, it is a very diverse and big tent party. The best way to fuck the Democratic Party over is to divide and conquer. Set it against itself. That's what the PUMA's attempted to do. And we're seeing that sort of shit with pledges to not vote for Clinton if she's the nominee. It's the same damn thing.

Don't post stories here that come from the Moonie Times, Fox News, Breitbart, Drudge Report, or any other open editorial site like OpEdNews (and present it as news). Doing that constitutes carrying water for the right wing and is indeed ratfucking.

More on ratfucking here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking

There are any number of potential candidates I personally "don't care for," but I would never post Right Wing trash about them while refusing to name who I am actually in favor of (aside from someone who has said about a hundred times that they are not running).

But if you can't see the difference, I can't explain it to you.

Who am I supporting? No one yet. I am looking forward to a robust and challenging primary season so everyone gets a chance to be tested and vetted.

I vigorously oppose her, but that is NO reason to assume those that vigorously support her here, are "operatives". It's despicable to lable them as such.

You are civil to me. I will be civil to you. That's how I conduct myself in real life and on this board.

You troll me...I will troll you back exponentially...

Ugly Я Us these days..

There's been enough of it going around, and juries let a good deal of it stand.

also called are rather ugly too.

and/all of the following (without apology)-
Advocate
Hillbot
Operative

The horrible possibility of Jeb or any of the other Republiclowns becoming leader of the free world is unthinkable.

I am still waiting for that check though.

Whether you are or not? ... I don't know, but let's not pretend it is a false claim - it is true

Can you honestly believe otherwise?

I know there is a such thing as paid trolls and paid supporters, but they tend to stick to places like reddit, facebook, and news comment sections. Not small, mostly unknown message boards like DU. Keep in mind that DU doesn't represent the mainstream of the Democratic party, and those here that DO represent the mainstream are the ones who are generally accused of being paid shills.

you make more posting at kos or reddit.

As a longtime member of the John Kerry group, there was a time when all of us in that group were accused of being paid Kerry Shrills - which was absolutely not true. The purpose - as it is now - seemed twofold - to discredit any arguments we were making AND to render us "others - ie not true blue DU members.

In essence, what it was and is - is bullying. You, along with many others, should be completely immune to this type of attack as you have posted for years and your name should be familiar. That does not make it more pleasant. It also is not meant to say that someone just joining DU as someone excited for the Clinton run to start should be suspect. There are many here now who started posting as the 2008 contest started - especially in 2007 and 2008.

If it makes you feel better, consider what one of my fellow JK group posters once said to me -- after denying it, we should take it as a compliment. After all, what we are accused of is really being considered effective enough that a sitting Senator would have hired us AND kept us on his payroll for years. (Our bank accounts will show this is not the case.)

Not to mention, it was very obvious that some (likely Russian) posters were not who they said they were. In posting, people tend to give enough of themselves away that you get kind of a picture of who they are. In there case, between language not sounding "right" and not seeming to have the shared experiences that they would have if they were who they said they were. The ONLY account here that I think is a paid shrill is ALAN GRAYSON - which is almost certainly one of his staffers - as all he does is drop canned fund raising messages with many blue links.

As to you and other Clinton supporters, it is stunning that some here think that HRC needs to pay people to post in her favor on a Democratic board -- when every poll shows that over half the Democrats want her to be the nominee.

And that is what is so ironic…. the stupid crap that gets flung at her has me ending up having to defend her.

And the reason for that is, she might very well end up being the nominee. And if she is the nominee we're all going to have to suck it up and look for her good points and shoot down the garbage.

I don't usually like to let bullshit and RW talking points go uncontested. You repeat a lie often enough, it becomes truth. Especially if that lie goes uncontested.

I'm not a Hillary supporter. Seeing as NO ONE has dropped their hat in the ring yet, I don't know who I'm going to support in the primary. Last time around, it was Kucinich (my wife, who hails from OH also loved Kucinich, but she knew he had a snowball's chance and put her money behind Richardson). If Bernie switches parties and actually runs, I'll probably throw my support behind him. But the reality is that Hillary will most likely end up the nominee (at least as things stand today). When that time comes, I'll be sucking it up with you.

:cheers:

She may very well be the nominee and you are right that most of us will try to emphasize where she is better than the alternative. (I HOPE if she is the nominee that the real negatives will be lost in the noise of all the faux garbage that is thrown at her.)

I did though want to make the other points (even though) that it is bullying and really obnoxious to attack ANYONE rather than just discuss the issue at hand.

PS I recognized your name, but was too lazy to look back to see if you were for or against anyone for 2016. Sorry for assuming - if you want I will delete it, but I think it does make the point I want to make.

...against people who bring RW sources here against her, and it is aggravating as hell to me. The animosity against Hillary is beyond belief at a "Democratic" board. There are so-called sources that should be flat-out banned at this board, in my opinion, and the posters who persist in using them.

I'm still waiting for the primary to open up for the Democrats. I await it with eager interest. I have not yet made up my mind.

Yet I am so pissed off at the bloody-minded stupidity of the attacks on a good Dem woman that I have participated in the "I'm a secret operative with a decoder ring" mockery for the sheer relief of it, and I will do so again.

DU is making itself irrelevant, and that's a damned shame.

that obviously works.

-- and that was even though the JK group was among the most cohesive groups there was on DU - so there was support.

It's a lot easier to call someone a paid shill than to actually address their argument. So both supporters and detractors of Clinton use that argument.

Last edited Wed Apr 8, 2015, 12:03 PM - Edit history (1)

Hell, I signed up almost a full day ago and haven't gotten a penny so far!

Sleeper cells?

5th Column?

(I'm joshing you if you can't tell.)

... and I will support Clinton if she is the nominee.

Where the hell is my check?

lol@you

Darn you! You buy the next round of pizza and beer!

I was so hoping to buy a bag of Doritos with it.

or some industry.

"Well, I'm an engineer by day, but by night, I'm an operative...."

Sounds kinda sexy!

each other over who we're backing.

Any Democrat is going to be better than any Republican. We can all agree on that.

calling FDR Democrats ratfuckers?

Just wondering.

And that a desire to see Sanders run makes me an "idiot leftist..."

I'm not really worried about the feelings of Clinton supporters.

But if we don't like Hillary, we should find-- and fund-- our own candidate. But relying on grassroots funding ain't gonna win elections, so forget about that because Hillary already has the huge bucks and is inevitable anyway, and she's guaranteed to win the presidential election because all of her opponents are Dumber Than Dubya

The term "Hillary operative" sounds interesting and all,
but baseless accusations are not to be confused with actual proof. Facts should compete with facts. I am not a supporter of HRC, but if she best represents my position in the election she will have my vote. As would whomever else the Democratic party decides on.

And I stand by that. Name calling accomplishes nothing other than lowering the level of conversation.

Does this include posts that actually are from paid shills?

Actually the reason to cock an eyebrow about this posts is Hillary supporters constantly heap much uglier names on people who refrain from getting on board with their bandwagon: freeper, rw troll, conspiracy theorists....usually reaching for labels that might have jurying or banning power. The onslaught has been constant and obviously strategic since this is a high profile Dem forum, and Hillary supporters want to create a picture of party unity behind Hillary and only a "not even Democrat" fringe against.

But the best they can do is try to paint that picture, and they haven't been very successful because there is, frankly, not overwhelming support for Hillary here. It seems about half and half.

That said, you Hillary supporters are just embarrassing yourselves when you try to cover your behavior with: "Well you called us X ugly name, too." Who do you think is going to throw a pity party for you? Posts like this just point up that *by your own standards*, your name-calling tactics have been uncivil and should be called out as worse.

K & R

I have no seen any DUers criticizing her on Benghazi, Foster or anything of the lies created by GOP.
Let me be clear.
We critocize her on her taste of secrecy and the Clintons lean to dirty politics. All what we state are proven facts.
its proven that she cozies wis WS and criminal such as Kissinger.
Its is true that Bill and Hillary cares and run only for themselves.
it is true that in 2004 Bill praised Bish while officially "supporting Kerry " while both Clintons stabbed him in the back with "Hillary 2008" in mind.
It is true yhat Hillary Clinton atvStatevdidnt took much risk.

But that do not stop me meanwhile, to AGREE that Hillary was wonderfull on issues re women right and that Bill did good re economy while serving as President.

It sucks. Sometimes I think that if it wasn't for ad hominem, some folks here wouldn't be able to add at all.