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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.
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.
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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