The vast weight of evidence presented so far has shown us that the central cause of January 6th was one man, Donald Trump, who many others followed. None of this would have happened without him. He was personally and substantially involved in all of it.
I really do suspect it [the election] will be up in the air. When that happens the key thing to do is claim victory. Possession is nine tenths of the law. 'No, we won. Fuck you. Sorry. Over. We won. You're wrong. Fuck you.'
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Similar video of Steve Bannon has been available to the public since this July. Bannon, too, described the strategy.
And what Trump's gonna do, is just declare victory. Right? He's gonna declare victory. But that doesn't mean he's a winner. He's just gonna say he's a winner. More of our people vote early that count. Theirs vote in mail. So they're going to have a natural disadvantage and Trump's going to take advantage of it. That's our strategy. So when you wake up Wednesday morning it's going to be a firestorm. . . . And Trump's gonna be there sitting there mocking, sweeting shit out, 'You lose.' I'm the winner. I'm the king."
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People with a primary diet of Fox News don't hear Stone or Bannon spilling the beans. They hear that Trump won, and that somehow Democrats stole the election.
The news blackout is profound. The House Committee hearing does not penetrate the Fox shield. This morning on Fox the news is about Hunter Biden's laptop, a loud heckler at a Town Hall held by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a mother attending school board meetings to make accusations of "grooming."
The Fox News website this morning leads with criticism of Biden for claiming progress on inflation. There follows a report that Bill Murray "absolutely hated" the SNL cast; a family tradition of a general store in Pennsylvania; that mother angry about grooming at a gay themed school Halloween show; voters in Brazil who prefer Trump to Biden; and a Colorado tow company with exotic cars to auction.
The 16th story on Fox website acknowledges something revealed by the committee, but it wasn't about Trump. A story describes Nancy Pelosi while the Capitol was under attack saying she wanted to "punch" Trump if he showed up in support of the riot. There is no story anywhere on Fox that describes the revelations of the January 6 committee.
The Fox News blackout helps explain the lockstep behavior of GOP candidates and officeholders in support of Trump. GOP primary voters think Trump is a victim. People who know better don’t dare tell them that Trump is conning them.
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8 comments:
Considering Trump’s attempted coup, there truly is no other president so corrupt or destructive. He and his cult are like Putin’s fifth column.
I have to laugh at people accusing President Biden of corruption without any evidence. The whole point of Trump’s presidency was to profit from it, at least until he realized how easy and amusing it was to manipulate half the country into swallowing complete bullshit.
RIP: May he rest in prison.
I have written it before, but it merits repeating- public airwaves need to have balance in the reporting as used to exist. Rush Limbaugh and hate radio started the destruction of America and then Fox News took over. Licensing should demand a balance of reporting. I have read that viewers of exclusively Fox News are less informed then people who watch and read no news. It doesn’t seem like anyone ever suggests that licensing should be re-examined. I guess it’s just me that thinks that, oh well.
Faux News is the epitome of "Fake News!" Irony noted.
Oregon used to do vote by mail the right way. Your ballot had to be in by 8:00 PM on Election Day, the ballots could be counted right then, and the results of the election would be known sometime later that night. Instead we now have this catastrophically stupid system where your ballot only has to be postmarked by Election Day. So we have to wait something like a week until we are sure that all of the properly postmarked ballots have trickled in.
It would be difficult to design a system more likely to sap voter confidence in the integrity of elections. Partial counts continue to be released over the course of a week or two, and the results keep changing back and forth. Even if everything is on the up and up, it looks unreliable and open to all kinds of potential manipulation.
Why did the Democrats do this? Apparently to accommodate voters who are too inattentive and/or incompetent to get their ballots in on time. My computer scientist’s view of democracy is that it’s an effort to extract high-quality decisions from a large number of components whose quality varies widely. Democrats seem determined to do everything they can to lower the quality of those components.
This reminds me of the infamous quote by Senator Roman Ruska:
“There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they?”
Fox News = BAD
CNN & MSNBC = GOOD
Breitbart = BAD
New York Times & Washington Post = GOOD
All that is left for me is to hope that November 8th is a repudiation of the lies the GOP and Fox spread. Realistically it appears to be a red wave developing. Sad.
My biggest concern is that if the roles were reversed, Trump wouldn’t be holding hearings. He’d be having his political rivals arrested and imprisoned a-la-Putin, and his loyalists in every jurisdiction wouldn’t just stand by- there would be a pig-pile.
It would make the civil “unrest” in aftermath of George Floyd seem as tame as a kindergarten food fight.
The First Amendment is a double-edged sword. Todays post shows that the very freedoms it enables may be the very cause of its undoing.
Independents, Greens and Republicans get the exact same amount of time to send in their ballots as Democrats. Additionally, the post office is not perfect or entirely predictable.
This is the same rule followed by the IRS for submitting tax returns. No one seems to complain about that.
Vote by mail is equal opportunity for every voter. Complaints about post marks are sour grapes and make no sense.
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