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Since it’s election denialism day. Let’s talk strategy on the Hunter laptop. I believe this is an accepted fact now: The FBI had possession of the laptop a year prior to the election and had verified it while being aware Guiliani and others had a copy. Hunter and Joe also knew he had a copy.
Guiliani’s behavior makes sense to me. You have a bombshell on the opposition so you release it last minute for maximum effect.
But what about the lefts/fbi play? The play they ended up choosing was do nothing until it’s released then claim it’s a Russian plant. Now the fbi ran with something going to happen from Russia that is misinformation to their media and social media partners. Those who did that I guess have plausible deniability they just meant a “general threat” and weren’t aware it was “Hunters verified laptop”. I have my doubts those people hadn’t been read in on the laptop.
My question is why wasn’t this leaked earlier? Prevent the October surprise by getting it out earlier? Ideally even perhaps the primaries so you just didn’t have to deal with Joe. All it would have taken is telling Warren or Sanders about it and then they go get a copy from Isaacs.
Instead the path chosen seems to have been let’s run a psy-op to protect Biden. It just seems like frequently when given choices people seem to be choosing let’s just lie to them.
I guess the conclusion I can come up with is the people with access to the laptop were not fans of a lot of the Democratic Party and weren’t fans of Trump.
I know the Sanders people have long thought the official DNC was against them. And I’m no Sanders fan. But the fact no one tipped them off to the laptop when it could have been used seems interesting. Along with what felt like a successful media-op which I guess was organized by the FBI.
Alternative strategy Guiliani actually have played it wrong and should have released it earlier to let it get digested instead of late to swing a few voters. And Isaac perhaps was more partisan since he didn’t get a copy to the left.
Giuliani was naively trusting an honest and traditional democratic system. He didn’t expect that the institutions and public forums would conspire together to thwart the democratic process from unfolding. This was the largest escalation of the culture war in history: information indicating that the Vice President’s own son took bribes from foreign adversaries to influence his father’s politics was hidden from the voter’s access through a cabal of anti-democratic figures behind the scenes at major tech companies and news websites.
This is why I don’t care at all if “Republicans lied about the election!” My response is, “brother, the Republicans should be out there telling the Public the most persuasive possible lies they can conceive”. That’s the natural response to the anti-Democratic manipulation we saw in 2020. It is morally permissible, in fact obligatory, to match your enemy’s escalation when that very escalation thwarted the democratic process and destroyed the fabric of American democracy. When you destroy the rules of conduct, we go back to millennia-old idea of just proportional response — this is the nature of “just [culture] war” theory. The Republicans ought to be treating Democrats like we treat Russia: you have violated the borders and agreements, we will do whatever we can to push you back and reestablish a rules-based national order.
A better response to any misgivings about the FBI is to have R politicians probe the organization and gradually escalate if it's found to be breaking the law to assist Dems. On the other hand, saying "the enemy's misdeeds justify our own lies" is pure toxoplasma.
Sure, but, it is not illegal to slow walk an investigation or selectively enforce laws. They could be egregiously partisan and also not breaking the law.
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Did the FBI break any laws here? I don’t think so. But they (and ex CIA people) heavily tilted informational warfare in favor of the Dems and against truth.
Are there serious ethical and spirit of Democracy things at play - yes. Illegal probably not. FBI doesn’t seem to have been neutral as they are suppose to be but that isn’t illegal.
I don't know if they broke laws specifically, but if they did then that's an easy target to nail them for. If they didn't, then it's just another battle of "why are almost all institutions left-leaning?"
The latter is why a bunch of us advocate for raising the temperature and just playing the same games. Lie. Because there’s no other choice besides acceleration. Or a bit of a Russian tactic of offensive for peace.
That logical endpoint of that sort of escalation is a violent right-wing insurgency like the Troubles in Ireland, but with every major institution aligned against them the conservatives will almost certainly lose.
The US' track record with insurgencies hasn't been that great. It will be an even bigger shitstorm when the insurgency is coming from inside the house instead of being on some one else's hell blasted sand box.
Conservatives won't engage in any insurgency. They'll just keep ceding territory until they're left with the afterlife and nothing more.
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I mean, the IRA did get significant concessions.
The IRA wasn't universally loathed by every institution within Ireland though.
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This is just the “left will always win rhetoric”. But it wouldn’t need to devolve to Troubles. You can ruin the political culture to force reform hopefully.
Hardly. I'm saying this particular strategy seems like it will fail. A better strat would be to fight for control of institutions, undercut woke methods of power, and vote for R candidates who actually give a damn about culture war stuff instead of Romneycrats who "compromise" on it to get tax cuts for the rich. Hanania writes a lot on this sort of stuff.
What? How would that work? This sounds like
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Yes, because Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell are exactly who I trust to investigate things, and to tell me if they uncover damning information about the FBI and the intelligence apparatus.
It has to be an outsider. There is a uniparty, and Trump isn't in it. That is the true reason for this indictment: he won in 2016 and wouldn't play ball. He keeps going off-script and he's impossible to control. If he had played along, if he had been controllable, then he'd be treated better.
And then there's JFK, who wanted to destroy the CIA, and then the CIA murdered him and got his VP to cover it up. Fortunately, our deep state is loathe to murder politicians these days like they were willing to in the 60s and 70s, or Trump wouldn't live to see the trial. Hell, we still don't have any guarantees.
I don’t think an inquest led by Trump would be any more credible. Who else do you think is a valid outsider?
As for JFK—I want to know what you think is wrong with the normie explanation. It looks like you’re just spouting a generic conspiracy theory.
There have been a number of people I would consider outsiders. Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Donald Trump. I'll throw Bernie in there, too, although I'm less than pleased with his conduct since 2017.
It's only generic since it's been sixty years, and was itself the foundational "conspiracy theory" (a term I reject as a psychological operation to discredit anyone questioning the official story).
If you want to know what's wrong with the normie explanation, I suggest reading Noel Twyman's Bloody Treason. That was the book that convinced me that there was a cover-up perpetrated by the federal government, specifically Johnson, Hoover, and Dulles. It convinced me that the Zapruder film was doctored. It convinced me that the "normie" explanation simply could not hold, and another explanation was necessary.
As to what that explanation is, well, you heard what I think. Maybe I'm wrong about the specifics, but I don't think I'm wrong about the cover-up, and it's the cover-up that recasts the whole affair as a palace coup by the MIC.
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What makes you think that JFK wanted to destroy the CIA?
From the Bay of Pigs Invasion article. Never mind the next sentence…
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If you're convinced establishment Republicans won't help you, then vote them out and get people in office who will. And if those new people don't do a good enough job, vote them out as well and get new people in. A big part of the problem for conservatives is that they kept voting in Romneycrats prior to 2016 who did almost nothing to help win the culture wars. Instead of fixing the problem, they developed learned helplessness like "Cthulhu always swims left".
Trump was a step in the right direction, but had clear flaws. Instead of trying to get a more reliable candidate though, most Republicans seem content to turn the party into Trump's cult of personality.
I am not able to vote out any Republican politicians because none represent me.
Trump is completely reliable. I can rely on him to fight.
If you consider tweeting and grandstanding followed by policy reversals when things are criticized on cable news, then sure, Trump is your guy.
That doesn't seem like a very good strategy to win though. Hence why most of Trump's limited accomplishments while in office came from McConell appointing conservative SCOTUS justices, i.e. stuff any Republican president with a heartbeat could have done.
He didn't appoint any squishes to the supreme court which is better than virtually all Republican presidents before him in recent memory.
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How much of that is the federalist society created a pipeline?
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TBH there’s some smaller scale stuff he did like reviving the federal death penalty which may not have happened under President Jeb!
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I mostly buy Nixon-related conspiracy theories with regard to deep state subversion. Nixon was paranoid about people being out to get him because people really were out to get him. If that's correct, the spooks had already gotten cleverer about how to rid themselves of meddlesome politicians by the 70s.
I do not think that the Deep State would have succeeded in removing Nixon if he had run his re-election campaign honestly, rather than hiring the former Plumbers to ratfuck McGovern. It is entirely possible that the Deep State would have failed to remove Nixon if he had used fewer bad words while on tape plotting the Watergate cover-up.
Apart from Spiro Agnew's conviction for tax evasion, essentially all the big Nixon-era political scandals relate to the activities of Liddy and Hunt. He didn't need them, and would have done better without them. A lot of the smaller scandals relate to the over-enthusiasm of John Dean in pursuing petty feuds. Given that Dean eventually ratted Nixon out over Watergate, he would have done much, much, better without Dean.
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Escalate to... what, exactly? Just getting rid of the whole organization due to its history of misdeeds ranging from MLK to Whitey Bulger to modern political interference? When I look at something like the Strzok text messages and his role in the Russia-baiting, I arrive at the conclusion that this organization cannot be salvaged.
As long as you have federal crimes you need someone to investigate them. And if it's not the FBI it's going to be someone even more political, like the local US attorney, or even more disliked by the right (any votes for giving the ATF more power?). It's like the calls to eliminate the IRS that don't realize that unless they want government spending limited to customs revenue, any other tax collector is going to be just as bad.
If someone discovers that the local police force is astonishingly corrupt and has just been taking money from the mafia in order to allow them to run their protection rackets and deal drugs with impunity, "But who will investigate crimes?" is not a meaningful response to the argument that the current police force needs to be replaced.
It's an argument in favor of firing corrupt people, not of disbanding the department entirely.
If the corruption is deep enough, the difference is probably negligible. Especially if the corrupt people are running the show.
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Big parts of the right consider declining federal state capacity to be a good thing- either because they want to live in Montana collecting machine guns in peace, or because they live in places that would strongly benefit from capital flight.
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Killing the FBI entirely is certainly a nuclear option, but yes it should be on the table if things get that bad. R's want to abolish large parts of the federal government including entire agencies, so I don't see why the FBI would be considered off limits.
Trump should campaign on dismantling the FBI and the ATF. Can't imagine a more redmeat sort of deal for his base.
Trump doesn't need to offer red meat to his base. His base already love him so much that they are still supporting him even after he has been indicted twice for serious crimes of which he is obviously guilty (and once for some bullshit process crime in NY). His problem is that his base are not close to a majority of the electorate - they are barely a majority in a Republican primary.
Trump either needs to convince more NeverTrump Republicans to hold their noses and vote for the crook, not the Democrat, or to convince more Reagan Democrat types that trannies are more of a threat to their kids than Russians.
...These are a thing?
Per Wikipedia, the term referred to non-Southern white working-class voters who switched from D to R for culture-war issues, particularly (in the 1980's) crime. Obviously that group has continued to drift right since Reagan to the point where most of them voted for Trump, but it isn't really part of the Republican base the way rural voters, small business owners, or the white South are.
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