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Notes -
This is a relatively small thought. But watching more mainstream news being home for Christmas I see the supposedly moderate channels like NBC/ABC constantly running Santos lying about his resume and absolutely zero coverage of alphabet agency interference with twitters moderation. No mention that the fbi was paying twitter 3.5 million and suggesting who to censor.
The former I do think is bad that he lied. The latter seems like the biggest scandal since JFK assassination. What is it WaPo declares that Democracy dies in Darkness? And there is nothing in the mainstream media about the scandal.
I cannot tell if this is intended to be hyperbole. I feel like I could name a dozen government scandals worse than anything the US government could possibly have been doing with Twitter. Iran-Contra? NSA spying? Watergate? Pentagon papers? The government pressuring a social media company to suppress speech it doesn't like and promote its own agenda is bad, to be sure, but I am not sure it is "sell weapons to Iran and send the profits to South American rebels in direct violation of an act of Congress" bad.
I don’t think those scandals are worse.
Iran is a different country. Our constitution doesn’t apply to them.
NSA spying. I consider this similar level. Perhaps worse because this was government election interference.
Watergate feels like child play to me. Some burglary.
Pentagon Papers - again bad shit we did to people who weren’t Americans. We expect the CIA and Pentagon to fuck up our enemies
Act of Congress < Constitution
Doing things to non-Americans < Americans
This was literally a coup by the deep state against the will of the American people to overthrow a Democratically elected government.
The part of the Iran-Contra affair that is scandalous does not primarily concern events that occurred in Iran. The part that is scandalous is the part where the executive branch of the government deliberately defied a restriction on what it can spend money on passed by Congress, in violation of Article 1 Section 9 of the United States Constitution.
Again, the significance in Watergate is not in the initial break in, it is in Nixon's attempts to impede or end the investigation into the break in, due its links to his campaign and top officials. Imagine some people are arrested breaking into Mar-A-Lago. Investigation by the FBI reveals the perpetrators are connected to high level members of the Biden administration and perhaps the president himself. The Attorney General appoints a special prosecutor to investigate. After the special prosecutor's investigation implicates Biden, he fires his Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, because they refuse to fire the special prosecutor and end the investigation into him. Would you characterize the scandal here as "some burglary"?
The significance of the Pentagon Papers is only partially the things the US government did in Vietnam, it is also about the way the US government deceived the American people with respect to its intentions and motivations for engaging in the Vietnam War, a war that killed some 50k Americans!
Can you describe for me, as literally as possible the acts you understood the "deep state" to have taken?
Did you say that Obama's actions with PPACA subsidies were as scandalous as Iran-Contra? Were you upset that the mainstream media barely covered it, nor were concerned in the slightest? (Even now, when I went searching for a link, there was basically nothing from any of the standard center-left outlets, probably because I used the search term "unconstitutional", and they almost certainly didn't want that mood affiliation anywhere near Their President.)
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It is funny. Read your watergate example. You are saying “the problem was the cover up that had ties to the Nixon campaign / administration.”
Now, understand what the Republican complaint is here. We had the FBI—amongst other alphabet agencies—actively work to thwart sharing info they knew was coming out that would be harmful to one candidate because the IC favored one candidate over the other.
You might think the above is wrong (though would like to hear the contra argument) but how aren’t those facts clearly worse than watergate?
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Directly violated the first amendment - paid a news media organization to censor relevant news with the desire to change a Presidential election (which they successfully accomplishment).
POTUS spend money all the time without the approval of congress. Biden just spent a trillion on student loan relief without congressional approval
Anything with impeding an investigation was also done with Biden here. Suppressing information of criminal activity by Joe Biden is well the same as Watergate. Except there’s more - first Amendment violation and direct interference with our Democracy
Cia constantly doesn’t tell the American people what they are doing in foreign country. We’ve got like 100 Pentagon paper examples.
I mean I don’t agree with all a lot of these actions in 1-3. But it’s different for the FBI/CIA to propagandize American people on matters related to domestic politics with an end goal of changing election results.
But I don’t want to get into a game of X was worse than Z. Maybe Z is stand alone just a really bad fucking thing - like paying private news organizations to censor people. A direct contradiction of the very first value we wrote into our constitution that the government shall not suppress speech.
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