Oh, now that was a swell thought...

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?

____________________________

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.

Greenwald on 'nobody is coming to take your guns'.

Well, actually, no, that's not what he's writing about here:

The reality is that there is ample evidence uncovered by journalists suggesting that regimes donating money to the Clinton Foundation received special access to and even highly favorable treatment from the Clinton State Department. But it’s also true that nobody can dispositively prove the quid pro quo. Put another way, one cannot prove what was going on inside Hillary Clinton’s head at the time that she gave access to or otherwise acted in the interests of these donor regimes: Was she doing it as a favor in return for those donations, or simply because she has a proven affinity for Gulf State and Arab dictators, or because she was merely continuing decades of U.S. policy of propping up pro-U.S. tyrants in the region?

It's a great article (worth a RTWT), and should, if there were actually any sort of popular interest in restraining the ruling class, be more than enough to prevent HRC from ever again holding actual power over so much as a single cat, much less hundreds of millions of human lives.

But it's not about the guns at all.  And yet somehow, the "nobody is coming to take your guns" canard simply keeps popping into my head:

So if you want to defend the millions of dollars that went from tyrannical regimes to the Clinton Foundation as some sort of wily, pragmatic means of doing good work, go right ahead. But stop insulting everyone’s intelligence by pretending that these donations were motivated by noble ends. Beyond that, don’t dare exploit LGBT rights, AIDS, and other causes to smear those who question the propriety of receiving millions of dollars from the world’s most repressive, misogynistic, gay-hating regimes.

I know, I know, it's one thing to say all this about campaign finance, but it's like totally different when it comes to plebes with guns.  You can just sense a politician's scruples come roaring back into line, when it comes to plebes with guns.

Which nobody wants to take.  The guns, I mean.  Not the plebes.  Of course not the plebes.  Well, unless they want guns.  Then, maybe the plebes too.  Wait, is this thing on?

File this under "Do you understand?"

Sure, we've long known that the Establishment propagandizes for the Establishment.  But this Greenwald article does make the case in a way that should be digestible by a larger audience of fence-sitters than I'd ever be able to reach.

We’re bravely here to report that these two incidents perhaps coincidentally occurred at “about” the same time: There was a hospital that blew up, and then there was this other event where the U.S. carried out an airstrike. As the blogger Billmon wrote: “London 1940: Civilians throughout the city were killed at about the same time as a German air strike, CNN reports.”

The entire article is designed to obfuscate who carried out this atrocity. The headline states: “Air attacks kill at least 19 at Afghanistan hospital; U.S. investigating.” What’s the U.S. role in this incident? They’re the investigators: like Sherlock Holmes after an unsolved crime.

This, too, pretty much says it all:

Now, if only we could get more folks to remember how this all works when the subject is "Plebes with gunz, ZOMG!", or "Working within the system is the only way to get results."

(That includes you too, Glenn Greenwald.  You may be better than most, but you too have your blind spots.)

Calling out Glenn Greenwald.

Wait, what was that?  Calling out Glenn Greenwald?

Yes.  You read that right.  And I'm talking about a legitimate calling-out, too--not the playbook-regurgitated tripe that you'd expect from the various flavors of American Exceptionalism.

I've been following, with some interest, Arthur Silber's recent work on this topic (which seemed to start back in June, here and here), and as much admiration as I have for Greenwald's work (and I do), Silber's core point cannot be denied.  He articulated it in October, this way (emphasis in original):

...Greenwald, together with the other journalists to whom he has granted access to the Snowden documents and who abide by his ground rules, is engaged in precisely the same exercise of power that the State employs. Yet Greenwald continues to vehemently condemn the State's exercise of such power, just as he condemns those who obey the State's edicts, while he and his enthusiastic fans view his identical exercise of power in glowing terms, offering endless praise for the "bravery," "courage" and "independence" demonstrated by those who bring us these carefully selected, sanitized, edited, and redacted tidbits from the documentation of the State's actions and crimes.

Silber makes this case by illustrating the substantive differences between WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden (emphasis in original), of which this is just an excerpt:

...WikiLeaks' methodology stands in stark contrast to that used by the journalists to whom Edward Snowden gave his document trove. These journalists insist that filtering of the "raw" documents is indispensable to understanding by the otherwise untutored (and, presumably, unwashed) public. These journalists will first select which documents we will be permitted to see, and which we won't (which is most of them). But that is far from sufficient in the view of these journalists, who are gifted with powers of understanding and judgment far exceeding the abilities of us ordinary schmucks. We are told that the Snowden documents are "difficult" and "complex." Therefore, when we are allowed an occasional glimpse of carefully selected documents, these journalists will explain to us what we should think of them, and what conclusions we are entitled to reach. These self-appointed authorities are genuinely dedicated to the role they have granted themselves: they will guide us in every step we take. Our "protectors" will guard from all the dangers that might unleash chaos resulting in the immediate implosion of the rigid structures that narrowly circumscribe our lives: an original thought, a unique perspective, an unexpected insight.

You can see where he's going with this.  And while it's not that I want him to be right about it--Greenwald seems to make for a truly excellent hero in many respects--I sure can't see where he's wrong.  (As with so much of Silber's work, you don't so much read it as confront it--which is what makes it some of the most useful writing available today.)

And if I'm understanding events properly, Greenwald just seems to be serving himself up perfectly according to the very script he seems to have spent so long railing against.  For anyone who does bother to look beyond his past laurels and view his current actions critically, it ain't lookin' so good for Glenn Greenwald.  (Emphasis and links in original.)

If there is a single general theme to Glenn Greenwald's career as a journalist, it is that he constantly confronts and challenges power and those who exercise power, primarily in the political sphere. Greenwald himself has often proclaimed this to be his major concern, and he repeated this conviction in a recent interview: "I came to believe if you’re smart, skilled, and have the resources, you should use those things to fuck with the powerful.”

So challenging power and those individuals who exercise power is a positive good, one of critical significance. Indeed, if you are able to do so, you should "fuck with the powerful."

Pierre Omidyar is a multibillionaire. On Fortune magazine's list of "The World's Billionaires," Omidyar appears as number 123. Fortune describes that article as follows: "The names, numbers and stories behind the 1,426 people who control the world economy." At 123, Omidyar is very high on the list of people who control the world economy.

Look, I'm hardly against the idea of wealth honestly earned, but even if Omidyar is just exactly, precisely that, still:  that's painfully ironic and Greenwald has got to know that.  (For anyone who isn't yet up on the Omidyar connection, see here and here.  The short story is that he seems to want to make GG into some sort of large-scale franchise.)

Nor does it help that the State seems to have found a perfect comfort with Greenwald's "filtered leaks" strategy.  Rather than offer a quote from the article, I'll just use Silber's title, which says it all:  The Establishment Makes Big, Sloppy Love to the Snowden Leaks.  Again, more than worth a RTWT.

As much as I hate to admit it, as a whole this stinks pretty big.   I wanted to believe better, but with Master so content, chaos replaced with subjective "management", and what leaking there actually is backseated for books and branding deals...

...well, it'll take something pretty spectacular to recover from that.  I don't think I have that much more breath left to hold.

That Snowden guy? Yeah, you juust missed him...

Hat tip to Claire.  Today's entry for Most Awesomest Thing To Come Out Of A Government Office goes to Hong Kong, for this:

Mr Edward Snowden left Hong Kong today (June 23) on his own accord for a third country through a lawful and normal channel.

The US Government earlier on made a request to the HKSAR Government for the issue of a provisional warrant of arrest against Mr Snowden. Since the documents provided by the US Government did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law, the HKSAR Government has requested the US Government to provide additional information so that the Department of Justice could consider whether the US Government's request can meet the relevant legal conditions. As the HKSAR Government has yet to have sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr Snowden from leaving Hong Kong.

The HKSAR Government has already informed the US Government of Mr Snowden's departure.

Meanwhile, the HKSAR Government has formally written to the US Government requesting clarification on earlier reports about the hacking of computer systems in Hong Kong by US government agencies. The HKSAR Government will continue to follow up on the matter so as to protect the legal rights of the people of Hong Kong.

In the words of this article from The Atlantic, "...it's difficult to interpret this statement as anything other than an artfully worded "screw you" to the United States."

Oh yeah, that's what it looks like to me too.

Awesome. 

Now we just need more here to act like free people, too.  Enough so that maybe we can even wrest America back from this self-styled "United States" thing which has occupied it for far too long now.

You know:  hope 'n' change, baby.

Greenwald on the puppet show.

The hardest part about quoting Glenn Greenwald is picking the money quote:  at some point, you actually have to decide on just one.

Best to just RTWT, but here you go anyway.  I'll just use the cheap expedient of his closing statement, which is like a big old tonic triad ending a song:

"To understand the US political process, one can just look to how these sham debates are organized and how they function. This is the same process that repeats itself endlessly in virtually every other political realm."

Indeed--and I'm not sure anyone could demonstrate that more authoritatively, to a larger audience, than Greenwald.  To anyone who thinks they got value out of last night's puppet show:  please, read this and check it out for yourself.

The joke is on you.  It's always on you.