US Politics Thread 2016-2020

[August]

Originally Posted by Dowly

I didn't say that and you know it, but hey good try!

Well that's the gist of what you're saying whether you admit it or not. You're always eager to dismiss and minimize left wing violence if it's against those you hate. Just like here. There are numerous stories of innocent people being harassed and attacked by these thugs that you can't spin into blaming the victim but you ignore all of it.

[skidman]

Originally Posted by u crank

Will this kind of thing persist throught Biden's administration?

That's a very good question. But you and "The American Spectator" obviously already know the answer, months before Biden is even sworn in. And this is exactly the conduct that makes a discussion more or less pointless.

What we have of course is a complete 180 degree turn by Trump's detractors in the MSM who now are shamelessly willing to protect the President of their choice from any and all harmful reporting.

I don't think the conservative, libertarian and evangelical media will refrain from taking part in the press conferences in the WH in the future. But I expect a more professional performance by the new president, dealing with them.

Sure, a 78 year old faces physical limitations (we all do, don't we?), but I suppose him to outperform Trump in terms of attention span and ability to abstract.

More important: Biden is a politician, Trump is an amateur. Biden knows about the dos and don'ts. Wether or not we like it: Politics is a trade to learn. If the kitchen sink leaks, you call a plumber, not a banker.

[Skybird]

This thread already is on a slippery slope again.

-------

https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54910344

[u crank]

Originally Posted by skidman

That's a very good question. But you and "The American Spectator" obviously already know the answer, months before Biden is even sworn in.

If you read the article you would see that Biden's behavior since his candidacy began up until now is well documented. It isn't fiction. Do you have any facts to the contrary?

And this is exactly the conduct that makes a discussion more or less pointless.

Not much of an argument. It would seem to me that you and others consider Biden to be untouchable and that any criticism of him is unfair or unfounded. Joe Biden has been in politics since the Nixon administration. He has a train of political baggage a mile long and now he refuses to speak to the media in an honest and open manner. Do you think that is right? When someone like Chris Cillizza of CNN is complaining about this then it is worth noting. We can only go by what we now know so if Mr. Biden becomes more accessible then that would be a good thing. But it hasn't happened yet.

Sure, a 78 year old faces physical limitations (we all do, don't we?), but I suppose him to outperform Trump in terms of attention span and ability to abstract.

If you have been paying attention you would know that it is just the opposite. The future President has had numerous occasions where he has become confused and seems unable to finish a thought coherently. But we shall see. I'm all for giving him every chance in the world to prove his detractors wrong. Let's see if he does. He can start by granting non scripted press conferences. That is part of the job not an option.

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

Rgr the above and as a small point of interest or disinterest whichever viewpoint or opinion you have, I started following Trump on Twitter about a week ago and boy did I get my eyes opened.

How?

[August]

I'm guessing there will be an awful lot of "Trump was right" calls in the upcoming years.

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by August

I'm guessing there will be an awful lot of "Trump was right" calls in the upcoming years.

Not by his detractors. They'll never say that. But we will hear them lash out in anger and confusion plenty, they can never be truly happy. Their ideas of utopia are an illusion, right?

What I'm waiting for is the angst of the rich backers of the Dem party, they somehow haven't caught on to who is going to fund free college, free healthcare, and the GND, have they?

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Onkel Neal

How?

His posting is incessant and just about all his tweets and claims are without a shred of proof other than what is in his own mind. Nor have I seen so many different admin notes at the end of a tweet 'This claim about election fraud is disputed'

It is rather entertaining though and that is probably the reason I also follow Piers Morgan

[Jimbuna]

President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign has removed controversial claims it made in a lawsuit filed on Sunday in Pennsylvania that previously alleged its representatives were unable to watch the processing of 682,749 ballots.

The claims were a key component of the lawsuit, and had been amplified without evidence by the president and his inner circle.

State lawyers have since called for the lawsuit to be dismissed, saying it featured no “plausible claim for relief on any legal theory” in a statement provided to the court.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world...out&li=BBoPWjQ

He certainly doesn't appear to be doing himself any favours atm.

[August]

This guy is absolutely right.

Republicans Have Good Reason Not To Trust The Election Results

And it’s not because they’re stupid, traitorous Nazis.


By John Daniel Davidson November 16, 2020



To read reports in the mainstream press about the throngs of President Trump’s supporters who rallied in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, you’d think the crowd was made up of a bunch of conspiracy theory-addled rubes and delusional far-right extremists all of them hoodwinked into thinking the election was stolen. To read David Frum’s Twitter take, you’d think they were all Nazis.
The march came on the heels of a poll last week that found a staggering 70 percent of Republicans now say they don’t believe the presidential election was free and fair. That news, like news of the self-described Million MAGA March, was met with a mix of contempt, hysteria, and condescension from Democrats and the media.
Their rough consensus is that GOP voters who still support the president are either treasonous or stupid, reinforced constantly by a brittle insistence that there was “no fraud” in the presidential election. A totemic front-page declaration by the New York Times, “ELECTION OFFICIALS NATIONWIDE FIND NO FRAUD,” has been repeated everywhere, mantra-like. Any claims of voter fraud or ballot-counting irregularities, whether from President Trump or the tens of thousands who marched over the weekend, are “baseless,” “unfounded,” and have “no evidence” behind them.
There’s a palpable nervousness about the media’s insistence that the election was as pure as the driven snow. Maybe they seem so nervous because they know what everyone in America knows: there was nothing pure or secure or even ordinary about the election.
How could there be? Under the pretext of ensuring “voter access” during the pandemic, Democrats, leftist nonprofits, and activist judges across the country unleashed a flood of changes to election rules in the months leading up to the vote, including an unprecedented expansion of mail-in voting, an inherently fraught method of casting ballots that removes almost all oversight from the process.
No matter. States pushed ahead, mailing ballots to outdated voter rolls en masse and recklessly loosening oversight for how those ballots could be collected and counted. Chain-of-custody for absentee ballots went out the window, along with whatever meager safeguards usually apply to absentee voting. Ballot harvesting, long a tradition of corrupt Democratic political machines in places like Detroit and Philadelphia, was introduced in some places for the first time. Taken together, all these pandemic-inspired reforms presented an ideal opportunity for Democrats to flood absentee ballot-counting centers in major cities and run up the vote-count long after the polls closed on Election Day.
No wonder scores of Republican poll challengers in Michigan filed sworn affidavits claiming tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots were counted for Biden in Detroit. No wonder that in Philadelphia, poll watchers reported how they were forcibly kept from observing the counting of absentee ballots, as required under state law.


Not all the reports of ballot-counting skullduggery amount to old-fashioned voter fraud, but as my colleague Margot Cleveland has noted, they’re just as important because they undermine the integrity of an election just as much as, say, thousands of dead people voting.
Even more egregious than voter fraud (and harder to redress) are cases where election bureaucrats or activist judges simply ignored restrictions that GOP legislatures had passed into law. In Pennsylvania, the state supreme court brushed off rules set by lawmakers and extended a deadline for when absentee ballots could be received. Extending deadlines for absentee ballots is of course an invitation to break election laws—especially in Philadelphia, a city with a long history of ballot-stuffing and bribing election judges.
In other states, the corruption of election integrity was voluntary. In Georgia, the state government settled a lawsuit in March with a cadre of Democratic Party groups that changed the rules for accepting mail-in ballots. Instead of the signature on the ballot having to match the signature on the voter rolls, it only had to match the signature on the mail-in ballot application. You don’t need to be a sophisticated election thief to figure out how to get a fraudulent ballot counted under such rules.
On and on it goes. A dozen states temporarily expanded mail-in voting just for the 2020 election. Others mailed ballots to everyone on the voter rolls. Many others extended the mail-in ballot deadline, set up ballot drop boxes, and allowed mail-in ballot harvesting on a mass scale.
Any reasonable person can look at these changes and conclude they create conditions ripe for fraud and abuse. Only the most naïve, pollyannaish observer would survey all of the above and conclude, as our mainstream media has, that there was “no fraud” in the election. Of course there was, and everyone knows it.
Whether it was enough to change the outcome of the election, we’ll probably never know, partly because the kind of abuses and criminal activity engendered by mass mail-in voting are hard to detect and even harder to prove in court. But pointing all of this out, and having a problem with it, even to the point of saying you don’t have much confidence that the election was free and fair, doesn’t make you a rube or a conspiracy theorist.
By contrast, pretending that none of this had any effect on the election, and demonizing anyone who says it did, as the media is doing now, is a reaction born of self-doubt and desperation—like labeling anyone who disagrees with you a traitor or a Nazi. There’s an exhausted nervousness about it, a contempt rooted in insecurity. It’s the kind of thing you do when you’ve written off your countrymen, and given up on the idea of a republic.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/16...ction-results/

[Kptlt. Neuerburg]

[Jimbuna]

The first video is unavailable but the second one, if accurate is how I presumed the current situation to be.

[Catfish]

"Electile dysfunction"?

[Jimbuna]

Scary stuff...if true.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-election-loss

Surely the military hierarchy would run a million miles away before complying to any such order from an outgoing president.

[u crank]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

Surely the military hierarchy would run a million miles away before complying to any such order from an outgoing president.

I would say that you are correct Jim. The bigger question is what will a Biden administration do in the Middle East and especially concerning Iran. If it is a return to Obama era policy then it won't be good. And will Joe Biden listen to and give in to the Washington war lobby and if he does will it undo the recent peace deals in that region? Joe's got a lot on his plate. Hopefully he will not go backwards but we shall see.