So, y'all been enjoying this ongoing game of "What Fresh New Swill Will We Be Expected To Swallow Today?"
There's little point of my recounting or even summarizing all the electoral fraud shenanigans; many others have already done a really good job of this, including dismissing the nothingburgers among the legitimate gotchas. For some context, just to give the first nod to "best titles", I'll give the link love to Larry Correia:
- The 2020 election: fuckery is afoot
- Election 2020: the more fuckery update
- [Added 11/12] I asked one simple question to people who work with fraud
Indeed.
Other resources are worth the time as well, including this from the redoubtable Glenn Greenwald, and this interview (this link starts at about 7:10 on the timeline, where the best bits begin, and continue until about the 20-minute mark) in which one Robert Barnes very clearly lays out several of the most glaring "indicia of fraud" concepts. There are others.
Actually...there are a lot of others.
Some of the usual suspects, of course, like Project Veritas, Breitbart, American Thinker, etc.; and of course many sources come with varying degrees of obvious Team Red partisanship. Caveat lector as always.
But again--there are a lot, and with a significant number not easily dismissible without the assistance of partisan beer goggles. And there's a different vibe about the group of them, as a whole. This isn't like what you're used to with the Hive Mind wokester crowd rallying behind an idea, where everyone refers primarily to each other, leading eventually back to a singular and highly partisan source, using the same talking points, same strategy, same rebuttals, etc. No, from what I've seen here, there are simply a lot of reports (of evidence of shenanigans), from different people, stressing different evidence from different sources, appearing in different places...what's the same isn't the who, nor the evidentiary details, nor the style, nor the source, but only the obvious conclusions to be drawn from taking the body of reporting as a whole. Even when multiple accounts do point to the same observation (e.g., the statistical impossibility of huge tranches of Biden-only-with-no-downticket-votes happening only in critical swing state locations), they often seem to do it from different angles, or the same observation gets made in both a statistical and a historical context by different people in different states...things like that. To me at least, the signature of this landscape says grassroots, and self-motivated involvement, as opposed to water-carriers carrying water.
Woodward and Bernstein introduced the world to the modern term "follow the money", and this has the feel of a whole bunch of crowdsourced citizen-analysts, with various degrees of standing to analyze (e.g., I've seen things from data analysts, auditors, poll workers, historians, lawyers, and of course pundits, researchers, and activists as well), independently "following the money" with a fat lot of differentiated observations that all point to the same conclusions...
And boy, do these differ in presentation from the stank all the Cool Kids are so busy pimping: I see a noticeable amount of "here are my sources; by all means check my work"; as opposed to all the shouting, shaming, and Most Glorious Censorship of our modern MiniTru. ("Joe Biden loves me / this I know / 'cause Twit-Face-Google / told me so.")
Really, taken as a whole, it seems like the sort of broad evidential saturation that you'd absolutely dream of having on your side in a court case. (Or, presently, quite possibly a lot of court cases.) And as of this writing it keeps coming, with increasing reports and claims of actual intentional malfeasance, to go on top of the initial "this is just not possible" statistical and historical observations which merely imply malfeasance.
So, shenanigans then. (Duh.) And so we have Team Blue partisans looking away from the evidence so hard they risk snapping their own necks, and Big Tech and the urinealist media have their "nothing to see here" support schtick in full swing. But a lot of people still seem to have noticed that what we're being asked to believe simply wouldn't pass as credible fiction, it's so over the top. And now we have the great Hive Mind push to legitimize the shenanigans before they can be questioned.
Which reminds me: I've found a pretty good analogy for trying to find some way to explain this shitshow to my girls, currently eleven and nine. "Imagine you're watching a football game and the visiting team, heavy underdogs in the betting, are driving down the field for the go-ahead score at a critical point late in the game. Suddenly there are multiple, inexplicable calls, all favoring the home team and shifting the momentum of the game. The announcers and commentators can't figure this out, looking repeatedly at replays and scratching their heads, but the fans clearly love it, and play continues. Then the home team commits a horrible roughing penalty, stripping the ball and returning it to within an inch of the goal line (but still clearly short). Flags fly everywhere, but then the officials confer privately amongst themselves...with the clock running...and then rule that there was no flag on the play and the result is a home team touchdown. The crowd goes wild. At this point the home team literally races to get off the PAT play before the ridiculous spectacle can be reviewed. (Oh, and it can't be challenged, see, because now they're now inside the two minute warning, even though the game clock hasn't been reset, and remember, the call on the field favors the home team...and how about that, now there's also been a glitch in the video footage for replay.) And everyone knows that once that point-after kick is away, it's all a done deal, because you know, no backsies. That's basically what's happening now."
And so now we have Biden already acting like he's official, with the mendacious partisanship level cranked up to eleven in support, all while more and more evidence piles up illustrating just how far and wide the Team Blue shenanigans went. I've now seen some opinions coming forth that this is QED desperation; that they know they've been made, and simply have to go all in or get completely destroyed from being hoist on their own petard. It's a plausible idea, and maybe it's even true. Under any amount of scrutiny, it just looks really bad for Team Blue here.
And then the thought hit me. Oh shit.
Oh, shit. No, no, no, no...
We've been here before.
Remember the absolutely massive amount of evidence, and even public demand, to go after the Clinton cabal in 1998, for actual abuse of power crimes? Waco. Filegate. Ron Brown. Vince Foster. (I'll stop there, but do you remember? It was a lot, and the evidence was good.)
All we needed, for a "within the system" remedy, was an opposition committed and competent enough to hit a barn from the inside. It should have been the easiest layup of all time.
I may have written this here before, but it bears repeating now: I can remember the exact instant when I finally gave up completely on "working within the system". Why, it was in 1998, when I heard that Team Red was actually going to go after Slick Willy...for getting some unauthorized nooky in the White House, and for nothing else.
They did it! They missed the barn!
And JFC, it's the same crowd that needs to come into play as a viable opposition now, to make any of this current cluster-coitus into something constructive.
Shit. We're screwed, aren't we?
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Why does this matter? It's a question I've asked myself as well, and it's a reasonable one. Claire recently touched on the idea too: for those of us who have lost faith in the system to even show an interest in correcting itself, why sweat over these latest shenanigans, which for all their impressive magnitude, are hardly new in principle?
I'm not going to claim any sort of intellectual purity here, but I think there's a part of me that still wants to believe that a correction can happen; that the grassroots of Greater Leavemethefuckaloneistan actually can rise up above the Establishment and bloody its nose just a little bit. No delusions here that any such would somehow produce a true long-term solution, and maybe it's just sheer misplaced spite at decades, now, of having pretty much all the things I hold dear under continual attack by a mendacious, sanctimonious Establishment that now wants so bad--so very bad--to rid itself of an aberration in its hegemony (an embarrassing one that makes it look bad just like it really is). But I don't think all this would bug me so much if that weren't at least a little bit true.
And so the realization that effectively exposing the obvious fraud here, and at least delegitimizing the transparently engineered election result, is going to depend on the cooperation of the same people that can and did turn a gigantic abuse of power case into a flaccid burlesque theater, leaves me a bit more despondent than usual, during the week after a presidential election.
(What's most bizarre to me is that Trump himself, preening peacock and general toad though he may be, has actually proven himself unexpectedly capable of the sort of fortitude needed to lead such an effort. I may have no confidence in the Team Red party apparatus to do anything substantial--hello, history--but DJT himself, now, he just might start swinging, and to the extent he appeals to people not on his own merits but simply as a functional stickfinger salute to the more couth, polished forms of authoritarian statism...well, he just might bring enough to the yard to land some hits. (Personally, I like the idea that if he does wind up losing the war here, he could really stir things up with simple outgoing pardons of Julian Assange and Ed Snowden.))
In the end, philosophically, I remain where I have been for a while--over a generation now--but I think I have to admit I got caught hoping for better, here.
Damn buffoon sure has been entertaining, hasn't he? The ability to give that much apoplexy to the pretentious mob...is actually pretty impressive.
1 comment:
And just 10 months later....
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