I Was Right About the December Surprise, But For the Wrong Reasons
I have observed in the past that the media will run negative pieces about legislation they favor, but only after the legislation is passed and the information is not longer useful to the debate. I suppose they do this to retroactively create a paper trail for being even-handed. So I hypothesized that we might see a December surprise once Hillary won, raising issues about her more forthrightly than they were willing to before the election.
Well, I was sortof right. We are seeing a December surprise -- the silly Russian hacking story being pushed by the Clinton campaign and the White House -- but for completely different reasons. These stories are clearly to try to de-legitimize Trump's election, either just as general battle-space preparation or more specifically ahead of the Electoral College vote.
By the way, speaking of fake news, it strikes me there is an interesting bait and switch in how this story is presented. The story itself is about the appropriation and publication of the emails of Democratic insiders. To my knowledge, no one has claimed the emails have been altered or faked, so one could argue that most of the damage is self-inflicted on Democrats -- if they had not been writing about inciting violence at Trump rallies, there would be nothing salacious to leak.
But the media shorthands all this as just "hacking" which I suspect many low information voters think refers to actually altering vote tabulations. Certainly this is the assumption that Jill Stein and all the suckers who donated to her money-hole recount effort ran with. But of course there is zero evidence of this and it is almost impossible to imagine happening in any kind of wholesale manner. But I think that some in the media and many in the Democrat camp are purposely throwing around the "hacking" term in the hopes that people will get this false impression.
Postscript: I have a new standard we should apply to any government regulatory effort aimed at a private company selling a product or service thought to be fraudulent: No private individual can be prosecuted for selling any product or service that is less of a scam than Jill Stein's recount eff0rt (which, oh wait, may get spent on something else, anything else they want). Ordinary people are being suckered into giving money to this on completely false, really absurd, principles. It infuriates me when politicians get all pious about, say, Exxon misleading the public about global warming when they sell crap like this. At least when I pay my $3 to Exxon, I get a gallon of gas that actually runs my car as promised. What will any of these donors get from Stein's effort?
Ike Evans:
All of this underscores why I would be so much happier with a Clinton presidency. Not because I am in any way supportive of her nor her agenda, but because I am more than happy to let the Dems have their own disaster while they stopped the Republicans from having theirs. Alas, it was not to be.
Buckle up. This ride is going to be bumpy.
December 20, 2016, 9:32 amMercury:
"By the way, speaking of fake news, it strikes me there is an interesting bait and switch in how this story is presented. The story itself is about the appropriation and publication of the emails of Democratic insiders. To my knowledge, no one has claimed the emails have been altered or faked, so one could argue that most of the damage is self-inflicted on Democrats -- if they had not been writing about inciting violence at Trump rallies, there would be nothing salacious to leak."
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You are the only other person on the planet besides myself who has articulated this astoundingly obvious set of facts.
I expect the MSM and even the president to spin the crap out of this story - although you'd think they would want to bury an incident that amounts to Hillary and other Dems incriminating themselves with their own words and deeds.
But how Trump, GOP leaders and various non-super-Left pundits failed to spell this out is beyond me.
Like "Climate Change", important issues now get reduced to meaningless and self-contradictory tag lines and actual evidence is dispensed with in favor of "a majority of experts agree...".
Look up The Cuban Missile Crisis. Notice how US government officials confronted the USSR by presenting hard evidence for all the world to see. That's how our government conducted itself back when the vast majority of Americans trusted it. Assholes.
December 20, 2016, 10:02 amChris:
I love it - the Dems sending money in to Jill Stein to "save" Hillary are in fact funding the defeat of the next big Democrat candidate. If Jill Stein hadn't run, Hillary might well have been elected. But flush with cash, Jill is certain to run again.
December 20, 2016, 10:18 amSamWah:
"But how Trump, GOP leaders and various non-super-Left pundits failed to spell this out is beyond me." When the competition is shooting itself in the foot, Do NOT Interfere.
December 20, 2016, 12:07 pmSamWah:
I take it you'd be good with a Leftist Supreme Court.
December 20, 2016, 12:08 pmIke Evans:
I want you to stop and think about this a little more carefully.
Your logic can be answered with: I take it you'd be okay with a man-child in charge of the most sophisticated nuclear arsenal in the world?
No, I would not not okay with whoever Hillary would nominate if she were to be elected president. But, my nuclear weapons (and a dozen other vital issues) trumps your SCOTUS.
December 20, 2016, 12:16 pmWolfman:
Living (if you could call it that) in Illinois, I would like to point out last weeks Tribune article on the Lotery scam, where the lottery creates a 'fun lotto', which they cancel before awarding the grand prizes. Not just once or twice, but a lot. Were I to do that as a business, I would have a cell next to Bernie Madoff.
But hey - the lottery proceeds go to the schools - oh wait - they go to general fund!
BTW - love you blog, and red it every day. Most inciteful and interesting.
December 20, 2016, 12:26 pmCapnRusty:
"What will any of these donors get from Stein's effort?"
They got a few days during which they could signal their superior virtue. That's all they ever really want.
December 20, 2016, 1:10 pmPeabody:
Rob Schneider had a good tweet yesterday: "It's true. The Russians may have rigged the election by showing that the Democrats definitely rigged the election."
December 20, 2016, 3:35 pmRecovering libertarian:
Welcome aboard, Coyote!
December 20, 2016, 4:22 pmmorganovich:
more interesting is the other narrative that has been so thoroughly buried/ignored by most media outlets:
wikileaks have said publicly and on multiple occasions that they did NOT get this info from the russians.
https://www.rt.com/news/370478-dnc-emails-whistleblower-russia/
the evidence seems strong that they got this info from a dnc whistleblower.
yet, the narrative, from the same groups wailing about "fake news" appears to ignore this awfully salient side of the issue.
this is precisely why i get so nervous about policing "fake news". it gets awfully tempting to start presuming "news i don't like" must be fake.
December 21, 2016, 7:12 amNehemiah:
The best thing to come out of the recount is that it uncovered massive voter irregularities in Detroit. Many polling stations had more electronic votes tabulated than hard copy ballots cast. They use a ballot where the voter marks his/her choices. The ballot is then fed to a machine which records and tabulates the vote. Nothing to prevent a ballot from being run through more than once. A poll worker see that a ballot has the preferred candidate selected and bingo, it gets run through as many times as possible before the next voter shows up with his/her ballot.
The penalties for voter fraud must be more harsh. No slap on the wrist, but meaningful jail time and out-of-pocket fines.
December 21, 2016, 8:01 ammarkm:
Is "having a man-child in charge of the world's most sophisticated nuclear code" worse than having Hillary e-mail the code to her housekeeper to print out?
December 21, 2016, 9:06 amIke Evans:
You can trade tit-for-tat all you want, you are still missing the point. The point isn't who is worse. Hillary is bad. Trump is bad. So why not let the Dems have their own bad? Why are we making excuses for Trump?
December 21, 2016, 9:10 ammesaeconoguy:
Leftists know they still (mostly) control the “major” “mainstream” news outlets, so they are resorting to the only tactic they have left: Run the false narrative, and delegitimize/destroy opposing opinions.
I do think that leftists/mediabots are suffering from a massive collective psychosis and actually do believe much of the false tripe they peddle, which Trump’s win laid bare.
The lesson of this past election was how decentralized social media displaced leftist mainstream media, and thank God for that. They’re scared, and rightly so: they lost control of the narrative, and the audience.
December 21, 2016, 4:50 pmTruthisaPeskyThing:
Ike, I think that Trump is a terrible role model and some of his proposals sound ridiculous, but I do not think that we will see the implementation of bad policy. Some people are looking foolish in their panic. Prudent people will learn when to take Trump seriously and when to take him literally. I am not worried about Trump having access to the nuclear code. I am not worried about him as Commander in Chief. In his past life, he has demonstrated an ability to be provocative and stake out an position that gives him superior bargaining position, and he has surrounded himself with people whose judgements help him make good decisions.
December 21, 2016, 6:26 pmOn the other hand, there would be no check on Hillary implementing bad policy or giving us a leftist supreme court that would have imposed big government on us for at least a generation.
Ike Evans:
This is an interesting statement. I agree with it, but I think it ultimately undermines your argument upon analysis.
Trump is a terrible businessman, but he is a world-class salesman. Trump has a loooooong history of gaining a superior bargaining position by convincing his underwriters to overleverage themselves. Lots of columns have been written by industry insiders noting this behavior long before Trump ever ran for President. In reference to Trump, Warren Buffet said (paraphrasing): when you owe the bank $1 million, the bank owns you. When you owe the bank $100 million, you own the bank.
As a result we have a man who has defaulted on an astounding $4.7 billion along with a series of failed business ventures. Gauging his wealth is difficult to do (especially since he is hiding his tax returns), but the most generous estimate anyone has ever done was Forbes Magazine, who only put him at $4.5 billion - which is less than half what he claims. Even if we ignore his defaults, he has underperformed the index by a significant margin, demonstrating he is all talk, no walk.
As a two-timed veteran of Iraq, this is precisely not the man I would want acting as Commander-n-Chief if I were still in the army.
December 22, 2016, 7:06 amMM:
Many of us noticed that there was almost no effort made to claim that the actual messages were not authentic, or that they had been edited to make the DNC look bad. We just did not have the big megaphone that Coyote has.
I have been waiting for the Bernie contributors to cry "foul" ever since the email from DWS explained to worried committee members that, regardless of the state primary results, Bernie "was not going to be nominated" [that may be paraphrase]. This allowed them to contribute to what they thought was a righteous campaign effort, when the powers-that-be had already decided their candidate would not win. In many worlds that is fraud. The Stein recount showed that this information, had it been made public sooner, would not have mattered much to the donors....
The dogs bark and the caravan continues on across the trackless desert.
December 24, 2016, 9:18 am