Dumps in his pants has reiterated his purported opinion that he'd lose the coming poll only should he be biggly bamboozled of his erection. Of course, that's what he said to Pennsylvanians four years ago, so you can throw that grain of saltpeter over your lelf shoulder.
Thing is, imagining the moment of that utterance in hindsight, as one does in the perfection of any 2020, ominates of Dubya's "my brother's got 1800 votes for me there", in regard to a major media network calling Florida for Gore in 2000 when the central time zone district polls in the panhandle were still open. The subsequent claim would be that Gore's camp suppressed voter turnout. Funny, isn't it?
It's a classic move of chicanery, and in the context of our era's governance, more the rule than the exception: Accuse someone else of doing what you're already doing. Of the few substantive differences between the two US parties, Republicans seem to be much better at this kind of subterfuge.
(It's been my belief that in 2004 candidate Kerry's team didn't contest the dubiously flipped results in Florida and Ohio because they had themselves been trying to hack their way to a, perhaps honest, victory, and when it backfired; they didn't have the guts to point fingers.
I tend toward this theory because it fits the parties' respective images, which also unfortunately, gives the Republican prole the feeling that theirs is somehow fighting harder for them and therefore would indicate that they do not outright betray their voter base, which they do, of course.)
Anyway, what brought all this up was an article in German about Donnie Dump's latest claim. There's a mention that he had "so far provided no conclusive evidence" for it, and that among the experts rejecting his warnings are "even Republicans". Now, that's not what got me, although this sort of allusion I find infantile*. That is, that given the fact that Republicans would stand to benefit from exposing the alleged cheating, their rejection of its existence would therefore, along with the claimant's failure to prove his case, add weight to the claim that the claim itself is preposterous. I can think of no other reason to add this point except as an intended talking point to convince Republicans.
The liberal press has always given Republicans the benefit of credulity.
No, the part that brought all this up was the editors' claim that "electoral fraud in the US is extremely rare" and that it is severely punished by the judiciary.
German journalists in my experience do not forsake the subjunctive mood that indicates indirect speech unless they are purporting to state an objective fact, which they have done here. So I assume that what they mean is the instances of electoral fraud that are found and punished by the US judiciary are extremely rare. And I guess that the authors might suggest that this is the crux of their conclusion that the fraud would be likewise rare.
Where you see no smoke, Shirley...
Aside from the fact that American elections relative to others receive horse-race coverage from midterm to midterm but are never accompanied by the scrutiny given to those that involve candidates who promise to sever some private industry from a lucrative public resource, it is a willful choice by the corporate press that dominates the narrative not to see smoke, or to call it by a different name.
As someone who came to know electoral fraud in the primaries, after years of never having a candidate remaining in the race come Tuesday relevant, pointing fingers now makes me seem kooky, but how naive would I have to be to believe that the benanigans of Primaries '16 & '20 were a new thing? The wonks that want you to know say it all began with the DLC, but I think that's just more smoke by another name and self-reflection by theatrical means. The machines precede the precedents even.
The voters do not have anyone representing them for their grievances. That is, the extent to which the complaints that are lodged in a judiciary are taken seriously are extremely rare, apparently. Let alone is it in the interest of the underwriters of the elections to see that anyone gets paid but themselves.
I'm not making predictions, but if the narrators who are cautiously slam dunking this time around are correct, the next American president will keep treading the ground that's been stirring up the dirt that was there long before hindsight deemed it appropriate to talk about. And while it doesn't make me feel any better that not just the audience but many of the actors themselves believe their own bullshit, it doesn't make me feel any worse.
* I oughta know. —the Projector
