The climate of judging people for private sexual morality is slowly changing in the United States… Same with marijuana smoking. In the 90s, affairs or past pot smoking were considered a big deal. Since then, we have elected Obama and Trump, who would not have passed moral snuff in the 80s.
I know plenty of people who despite really, really disliking Donald Trump were very put off by the public discussion of the "pee tape" stuff. They called it kink shaming and said that on its own it shouldn't matter if that is the kind of stuff the President is into. I tend to agree and I think a lot of other sensible people do too.
That’s a completely different situation. Assuming that such a tape exists, the issue isn’t that Trump has sexual kinks. The issue is that the President is subject to blackmail from a foreign power.
If such a tape existed for anyone else and was in the hands of a foreign government, that person would not be able to get the lowest level of security clearance in the US because the opportunity for blackmail places them at great risk.
In an ideal world Americans would be more like the French and not care about people’s personal consensual sex lives at all, in which case the tape would lose all its blackmailing power, but since the American public does care, the possibility of blackmail is real.
Interestingly, the "pee tape" as described doesn't really even depict the typical self humiliation-oriented urination kink. The allegation is that Trump hired five prostitutes to pee on a bed, not one that he was in or using but one that Obama had used years earlier.
It's unclear to me whether that even counts as a kink: if it's true, I'm not sure Trump was getting a sexual thrill out of it. My guess is that it's more of an unchecked mental illness, with Trump as Captain Ahab chasing after his great white whale.
None of the people I'm talking about misunderstand what the real point is. What they took issue with was the snickering about the content of the video and the fact that someone's sexual fetishes would be used as blackmail in the first place. Everyone understands the gravity of the President being blackmailed.
Well that's better- it at least shows the problem isn't misunderstanding the significance so much as it's letting a peripheral issue occupy attention at the expense of the more important issue.
But that's a problem because it's exactly this kind of conversational shift that makes derailment a good tactic for mitigating the impact of political scandals.
The Pee Tape is an issue because the Racist President had prostitutes pee on a bed that the Black President slept on. That is what the issue is with the Pee Tape. It is not about kink or anything else, just a racist doing racist stuff.
I think it's less about race and more about embarrassment. He seems to have deep-seated psychological issues that are being triggered by having been mocked at the correspondent's dinner. I'm not sure how he felt about Obama before, but he has become obsessed with fighting back and undoing everything Obama did just on principle -- regardless of whether he otherwise likes or agrees with the policy.
No. The dossier has neither been discredited nor substantiated. It was Republican opposition research (I don't think we know what candidate or group funded it) and then was later picked up by someone connected to Hillary Clinton after the Republican primary was over.
AFAIK, there's no more or less reason to believe it now than there was when it first came out.
The "pee tape" has been widely discredited. I'm not pro trump but using the word "racist" three times in two sentences and offering fake news as proof does not help your point, in fact it makes you look silly.
I'll break the news to you, the current President is a racist. He is not just a little casual racist, he is pretty damn racist. Let's not tap dance around the issue anymore and let's just call him what he is.
He is also dumb, but that has nothing to do with being a racist or our discussion.
Can you imagine if during Reagan's campaign someone leaked nude photos of his mother? Or Bush? Do you really think Evangelicals would have gone for that?
Muckraking is not a new phenomenon at all, even to this degree. The "nude photos" of Ann Dunham have been debunked as false. [1]
I speculate you are right, though, that less people these days would give a flip about whether one modeled for a underground fetish publication in the late 1960s, even if true.
Unfortunately, there are still a significant amount of people who would have an issue with this. But to me (and probably others), the claims made say nothing about Ann Dunham (even if they were true). But they say a heck of a lot of negative about the authors of what seems to be the primary source of this muckraking [2].
He openly admitted smoking marijuana in his youth. Bill Clinton weaseled out of it, famously claiming he "didn't inhale" and didn't like it. 16 years later, Obama didn't feel the need to fudge his history in that regard.
