A Quick Note About Comments & Sanity
Discussion threads here at Ordinary Times often sprawl from one subject to another. This is often quite healthy. We have a lot of intelligent people here that like to talk about things and it can be fun to see where a conversation might lead. Other times, though, we have to be more careful. This is going to be one of those times.
Going forward, discussions about the election and post-election need to be limited to posts about the election and post-election. It’s a discussion that draws so much heat that the flame can deprive the room of oxygen.
Further (and this one will be more temporary) we should limit our political conversation to either (a) posts themselves about politics, or (b) politics actually related to the subject-matter at hand. So a post about masks invites a conversation about the politics of masks, but a post about a telescope doesn’t. You get the idea.
If you want to throw an update about the latest thing Trump did, find the most recent post about the election. It is probably not very old. If for some reason there is a dearth, let me know and we can start an open thread.
For my sanity, I will refrain from talking about this election until, probably, after January.Report
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Remember in 2000, when the election was actually disputed, but it still wasn’t this insane?Report
IMHO 2000 was worse. The election was actually disputed, the outcome uncertain, and the lawsuits had meaning. Both sides got serious, at the peak 7 Supremes made rulings that imho were pure emotion.
Here we have the legal version of twitter. Some lawyers get some billable hours. Trump gets to have some drama. The lawsuits aren’t serious and the outcome is certain. Subtract virtue signaling and there’s nothing going on.
I assume Trump is getting paid for this somehow but that’s him doing his reality show thing to increase eyeballs.Report
RE: How Trump is getting paid.
Ah. CNN reports that Trump is engaged in revenge here.
President Donald Trump told an ally that he knows he lost, but that he is delaying the transition process and is aggressively trying to sow doubt about the election results in order to get back at Democrats for questioning the legitimacy of his own election in 2016, especially with the Russia investigation, a source familiar with the President’s thinking told CNN on Thursday.
The President’s refusal to concede, as CNN has previously reported, stems in part from his perceived grievance that Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama undermined his own presidency by saying Russia interfered in the 2016 election and could have impacted the outcome, people around him have said.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/19/politics/trump-democrats-election/index.htmlReport
This is a strawman! Nobody was arguing that Russia hacked the election.Report
Of course not, they hacked the electorate!Report
How dare Trump do to them what they did to him. This is undermining democracy.Report
Trump is getting paid because 50% of any donations made toward his legal fight can be sent to pay down his campaign debt, which is owed to one of his corporations.
At least, that’s how I heard it.Report
This is almost as bad as when Democrats didn’t abandon Obama for Romney in 2012.Report
The problem isn’t “should have abandoned”.
The problem is ideally there should be a difference between how the Dems treated treated/reacted to Romney and Trump.
Bluntly, Romney level ethics and accomplishments should be an advantage, not a disadvantage.Report
I recall when we investigated Romney’s ties to Putin, but he got away. Slippery devil.
I also recall how Republicans appreciated that Obama was a great family man, not a womanizer like Clinton, and treated him accordingly,Report
Of course there were thousands of pages of reports ( mueller and senate intell) along with testimony in court by Manafort and Stone describing how the trump campaign cooperated with Russia. But it’s safest to ignore all that now isn’t it. Just stick with the most outlandish claim and ignore the crap you want to avoid. That is the argumentative tactic.Report
The “logic” is: If the D’s did anything, it’s fine for the R’s to do everything. Always has been, always will be.Report
What has been proven is that they met.
1) Trump’s dealings with the East Block started back in 1977 or 1986 depending on how you want to measure things.
2) Being President (or even future President) involves dealing with Russia.
3) The claim was “cooperated with Russia to steal the election”.Report
Russian hackers and bots coordinated to inject disinformation and propaganda on into the American campaigns entirely with the goal of electing Trump.
Trump campaign knew this was happening, and welcomed it, and cooperated when they could.Report
That is the claim. Can you prove that without lowering the evidence bar to include things that would be fine for a normal real estate guy or a normal Presidential candidate?
My general impression is we spent a lot of money and found meetings that would be fine for a normal real estate guy or a normal Presidential candidate.Report
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/report_volume5.pdf
And the four reports before that for starters.Report
Proving that Russia was trying to influence things isn’t even close to enough. You need to prove Trump was using Russia, not just Russia.Report
I flipped more Hillary voters into going 3rd party than the Russians did. The Russians had some people trolling Facebook, but couldn’t match my effectiveness.Report
Look, Clinton lost in 2016. If the system were a little different, or if less than 100k more votes were cast for her in the right places, she could have won, because the American people are pretty well split. The reason she lost is that she’s detestable.
Barring any new revelations, it looks like Trump lost in 2020. If the system were a little different, or if probably less than 100k more votes were cast for him in the right places, he could have won, because the American people are still pretty well split. If he weren’t such an awful person, he could have won easily.
Politics, like football, is situational. You both put your teams on the field and exploit each others’ weaknesses. You can tell yourself your team should have won, but the score is the score, and the second-highest-scoring team is the loser.
Everyone knows this to be true.Report
Um, if you check hereIsTheEvidence.com you can see 500+ URL’s listing evidence.
In Michigan alone it is certain that 200K late-night Biden votes can’t really exist because a 300K vote spike was counted in 2 hours and 38 minutes on vote counting machines whose maximum burst throughput, if somehow sustained, could only count 90,000 votes during that period. It’s based on how many pages each machine can feed per minute, and how many machines they had.
That kind of impossibility was happening all over the place. Basically, those late-night spikes can’t be real votes because votes couldn’t be counted fast enough to produce them. If the counting machines could, everybody would have finished counting by 9 PM.
Back in the 1960 and 70’s they could rig elections and regular people didn’t have the access and computing power to detect what happened. Now we all do. As has been said, mail-in-voting makes it fairly easy to commit election fraud, but it also makes it trivially easy to detect.Report
You’re overthinking it. We sabotaged Trump’s bronzer to make him look like a sad clown. Now we’ve done the same to Rudy’s dye job so he looks like a maniac. Key to 2024: you need to nominate someone who doesn’t need cosmetics. (I’d expect this advice to be unnecessary for a party so obsessed by manliness, but whatevs.)Report
About a month ago, I suggested to you that if you were believing the comments you were posting, you were headed for a disappointment. That wasn’t an election forecast as much as personal advice. I’ve looked at some of the allegations about the election, and they’re a mix. But Trump would have to flip at least three states, and I don’t think the evidence is there for that to happen. If a few things had been different, or he wasn’t a horrible person, he would have won. I don’t think he did win, but we’ll know when the results are certified. If he isn’t certified the winner, then the stuff you’ve been posting will start to be bad for the country. We’ve had four years of watching a sore loser party – do you want to become like them?Report
Yeah, don’t be a sore loser like *them* 🙂
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If I grant you that Trump is a whiny crybaby, will you grant me that everyone who said that Trump is an illegitimate president is also a whiny crybaby? If not, why not?Report
Why would I have to trade something for such an obvious fact?
Clinton conceded. Obama presided over a normal transition. No one denied Trump was president. It’s the lies and corruption he espoused from the very start that made him illegitimates.Report
So he is president, just not legitimately president? How is that not denying he’s president? The presidency is a governmental position determined and defined by the law. Legitimacy is legality. If you’re president, you’re legitimately president. If you’re not legitimately president, you’re not president.Report
He’s prez for another few weeks. He is the legit whiny crybaby prez. His BEST people are claiming the Repub gov of Georgia was paid off by Venezuela to fix the election so never mind the vote being certified …oh and also all the swing states should nullify the vote of the people and give their electoral votes to the prez and trumps BEST people have lost like 32 court challenges so far but only one with prejudice but i’ve been informed trump actually won in a landslide and if weren’t for the chavez who died years ago and the CIA and (drops acid) for some reason all our votes go to a server in germany so he actually won by at least 100 million votes. But trump is, no lie, the legit prez for the next few weeks. Truth.Report
Yes. Trump is the legitimate legal whiny crybaby president, and he will be for a few more weeks after which, barring something extraordinary, he will no longer be president. That’s the baseline for a well-grounded discussion.Report
He’s going to be an interesting ex-President.Report
I was sitting with some friends yesterday, and we were speculating on what could possibly be in his presidential library.Report
unless everyone’s bored with himReport
Here, again, this is Russia being a bad actor, not Trump being a bad actor. I’ll grant that there’s lots of smoke here.
Former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell stated in March 2017 that he had seen no evidence of collusion between Trump and the Kremlin. “On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates_and_Russian_officialsno fire, at all,” Morell said.[1]
In a March 2017 interview, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence under President Obama, said that at the time of the intelligence community’s report on the issue in January 2017, there was no evidence of any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.[2] Former FBI Director James Comey, who was dismissed from his position in May 2017, subsequently testified under oath as follows: “In one conversation, Trump suggested that if there were some ‘satellite’ associates of his who did something wrong, it would be good to find that out.”[48]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates_and_Russian_officialsReport
Should be… “but there is no fire, at all” but that’s obscured by the link.Report
There was lots of smoke, which is why an investigation was indicated. Trump welcomed the chance to prove his innocence, as shown by his obstructing it however he could, up to and including firing the FBI director.
There is a reason so many of his top campaign advisers have been convicted or pled guilty to serious crimes.Report
We are at the “You can’t prove Oswald acted alone” phase of this story.Report
More like “Actually, Lincoln shot John Wilkes Booth”.Report
And how much of that smoke was Trump’s doing, how much was his people’s doing, how much Russia’s, and how much was the Obama Administration’s (and/or Clinton’s campaign’s) doing?
Trump clearly thinks most of that smoke was created by Obama’s people as an FU against his administration. BTW if you viewed those endless investigations as politically motivated hit jobs where people play “show me the man and I’ll find you the crime”, then maybe obstruction would look reasonable.
Joe Biden was high up in the Obama Administration, high enough that he’s basically a third term of Obama. The thinking clearly is one FU deserves another.Report
It was the doing of Manafort, Flynn, Bannon, and Trump’s other “best people”. Trump’s own DOJ investigated “Obamagate” and found nothing beyond normal prosecutorial shenanigans. Trump thinks it was a personal FU because
1. Everything’s always about him, and
2. He has no idea that corruption isn’t normal behavior.Report
Is he wrong if we use Washington standards?
Our real world alternative was HRC. She was given Billions of dollars from groups like the Saudis, Russia, Blackwater, and so on.
Presumably this was legal. Presumably the Obama administration was cool with this and wouldn’t have given her a massive FU investigation just to say hello.
With that as the backdrop, it’s really easy to think it was about him.Report
Trump’s people were investigated because of their contacts with foreign governments. That’s where it started; it didn’t become clear they were Trump’s until they were unmasked.
What other campaign has ever had that kind of behavior?Report
HRC and her husband accepted Billions of dollars from foreign governments. The money stream dried up after she lost the election to the point where they had to close that arm of their “charity”.
So, it’s a serious problem for someone whose future job will entail dealing with the Russian to meet with the Russian ambassador while accepting Billions of dollars is not?
Or how about Biden? His son’s jobs look a lot like raw influence pedaling to foreign countries. Now that his Dad is President, will he stop or just raise his rates? If he just raises his rates, will the media ignore it like they did while he was VP?
With HRC and Biden, the issue seems to be a problem with what is legal. With Trump, in those days, it looks a lot like Russian opportunism and a serious lack of professionalism… but to be fair, this wasn’t their field.Report
No, the Clintons did not receive billions of dollars from foreign governments.
This is Turneresque level nonsense and I don’t mean glowing paintings of seascapes.Report
Vox disagreed, and lists some of the donations from foreign governments, oil companies, and businessmen, all with business before the State Department.Report
Vox isn’t being judgmental enough, but even their brief summation goes north of $200 million (and suggests there are a lot more that we don’t know about so there’s that).
The New York Times has a different list: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/politics/hillary-clinton-presidential-campaign-charity.html
They don’t give numbers for all of them but my back of the envelope and wiki suggest it was also north of $200 million.
To be totally fair, we’re only deep into hundreds of millions so “billions” is just within the margin of error and not actually a known thing.Report
I cut it really close on that thread, basically giving the baby-sitter the keys to the liquor cabinet and telling her not to invite her friends over. I’ll try to be smarter.
ETA: I bear no responsibility for the people hijacking the thread on the article about not hijacking threads to talk about politics, to talk about politics.Report