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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.
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.
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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