First, keep in mind that a majority of Republican legislators in the House of Representatives have supported Trump's coup attempt.
Second, Republicans are hell-bent on making it harder for those people to vote.
Third, their party leader is tacitly endorsing violent street protests in the hopes of being able to somehow overturn the election.
What we have, now, is a country where a significant minority of the population does not believe in free and fair elections. They believe in trying to tilt the process as much as they can, by restricting the right to vote to those people. If, despite their rigging the process, the other side wins, then the election had to have been stolen, a belief that they hold without any proof other than that ginned up by QAnon-grade conspiracy whackaloons.
If they lose, then they think that they should be able to declare martial law and throw out the election results and govern by force.
I don't think that we can have a functioning democracy under such circumstances. The saving grace, this time, was that the clown who wanted to pull off the coup was as incompetent in coup-planning as he was at governing or at being a businessman. There were enough responsible people, those who believed in the rule of law and the Constitution, who were in nodes of power and were able to derail the attempt. The legion of Trumpanzees who were advocating for a coup mostly were keyboard commandos who were not willing to do anything more than run their yaps on the Internet.
But that is no guarantee that the next time some wannabee dictator tries to overturn the results of an election, that he won't be able to do it.
I agree that a loser is entitled to fairly litigate the loss. But that does not mean filing complaints that are lacking in foundation of any kind. The lawyers who filed most of these bullshit actions did so under either penalty of perjury or under ethical rules that require an attorney to have a legitimate basis for the action. They need to be held to account.
The only way that I see to stave off another attempt is to make sure that those behind this one pay a bitter price for their actions.
But I don't see that happening. Just as letting a kid who tortures animals go unpunished and untreated makes it more likely that a new serial killer, dope addict or real estate agent will be forthcoming, not holding those who participated in Trump's witless coup makes it more likely that we will have a serious coup attempt one day.
Training Them How To Behave Around Trains
1 hour ago
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I agree. Like Bill Clinton said, they'll keep doing it as long as it keeps working.
Like the grift around the phony accusations of voter fraud, they won't stop as long as it keeps on paying, but the lawyers filing the suits do have rules to abide by, and those need to be rigorously enforced just now to establish a robust precedent against allowing the courts to be turned into a two bit reality TV show for wingnuts to profit from.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
We can look at the bright side...
We know the names of the seditionists and other criminals.
We have a good idea who the fascists are, they are so bold
as to stand up and be there as well as seen.
And if the so called alt right bois show up with guns we
will know them too. If they start shooting there will be
fewer of them to worry about. They don't have the high
ground morally or physically. They risk being shot from
behind figuratively or actually.
They have a false idea they will win. Reality is likely
they will die, get jailed or spend a life hiding and
running. Their cause is unpopular and unsustainable.
When the rubber meets the road most will be home in
the basement, some stupidly tweeting. Some may need
more effort to dislodge, but in the end, dirty, cold,
hungry, and in the dark is in their future if they
go there. No glory in that.
I have the belief our police, State Guard units, and some
number of true patriot militia that believe in country
over the cult of personality. They will make those who
would destroy to serve their anarchist goals put their
lives on the line.
It will likely get worse and for sure it will be nasty.
However when we clean up things will be different.
One can hope not worse.
We have learned to solve covid, its a grind but that
is what it takes, persistence and perseverance.
The others we can wait out as they will be inside wanting
and the people outside will the ones that have it.
Eck!
What color is the sky in your world?
Most of us want Free and Fair elections. We didn't get one this time.
Most of us wanted an election without rampant fraud. We didn't get that either.
There was no "coup attempt", but rather an attempt to get an election without stain. You know, one where we could ALL trust the results...which none of us currently can, no matter what side we might be on. One without controversy or irregularities. One where the rules were not circumvented or ignored.
While I understand that you are happy with the results of the "election", because the person who "won" wasn't Donald Trump, you as an attorney (and a Servant of the Courts) should understand the damage that this election has done to the integrity of our elections. You can no longer trust that the Will of the People is relfected in the ballot count any more than I can. Yet you are willing to let it pass because you feel that the end justifies the means....I expected you to be more intelligent and more insightful than that....You were once.
I have a broken heart. I never imagined that so many of my neighbors hated me. They are still waving their---- flags.
They hate my little town because we are wearing masks and trying to be careful. They call us fags and communists. It breaks my heart.
They won't even listen to their own leaders. Instead they go with "konstitution".
Things will get worse.
B- usually it is blue but it is gray today because clouds. It might snow tomorrow. We often have beautiful sunrises and sunsets. That is all you are getting because i have been told not to feed the trolls.
That is good advice.
@B: Giuliani and Ellis and Sidney Powell and Trump can get behind a microphone and bleat their opinions at the sky, for they have the right of free speech. However, not one of their cases has held in an actual court of law, where actual facts and actual evidence must stand. Judges, both Republican and other background alike--including the Conservative 2/3 majority of the SCOTUS--have thrown their cases out repeatedly (60 cases, last I saw).
Seriously, what would it take to convince you that it WASN'T stolen? What evidence would pass your sniff test? Please, tell us.
You are living a delusion. You are in a cult. YOU are the ones that have done the damage to the integrity of our elections. And it's so terribly sad for this country, that you did it all for an insipid, little, cruel man's ego.
Endless stupidity from the Trump supporters about "rampant fraud." Trump's team had millions of dollars and plenty of time, yet managed to bring exactly zero evidence of any fraud to any court. The question for the normal people is how to move on when there's a huge cadre of idiots who are immune to facts and rationality.
When 160,000 mail-in votes arrive overnight after the observers have left and of those votes only 3,200 are for Trump it speaks to me of tampering. I use this test, I reverse the candidates. If 160,000 votes came in and only 3,200 were for Biden, I would call foul. I want unbiased vote counting! I may be naive, but I have trouble believing any American would do this (vote tampering) and still call themselves an American.
By the way, I do believe Biden won, but by a much smaller margin. I also believe that the incoming administration reduce or try to reduce my personal freedoms. I hope I’m wrong.
"If 160,000 votes came in and only 3,200 were for Biden, I would call foul."
As would I.
And that, my friend, is the difference between us and the others here.
B, i have to confess you caught us secret Soros operatives red handed this time.
@JFM: Which 160,000 votes? You mean these 140,000 in Michigan? Trump's claims were proven false.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/nov/04/tweets/no-biden-did-not-receive-thousands-mysteriously-su/
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-ap-fact-check-joe-biden-donald-trump-technology-49a24edd6d10888dbad61689c24b05a5
Trump’s allegations of massive voting fraud have been refuted by a variety of judges, state election officials and an arm of his own administration’s Homeland Security Department. Many of his campaign’s lawsuits across the country have been thrown out of court. And his administration has already agreed to allow the formal transition of power to Biden to begin.
On Tuesday, Barr told The Associated Press that no proof of widespread voter fraud has been uncovered. “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” he said.
No case has established irregularities of a scale that would change the outcome. Lawsuits that remain do not contain evidence that would flip the result.
BALLOT ‘DUMPING’
TRUMP: “I go from winning by a lot to losing a tight race. It’s corrupt.”
TRUMP: “It’s about big leads on election night, tremendous leads, leads where I was being congratulated for a decisive, easy victory, and all of a sudden by morning or a couple of days later, those leads rapidly evaporated.”
THE FACTS: No mass corruption happened. Trump is actually describing a legitimate vote counting process, not a sudden surge of malfeasance that no one has seen before.
Indeed, news organizations and officials had warned in the days and weeks leading up to the election that the results would likely come in just as they did: In-person votes, which tend to be counted more quickly, would likely favor the president, who had spent months warning his supporters to avoid mail-in voting and to vote in person either early or on Election Day.
And mail-in ballots, which take longer to count since they must be removed from envelopes and verified before they are counted, would favor Biden. That pattern was exacerbated by the fact that many states prohibited early counting of mail-in votes that arrived before Election Day.
In addition, big cities are often slower to report their numbers, and those votes tend to skew Democratic. Likewise, many states tend to count mail-in ballots at the end of the process.
TRUMP: “In Wisconsin, as an example, where we were way up on election night, they ultimately had us miraculously losing by 20,000 votes. And I can show you right here that Wisconsin, we’re leading by a lot, and then at 3:42 in the morning, there was this. It was a massive dump of votes. Mostly Biden.”
THE FACTS: No, there wasn’t a “massive dump of votes” in the middle of the night. Milwaukee election officials finished counting the city’s roughly 169,000 absentee ballots around 3 a.m.
Wisconsin law requires the results of those absentee ballots be reported all at once. The count of the absentee ballots was livestreamed on YouTube for anyone to watch. When it was finished, Milwaukee police escorted the city’s elections director from a central counting location to the county courthouse to deliver thumb drives with the ballot data.
Sorry, the facts aren’t supporting you this time, B.
B: All of the people, in Fergus' own administration, whose jobs it was to know that stuff said the election was free and fair.
But for some reason you won't believe them. You only believe the right wing propaganda you consume, and let's get real about that, they publish what Fergus wants them to publish. It'd their goddamn business model.
And all of that massive fraud bullshit?
It all had its investigation and its day in court and it all was proven false.
By judges and DOJ officials appointed by Fergus.
So basically you won't believe it until Fergus says it's so.
So what color is the sky in your world? I'm guessing a sick color of orange.
And that is the very subject of this post.
So, really, what do you propose that we, as a country, do about it?
Because as Driftglass says, this nation cannot long endure half Fox and half free.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
The facts aren't supporting the Trump fans this time, just like all the other times. They pop up with some BS claim like the one about 160,000 votes and then vanish when asked to provide some more evidence.
To all the Trump True Believers, a line from the fundies paraphrased:
Trump said it, I believe it, and that settles it.
Trump: more followers than the Moonies; both are cults.
We’ve had our own Reichstag fire, "9/11", now there needs to be a Kristallnacht, a night of broken glass. Been at the top of the page at my house for quite a while and it’s gonna’ stay there: Boycott Republican Businesses – it’s easy, they’re rude. Time to take it further: smash their storefronts, loot their shops, burn the buildings. Tar and feather the daughter-fucking bastards and ride them out of town on a rail.
They're NAZIs. They're not Americans ...
I’m reminded of Richard Pryor’s line about being caught in flagrante by his wife: “What are you going to believe: Me, or your lying eyes?”
This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture—it is no more than that—that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties. In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.
We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/
B and others, we know who you are, what you believe,
and the cult you subscribe to.
I for one do not believe what you say as its all repeated noise.
It has no weight or facts supporting it.
As an engineer of 5 decades I tend to look at things for proof,
correlation, or at least a way to test if for quantifiable or
validatable fact. Without that its all noise and speculation.
What has me most baffled is what _you_ gain by the facetious
claims should they become real? IF you not a loser or sucker
whats in it for you? There must be something tangible, money,
power, what?
Drumpf lost, mostly by his own doing. He ran down mail in voting,
he appointed a failure as postmaster to break the mail, he claimed
the election was rigged from the start even before it happened.
Worst of all more than 23,000 lies later we are to believe his
assertion he has proof that has never been produced. That alone
is a bridge too far. There is fact and fiction, this administration
has been all about fiction. Despite assertions he lost, by how many
makes little difference.
End it. Do something useful. Stop reading and listening to lies as
if they were true. Accept you brain was hacked and the propaganda
used for that has misled you.
Eck!
>>> 23,000 lies later we are to believe his assertion
>>> he has proof that has never been produced.
The lie that sticks in my mind is birtherism: if you go back and look at articles at the time, Trump claimed to have seen proof that Obama wasn't American. Of course, that was a lie, proven to be an out-and-out lie, but millions of Trump supporters don't care.
I think this article is a good explanation of the underlying cause:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trump-and-obama-a-night-to-remember
"Populist nationalism is not an eruptive response to a new condition of 2015 — it is a perennial ideological position, deeply rooted in the nature of modernity: a social class sees its perceived displacement as the result of a double conspiracy of outsiders and élitists. The outsiders are swamping us, and the insiders are mocking us — this ideology alters its local color as circumstances change, but the essential core is always there. They look down on us and they have no right to look down on us."
Like Eck, I'm baffled by what the average Trump supporter gets out of their support and the New Yorker article has at least a partial answer.
They get affirmation, same as they get from the rallies. A big part of the rallies is affirming that what they feel is the truth (we can ALL see that,right?). So when something feels wrong (tRump has big rallies, Biden has pretty much no rallies) Biden can't possibly win, and when he does, it has to be by cheating, because anything else doesn't feel right.
Eck has nailed it. Trump has made over 23,000 verifiable lies, half-truths, misleading statements, disinformation, whatever you want to call it; and yet the claim that the election was stolen is taken as Gospel by the Trumpanzees. You just can't argue with stupid.
And anyone that repeats those lies are themselves liars.
Dale
The propaganda process is well documented. A key element is the big lie.
The rest is supporting the lie with plausible stories and events. Add
pumping energy into the crowd to insure they see the lie as both valid
and why they hurt.
Working with the "feels":
Oddly the rallies for Drumpf were countered with Biden's televised
exposure and car rallies supported with words that also had good
feel to them. Same mechanism, the appeal to the the people, was
the same only different methods. If one cant't see that then the
other guy is doing it wrong. hence the perception of what Biden
was wrong because his crowd was told Biden had no crowd save for
the difference in the arena, Biden had ones augmented with TV.
Size would seem to matter but Eyes and Ears were still captured
and the hearts followed.
What worked, well, we know who lost. The techniques were very similar
but one might have had too much vitriol that negative impact with
Covid and mass spreading as well as the general malaise with jobs,
race, and an excess of badly directed anger. Some were so badly
managed as to fail.
The article does explain Drumpf's hate for everything Obama. And
likely the destructive path he's taken. It's revenge based. He
created victims and then weaponized them by making their
dissatisfaction a cause to promote and making it worse with
his failures seeming to impact them. Just another part of the
smoke and mirrors show.
There are many more the fence, money badly spent. Illegal and legal
immigrants the the job and resource stealers. Its easy to list them
and they are many.
As to populist movements see Madelene Albright's Facism a warning
(book). Dumpf may have seen himself as El Duce without the
head cut off and hung by his feet part.
Eck!
What they get out of it is constant reassurance that their ignorance is noble and their bigotry is patriotic.
It's the same toxic soup the Republicans have been selling since the southern strategy, just without the window dressing of common decency.
That's the crude brilliance of Fergus' politics, he saw the maintenance doses of racism and xenophobia the Republicans doled out to their supporters to keep them in the fold between elections and decided to offer up a straight geeze of the uncut product, and now his followers are as loyal to him as any junkie is to their main source, and feel just as betrayed by the Republicans who kept them on a short chemical leash for all those years as they do by the evil Democrats, who look down on them while trying to provide them with healthcare and clean air and water.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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