iwpoe wrote:

Petraeus was, I suspect, lost on a much higher level than that to which we have access. I take it that people who command high levels of media attention and profile are favored at an elite level (the Clintons) and those who have secondary media attention like Petraeus are not in command in the way they need to protect themselves. Only in those situations to things like scandals and affairs really matter- since the person in the secondary position is a threat to the people in the prime position and those things can be mustered as an excuse. The Clintons likely have too many aliances to fall victim to something like leaked classified emails.

Also, even without all the cloak and dagger, Petraeus is directly military while Clinton is ultimately civilian. Petraeus' classified info failure is more important to the kind of person he is- like an accountant who is sloppy with the money.

Petraeus, I believe, did not give out information as classified as Clinton mishandled, but he gave out the information knowingly. Clinton doesn't seem to have shared classified information knowingly, or she can claim sge didn't. The question for her is if her negligence was enough to cause her legal problems. Experts seem to give different opinions on this.

I think if anyone can pull off an upset it will be Trump. Still, I wouldn't put money on him. The general electorate is not the same as that for the Republican primaries.

z10 wrote:

I get the impression that most of the members here are right wing?

As Jeremy Taylor says, the phrase doesn't mean much, especially since a lot of our members aren't even Americans.

I think it's probably fair to say that most people here are conservatives of some sort or another, although that too only loosely correlates with how that term gets used today; I doubt many commenters would have much truck with somebody like Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern; certainly I don't.

I tend to see most politics as still working exactly the same way as Chesterton saw it working; one has to choose between the candidates of hudge and grudge, with them all being indistinguishable except for the fact that one side likes their government big and the other likes their corporations that way.

Either way, the average joe, and especially the family, gets fleeced.

The rightwing-leftwing spectrum is problematic for so many reason. There is the familiar complaint that one can be on different places in the spectrum on different issues, most obviously economics and society/culture, but also things like defence, law and order, etc.

 ​But there are wider problems. On some issues it is questionable which positions are rightwing and which positions are leftwing. For example, on foreign affairs, sometimes interventionists define themselves as rightwing and realists and non-interventionists as to the left. But it is open to question if this is the best way of seeing things - the original Tories, for example, were opposed to standing armies and foreign wars even more than their Old Whig opponents. Even on economics, where free market economics is assumed to be rightwing, many classical conservatives, from Bonald to Southey, were not enthusiastic about free markets and capitalism. They looked to a more feudal and paternalistic arrangement. It was the originally leftwing classical liberals who championed free trade and free markets. 

And then there is the problem that positions don't fit easily on the political spectrum, even if you have a different spectrum for each major issue or area of politics/social thought. The issues and positions are too complex. How do you situate distributism or E.F Schumacher on the usual left-right economic spectrum for example? Here you have anti-capitalists of sorts whose alternative is hardly the sort of centralised state intervention normally associated with the left (although this is a simplification even, because anarcho-communists and libertarian socialists, as well as left-libertarians, are presumably on the left too). But I don't think you'd call them simply centrists either.

z10 wrote:

I get the impression that most of the members here are right wing?

I am socially conservative and generally don't have positions on fiscal or foreign policy issues.

z10 wrote:

I get the impression that most of the members here are right wing?

I'm far to the right of most of the folks I've encountered during my brief time here, though there seems to be a strong anti-abortion contingent in which I feel right at home. 

Then again, I'm far to the right of most folks anywhere.