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Mr Hinderaker, I Demur*
*Why Trump is right and you are not (although understandably so).
John Hinderaker, on Power Line blog, is critical of what he calls being “obsessed with righting the alleged (and to some extent imaginary) wrongs that Donald Trump suffered in 2020.” His occasion for these observations is President Trump’s remarks about removing his endorsement of Mo Brooks —
Last year I endorsed Mo Brooks for the U.S. Senate because I thought he was a Fighter, especially when it came to the Rigged and Stolen Presidential Election of 2020. The evidence is irrefutable. Then, out of nowhere, and for seemingly no reason, Mo backtracked and made a big mistake by going Woke at our massive Cullman, Alabama Rally. Instead of denouncing the Voter Fraud in the Election, Mo lectured the crowd of 63,000 people saying, “Put that behind you, put that behind you,” meaning that, in effect, forget the Rigged Election and go on to the future.
The problem is, if you do that, it will happen again. Also, why do Republicans allow Democrats to get away with rigging and stealing elections?
Mr. Hinderaker’s stance is that is not forward-looking and risks being mired in the past for President Trump’s vindication.
That is a respectable position if you take President Trump literally. But as Salena Zito remarked back in 2016–
Sorry to remind you, but a lot of people seem to have lost their President Trump decoder ring. It’s not entirely their fault. President Trump’s personality is such that it is easy to think it is all about him, even when it decidedly isn’t.
It’s about us and the needed electoral integrity for us to be a self-governing society. Hinderaker relies on the Hugh Hewitt formulation that “if it’s not close, they can’t cheat.” But there is evidence that 2020 wasn’t all that close, but they cheated anyway. But it will never be proved with forensic science because we did not require that our elections be auditable.
Hinderaker in his piece essentially accepts there to be cheating and only wants to limit, not eliminate, it. President Trump says it must be eliminated. And the only way it is going to be eliminated is if the truth about 2020 is laid bare. That is not the GOPe position, but it is patently true.
Half the nation gets this; half the nation doesn’t; few politicians are interested in truly buttoning up our electoral process. No, President Trump is not pushing 2020 for personal aggrandizement even though it would certainly personally vindicate him. Just as in 2016, he sees something wrong and he pounds on it. His pounding doesn’t make what he’s pounding about wrong. And some things just don’t get done without a pounding.
Published in General
Apparently Biden hired a team of competent lawyers.
Trump hired morons.
Electoral fraud must be looked at because the System makes fraud easy. We need a simple one day vote system where fraud is difficult. Electoral fraud isn’t about Trump, it’s that the last election was wild, spread out, too many hands on too many ballots, and it invited belief in fraud. I’ve lived in over a half dozen countries during elections, most of the them third world. Only the Philippines during Marcos was as easy to commit fraud as ours and even Marcos buddies in their provinces had to use obvious muscle to commit fraud, so even there it was more difficult to cheat than here. No where else was the voting systems as open to fraud as ours in the last election. If we want to fix it and we must if we are to survive, we have to forget whether the fraud elected Biden or not. It’s too late to undo and it’s over. If we can’t fix it we won’t survive and we’ll have to take states and pieces of states out and start over.
Your definition of competent lawyers is lawyers who can somehow convince a judge to do something illegal/unconstitutional?
Interesting.
But that might still be only another symptom of your bigger problem(s).
First, Covid was a real dampener. Trump’s share of the vote would likely have been higher if not for that. The economy would have been much better than it was by election time.
Still, Trump could have increased his chances to win the election if he had emulated his conduct in 2016. He essentially went dark on Twitter and toned down his rhetoric during the last month of that campaign.
I waited for him to repeat that. He was too obsessed by then. He couldn’t stop himself. Like Hilary Clinton, he would often get a bump in popularity if he had just shut up. It worked in 2016. He had already maxed out his base. Going dark the last month would have allowed some of the women in the suburbs to reluctantly mark the ballot for Trump, while still keeping his base.
As for the advice Barr gave him before the election, that he should have had a law firm on retainer and ready to go, he should have taken that advice. 159.6 million voted in 2020. You will never have a fraud free election. But there is no evidence to showing that there was enough fraud that the election was stolen.
And then there is what he did after the election. His legal team was half-baked, unprepared, and in the end was not able to show sufficient fraud. Some irregularities yes, sufficient fraud no.
Trump’s attempt to overthrow the election by pressuring Mike Pence, as well as local election officials in Georgia was a disgrace. And if it hadn’t of been for January 6th, he would have had a clearer path towards a rematch in 2024 if he wished.
As it stands, he would be doing the country a favor if he doesn’t run and lets DeSantis take the party nomination. Without Trump, there would not be a DeSantis in his present form. He should allow that to be the last part of his legacy.
DeSantis has most of Trump’s good points, without all those bad ones. But Trump won’t do that. Hopefully, by the time 2024 does roll around, he will have lost enough popularity so that his base is willing to move on.
If Trump does get the Republican nomination, he will likely lose. Will he send another mob to the capital? I wouldn’t put it past him.
You could adjust and get used to it.
Just want to make sure you’re considering all the options.
Well, this is just wrong. It is like referring to a hall monitor as “Hall Jones”. If such a perversion has crept into court proceedings a simple practice note from a relevant court should bring things back into line. Conservatives should be against the misuse of language; Americans should be against the invention of titles.
Yes!
This is when the law isn’t really the law, it’s just the pay-to-play.
Exactly.
Or maybe he’ll put up barbed wire around the capital! And bring in thousands of troops!
Oh wait, that was Biden and Pelosi.
It’s easy to say this, and not necessarily wrong. But what president running as a Republican wouldn’t endorse Graham, with all his baggage? Was there another viable candidate for the seat?
We all seem to go all-in on going all-in on candidates, one way or the other. In most cases, you’re forced into the constraint of choosing one or the other.
Another way of asking this is: Would you rather have both the legislative and policy decisions made during Trump’s presidency, or Biden’s?
There are people on Ricochet who actively chose Biden, and in the prior election, Shillary. Let’s sit back, sip some coffee, and think on that for a bit.
Or the gift box, with a nice shiny treat inside!
How many polling stations are there?
Would the news have reacted positively on this fraud prevention effort? Or called for hearings claiming he’s trying to influence people at the ballot box?
I think that’s it. It’s their only real card to play right now ahead of the vote later this year. Everything else Biden is doing they have to run away from in their races at home.
It also ignores the mail in ballots piece, which was done at an unprecedented level, in terms of the pure number of mail-ins. I keep hearing from people that they’ve worked at polls, it’s hard to cheat – I believe them. But they, working at the polls, weren’t handling or dealing with the mail-in ballots.
It’s worse, it’s blaming him for the crime that happens in the dangerous neighborhood, armed or not.
The above formulation is akin to “she’s asking for it”.
I guess when we lose the next election, in part due to cheating, we’ll be safe and secure in the knowledge that so many things still need solutions.
It’s perfectly legal to hire a team of attorneys and to have those attorney scrutinize the policies and activities of various election boards.
It was an act of negligence for Trump to unilaterally disarm in his context against Biden.
That’s one of the things Bill Barr mentioned in his interview with Peter Robinson. Rather than take a leadership role, Trump would sit back and snipe (tweet) from the sidelines, as if he was a bystander not a candidate for president.
And now we see the results of Trump’s behavior: A Biden Presidency.
Absentee ballots are where election fraud takes place in our area.
The old saying along the lines that it is better for 9 guilty men go free rather than convict a single innocent man seems to be how absentee ballots are treated. There is lots of tolerance for fraudulent ballots.
Double like.
I am not disagreeing with you, but…for whatever reason that is the tradition, and honestly honorifics are all about tradition aren’t they.
Mind-reading.
Well, he’s got at least three years on you, then.
News from 2016.
I covered a lot of that here: https://ricochet.com/821157/election-fraud-101-the-rules/
This.
There are over 3500 counties in the US, and each one has multiple polling locations. My county has about 35-40 for large elections. My county is semi-rural with part essentially a sub-urb, and part farmland. That would mean 140,000 locations to send watchers to cover them all. You would need 3-4 per location unless they are willing to put in 14 hours days each without a bathroom break. You see, if you show up at my Vote Center as a poll watcher and you leave, you are not allowed to return (though I don’t have the manual in front of me so I might be misremembering that part). So you need at 4 per location a bit over half a million poll watchers. Each one has to get certified by the state they live in to be a poll watcher. This doesn’t include observing mail ballot opening and curing, which takes more days, but (usually) is only in one location per county. It is, literally, an army of volunteers that one has to find, train, and mobilize for the entirety of the election cycle (including early voting). This is one reason that I like how Texas uses adversarial election judges. The two judges for a Vote Center are picked one from each party and should serve as a check on each other. Of course the problem is that too few Republican are willing to take off a day from work and work the polls. I live in a 60/40 GOP leaning county and the majority of the poll workers are Democrats just because not enough Republicans are willing to do the work.
Exactly. And he perfect for the Dems from their standpoint. He’s photogenic, he ticks lots of boxes, he’s not threatening to suburban white w(h)ine women, and he’s an empty vessel. A certain governor from Florida ticks all our boxes and is one of our generational candidates.
I have. It doesn’t prove. It makes a strong case and supports my suspicions, but it doesn’t prove to anyone not inclined to accept the argument.