US 2024 Presidential Election

BrawlMan

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I mean the only presidential debate Trump ever won was against a 82 year old with a cold. So evidence suggests he's indeed a poor debater.
Trump is 78, so he really has no claims of Biden being too old, when the former is raging biatch going to be 80 in 2 years. We don't need someone like that in charge again.
 

Hades

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Remember people pointed out she was wrong for doing so. Were any of her "targets" shot about 5 days later?
I actually think this is a fascinating line of reasoning Republicans have developed. When Trump summoned a crowd to Washington, riled them up with lies and directed their anger towards the vice president you had Republican argue that Trump somehow wasn't the cause of his crowd going berserk and trying to lynch the vice president. And when they made the weak argument that Democrats had used the word ''fight'' before in a far different context no Republican cane forward to ask ''Were any people subjected to attempted lynching 5 days later''

But when Trump is shot by a Republican then Biden using the word Bullseye once MUST be the cause of it.
 
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tstorm823

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When Trump summoned a crowd to Washington, riled them up with lies and directed their anger towards the vice president you had Republican argue that Trump somehow wasn't the cause of his crowd going berserk and trying to lynch the vice president.
A) Just about every Republican put blame on Trump for riling up that crowd.
B) Nobody tried to lynch the vice president.

If you made only accurate claims, people wouldn't dispute it. If you blamed Trump rightfully for drawing a hostile crowd towards the vicinity of Congress on election certification day and letting chaos erupt, you could have agreement with you. Adding in exaggerated details or calling it part of a deliberately planned coup accomplishes nothing but forcing people to disagree with you if they want to be truthful themselves. I can only assume you do so on purpose.
 
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Hades

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A) Just about every Republican put blame on Trump for riling up that crowd.
Republican officials. Maybe. While then refusing to punish him and taking it all back. The Republican electorate? You did see how the clown is still in the running right? As well as people insisting that because Trump said the word peaceful one time that its okay?
B) Nobody tried to lynch the vice president.
So you think all those people said ''hang out WITH Mike Pence'' then? You know, when they stormed the place to get him? Kinda weird but you do you.

Adding in exaggerated details or calling it part of a deliberately planned coup accomplishes nothing but forcing people to disagree with you if they want to be truthful themselves.
Yeah sorry but calling it an unhappy accident goes way too far. Fact of the matter is that Trump spend weeks pressuring Pence to crown him, while also sending fake electors to try and give him an argument to do so and at spending the same amount of time radicalizing his supporters. The coup absolutely wasn't a spontaneous riot that just got out of hand. If Trump and co schemed to use violence, deceit and abuse of power to prevent the legitimate government from taking office and installing a false on in its place then why exactly is it not a coup?
 
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Silvanus

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Is there something in that last link I'm missing, or did you just call WaPo right-leaning? Are you perhaps thinking of the Washington Examiner?
I was indeed thinking of the Examiner. I mean, economically it's on the right, but that's par for the course and it's not generally supportive of Republicans.

Also, 1000+ respondents is 3% margin of error with 95% confidence, which is certainly less than ideal but is relatively standard practice.
For a straightforward poll it would translate to such confidence. That's not what we have here; we have various kinds of improper procedure (none of which necessarily indicate a vote fraudulently added to a party's total), being used to support a conclusion of a "stolen election".

And on the numbers: how many respondents are actually contributing to that conclusion? 16% of about half of them, which is... less than 100. Less than 100 respondents, none of whose votes are even shown to be inflating the Dems' total. This is a paper thin basis for claiming a nationally stolen election.

Also;

"Among those who cast mail-in ballots in 2020, nearly equal percentages of Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters admitted to fraudulent activities. For example, 19% of Republicans, 16% of Democrats and 17% of unaffiliated voters who cast 2020 mail-in ballots say they signed a ballot or ballot envelope on behalf of a friend or family member."

So, uhrm, not really any basis whatsoever for thinking this evidences an election "stolen" by the Democrats.
 
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tstorm823

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For a straightforward poll it would translate to such confidence. That's not what we have here; we have various kinds of improper procedure (none of which necessarily indicate a vote fraudulently added to a party's total), being used to support a conclusion of a "stolen election".

And on the numbers: how many respondents are actually contributing to that conclusion? 16% of about half of them, which is... less than 100. Less than 100 respondents, none of whose votes are even shown to be inflating the Dems' total. This is a paper thin basis for claiming a nationally stolen election.

Also;

"Among those who cast mail-in ballots in 2020, nearly equal percentages of Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters admitted to fraudulent activities. For example, 19% of Republicans, 16% of Democrats and 17% of unaffiliated voters who cast 2020 mail-in ballots say they signed a ballot or ballot envelope on behalf of a friend or family member."

So, uhrm, not really any basis whatsoever for thinking this evidences an election "stolen" by the Democrats.
I would agree it's a poor basis to call the election "stolen", Gorf's original claim. The secondary complaint, that it was poorly secured and then the media claimed it was the most secure election in history, I think is reasonably supported here. Not that I think you need a poll to laugh in the face of that claim. (In case you need an argument for why that is laughable, there was a pandemic going on, and we changed a bunch of voting rules and methods and polling places all at once to accommodate. It was a mess even without any foul play at all.)

Tangentially related, I think I'm going to henceforth refer to the week between the Trump assassination attempt and Biden dropping out at as "The Week of Honesty". For just that brief moment, the news was telling the truth all over the place, and now we've got a new Democratic candidate and they are lying at record pace to try to make up for lost time. In the last week, we got "Trump called JD Vance JG Wentworth by accident", "JD Vance had sex with a couch", "Kamala was never the border czar", "Kamala never suggested decriminalizing border crossings", and "Kamala didn't help bail out rioters". Axios went back to articles from years ago to issue corrections that she was never border czar, GovTrack started removing their report cards for Senators when Republicans spotted the one that had Harris furthest left. Genuine memory holing going on here, just like the "most secure election in American history". The news media have genuinely no shame at all.
 

gorfias

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A zoom debate about Kamala Harris. Watching this now. About 4 min. in and so far Anthony Brian Logan has not spoken yet. But he's made his position on the matter clear in his own videos.

 

Agema

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And the Secret Service appear to have been negligent but not murderous. I'm sure its all part of the plan. Too many coincidences to find credible at all.
Major security breaches are more common than you might think. I'd also suggest that the protection level for an ex-president is also significantly lower than that for the sitting president.

The Secret Service may have been negligent in this case. However, irrespective of whether they were the principle of "throw enough mud at the wall and some of it sticks" applies. There's no such thing as perfect security, someone's always going to get through eventually. As the IRA said after trying to murder Margaret Thatcher, "You need to be lucky every time, we only need to be lucky once".
 

Silvanus

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I would agree it's a poor basis to call the election "stolen", Gorf's original claim. The secondary complaint, that it was poorly secured and then the media claimed it was the most secure election in history, I think is reasonably supported here. Not that I think you need a poll to laugh in the face of that claim. (In case you need an argument for why that is laughable, there was a pandemic going on, and we changed a bunch of voting rules and methods and polling places all at once to accommodate. It was a mess even without any foul play at all.)
"The most secure in history" is a bit of a strange absolutist claim; there was barely any fraud, but AFAIK that's been the case for quite a few US elections, and also low incidence of fraud =/= security.

Tangentially related, I think I'm going to henceforth refer to the week between the Trump assassination attempt and Biden dropping out at as "The Week of Honesty". For just that brief moment, the news was telling the truth all over the place, and now we've got a new Democratic candidate and they are lying at record pace to try to make up for lost time. In the last week [...]
Hmm, no, that record would still be held by Trump by a very comfortable margin. He lies like a gatling gun, often multiple times in a single sentence, often self-contradicting. Take almost any debate or speech performance from him and you'll exceed anything Harris has come out with.
 

tstorm823

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Hmm, no, that record would still be held by Trump by a very comfortable margin. He lies like a gatling gun, often multiple times in a single sentence, often self-contradicting. Take almost any debate or speech performance from him and you'll exceed anything Harris has come out with.
In case it's unclear, it's not Harris I'm concerned about. Politicians lie all the time, Trump more than most, but it's a combination of expedience and generous interpretations of facts. Something like citing inaccurate statistics in a press conference Q&A is forgivable by circumstance, giving yourself the best possible interpretation of events is expected, nobody but the "fact-checkers" is going to care if a rally has 50k people and the speaker claims it had 100k. And for the lies of consequence, there's the whole 4th estate to call it out.

But that 4th estate is the problem at the moment. It's not Harris lying, it's the news media that wants her elected, and is seemingly willing to say anything to help that cause. All these things they are trying to memory hole from 4 years ago are well documented. There are videos of interviews where they ask Harris personally about bailing out rioters or decriminalizing border crossing, and now the same news organizations that asked her those questions is denying the answers that they televised. Like, I know politicians often know they're lying, but they're also often idiots, and that gives at least some plausible deniability that they are lying rather than just being misinformed. If Kamala Harris or Donald Trump say something indisputably incorrect, my first instinct is that they are just plain ignorant, unless they have previously demonstrated that they know the truth and start lying about it after.

That's actually pretty rare in politics, that someone will let the cat out of the bag and then later pretend they don't know the truth anymore. Major media corporations over here have done that a spectacular amount in just things I've seen in the last week, where they are going back and trying to scrub their own reporting wherever it makes Harris look worse. There is sentiment in right-wing circles recently that has been phrased a few different ways, but the essence is "No matter how much you hate the media, you don't hate media enough", and I'm not personally going to advocate for hate, but the judgment is about right. No matter how bad you think journalism is right now, it's worse than that.
 

Agema

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There is sentiment in right-wing circles recently that has been phrased a few different ways, but the essence is "No matter how much you hate the media, you don't hate media enough", and I'm not personally going to advocate for hate, but the judgment is about right. No matter how bad you think journalism is right now, it's worse than that.
A sentiment that is incredibly ironic considering the significantly lower standards of their own right-wing media and the candidate they are selecting for the presidency.

It's almost like they don't really value truth and accuracy at all.
🤷‍♂️
 

Silvanus

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But that 4th estate is the problem at the moment. It's not Harris lying, it's the news media that wants her elected, and is seemingly willing to say anything to help that cause. All these things they are trying to memory hole from 4 years ago are well documented. There are videos of interviews where they ask Harris personally about bailing out rioters or decriminalizing border crossing, and now the same news organizations that asked her those questions is denying the answers that they televised.
Ah it was the media. Do you have examples for the above?
 

tstorm823

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Ah it was the media. Do you have examples for the above?
" the Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the "border czar" title — which she never actually had.
https://www.axios.com/2021/04/14/ha...order-czar-immigration-crisis-haunts-campaign
" Harris, appointed by Biden as border czar, said she would be looking at the "root causes" that drive migration. "

Yes, I'm aware that Axios has stated their previous reporting is wrong. Their previous reporting was not wrong, nobody ever called "border czar" an official title, it was just a turn of phrase they used to like (because it was showing how seriously Biden took the border) and now they don't. All that matters in the present is that they can call Republicans wrong and liars.

Or this:


"She didn't donate herself, she only told her poor followers that they should donate, so obviously that means that it's a lie if you say she helped."

Or feel free to check the next thread over where a "Democratic commentator" tweets out a JD Vance quote without the middle third of the sentence to make it sound horrible.

Like, you can maybe start to see my lack of concern when you talk about Trump lying all the time, when many of his alleged lies are just the media lying about what he said and/or what makes it untrue.
 

Silvanus

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it was just a turn of phrase they used to like (because it was showing how seriously Biden took the border) and now they don't.
Yeah OK, but a turn of phrase 'conveniently' going out of fashion is hardly mega dishonesty. This is really mild.

Or this:


"She didn't donate herself, she only told her poor followers that they should donate, so obviously that means that it's a lie if you say she helped."

Or feel free to check the next thread over where a "Democratic commentator" tweets out a JD Vance quote without the middle third of the sentence to make it sound horrible.

Like, you can maybe start to see my lack of concern when you talk about Trump lying all the time, when many of his alleged lies are just the media lying about what he said and/or what makes it untrue.
Those are both pretty dishonest. They're also pretty mild by media standards, outdone by the average Fox or Daily Mail output. And no, I can't excuse your lack of concern for Trump's falsehood, because unlike those commentators, he was the President of the United States, and lied far more often and far more egregiously.
 

tstorm823

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They're also pretty mild by media standards, outdone by the average Fox or Daily Mail output.
Do you have examples of those outlets shamelessly lying to your face from the last week? It's not really a counterpoint, as that's still journalism being terrible, but I'm disinclined to just accept your "but the right is worse!" response.
 

Silvanus

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Do you have examples of those outlets shamelessly lying to your face from the last week? It's not really a counterpoint, as that's still journalism being terrible, but I'm disinclined to just accept your "but the right is worse!" response.
--"From the last week" is an odd stipulation, no idea why you've put that there, I'll disregard it.

-- I didn't say "the right is worse". Plenty of right-wing outlets (such as The Times) have much better records than Fox and the Daily Mail. Don't rewrite my position into simple tribalism.

-- it would certainly be a counterpoint to your characterisation of these recent mild misrepresentations as "lying at a record pace".


But, for examples of far more egregious manipulation/falsehood;

1. Used photos from other cities, different protests, and unrelated areas of Seattle to illustrate the CHAZ in Seattle;
2. Edited Donald Trump out of photos with Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein;
3. Repeatedly falsely claimed the voting machine companies had conspired to defraud the election;
4. While at Fox, Tucker Carlson claimed the police aided and "acted as tour guide" for the QAnon shaman nutcase during the Capitol attack;
5. The Mail published a now-infamous double-page spread claiming that Saint Denis in Paris was home to 300,000 illegal immigrants, and "350 known Jihadis". It had to retract these claims after a 6-month legal battle-- but of course did so in a tiny bottom-of-the-page "clarification".
 

tstorm823

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--"From the last week" is an odd stipulation, no idea why you've put that there, I'll disregard it.
All my examples are from the last couple days. You do not want to get into an all time lies fight about this, you will not win.
-- I didn't say "the right is worse". Plenty of right-wing outlets (such as The Times) have much better records than Fox and the Daily Mail. Don't rewrite my position into simple tribalism.
Why did you pick those two outlets then?
 

Silvanus

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All my examples are from the last couple days. You do not want to get into an all time lies fight about this, you will not win.
I talked about average output (though even that wasn't necessary to dispute what you said; you talked about a "record", as if its never been this bad). And you instead wanted to make a comparison of one specific week, which is just bizarre and irrelevant, so we can safely disregard.

Why did you pick those two outlets then?
....to show how certain right-wing outlets routinely out-lie those mild examples you had, so your claim that a new "record" was being set was bunk. They weren't there to smear the entire right-wing.
 

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I've said it many times before: you need to be less credulous and actually do your damn research. That did not happen. What you refer to is Biden talking to donors in the context of asking them to move on from his poor debate performance and put the focus back on Trump. It used the word bullseye, yes, but that does not constitute an assassination order.
And yet, Trump saying if he lost there would be a bloodbath in the auto industry was definitely a threat of violence and not a metaphor.

Grrrr, wife just told me she thinks Kamala is going to win as she will destroy Trump in a debate as she finds Trump to be a poor debater. Must not fight with family over politics!
She's not wrong. Trump is going to avoid debating Harris if he can manage it specifically because 1) he would definitely lose, he was rambly, only sort of coherent, and seemed to actively avoid the question being asked at every opportunity during the last one - him being seen as winning the last debate is a testament to just how badly Biden performed and 2) it will help demystify Harris to the general public in a way that would likely help her numbers (same reason why Biden should resign - a few months of Harris in charge and the country not burning down would help her numbers).

It had to retract these claims ... but of course did so in a tiny bottom-of-the-page "clarification".
This bit, right here, describes sooooooo many examples of shit in the press that it's ridiculous.

My personal favorite example didn't last long and included a video clip to back the original story, that was carefully trimmed because the literal next sentence changed the meaning entirely. It was CNN reporting on Sylville Smith's sister making a "call for peace" in a speech after her brother was shot by police. Then video including the rest of the speech went viral and they issued a small "clarification" in the article. The rest of the speech makes it clear that she wasn't telling people not to riot, but not to riot in black neighborhoods and take that shit to white neighborhoods. But they wanted a "call for peace" narrative and not a "black victim's sister calls for black folks to riot in white neighborhoods" narrative, regardless of what she actually said.
 
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