Breaking 1-06-21: MAGA terrorist attack on Capitol

Why do people still talk about Trump? I don't get it. He has his fan base but other than that he's irrelevant. He's not the president. He lost. Amazing some people can't move on. Just as bad as his cult of supporters

 

its been 8 months and 18 days since the "incident" at the capital and 20 years since 9/11 "Incident" I think we have a while to go before we can tell how devastating the attack on the capital was when we consider the GOP are still pushing the big lie and trying to subvert democracy and voting rights across the nation in its wake.

 

Hey brainiac, Trump is the most influential person in the Republican party by a huge margin. He is far from irrelevant. Trump is dictating candidates and policy right now.

 

Other than he is the leading candidate for 2024. That leading republicans still think they need to meet with him.

And this republican pollster just tweeted out this...

 

Cause and effect…. He is still having rallies…. Playing king maker in primaries…. Releasing statements…. The cause of changing election rules to blunt democrats…..

It’s pretty straightforward…. I wish he would just shut up and ride off into the sunset but it would seem he is still interested in politics. Conservatives still seem to rally around him.

 

I'm pretty sure even if every "subversion" of voting rights, like requiring in person voting and voter ID passes in every state where it has been put forward, and even in every state in America, it will still be less devastating than 9/11. Thousands of people died, our freedoms were permanently stripped away, there was a huge domestic spying program put in place, and we fought two wars for 20 and 15ish years respectively. Short of an actual civil war that can somehow be blamed directly on the 1/6 riot, I don't see any way it can possibly be considered worse than 9/11 by anyone that isn't trying to sell a narrative.

In fact, it is a stretch to blame any of the voting rights legislation on the riot, as it is more a symptom of the same cause (lack of faith in our elections). Actual responses to the 1/6 riot were increased security at the capital, the cost of the damages and investigation, etc. The stuff that happened after 9/11 was a direct response to the attack.

 

Release the footage.

 

But in your defense of more voter restrictions which also strip away our liberties is in fact further being stripped away.

We are absolutely in agreement in being against liberties stripped away as a result of 9/11.

I was against it at the time and I still am against them. But those were the result of people elected in free and fair elections enacting those policies.

Dictatorships are kept in place by decrying the results of free and fair elections. That is exactly what happened when Trump encouraged his supporters to distrust the election and to march on the captiol.

You are ignoring the supposed leader of the free world trying to make sure the results of a free and fair election were not a knowledged.

Not only are you disagreeing with the impact of the problem, you're refusal to address the issue is part of the problem.

1. When a leader tries to use his power to invalidate the results of a free election it is a threat to Democracy of that nation.

2. When people don't support holding them and their supporters accountable, that becomes part of the problem.

3. Acting as if subverting democracy is no big deal, is in itself a big deal.

 

The acceptance of subverting democracy is wider and deeper than ever before and frankly is mainstream Republican politics now. Look no further than all the attempts to obtain state Secretary of State positions, attempts by those who deny that Biden won the election. The end of democracy scenario that was avoided in 2020 could easily occur in 2024.

 

What liberties? The right to vote by mail. The right to vote if you are not who you claim to be? You can agree or disagree that the current election system is subject to abuse. If it is not, then the new rules to fight voter fraud would be solving a problem that doesn't exist. That doesn't take away any liberties from you. The NSA reading your email without a warrant, people being denied the right to travel because they are suspected of wrongdoing but there has never been any process to challenge this suspicion (or having a similar name to someone in the same situation). Those are actually losses of liberty. Only being allowed to vote in person and only if you are the person you purport to be is not, it is a minor inconvenience. It is taking off your shoes to go through the security screening.

As are the changes to voting rules, are they not? Isn't it the state legislatures making these changes?

Dictatorships are kept in place by the dictator deploying his goons against those who would challenge him. Saddam Hussein wasn't voted out and then claimed on news networks he didn't control that he thought he won and that the legislature should refuse to certify the vote. People just got "disappeared" if they voted for someone else. That's why he won with 99+% of the vote. Trump saying he thinks there was election fraud, whether or not he believes that is true, and then allowing the election to stand, leaving the White House and no longer issuing orders to the military or receiving legislation from Congress is hardly the actions of a dictator.

Trump claimed he won the election. Gore claimed he won the election. Multiple senators challenged the certification of the Ohio electors in 2004, saying Kerry won the election. It is not at all uncommon for the losing candidate to challenge the outcome of elections, especially the certification of state electoral college slates where the margin was close. There was a riot this time. In 2016 it only went as far as people screaming in the Senate chamber to try to disrupt the certification. The actions of challenging the election results ("the big lie") were the same.

You are ignoring that this happened before and will happen again. You know what would help, if there were no circumstances under which the results could be considered questionable, because everyone voted in person, with valid ID, and had a paper receipt that they could compare with the ballot that was counted. When we have 100 million mail in ballots, people lose confidence.

1. It has happed multiple times before. Maybe you didn't know that.
2. What should be the penalty for challenging the outcome of an election in which you believe you were cheated? Under what circumstances should challenges to the results be allowed?
3. What constitutes subverting democracy for purposes of this standard. What am I required to consider a big deal? Saying you won when the official count says otherwise?

All of this ignores the fact that you have switched the goalposts from 1/6 was worse than 9/11 to Trump challenging the election outcome was worse than 9/11, one consequence of which was the riot on 1/6. There is no reasonable argument that the 1/6 riot (or "insurrection" or whatever term you want to use) was itself worse than 9/11. Yet that is what is being asserted by the left.

 

If Trump is the R nominee in 2024 his entire campaign will be “the election is rigged unless I win”.

I guess that’s better than running on “brown people are bad”.

 

Yeah it's amazing that biden won with that slogan.

 

1. No. Nothing like what happened with Trump in 2020 ever happened before. I'm sure that you know that. The complaint was never about legitimate challenges. It was about abusing power in attempts to get officials to change the legitimate result of the vote.
2. There should be no penalties for legitimate challenges to fraudulent results. But there should be severe penalties for attempting to abuse power to overturn legitimate results and trying to stop the democratic process from continuing.
3. You are free to consider attempts by a leader to overturn the verified results of an election no big deal. But you should at least have an understanding why other Americans might disagree. Using a position as head of the executive branch in order to coerce officials to change the results of the vote or to not certify the legitimate vote is a good standard.

I didn't move the goalposts. Trump and his lie about the election was always part of 1/6.

If the goal is to make an atmosphere where the elections shouldn't be questioned then we already have that even with mail in balloting since there has never been an instance where it was a significant problem or significant fraud with it. Adding additional requirements which may keep people from voting is less democratic.

But you are the one who brought up the idea of a situation where there can be no challenges.

Challenges were never the issue. Nobody had voiced the opinion that there can be no challenges. The issue is with attempts to abuse power and subverting a legitimate voting process has always been the issue.

 

But from Trump's r****ded point of view, he thinks it is a legitimate challenge. He wasn't telling people to change the results to make him win even though he lost, he was telling people (for example, the Georgia Secretary of State) to find the fraudulent votes that prevented his legitimate win. You are attributing to Trump the knowledge that his loss was above board and that his challenges are in bad faith. I don't think that is his point of view. From his perspective, he won and won big, and it is not just a few votes that were fraudulent, but a massive fraud. This was the first election where the absentee vote was such an enormous part of the overall election. Normally, as the votes are coming in on election night, the results that we are seeing during the reporting of in person votes are essentially going to reflect the final vote. I think Trump actually believed that would hold true in 2020. When he was winning at the close of the polls, but then in the middle of the night absentee ballot counting started turning the tide against him, it seemed to him that he was being cheated. As such, he challenged. This was exacerbated because Trump's source of information seemed to be the most biased of pro-Trump media like OANN. He was calling Fox News part of the left biased media. He was watching the videos claiming ballots were being smuggled in during the night. It didn't help that there were videos posted like people allegedly being told they were stopping the counting and the observers leaving and then counting resuming. If you consider the possibility that Trump actually thought he won (and of course he did, could you imagine Trump thinking he lost), the challenges were legitimate.

How would they look different when the processes he was using are the same processes used in legitimate challenges. As I said, look at the difference between what Trump did and what a real dictator like Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Un does. Trump isn't telling the Secretary of State of Georgia to declare him the winner if he wants to see his family again, he called and said it isn't possible that he lost Georgia, they have to find the votes that show he won. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.

In what way did he use his position as head of the executive branch? His powers as President do not in any way afford him an ability to change the results or not certify the vote. He didn't declare martial law, he didn't try to veto the certification, he didn't have Pence break a tie in his favor, he didn't fire someone in his cabinet that has influence on the outcome of the election. He threw his big baby temper tantrum and said, "I couldn't have lost. I won. I won by millions of votes." He is a delusional narcissist, not a Machiavellian chessmaster. The things he did that actually relate to certification were asking members of Congress to vote not to certify slates of electors from states he claims he won. That has happened before. If happened as recently as 2016, when several members of the House of Representatives tried to challenge certification, but they couldn't get a Senator to sign off on their challenge.

It happened in 2004 when Senator Boxer and Representative Jones objected to the certification of the Ohio electors, a challenge that was then debated and voted down. CNN.com - Democrats challenge Ohio electoral votes - Jan 6, 2005
The big difference is Trump is an enormous blowhard with a cult of personality built around him and a few hundred of his dumbest supporters decided to break into the Capitol and riot instead of just screaming at Senators like previous Capitol protesters.

By the way, although the current narrative is that an attack on the Capital by extremist Americans is unprecedented, the Weather Underground actually bombed the Capitol in 1971 in pursuit of their far left ideals.

Then the claim should be that Trump claiming he won ("the big lie") is worse than 9/11. No one is buying that though. The Democrats are having a hard enough time selling the idea that the Capitol Riot was worse than 9/11.

The issue is that it is nearly impossible to check. I voted absentee (using the county drop box, not mail) in the last four elections (2014, 2016, 2018, 2020). I don't know if you could check the status of your ballot online in 2014. In 2016, the only system said my ballot was never received. I don't remember if I checked in 2018 or not. In 2020, it said my ballot was received and counted, but I cannot check to see how it was counted. I assume it was counted correctly 3 out of 4 times, but a 25% failure rate is absolutely awful, especially when I am dropping my ballot off in the drop box right outside the County Administration building. No evidence of fraud is generated in this case, but my vote in 2016 seemingly did not count. How many times across America does something like that happen? There is no way to know. The only information in the system would be that I did not vote in 2016, despite dropping off a ballot. So while it is true there has been no evidence of wide scale election fraud, there are vulnerabilities that do not lend themselves to generating evidence. In person voting with voter ID and a paper receipt that you can check online against what is actually counted would eliminate that issue. To me, that is worth the inconvenience (not voter suppression, very slight inconvenience) of some additional voter integrity measures.

That is just a matter of perspective though. From the point of view of Trump and his supporters, those were legitimate challenges. From the point of view of Clinton and her supporters, the challenges they were raising over Russian interference were legitimate, but the Trump supporters would say that was an attempt to use the power of the government to subvert the election (by having the FBI investigate Trump right before the election, for example). There are always going to be people who think their challenges are legitimate and the other guys challenges are abusive. People still insist that the Supreme Court of the United States subverted the election in 2000.

In the end, Trump raised his challenges, the challenges were denied, and the election was upheld. Biden is still President. Democracy continues.

 

No.

If a political party's private correspondences are hacked and leaked during a presidential campaign that benefits the opponent and our own intelligence agencies confirm it was done by a foreign government to benefit said political opponent with whether said opponent willingly took part in or was a mere unwilling beneficiary of the foreign interference, it is within reasonable grounds that the political party that had its private correspondences leaked would be suspicious of the opponent and request investigations of their opponent. This doesn't fundamentally damage America's democratic institutions. A political party had their servers hacked that benefited their opponent and said party was suspicious of their opponent. Nothing about this lessens our trust in our democratic voting process.

Now a presidential candidate actually stating that our voting count is illegitimate is unprecedented and that actually steadily will destroy our nation from within. This doesn't require some anomoly situation such as a party's emails being hacked and leaked. It merely requires a charasmatic candidate to continuously spam that the election and vote count itself was fraudulent. We already are seeing this with other GOP candidates like Larry Elder in the recall election in Cali.


So no, being openly suspicious and accusatory that your opponent had some role in your private correspondences being hacked and leaked that benefited your opponent's campaign is no where near the long term damage in trust in our institutions that claiming our entire voting system is fraudulent and that vote counts in the presidential election can't be trusted.

Pretending that the threat of Trump's rhetoric is over is absurd when 60% of registered GOP voters still believe the election system is fake.

 

and then those challenges were raised again and again.
When is this 'end' you speak of? Blue lives matter except for Jan 6 amirite

somehow trump trying to void a democratic election is no big deal and yet a tan suit is a national emergency.

Cover for it by saying you don't like trump ( then still support him) it's pathetic.but also some of the most transparent sh*it you'll ever see

 

Perhaps one key difference is you didn’t have half of lawmakers supporting the attackers on 9/11 like you do now. That’s the main reason the legislative fallout/impacts are not comparable, not the events themselves.

 

Blue lives mattered on January 6th, too. No officers were killed. Anyone that attacked officers should be charged with battery on a police officer. The end is that Biden is president. Trump is not going to be reinstated as president. The end was the certification of the election results.

Again, multiple candidates and legislators have tried to void democratic elections. You are ignoring that because you need to pretend election challenges are unique to Trump. They are not.

When have I supported Trump? When I voted for someone else? When I said during his initial election that he was a clown, and it was an embarrassment that he was being made the candidate for a major party? I supported his Supreme Court appointments, and that's pretty much it.

 

No insurrection charges... lol this over dramatic thread is going in the dustbins of history.