Didn’t know the noble truth-tellers at WikiLeaks had their own merch shop on Twitter:
Check out our new novelty Bill Clinton bimbo poll tee: https://t.co/6gt9AtQ9Lm #WikiLeaks pic.twitter.com/EAmYiuI5NM
— WikiLeaks Shop (@WikiLeaksShop) October 13, 2016
The Twitter account for the shop is followed by the verified WikiLeaks account, so it appears to be an actual thing, not some false flag cooked up by an organization that wants to make WikiLeaks look bad. And given the clumsiness of the copy on the shirt, it looks like WikiLeaks is outsourcing its snark; it’s probably much funnier in the original Russian.
The only thing that’s “transparent” about WikiLeaks is its role as an avid supporter of authoritarians who would harm the U.S., both domestic (Trump) and foreign (Putin). Any media coverage of WikiLeaks-published stolen documents should come with a warning label to that effect.
Trentrunner
Wikileaks is disgusting for many reasons, but their failure to grasp parallel structure is unforgivable.
gogol's wife
I don’t even understand it.
cervantes
I realize the U.S. doesn’t have good relations with Ecuador, but I should think there is enough leverage to prevail upon them to kick Assange out of the embassy. Presumably Putin is paying them something but is it really worth it to them?
eric
so, if i am to believe this (and i still dubious), an organization run by a man seeking asylum for RAPE charges is trying to make money off of another man’s ALLEGED consensual sexual encounters? really? really?
Helen
Obama up live stumping for Hillary in Ohio.
slag
@gogol’s wife: Yeah. Either it’s flatly stupid, or it’s alluding to some righty conspiracy theory that 0.000000000001% of people are going to appreciate and of whom maybe 0.0000001% are going to want on a tshirt.
Great business model there, Republicans.
Betty Cracker
@Trentrunner: FTW!
Mickee
Quick. Someone alert Glenn Greenwald so he has time to work up an apologist screed to explain this.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@slag: Guys, obvious: What’s worse, Bill having sex with bimbos, or Bill having sex with Hillary? Fits about half a dozen wingnut/Trumpkins/white supremacist memes . Have you learned nothing this election?
Edited because fucking autocorrect.
Gin & Tonic
@cervantes: Ecuador is holding Presidential elections on Feb 19, 2017. Rafael Correa, the incumbent, is not running.
I think Assange might want to pencil that day into his calendar.
slag
@Comrade Scrutinizer: So, flatly stupid then. This is why Republicans fail at comedy. Their onion is all skin.
enplaned
Wikileaks was, in my view, basically a good idea.
Unfortunately, it turns out that the founder was a lot less than someone would need to be to run something like that successfully — someone with an axe to grind, and willing to let Wikileaks be that axe.
Which means that Assange has done the work for those would would seek to discredit Wikileaks.
sukabi
@Helen: he’s killing it in new Hillary ad…
CJ in MPLS
The “dicking” statement can be attributed to one of Colin Powell’s leaked emails.
MisterForkbeard
Best guess:
1st part is a reference to Colin Powell’so hacked emails about Bill ‘dicking bimbos’ according to the news.
2nd part is… maybe about how horrible he is with Hillary? I don’t know.
I had a conversation not two days ago with a longtime leftier-than-thou friend who was convinced WikiLeaks was completely independent and any hint there of an agenda against Hillary was just because no one had coincidentally leaked them any Trump info at all. It’s all proof of how Paranoid Hillary supporters are, you see.
I’m going to take a lot of pleasure in showing this to him today.
hovercraft
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
Thanks for the translation.
So hilarious.
MisterForkbeard
@srv: Expect future Democrats to have a 47 percent approval rate? Uh oh.
Kylroy
@enplaned: Well, the problem with any unconventional endeavor is that…it’s not beholden to convention. And conventional journalists are either terrified of showing bias or very accomplished at hiding it, so no surprise that somebody committed to breaking that mold is looking to slant everything so it supports his personal grudges.
germy
@srv:
You had me and you lost me.
Mk3873
What!? Assange has had an anti US agenda all along?? No kidding …
bemused
Fark headline could be mistaken for the Onion: Trump Is losing so badly that Fox News is begging viewers to focus on the issues.
Barney
They’ve put up a new tweet to explain it: they got a quote from a 2014 Colin Powell email saying that, according to the New York Post, Bill Clinton was “still dicking bimbos at home” (and that’s one reason Powell wasn’t keen on voting for Hillary if she stood, though he respects her).
When you have to explain that much, your joke has failed. But even with the explanation, it’s hard to find it ‘funny’, especially funny enough to want it on merchandise. It’s hard to see if it’s meant to have a political purpose, either – is it criticising Powell for calling them ‘bimbos’, for making ‘at home’ relevant, or what? If it was meant to make a point about Bill, you’d want to do it with the Post story, whatever it was, rather than Powell’s wording of it.
Matt McIrvin
@germy: He had you?
hovercraft
@sukabi:
Those are all great Ads, every Ad I’ve seen for Trump both his and the ones from his superpacs have been terrible.
Frankensteinbeck
Assange has explicitly stated that he has an anti-US agenda, and that he is trying to stop Clinton from being elected because he blames her for his being wanted. I’m on a phone and can’t link easily, but it’s not hard to find online.
germy
@Matt McIrvin: No, not really.
FlipYrWhig
@Mickee:
SHOCKING NEW LEAK REVEALS POLITICIANS RAISING MONEY, TALKING TO PEOPLE
Material previously kept under wraps shows depth of establishment scheme to get “advice,” use “media,” “serve” “public”
Splitting Image
Funny considering the last thread was about “Burying the Brand”.
Assange learned all his business skills from Trump, apparently.
24 days to go. If anybody needs me, I’ll be watching videos of people petting baby owls.
Kylroy
@Mk3873: Honestly, I thought Assange showed the proper middle path to take when you’re burning the US government: don’t be like Snowden and flee to our biggest international rivals (the ones who will give you billions for embarrasing or harming US interests), don’t be like Manning and spend your life in prison; instead seek safe haven with a small country that will seize the opportunity to thumb it’s nose at the U.S. but isn’t a major player.
But it helps if you aren’t a sexual predator out to sink specific politicians, and he failed that. Bigly.
Bobby K
Unf#cking believable. When Wikileaks was releasing documents damning to the bush administration all you supposed progressives were cheering them on. Now that they’re releasing documents damning to HRC they’re the worst organization imaginable.
I’m sure there’s plenty of such posts on this web site that can be found.
sigaba
@cervantes: I don’t think you’re liable to see US and Ecuador realign until Rafael Correa is out of office.
Correa is pretty unpopular but he’s unlikely to be voted out of power any time soon, the next election is 2017 and that would be for his fourth term. Business people and people in the cities hate him but he’s very popular with the indigenous populations and rural people, lots of welfare checks. It doesn’t help that all his opponents are basically the Ecuadorian version of a Pete Peterson wet dream.
Calouste
@srv: I’m sure that if the GOP, as I expect they will, keeps nominating misogynist racist know-nothings, their candidates will stay unpopular.
nonynony
@cervantes:
Why? If they kick him out then he gets extradited to Sweden, where I think the statute of limitations on his sexual assault has passed but they still want him for questioning. Then Sweden maybe extradites him to the US where maybe he faces a trial on some charges that would be politically a pain in the neck from a PR perspective because Assange isn’t an American citizen. Or maybe Australia has something they can charge him with and the US can talk Australia into doing that, but again it’s a PR pain in the neck because the big dog America is pushing around the Aussies and making them do the dirty work.
Instead Assange has imprisoned himself without trial and Ecuador is picking up the expenses. And he’s doing all the hard work of discrediting himself in the eyes of former allies by being an idiot. A trial would make him a martyr – if you wanted to pay someone to smear Assange’s name you couldn’t pay them enough to do the kind of work he’s doing all by his own self. The only people who will work with him at this point are Russian hackers – any legitimate US citizens with concerns about what the government is doing aren’t going to be using WikiLeaks anymore – it’s too obvious that the entire enterprise is tainted by Assange’s ties to Putin’s authoritarian government at this point.
hovercraft
@bemused:
Case in point,Katrina Pierson On Trump’s Sex Allegations: ‘What About The North Carolina Hurricane?
C. Isaac
Speaking of Russia in a roundabout way —
One of the new things I’m seeing on my social media feeds from my wingnuttier friends is that if Hillary is elected, her desire for a No Fly Zone in Syria is certain to start World War 3 due to starting a war with Russia and Syria. That no matter how bad Trump is, we need to vote for him to avoid the apocalypse.
“Better a president who says mean things instead of the end of the world!” is a thing I’ve actually been seeing lately.
Chyron HR
@Bobby K:
Wouldn’t it be funny if Julian forgot when the statute of limitations on his rape charges expire and returned from exile a week early?
sigaba
@Bobby K: I for one never supported Wikileaks disclosing the Snowden leaks and continue to see Snowden as a renegade and personal schemer. I also think Bradley Manning’s disclosures deeply hurt the foreign policy of the United States, and the spectacle of Assange leading the life of an international celebrity while the actual leaker, a person with deep personal problems who Assange clearly manipulated and seduced, has been slowly tortured for a transgression that is at least half Assange’s responsibility.
No, you should actually cite something someone said and we can talk about it.
hovercraft
Can someone please grab Ben Carson, and get him some help?
I missed this on Morning Joke today.
nonynony
@Bobby K: Assange is an asshole anarchist who used Chelsea Manning and burned her. Some important information was released but that was because of Manning – and she should have been getting better advice from the people around her but they all used her and burned her instead. Assange is a cowardly anarchist con man who is willing to burn his sources and work with authoritarians – there’s literally nothing to cheer him for and he has discredited the entire idea of having a place for whistleblowers to dump documents to try to bring awareness to government malfeasance even before his idioctic attempts to get Donald Trump elected President.
Gin & Tonic
@sigaba:
The election is in four months from now, and Correa is not running.
sukabi
@hovercraft: drumpf surrogates reduced to deflecting to natural disasters rather than talk about a self made disaster… before long they’ll be showing the anchors where exactly on the doll that drumpf touched THEM….
bemused
@hovercraft:
They’re obviously exhausted all their canned “Hey look over there” tactics and desperately flailing around for new ones.
Betty Cracker
@Bobby K: Blame the guy who retweets Jim Hoft and Breitbart and hawks “bimbo poll” tees for the loss of credibility.
kindness
If you look at the Twitter thread it makes the Wiki folk look even worse. Seems they think they can deny blame by pointing out fine print as if that makes them blameless.
I have to believe Wiki has been taken over by really dumb Russians.
diierent-church-lady
@Bobby K: who is this “all you”? I could smell the sanctimonious bullshit coming off of them from the get-go.
hovercraft
@Bobby K:
Umm, I’ve yet to see any documents damming Hillary. If he was releasing documents about all the candidates who are running, there are four of them, to give us all a glimpse of what they are all saying behind closed doors, that would be one thing. But since he’s releasing documents on only one person Hillary and is timing his releases to do as much damage as possible, he is no longer doing a “public service”, he is executing a personal vendetta and trying ti impose his will on the election.
Cacti
Happy to say that I never thought Wikileaks was anything but full of crap.
Julian Assange is a preening huckster whose primary goal is to never be the one left holding the bag.
laura
@nonynony: I really appreciate your insight on this. Thank you.
If it were up to me, she’d be pardoned in a hot minute. I think of her as the opposite of Timothy McVeigh though both rightly pointed out why we should expect plenty of blowback for collateral damage.
catclub
@FlipYrWhig: NPR covered those emails, but it was just everyday political discussions and manuevering.
Hillary’s possible video to supporters on her email server, that was never broadcast. Discussions of what to emphasize, more details than in other forums. People doing their job as best they could.
sherparick
@cervantes: Again I understand the feeling, but two wrongs don’t make a right. I hope that DOJ does not have secret indictment under the Espionage Act against Assange due to the Chelsey Manning leaks. Assanges’s problem may be more with the Brits now since Manning and Snowden also revealed their secrets and the U.K.’s Official Secrets Act makes the Espionage Act and subsequent case law a Open Society paradise in comparison. So we can say we don’t care where Assange goes. But he should be treated as the misogynistic (read up on the Swedish incidents) and racist alt-right scum that he is. Assange could not resist getting into the right-wing grift machine (plus whatever Putin and FIS is putting into Seychelles and Cayman Island bank accounts.)
NorthLeft12
@srv:
Scott Adams with another idiot prediction. And for the record, I am struggling to understand how Adams equates Hillary’s issues with Deadbeat Donald’s. BOTH SIDES DO IT!
Villago Delenda Est
@Bobby K: The problem, Bobby, you ignorant slut, is that they’re NOT damning. They’re pathetic. Assange-face has sold his pathetic little dribs as “game changing” and “bombshell” and they’re anything but. They have to conflate what people are commenting on with the original comment to create the easily dispelled illusion of “scandal”.
Wikileaks is inadvertently self-parodizing themselves. They’re not even bright enough to recognize this when they’re told they’re doing so.
Miss Bianca
@Bobby K: Au contraire, mon frere: this liberal has despised Wikileaks, and its arrogant douchenozzle of a “leader”, from the beginning. My contempt has merely deepened at a rate proportional to their sloughing off even the slightest pretense of releasing damaging information “for the public good”, and outing themselves completely as Russian propaganda tools.
Peale
@NorthLeft12: Well, yeah. I’m guessing that the Republicans at this point will nominate anyone who gets on stage and pretends to be an alpha male by referencing his cock size. So yeah, future elections won’t necessarily be nasty. But they will be pretty gross.
Aleta
wtf.
about all of the above
Gin & Tonic
@Peale: So, 2020 campaign song?
Gelfling 545
@nonynony: since he’s basically put himself under house arrest, he’s welcome to stay where he is ad infinitum imho.
sherparick
@eric: Under Swedish law, having sex with someone with false promise that the sex will be “protected” is considered getting consent to sex by fraud, voiding the “consent” and becoming rape by fraud. The two women involved were apparently peeved that Assange falsely represented that he was not having sex with anyone else and that he would wear a condom when having sex with them. After discovering they had both slept with him, they asked Assange to get tested for a sexually transmitted disease. When he evaded that request and started dodging both women, then they went to the police. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-wikileaks-assange-charges-idUSTRE6B669H20101207
Gelfling 545
@srv: It’s early in the day to be this befuddled.
Villago Delenda Est
@Gelfling 545: It’s what srv does. And Srv so brilliantly parodies.
Chyron HR
@srv:
At the stake or in an oven?
Woodrowfan
@Gelfling 545: well, it’s late in the day in Russia…
Joel
@Bobby K: Unfucking believable. Our trolls are so much shittier than they used to be.
trollhattan
@NorthLeft12:
Adams is all out of sharks to jump. He fancies himself a hypnotist and an expert on propaganda and the subconscious, all somehow making him an expert in all things political. His cartoon was once very funny.
geg6
@Bobby K:
Not from me. I figured the rapist’s game out early on. I was never a fan of Assange, the sexual predator. He’s criminal too cowardly to face his crimes. Why would I support anything he did? And then he got involved with the traitor Snowden and it proved that I was right about his character all along.
Speak for yourself, Sparky.
Kylroy
@trollhattan: At this point it’s less “sharks to jump” and more “paint to huff”.
trnc
@NorthLeft12: I think it’s because as Adams becomes more desperate to look like he actually knows something outside of his cartoon world, his cognitive thinking skills take a dive proportionally. He was convinced that the mango menace would win simply because he had branded “Crooked Hillary” while she had signs that said “Love Trumps Hate.” The idiot actually told Bill Maher that it would work against her because people would see “Love Trump.” Outside of Trump supporters, who can’t get past 5 letters on the second word of a three word phrase?
But my favorite Adams dingbat moment is the I’m Brilliant – Just Ask Me one. That was about 1878 hours ago, and I have yet to see any evidence that he has mastered anything beyond the ability to not poop openly in the street.
Chyron HR
@trollhattan:
Let’s not sell Adams short–he thinks he can alter reality with his psychic powers.
sukabi
@Kylroy: the sharpies, waaaaaaaay to many sharpies.
chopper
@Bobby K:
well then, get to fuckin’ work.
tkrr
@C. Isaac: That is a weird-ass argument. I find it nearly impossible to believe that HRC would unilaterally create a no-fly zone in Syria without the Kremlin’s cooperation — she just is not remotely that stupid.
WaterGirl
As long as we’re talking about Trump damaging his brand… I would say that wikileaks hasn’t done itself any favors lately in the eyes of anyone who might have been sympathetic before now. I mean, is there any room now to think that they were just trying to do the right thing?
Ruckus
@eric:
Don’t try to make any sense of it. You’ll only hurt yourself.
BruceFromOhio
Grift-O-Matic 2016 knows no boundaries in the world of an apparently endless supply of marks to fleece.
LABiker
Also in the merch tent, did anyone see the buttons that say, “Life’s a bitch, don’t vote one” [sic]? I think that’s the ‘morans’ of 2016 so far.
sloan
@srv: Hey has that Dilbert dude started walking back his 98% Trump victory prediction yet?
Because there’s a 98% chance that he will before election day. And he’ll still claim to have been right all along!