Literally almost no difference after a hand recount. The fact is, GA and AZ loom large in this. If this was actually close enough to steal, they would do it. I think that is abundantly clear at this point.
The problem they have is the same problem they had running against Biden. They didn't change the playbook from their expectation of facing Bernie, and, in this case, their plan assumed only WI, MI and PA would need to be contested, and moving one of them could shift things. But they didn't count on Biden adding AZ and GA, and now their focus solely on the Rust Belt is meaningless (well, legally meaningless, what they are doing matters quite a bit).
Literally almost no difference after a hand recount. The fact is, GA and AZ loom large in this. If this was actually close enough to steal, they would do it. I think that is abundantly clear at this point.
The problem they have is the same problem they had running against Biden. They didn't change the playbook from their expectation of facing Bernie, and, in this case, their plan assumed only WI, MI and PA would need to be contested, and moving one of them could shift things. But they didn't count on Biden adding AZ and GA, and now their focus solely on the Rust Belt is meaningless (well, legally meaningless, what they are doing matters quite a bit).
I just hope my dad didn't sink too much of my inheritance into this shyster's coffers... ?
Trump's lawyers are only arguing that Pennsylvania votes in the presidential election are corrupt. They filed papers in court saying they did not contest votes in any other Pennsylvania election.
Trump wants all 6.8 million Pennsylvania votes for president thrown out.
Trump also asked the court to give him control of all Pennsylvania's electoral college votes.
The difference in argument, and I didn’t agree with it then, is that Clinton at least had the popular vote to fall back on to suggest it.
Trump has the voices in his head.
Infinite lawsuits, sitting President inviting state reps to White House to strong-arm them into overturning results in select states, the entire national party playing along vs......John Podesta agreeing some electors get some intelligence information. Yeah, I'd say the popular vote argument isn't the only reason the scales aren't equal here. If the goal here is equivalence, it's the difference between a match and 100 people with flamethrowers.
I mean, I was there, there was never any serious discussion about any of this, or Jill Stein's bullshit grift recount in Wisconsin. Clinton had conceded, Obama had started the transition immediately. Trump's refusal to do either is the dominant national story.
You also have Senator Lindsey graham phoning multiple states telling them to commit election fraud and toss legal ballots until they get the results that they want.
Trump wants all in person early votes thrown out in Milwaukee and Dane county. Those are the two most Democratic counties in the state. Every other county is apparently fine.
It's just obvious on the face of it. They dont have evidence of widespread fraud, and they're only trying to turn over every stone in states that Trump needs to win, and only in the Presidential race.
The idea that any of this is authentic is about as laughable as when people were saying Trump is against corruption. In retrospect, the level of corruption we're seeing *right* now makes that even more obvious for its bullshit.
Because the vaccine roll-out is going to overlap almost EXACTLY with the Administrations changing, this is arguably the MOST important transition period in history. And we aren't even getting a begrudging one. Trump and the Republicans betraying this country to the last.
My guess is it's pretty reliable. It's worth considering the statistics though. The database has been running almost 40 years and covers all type of elections, petitions and ballot initiatives - both national and local. The number of votes involved in those must be into the tens of thousands of millions.
I was going on here to look at the context of this level of fraud and had remembered that MIT had done some work on it. When I went to find that though, I found that it was specifically inspired by the Heritage list . The main concentration of their comment related to voting by mail, but the picture for all types of voting is very similar, so I'll let the MIT statement provide the context rather than continuing with my own:
"Widespread calls to conduct the 2020 elections by mail, to protect voters from COVID-19 exposure, are being met with charges that the system inevitably would lead to massive voter fraud. This is simply not true.
Vote fraud in the United States is exceedingly rare, with mailed ballots and otherwise. Over the past 20 years, about 250 million votes have been cast by a mail ballot nationally. The Heritage Foundation maintains an online database of election fraud cases in the United States and reports that there have been just over 1,200 cases of vote fraud of all forms, resulting in 1,100 criminal convictions, over the past 20 years. Of these, 204 involved the fraudulent use of absentee ballots; 143 resulted in criminal convictions.
Let’s put that data in perspective.
One hundred forty-three cases of fraud using mailed ballots over the course of 20 years comes out to seven to eight cases per year, nationally. It also means that across the 50 states, there has been an average of three cases per state over the 20-year span. That is just one case per state every six or seven years. We are talking about an occurrence that translates to about 0.00006 percent of total votes cast.
Oregon is the state that started mailing ballots to all voters in 2000 and has worked diligently to put in place stringent security measures, as well as strict punishments for those who would tamper with a mailed ballot. For that state, the following numbers apply: With well over 50 million ballots cast, there have been only two fraud cases verifiable enough to result in convictions for mail-ballot fraud in 20 years. That is 0.000004 percent — about five times less likely than getting hit by lightning in the United States."
Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), commemorating the lives that have been lost to transphobic violence over the past year. Like a lot of organizations, my local support group is going to read the names of the folks who have been killed on a livestream on Facebook. I'm one of the folks volunteering to moderate the stream and remove hate comments in the chat.
Joe Biden released a brief statement on TDOR, and while I'm not his biggest fan, I'm glad he's bringing attention to it (his victory speech also mentioned transgender people, a first in the nation's history).
My guess is it's pretty reliable. It's worth considering the statistics though. The database has been running almost 40 years and covers all type of elections, petitions and ballot initiatives - both national and local. The number of votes involved in those must be into the tens of thousands of millions.
I was going on here to look at the context of this level of fraud and had remembered that MIT had done some work on it. When I went to find that though, I found that it was specifically inspired by the Heritage list . The main concentration of their comment related to voting by mail, but the picture for all types of voting is very similar, so I'll let the MIT statement provide the context rather than continuing with my own:
"Widespread calls to conduct the 2020 elections by mail, to protect voters from COVID-19 exposure, are being met with charges that the system inevitably would lead to massive voter fraud. This is simply not true.
Vote fraud in the United States is exceedingly rare, with mailed ballots and otherwise. Over the past 20 years, about 250 million votes have been cast by a mail ballot nationally. The Heritage Foundation maintains an online database of election fraud cases in the United States and reports that there have been just over 1,200 cases of vote fraud of all forms, resulting in 1,100 criminal convictions, over the past 20 years. Of these, 204 involved the fraudulent use of absentee ballots; 143 resulted in criminal convictions.
Let’s put that data in perspective.
One hundred forty-three cases of fraud using mailed ballots over the course of 20 years comes out to seven to eight cases per year, nationally. It also means that across the 50 states, there has been an average of three cases per state over the 20-year span. That is just one case per state every six or seven years. We are talking about an occurrence that translates to about 0.00006 percent of total votes cast.
Oregon is the state that started mailing ballots to all voters in 2000 and has worked diligently to put in place stringent security measures, as well as strict punishments for those who would tamper with a mailed ballot. For that state, the following numbers apply: With well over 50 million ballots cast, there have been only two fraud cases verifiable enough to result in convictions for mail-ballot fraud in 20 years. That is 0.000004 percent — about five times less likely than getting hit by lightning in the United States."
In other words, it would be both theoretically and mathematically impossible to steal any election decided by more than 1-5 votes (have their been ANY elections with a margin that small??). Not 500, not even 50, but 5. And this is the cart the GOP rides in on as an excuse for wholesale attempts at disenfranchisement. The entire concept is basically a right-wing urban legend (emphasis on the urban in this case).
If someone wants to make the case as to why the Republican position on this ISN'T racist to it's core, they will have to explain why, magically, they never allege fraud in predominantly white and rural areas, nor are their policies enacted to prevent a non-existent problem ever focused in those areas. Only in cities, only in places with a high population of minorities and college students. When Rudy Giuliani says the word "Detroit" with disgust in his delivery, understand he is talking about a city that is 80% black. This is not an accident.
Infinite lawsuits, sitting President inviting state reps to White House to strong-arm them into overturning results in select states, the entire national party playing along vs......John Podesta agreeing some electors get some intelligence information. Yeah, I'd say the popular vote argument isn't the only reason the scales aren't equal here. If the goal here is equivalence, it's the difference between a match and 100 people with flamethrowers.
Infinite lawsuits, wow. It takes some truly epic level denial to consider the years worth of lawsuits against Trump personally as of a smaller scale and of lesser importance than the, what, 2 weeks we have been seeing lawsuits past the election?
Or that the only actor who ever cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2016 election was John Podesta, rather than almost everyone on the left, media figure and politician alike. The dishonesty is so flagrant it's like, what's the point here? Observable reality, memory, nothing is real so long as it doesn't paint them in the best possible light.
Even during the campaign Clinton was already setting the stage for the Russia conspiracy to take place. This is BEFORE the Podesta email leaks, the very basis of the Russia investigation in the first place. At this point in time, there is absolutely no reason to be saying these things. It makes everything that happens later that much more obvious.
Meanwhile policy around Russia has been anything but universally favorable and more than once has he ratcheted up military tensions against them.
It got so bad that polls have shown a majority of Democrats believe Russia literally hacked voting machines:
Which is classic conspiracy theory thinking, literally of the same kind being presented now. This didn't come out of a nowhere, it was a mindset deliberately cultivated by mainstream news organizations and the highest politicians in the land.
Democrats and Resistance types wanted Trump impeached or imprisoned. 3 years of time were devoted to the politics surrounding that very question, with all major leftist media and influencers supporting it wholeheartedly. After 2 weeks of failing court cases about audits and recounts, now it's not equivalent and the Republicans have been so much worse. Utter, demonstrable horseshit. But such is the case of most democrat/republican comparisons here.
Democrats having a opinion about the Russia investigation is now somehow equivalent to actively attempting to throw out the election results in multiple states. As I've said before, impeachment has nothing to do with "accepting the validity of an election", because even a successful one does not do so. It's a constitutional remedy to Presidential criminality, and even if it is successful, transfers power to an elected Vice President.
I'm aware of the Aaron Mate, Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracey view on the situation. Intimately familiar. I get it. The contrarian left are making a living off the false equivalency.
Please explain to what American interest there needs to be to have Russia reinstated into the G8 without being held accountable for it's action in Crimea?
Please explain to me what Flynn was doing with the Russians prior to the transfer of power after the 2016 election?
Please also explain to me what Roger Stone and Paul Manafort were sentenced with when it comes to the Russian Hoax/Conspiracy?
Please explain to me what the hotel meeting with Trump Jr was all about and do not, for a second, say it was about orphans.
Oh and please read the Republican led Senate report that clearly stated that the Trump team was working with Russia in the 2016 election.
Lets not glaze over these questions and facts while you throw out a term like 'Conspiracy.' There is/was something there with Russia that needed to be investigated. Is it as big and bad as what people make it out to be? Probably not. I will say most of America didn't understand the role in which Russia played in 2016 during and after the 2016 election and I also think Cambridge Analytica played a larger role than any Russian operative in determining the outcome of the election, but it is quite frankly, a lot more than what Trump is relying on at the moment which is the voices in his head.
Cherry picking tweets and news stories (my favorite is the Joe Biden one where Putin had a political opponent poisoned and he is condemning Putin for the action and Trump for not being able to condemn Putin as well) and claiming they are all part of this giant conspiracy is quite pathetic.
Each one of those tweets had a context at the time of being published and comparing them to what Trump is doing now is preposterous.
And don't even get me started on how Trump removing troops out of Syria/Iraq benefited Russia. That isn't him being hard on Russia, that is him having to overcorrect one of his biggest international bungles over the last 4 years. All because he was cozying up to another strongarm dictator.
Like seriously. Feel free to glaze over the last 4 years as if Trump did nothing wrong if you want. That's your choice and blindness but that doesn't give him (or any republicans now working with him) the right to attempt to overturn any election results without ZERO proof.
We'll never get a full reckoning, because all the major players lied to investigators, were found guilty of doing so, and 2/3rds of them were either pardoned by Trump or had Bill Barr interfere to drop the charges. It was and is no different than mafia soldiers taking the years so the boss can't be implicated.
Trump's fit about losing the election isn't even specifically about not getting to be President anymore. It's the fact that his blanket immunity to criminal charges for him and his family is about to go up in smoke, and that banks are gonna start to demand payment on his loans, which he can't pay back.\
Biden's Justice Department is now in an impossible situation, because Trump and his children and cohorts are, without question, criminals. But any actual prosecution of what they did will be viewed and framed as nothing but retribution. So they will likely skate on everything because the entire thing is now a Catch-22.
Yeah, I feel like the comparisons between the 2016 election meddling (which isnt a conspiracy, mind you - but something that virtually every intelligence agency in the US and congress has agreed happened) and Trump actively trying to subvert elections in 2020 shows a general lack of understanding of either situation.
They are unequal in a myriad of ways, not the least in which is that Obama and the government understood that Russia was meddling and still agreed to transition to Trump, whereas Trump understands that he legally lost and is totally refusing to transition to Biden.
You'd have a little more sympathy if you tried to make the argument that Trump refusing to concede was the same as the conspiracy on the left that Russia actively changed vote totals. That's a much more apples-to-apples comparison than the one you're forcing. However, the elephant in the room there is... that conspiracy was never openly pushed by Clinton/Obama/Any major leader of the Democratic party. Trump is actively arguing (without evidence) of software flipping millions of votes from Trump to Biden, which is being allowed by the GOP and supported by conservative voters across the nation.
Sorry - but the comparison just isnt a good one. At all.
Which is classic conspiracy theory thinking, literally of the same kind being presented now. This didn't come out of a nowhere, it was a mindset deliberately cultivated by mainstream news organizations and the highest politicians in the land.
Democrats and Resistance types wanted Trump impeached or imprisoned. 3 years of time were devoted to the politics surrounding that very question, with all major leftist media and influencers supporting it wholeheartedly. After 2 weeks of failing court cases about audits and recounts, now it's not equivalent and the Republicans have been so much worse. Utter, demonstrable horseshit. But such is the case of most democrat/republican comparisons here.
I agree there's a problem associated with belief in conspiracy theories. However, the fact remains that you are attempting to equate 2 different things - Democrat claims that Russia influenced the 2016 election are not comparable with the multitude of tweets from Trump claiming fraud in the election or the large number of lawsuits doing the same.
The NY Times and Washington Post articles are behind paywalls for me, but none of the tweets and none of the CNN articles suggested that votes were tampered with. They did refer to Russia having attempted to influence the election, but that really should not be controversial - all US intelligence agencies have been saying that for years. There were also references to troubling links between Russia and the Trump campaign - and again the fact that there were such links is not controversial. I don't want to relitigate the Mueller report, but it was clear from that there were links - it just said those did not provide evidence of a criminal conspiracy.
The facts remain:
- that Clinton conceded the election as soon as it was called for Trump and has never said that the result should be overturned.
- Obama started the transition process at an early stage and invited Trump into the White House. Again he has never called the result into question.
- compare that with Trump who called into question the result of the 2016 election - until he realized he'd won it. He did the same in 2020 and then doubled down (and double-doubled down etc etc) once he realized that he'd lost this time.
I know you believe that the 'mainstream media' wield a lot of influence, but equating the odd opinion article that did cast doubt on the 2016 election result with the current concerted campaign by Trump, aided by quite a few other Republicans, to convince voters the 2020 election was won by fraud just seems bizarre to me.
I do think this both sides are the same is maybe the most efficient obfuscatory tactic the GOP has. It seems that whenever they do something wrong, they will just accuse the Democrats of doing the same thing. Sometimes they actually have a point because the Democrats are anything but perfect, but just as often they have not and it is a false equivalence.
The Russia thing is a good example of such a false equivalence. There was good reason to investigate the Trump campaign and it's also true the investigation was hindered. They never even interviewed one of the family members.
And sometimes the GOP just does it pre-emptively. I would not be surprised at all that they are going to cheat in the next election - after all, they will say, so did the Democrats. Even in the past, things like Kemp supervising an election he ran in was really shady.
Other examples include jailing children and the accusations of Nepotism and shady financial dealings against Biden, as well as the supreme court nominations. It's the political equivalent of shouting "you did too" and sadly it is working.
Ironically enough the “both sides are as bad as each other” narrative is one that is consistently promoted in numerous countries by Russia and other ‘bad actors’, in order to degrade the functionality of electoral democracies across the world. At present that appears to have become- for the most part - a self-perpetuating system within the Republican party’s ideology however, and really doesn’t need any help from outside. For what it’s worth even Russia are perfectly happy to see the back of Trump’s unpredictability for now though professional analysts are reporting.
The refusal of the Republican party to accept electoral defeat, and the willingness of much of their base to believe it, could be highly problematic going forward. Refusal to accept electoral defeat has a corrosive effect on national coherency. Just take a look at the electoral history of a country like Bangladesh...
Donald Trump himself pushed the theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States for years (it's one of the main reasons he was able to crash the primary, as he was the Birther in Chief long before he was Commander in Chief). Even if you believe the Russia investigation is a complete hoax, the more apt comparison would be the crusade in right-wing media to get him to release his "long-form birth certificate" for almost his entire first term, not the outright rejection of vote totals. And even this is a shitty analogy, because the birther argument was based on nothing but racism, whereas Trump made his own bed on Russia by a.) firing the FBI Director for not dropping the case against Flynn at his request and b.) going on national television and admitting that was why he axed him.
Nothing has changed. People STILL defend Trump over things he has outright CONFESSED to, and then act like everyone else is crazy for pointing it out after the fact. Take our current situation. Trump told us a half-dozen times the last four years he wouldn't accept the results if he lost. Lo and behold......here we are. We aren't using some grand prediction model or crystal ball. We just listened to what he has been saying, and didn't automatically dismiss it as a joke, even though we were told we should, countless times.
I'm watching the Transgender Day of Remembrance livestream and I'm crying... The SAGA leaders are friends of mine and hearing Gideon tell us they would always be there for us hit so hard.
I didn't think it would affect me this much. They're singing a hymn now, a group of people all singing from separate homes, together on one screen. It's about not being alone when you're a member of a community.
There are 37 names to read today. It's an incomplete number because law enforcement misgenders trans folks after death; this is just the ones we know.
This is why politics can't be an impersonal thing anymore. It will always be directly entwined with the physical safety of the people I love. They will always be in danger until we're treated as equal to cis people.
One of the ladies from SAGA, one of the former presidents I think, is talking about the color issue. Every year, the trans people who were killed for their identity are nearly all trans women of color.
Comments
Literally almost no difference after a hand recount. The fact is, GA and AZ loom large in this. If this was actually close enough to steal, they would do it. I think that is abundantly clear at this point.
The problem they have is the same problem they had running against Biden. They didn't change the playbook from their expectation of facing Bernie, and, in this case, their plan assumed only WI, MI and PA would need to be contested, and moving one of them could shift things. But they didn't count on Biden adding AZ and GA, and now their focus solely on the Rust Belt is meaningless (well, legally meaningless, what they are doing matters quite a bit).
I just hope my dad didn't sink too much of my inheritance into this shyster's coffers... ?
Can we just honor the results of state elections already? Faithless electors are anti democratic.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/12/15/opinions/faithless-electors-save-america-piro/index.html?__twitter_impression=true
The difference in argument, and I didn’t agree with it then, is that Clinton at least had the popular vote to fall back on to suggest it.
Trump has the voices in his head.
Michigan Republican leader is meeting with Trump at White House to discuss coup
https://m.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2020/11/20/michigan-republican-leader-is-meeting-with-trump-at-white-house-to-discuss-coup
There are also discussions currently underway with the President about inviting Republican state legislators from Pennsylvania to the White House
Trump lawyers filed a motion in Pennsylvania to clarify they only want to block the state from certifying results of the presidential elections, not any other races on the same ballot.
Trump's lawyers are only arguing that Pennsylvania votes in the presidential election are corrupt. They filed papers in court saying they did not contest votes in any other Pennsylvania election.
Trump wants all 6.8 million Pennsylvania votes for president thrown out.
Trump also asked the court to give him control of all Pennsylvania's electoral college votes.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-lawyers-pennsylvania-motion-only-block-certifying-presidential-election-results-2020-11
Infinite lawsuits, sitting President inviting state reps to White House to strong-arm them into overturning results in select states, the entire national party playing along vs......John Podesta agreeing some electors get some intelligence information. Yeah, I'd say the popular vote argument isn't the only reason the scales aren't equal here. If the goal here is equivalence, it's the difference between a match and 100 people with flamethrowers.
I mean, I was there, there was never any serious discussion about any of this, or Jill Stein's bullshit grift recount in Wisconsin. Clinton had conceded, Obama had started the transition immediately. Trump's refusal to do either is the dominant national story.
It's just obvious on the face of it. They dont have evidence of widespread fraud, and they're only trying to turn over every stone in states that Trump needs to win, and only in the Presidential race.
The idea that any of this is authentic is about as laughable as when people were saying Trump is against corruption. In retrospect, the level of corruption we're seeing *right* now makes that even more obvious for its bullshit.
My guess is it's pretty reliable. It's worth considering the statistics though. The database has been running almost 40 years and covers all type of elections, petitions and ballot initiatives - both national and local. The number of votes involved in those must be into the tens of thousands of millions.
I was going on here to look at the context of this level of fraud and had remembered that MIT had done some work on it. When I went to find that though, I found that it was specifically inspired by the Heritage list
"Widespread calls to conduct the 2020 elections by mail, to protect voters from COVID-19 exposure, are being met with charges that the system inevitably would lead to massive voter fraud. This is simply not true.
Vote fraud in the United States is exceedingly rare, with mailed ballots and otherwise. Over the past 20 years, about 250 million votes have been cast by a mail ballot nationally. The Heritage Foundation maintains an online database of election fraud cases in the United States and reports that there have been just over 1,200 cases of vote fraud of all forms, resulting in 1,100 criminal convictions, over the past 20 years. Of these, 204 involved the fraudulent use of absentee ballots; 143 resulted in criminal convictions.
Let’s put that data in perspective.
One hundred forty-three cases of fraud using mailed ballots over the course of 20 years comes out to seven to eight cases per year, nationally. It also means that across the 50 states, there has been an average of three cases per state over the 20-year span. That is just one case per state every six or seven years. We are talking about an occurrence that translates to about 0.00006 percent of total votes cast.
Oregon is the state that started mailing ballots to all voters in 2000 and has worked diligently to put in place stringent security measures, as well as strict punishments for those who would tamper with a mailed ballot. For that state, the following numbers apply: With well over 50 million ballots cast, there have been only two fraud cases verifiable enough to result in convictions for mail-ballot fraud in 20 years. That is 0.000004 percent — about five times less likely than getting hit by lightning in the United States."
Joe Biden released a brief statement on TDOR, and while I'm not his biggest fan, I'm glad he's bringing attention to it (his victory speech also mentioned transgender people, a first in the nation's history).
In other words, it would be both theoretically and mathematically impossible to steal any election decided by more than 1-5 votes (have their been ANY elections with a margin that small??). Not 500, not even 50, but 5. And this is the cart the GOP rides in on as an excuse for wholesale attempts at disenfranchisement. The entire concept is basically a right-wing urban legend (emphasis on the urban in this case).
If someone wants to make the case as to why the Republican position on this ISN'T racist to it's core, they will have to explain why, magically, they never allege fraud in predominantly white and rural areas, nor are their policies enacted to prevent a non-existent problem ever focused in those areas. Only in cities, only in places with a high population of minorities and college students. When Rudy Giuliani says the word "Detroit" with disgust in his delivery, understand he is talking about a city that is 80% black. This is not an accident.
Infinite lawsuits, wow. It takes some truly epic level denial to consider the years worth of lawsuits against Trump personally as of a smaller scale and of lesser importance than the, what, 2 weeks we have been seeing lawsuits past the election?
Or that the only actor who ever cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2016 election was John Podesta, rather than almost everyone on the left, media figure and politician alike. The dishonesty is so flagrant it's like, what's the point here? Observable reality, memory, nothing is real so long as it doesn't paint them in the best possible light.
Even during the campaign Clinton was already setting the stage for the Russia conspiracy to take place. This is BEFORE the Podesta email leaks, the very basis of the Russia investigation in the first place. At this point in time, there is absolutely no reason to be saying these things. It makes everything that happens later that much more obvious.
Every major figure in the Democratic Party was supporting it the entire time, and to this very day continue to repeat the conspiracy.
Major Media organizations to this day continue to assert the conspiracy:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/22/politics/trump-putin-election-interference-intelligence-assessment/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/27/opinions/trump-biden-election-russia-putin-fishman/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/16/opinions/trump-russia-giuliani-vinograd/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/11/opinions/russia-vladimir-putin-election-meddling-zwack/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/opinion/trump-russia-2016-report.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/08/us/politics/trump-russia.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/us/politics/trump-russia-justice-department.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/world/europe/russia-china-trump-election.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-russia-putin/2020/10/24/4edb462e-13bb-11eb-ba42-ec6a580836ed_story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/09/21/russian-agent-trump-counterintelligence/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/01/more-evidence-trumps-subservience-putin-we-still-dont-know-why/
Meanwhile policy around Russia has been anything but universally favorable and more than once has he ratcheted up military tensions against them.
It got so bad that polls have shown a majority of Democrats believe Russia literally hacked voting machines:
Which is classic conspiracy theory thinking, literally of the same kind being presented now. This didn't come out of a nowhere, it was a mindset deliberately cultivated by mainstream news organizations and the highest politicians in the land.
Democrats and Resistance types wanted Trump impeached or imprisoned. 3 years of time were devoted to the politics surrounding that very question, with all major leftist media and influencers supporting it wholeheartedly. After 2 weeks of failing court cases about audits and recounts, now it's not equivalent and the Republicans have been so much worse. Utter, demonstrable horseshit. But such is the case of most democrat/republican comparisons here.
I'm aware of the Aaron Mate, Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracey view on the situation. Intimately familiar. I get it. The contrarian left are making a living off the false equivalency.
Please explain to what American interest there needs to be to have Russia reinstated into the G8 without being held accountable for it's action in Crimea?
Please explain to me what Flynn was doing with the Russians prior to the transfer of power after the 2016 election?
Please also explain to me what Roger Stone and Paul Manafort were sentenced with when it comes to the Russian Hoax/Conspiracy?
Please explain to me what the hotel meeting with Trump Jr was all about and do not, for a second, say it was about orphans.
Oh and please read the Republican led Senate report that clearly stated that the Trump team was working with Russia in the 2016 election.
Lets not glaze over these questions and facts while you throw out a term like 'Conspiracy.' There is/was something there with Russia that needed to be investigated. Is it as big and bad as what people make it out to be? Probably not. I will say most of America didn't understand the role in which Russia played in 2016 during and after the 2016 election and I also think Cambridge Analytica played a larger role than any Russian operative in determining the outcome of the election, but it is quite frankly, a lot more than what Trump is relying on at the moment which is the voices in his head.
Cherry picking tweets and news stories (my favorite is the Joe Biden one where Putin had a political opponent poisoned and he is condemning Putin for the action and Trump for not being able to condemn Putin as well) and claiming they are all part of this giant conspiracy is quite pathetic.
Each one of those tweets had a context at the time of being published and comparing them to what Trump is doing now is preposterous.
And don't even get me started on how Trump removing troops out of Syria/Iraq benefited Russia. That isn't him being hard on Russia, that is him having to overcorrect one of his biggest international bungles over the last 4 years. All because he was cozying up to another strongarm dictator.
Like seriously. Feel free to glaze over the last 4 years as if Trump did nothing wrong if you want. That's your choice and blindness but that doesn't give him (or any republicans now working with him) the right to attempt to overturn any election results without ZERO proof.
Trump's fit about losing the election isn't even specifically about not getting to be President anymore. It's the fact that his blanket immunity to criminal charges for him and his family is about to go up in smoke, and that banks are gonna start to demand payment on his loans, which he can't pay back.\
Biden's Justice Department is now in an impossible situation, because Trump and his children and cohorts are, without question, criminals. But any actual prosecution of what they did will be viewed and framed as nothing but retribution. So they will likely skate on everything because the entire thing is now a Catch-22.
They are unequal in a myriad of ways, not the least in which is that Obama and the government understood that Russia was meddling and still agreed to transition to Trump, whereas Trump understands that he legally lost and is totally refusing to transition to Biden.
You'd have a little more sympathy if you tried to make the argument that Trump refusing to concede was the same as the conspiracy on the left that Russia actively changed vote totals. That's a much more apples-to-apples comparison than the one you're forcing. However, the elephant in the room there is... that conspiracy was never openly pushed by Clinton/Obama/Any major leader of the Democratic party. Trump is actively arguing (without evidence) of software flipping millions of votes from Trump to Biden, which is being allowed by the GOP and supported by conservative voters across the nation.
Sorry - but the comparison just isnt a good one. At all.
I agree there's a problem associated with belief in conspiracy theories. However, the fact remains that you are attempting to equate 2 different things - Democrat claims that Russia influenced the 2016 election are not comparable with the multitude of tweets from Trump claiming fraud in the election or the large number of lawsuits doing the same.
The NY Times and Washington Post articles are behind paywalls for me, but none of the tweets and none of the CNN articles suggested that votes were tampered with. They did refer to Russia having attempted to influence the election, but that really should not be controversial - all US intelligence agencies have been saying that for years. There were also references to troubling links between Russia and the Trump campaign - and again the fact that there were such links is not controversial. I don't want to relitigate the Mueller report, but it was clear from that there were links - it just said those did not provide evidence of a criminal conspiracy.
The facts remain:
- that Clinton conceded the election as soon as it was called for Trump and has never said that the result should be overturned.
- Obama started the transition process at an early stage and invited Trump into the White House. Again he has never called the result into question.
- compare that with Trump who called into question the result of the 2016 election - until he realized he'd won it. He did the same in 2020 and then doubled down (and double-doubled down etc etc) once he realized that he'd lost this time.
I know you believe that the 'mainstream media' wield a lot of influence, but equating the odd opinion article that did cast doubt on the 2016 election result with the current concerted campaign by Trump, aided by quite a few other Republicans, to convince voters the 2020 election was won by fraud just seems bizarre to me.
The Russia thing is a good example of such a false equivalence. There was good reason to investigate the Trump campaign and it's also true the investigation was hindered. They never even interviewed one of the family members.
And sometimes the GOP just does it pre-emptively. I would not be surprised at all that they are going to cheat in the next election - after all, they will say, so did the Democrats. Even in the past, things like Kemp supervising an election he ran in was really shady.
Other examples include jailing children and the accusations of Nepotism and shady financial dealings against Biden, as well as the supreme court nominations. It's the political equivalent of shouting "you did too" and sadly it is working.
They just want to lie lie lie.
Republicans are bad for America.
Rick Scott
Chuck Grassley
Among Republicans with coronavirus.
Ben Carson says he's getting better but was desperately ill.
The refusal of the Republican party to accept electoral defeat, and the willingness of much of their base to believe it, could be highly problematic going forward. Refusal to accept electoral defeat has a corrosive effect on national coherency. Just take a look at the electoral history of a country like Bangladesh...
Nothing has changed. People STILL defend Trump over things he has outright CONFESSED to, and then act like everyone else is crazy for pointing it out after the fact. Take our current situation. Trump told us a half-dozen times the last four years he wouldn't accept the results if he lost. Lo and behold......here we are. We aren't using some grand prediction model or crystal ball. We just listened to what he has been saying, and didn't automatically dismiss it as a joke, even though we were told we should, countless times.
I didn't think it would affect me this much. They're singing a hymn now, a group of people all singing from separate homes, together on one screen. It's about not being alone when you're a member of a community.
There are 37 names to read today. It's an incomplete number because law enforcement misgenders trans folks after death; this is just the ones we know.
I'm not the only one who cried during the broadcast.