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A new fault line
Simple question: will the question of a “stolen election” by nefarious means – D malfeasance on the local level, top-down fraud efforts, Dominion manipulation, all of the above – divide the conservative side in the year to come? I get the feeling sometimes that if you’re not on board with the idea that Donald Trump actually won, full stop, you’re a cuck-shill Tapper-fluffer (cruise ship icon) RINO eager to buff your cocktail-party credentials.
Published in General
I am kinda late to the Party.
Yes there will be a divide, but that divide already exists.
There is a small % of the party that identifies with Jen Rubin, George Will, the Dispatch, the Bullwark and the Lincoln Project.
There is a large portion of the Party (Trump got a historic number of votes, even if he lost) that does not support the above people or does not even know who they are.
The divide is real and has existed for years. Just look at the Russia junk. Most of the party said it was garbage, a small segment thought it was real. The two side fought viciously.
For what it is worth the NT part of the right had a real chance to reintegrate into the majority of the party. They got what they wanted, Biden was “declared” the winner. Now was a time for them to sit quietly for a few weeks and enjoy their “victory”. Instead the worst gloating I have seen has not come from the left but from the NT right. 70million+ people are not going to be thrilled to see their theoretical allies gloating about their candidate losing.
Trump got over 40,000 more votes for the GOP candidate for Treasurer and 86,000 votes more for the GOP candidate for State Auditor. So it isn’t a matter or lots more people in Pennsylvania were willing to vote for other Republicans than Trump.
In time for the winner to pack his bags and make it to Washington for the inauguration would be soon enough.
The Evil Party and the Stupid Party. One getting more evil, and the other, having been presented with a potentially game changing strategy (heck, Alameda County CA went 17% for Trump rather than 11% as in 2016) has its establishment leaders lasciviously embracing stupidity.
I think he is assuming that this mistake was repeated in every county in Michigan and, unlike in Antrim county, the mistake (or intentional misconduct) was not reversed/corrected.
This is exactly why judges require a higher standard of evidence than someone’s assumptions and inferences, or at least they should.
If there is a glitch that transfers 6000 or more votes from one candidate to another, how is that not an important event to explore and route out?
I don’t think James Lileks is talking about a divide between those who openly supported Joe Biden and possibly the entire Democrat party ticket in the 2020 election on the one hand and conservatives on the other.
I think Lileks is asking the question of whether a bitter divide will persist into the next several years between those who claim that Trump was robbed of reelection in 2020 and those who claim that Trump lost reelection in 2020, even if no one within this group of people voted for Joe Biden or any Democrat in the 2020 election.
My sense is that about a year from now if you were to say, “It’s too bad Biden was elected president in 2020,” you won’t be scolded to suggesting that the 2020 election was 100 percent free of error and/or fraud. It will be generally accepted in most conservative circles that the 2020 presidential election was about as free and fair as all of the other presidential elections that have been held in the past 30 years. Or maybe not.
My understanding is that this error was caught by the same election officials who made the error in the first place and they quickly reversed the error.
As I understand it, even if no one had caught the error at the time, it would have been caught in what is called the “canvas process.”
We are all toast if election fraud goes unchallenged.
This fight, fir me, is about demanding transparency, and bring the norm closer to integrity.
The left and the media have done nothing but show there true colors.
Trump’s response and willingness not to take their $h!Г lying down is the hammer we need to change the cheating status quo.
Even if the results dont change.
Broken windows. Broken elections.
Both bad. Both need fixed.
Definitely only theoretical allies.
I will cry if @LILEKS is one of those theoreticals.
Top Senate Republicans say Biden should get presidential intelligence briefings
As Trump refuses to concede and continues to wage legal battles based on claims of voter fraud, Senate Republicans are increasingly deferring to the presidential transition process, arguing it should at least begin so that President-elect Joe Biden can receive high-level intelligence briefings.
“Both of them have got to be ready to serve, if selected. We don’t know who the winner is. So keep the briefings going,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said. “Ultimately, the president has to make this decision.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has already said that Biden should start receiving the Presidential Daily Brief, an intelligence report curated for the president and senior White House officials. Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), a member of the Intelligence Committee and the No. 4 Senate Republican, agreed Thursday.
“Whether [Biden] actually gets the product itself, I think the information needs to be communicated in some way,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a member of the Intelligence Committee. “I don’t see it as a high-risk proposition, and if in fact he does win in the end, I think they need to be able to hit the ground running.”
“All trends look like he’s going to be the president of the United States,” Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said.
“I see no problem with that,” added Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).”
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine.), one of a handful of Republicans who has congratulated Biden on winning the White House, criticized the GSA’s handling of the transition.
“The GSA, in my view is not acting appropriately in denying the Biden team access to the office space and the traditional, materials, services, that a president-elect would receive,” Collins said, adding that the intelligence briefings should “begin immediately” for national security reasons.
Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) — the current and future chairmen, respectively, of the committee that oversees the GSA — said they have no problem with Biden receiving the high-level briefings but did not call on the GSA to make the ascertainment.
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said Thursday that Biden has a “pretty good chance” of being the next president and suggested the briefings issue should be resolved sooner rather than later.
“I do think it’s going to come very shortly, that they’re going to need to have that worked out,” Rounds said.
I did not see a straight party vote option in my PA ballot.
It was Sharpie and circles on paper fed into some kind of Ocr machine. For the regular in person ballot.
The fury in PA seems more over election fraud with non-verified and cured ballots that disregard the clear legislative directive.
Every vote must count. Or something like that.
Like I mentioned. The election officials who made the mistake were the same people who caught the mistake and corrected the error. And if they had not caught the mistake, it would normally be caught in the canvas process.
How do you know this? Other than the tech company claiming “user error”?
I heard this on a podcast. But I admit that podcasts aren’t 100 percent reliable sources of information.
That’s why we have courts of law and judges and rules of evidence.
And since computer systems are often clones of each other, that single “glitch” begs for a review of all similar systems.
Because, the person who found it first may have inadvertently discovered it, but other officials in different precincts might not have been as observant or honest.
Neither Carter nor Reagan started getting the full briefings until later in November and Bush did not start getting briefings until December.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-briefings/trump-gets-one-presidential-intelligence-briefing-a-week-sources-idUSKBN13X2M9
Maybe he should be getting the full info but I don’t think it really matters. I am pretty sure that the Candidates for the President both the Democrat and the Republican get a watered down version of this while the election is going on, so it is not like he is totally blind.
I think the main takeaway is that people see the writing on the wall.
biden should certainly not get more thorough briefings until the states certify their votes and settle the lawsuits.
In December.
There is some motivation to stop cheating…
I suspected my remark about unyielding enthusiasm vs. ideology was a sloppy dichotomy when I wrote the words. It tarnishes many fine people who are Trump advocates. I should have been more charitable about many of his outspoken supporters. One feature of many Trump defenders, however serves to support my characterization of them as I originally stated. That is, even the mildest criticism of the President elicits a passionate defense by his disciples composed solely, ala Trump himself, of ad hominem attack. No argument, no reason, no substance, merely appellations such as “Never Trump,” “RINO,” accompanied with snide, unfounded remarks such as your accusation that “(my) definition of conservatism is mostly personality driven.”
Since you label me with the baseless assertion that I define conservatism as “mostly personality driven,” I’ll note here briefly that I have long been an advocate of limited government, Federalism, restraint of the courts on making law (Vide: Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges), respect for traditions and institutions quod est, and recognition of a social contract. Most recently, I have vocally endorsed curtailment of Presidential EO’s by congressional action. For what it’s worth (which is not much for those who employ the “Never Trump” method of debate) I was a youth for Goldwater in 1964 and a volunteer for Ronald Reagan in his Gubernatorial and Presidential races. If you want to further discuss conservatism, please let me know. One reason Ricochet is worthwhile is for that
I guess we have your answer then.
First there is no result yet. Just media spin. They don’t get to decide.
Second do you really believe that hot civil war is more believable than that the election was actually stolen?
That’s not surprising. With far too many we’ve already past the point where saying “fake news” or “enemy of the people” makes one an authoritarian. Fake news (the intentional or negligently uncurious variety) does make one an enemy IMO.
Since you didn’t provide a URL from an independent source, I’ll take your word for it. See how much I trust you?
Right. So this has not been my experience around here or in reason comments. I don’t read Breitbart.
The knives aren’t typically pulled out around here until uncharitable mischaracterizations of Trump supporters or bad faith argumentation has been demonstrated.
So hold yours back until you think you’ve been unfairly pilloried.
I remember Sore Loserman. The situations are not the same. Well, there are some similarities: Gore wanted to count obviously spoiled/late/irregular ballots too. D apparatchiks were willing to execute the plan then too.
I don’t recall, though, very many “conservatives” or “Republicans” counseling that we give up the fight against the obviously crooked and flawed counting.
The hidden assumption here is that Biden in capable of understanding the briefings. The “ready to serve” part of his life is behind him, in my opinion.
The big problem with the idea that “Trump turned off” such and such segment is that there has never been a non-distorted picture of Trump presented. Trump didn’t turn off, propaganda turned these people off if they were ever turn-on-able to begin with. I still say look at Illinois: we lost the suburbs 20 years ag (or more). Believe it or not IL used to be Republican. Did Trump cause that too? Nah, white suburbanites are the ones driving the progressivism on the left and that ain’t Trump’s fault.
Since the comments in this post seem to be arguing the validity of the vote, let me reprint a comment I made elsewhere:
***
I don’t know which post of the many posts to put this on, but this is from an article on American Thinker. And this looks provable.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/the_real_election_trump_card_refuse_to_certify.html
***
Well, this video also intrigued “Pede,” and he (or she) went to work. Pennsylvania uses Dominion voting systems, which forward their data to Edison Research, which then Javascript-encodes it and sends it on to the New York Times and the networks. So “Pede” downloaded the Edison data for Pennsylvania from the New York Times at this address and analyzed it to locate all similar vote switches, as well as for votes that just went missing. (Although I’ve given you the link, I wouldn’t bother opening it, because it’s just a big pile of Javascript code that’s incomprehensible to the naked eye unless you know your Javascript.) In the Javascript code, “Pede” located the specific code that changed the voting percentages for Trump and Biden:
[AND in summation:]
Here’s what I think happened:
The crooked Democrats actually believed their own propaganda — that Biden would win easily or that, at worst, it would be a tight race. So they created enough fraudulent paper ballots to be inserted into the counting to overcome any worst-case situation for them, which would be a “squeaker” Trump win. But Trump still led in the upper Midwest, even with the paper-ballot fraud, so they had to switch or destroy enough votes electronically to give Biden a “squeaker” win.
But as the votes were being counted on Election Night, it was quickly clear that Trump had a blowout win in Pennsylvania, far more than could be fraudulently papered over, so electronic fraud there went into overdrive, allowing it to be easily detected. (Although “lost votes” apply to the total vote count, forgive me if I suspect that most of them are Trump votes being thrown away.)
As of midnight on Nov. 11, the candidates’ vote totals, corrected for “Pede”-detected vote switches, are as follows:
Pennsylvania: Trump 3,550,163; Biden 3,159,698. Trump wins (55.5% to 44.5%).
Michigan: Trump 2,668,046; Biden 2,774,61.
Georgia: Trump 2,475,263; Biden 2,454,538. Trump wins (50.5% to 49.5%).