Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
Pretty much the case. With the massive influx of mail in ballots (ignoring the inherent insecurity of those types of ballots in the first place) standards for verification were lowered so that they were counted faster. Its one thing for my staff at the Vote Center to look at a picture ID of the voter, see that their name and address match what is on our rolls, ask them to confirm it is them, and that the information is correct, have the election clerk’s staff have validated their mailing address, look at their face and the photo, and compare the signature on the ID with what they sign with and use a preponderance of those factors to see that it is the right person.
Compare that to a mail in system where you must request a ballot, the clerk sends it to you, you have to sign it, mail it back, it has to arrive by the election, have the ballot be compared to the application before it is opened, and then, if all of that passes, counted. Even in that world, it is relatively easy to cheat and it happens almost every election. Nursing homes seem to be a prime location for such fraud.
Then look at 2020, where they just mailed a ballot to everyone, and then didn’t really have a way to validate that the person wanted it, or even voted it. Sure, they signed it, but what are you comparing that signature against?
Fraud, as defined in the laws of Wisconsin, was officially welcomed by the Wisconsin Elections Commission in nursing homes.
And of course, as a “Populist” we can expect Trump to stage ridiculous show trials and hold political prisoners without due process. Oh, wait, that was them too. But Trump is too old, old presidents never work put. Remember Reagan? Senility? Yes, that would be bad in a president. Worthy of removal from office. Removal would even be a moral imperative.
This is pure nonsense. When the Trump campaign very actively challenged election procedures prior to the election they were told that they had no standing without demonstrable harm having been wrought. When they returned to court right after the election, the same crooked judges told them they were negligent in not bringing their cases before the election when remedies might have been readily effected.
And now we see the results of a crooked judiciary: A Biden Presidency.
This. A criminal prosecutor who has to choose between murderers, rapists, and arsonists or ballot stuffers will, understandably, not put all of his time and resources into prosecuting the ubiquitous fraudsters. Charles Manson is scarier than Hillary Clinton, at least to the uninformed.
The first best remedy is procedural. One day in person voting with picture IDs and hand counted results is not perfect, but it is the gold standard.
Yes . . .
But he claimed that with his election the rising seas began receding. Oh, wait….
Read President Trump’s own listing of voting irregularities and concerns. People go to jail on strong circumstantial cases. The information developed thus far certainly meets a “probable cause” standard. It is telling when the people who benefit from a fraudulent process do everything to smear those that raise questions.
I suppose you could also argue that Trump’s actions are informed by the history of what happened to Nixon. His noble actions were not a successful strategy in US politics.
I did a quick search of a random year of Supreme Court documents. Only once was the term “General …” used in respect of the (or an) Attorney General, and it was CJ Rehnquist during the presentation of Janet Reno as AG. I still think this is an abomination (and not just because of the people involved) and should be stamped out. Error does not become hallowed tradition merely by repeated misuse. <shakes fist at cloud>
Trumps “failures” were not owing to the presence of political resistance. Ask Ronald RayGunz or HitlerBush. Where he fell down was predictably in the area of key personnel. The presidency being his first political office, he did not have a solid team of experienced, trustworthy senior personnel that he had experience working with. It was easy in places to stumble and hire an alligator or three to help him drain the swamp. Hey, I was using that leg. Trump’s overwhelming self-confidence combined with the lack of a tested team did not keep him from compiling the best track record of any president since Reagan, but it kept him from using many of the levers available to him to counter the Leninist campaign against any successful American presidency. And the tweets were stupid more often than brilliant, but the brilliant ones were groundbreaking.
I’m reminded of Bolton’s criticism of Trump, that he lacked the patience necessary to articulate policies and get them captured in enforceable written direction. This leaves the gators on their own with no legal corrective when deciding on how to drain the swamp, and destroys accountability. Normally, every state of the union speech launches a thousand directives in one form or another. A tried political team would have coached him in this before Bolton had even joined the administration,
You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know what the problem is. We need to know what was done and how it was done to keep it from happening over and over. John Hinderaker might be succumbing to the relentless push back from the lying Democrats. But where he is correct is that Mo Brooks is the best of the crew in Alabama, and should be supported by Trump. There is too little difference between Trump and Brooks for Trump to turn his back. The former President would be much better served by making the fixing of our elections always about the country and never about himself.
Don’t get hung up on the adjectives — a title is not a sentence to be parsed. Titles become jargon, bits of independently defined speech for use in a particular context. That’s just how titles work. Deputy Director Jones is referred to as Deputy Jones for short, rather than Director Jones.
As far as shoulds, conservatives should understand that a system may be the way it is for a good reason (why is this gate open?), and tremble at the idea of mindlessly systematizing, regularizing, flattening a system without encompassing every aspect. One way to sort your argument is to refer to the AG as the GA, the General Attorney, which would take on a different connotation.
The English language is full of history just as it is, such as the French adjective-after-noun formulation in many of our imported terms. I would hate to live in a rectified, lifeless, newspeak-Esperanto regime.
This is also true of anything that happens in DC or on TV.
As Ned Stark to Cersei.
Quite correct, it does not prove because it cannot. It can point out that it certainly looks like hijinks occurred and while we cannot go back and re-do the election, we can look at how it was “hacked” so that such shenanigans are less easy to achieve in the future. Instead of trying to use 2000 Mules as proof that the election was stolen, we should look to use it to show people that ballot drop boxes are easily fooled and that we should consider more robust controls, especially in places like CA.
In some cases I think they promoted it.
I am fine with in-person early voting, the key is in-person
It doesn’t really need to prove any particular conservative assertions “beyond a reasonable doubt,” it’s enough to show that leftist assertions of election integrity are… well, poppycock.
I doubt that Dinesh D’Souza’s movie would be persuasive to a judge.
If Joe Biden’s campaign produced a movie, it wouldn’t be given much weight by a judge either.
Election controversies are decided by legal arguments, not movies.
And I thought the mess over pronouns was a bowl of spaghetti.
That’s not spaghetti sauce…
The movie is a way of displaying the election problems to the public; they would be presented in different ways to a judge.
Well, sometimes they are decided in smoky back rooms, and sometimes by shooting in the streets. And I’ll quibble that things may be decided on the merits of arguments, but are decided BY judges. The same sort of people who also decided that Dred Scott was property, and that ObamaCare was a tax.
Another occasion for me to point out that “no great hand comes down from the sky to force people to do the right thing.”
I think the reason this situation has gotten to the stage we now face is that for a long time the Executive and Legislative branches have been joined with much of big business in avoiding ‘doing the right thing’ and joined recently at times by the Judiciary. The diminishing Christian influence does not help.
The election controversies we have had recently should not exist. They are caused by a total lack of integrity in the election procedures and processes. Guess who brought us to this place.
Trump swung and missed when he had his legal team file lawsuits.
Trump’s claims were laughed out of court.
Video of the judges laughing, or it didn’t happen.
Yes.