Wow... 170k views of this thread? I've avoided posting in it. Until now.
My advice is both sides need to take a deep breath, examine their consciences and confess their sins.
This guy summed it up best in a column last March. So read it carefully!
Like 2016, 2020 Isn’t Going Away
Our elections are racy, but meddling by intelligence officials shouldn’t be tolerated.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
March 30, 2021 6:29 pm ET
“Trump didn’t believe his election lies,” went a headline at the respectable news and commentary site Slate.com.
I was arrested by this statement of the obvious.
Politics is a strategy game, like war or litigation: The truth gets spoken only if it’s useful. I doubt legions of Democratic elders believed the guff about Donald Trump being a Russian plant.
Millions of voters see politics as nonstop mendacity. Even to many nonsupporters, the difference between Mr. Trump and his enemies was the difference between night and night. Mr. Trump once touted his own reliance on “truthful hyperbole.” In the 2020 election and in Joe Biden’s Ukraine entanglement, you could be sure something happened but it wasn’t what Mr. Trump said happened.
In one ironical way I can sympathize with Trump supporters who question how Mr. Biden could have won an election in which he barely participated. The race was one of Trump against Trump, in which Mr. Trump defeated himself by a nose.
After 2016, a deluge of articles and books pointed to Hillary Clinton’s 77,000-vote margin of defeat in three decisive states, blaming, plausibly, James Comey’s late actions or, less plausibly, Russia’s dabblings in Facebook and Twitter. These legends live today and are treated respectfully.
The same books could be written about 2020. Mr. Trump’s Electoral College failure was even smaller, 44,000 votes in three states. This legend is not going away either, however much Mr. Trump muddies it with absurd claims. No evidence suggests large-scale vote fraud. The “but for” argument is the one that will endure.
But for
late rule changes in many states in defiance of the U.S. Constitution, mail-in votes would have played a much smaller role in the election.
But for the efforts of the
mainstream media and Silicon Valley giants, many more voters might have been influenced by the Hunter Biden laptop story.
But for the efforts of
50 retired intelligence officials who suggested the story was Russian disinformation, news organizations would not have had a hook to insist the laptop story was false.
Mr. Biden’s allies were right in seeing the laptop as their James Comey. But the well-sourced
laptop story was true. The FBI, we learned almost as soon the election ended, possessed copies of the data since 2018 and was investigating Hunter’s tax and business dealings.
The laptop has now surfaced again to corroborate, with Hunter’s own text messages, a strange story about his lying on a federal background check to obtain a gun, then the improper disposal of the same gun in a public trash can by his then-girlfriend who also happened to be his brother’s widow.
The
New Yorker magazine, among a host of impeccably establishment news outlets, once devoted 10,000 words to the topic, “Will Hunter Biden Jeopardize His Father’s Campaign?” Today, the top half of the hierarchy in every newsroom in America knows the gun story is the quintessence of “news,” especially given the current clamor for strengthened background checks. Yet
news editors have largely treated the gun story as if it doesn’t exist, likely because they are terrorized by their own bottom half.
Let me hasten to add that Mr. Biden is a legitimate president. Under the Constitution, under the Electoral College, under the intuition that the popular vote also matters, he is president.
But our elections are always racy events and we shouldn’t hesitate in the slightest to recognize that after each there are messes to clean up.
It’s a straight-up fact that many states altered their election practices in 2020 in legally questionable ways. Why can this not be said?
Ballotpedia reports that, five months after Election Day,
we still lack rejection rates for mail ballots in 20 states; where the data do exist, rejections were in some cases
a puzzling fraction of those in previous elections. No court in its right mind would say the remedy is to invalidate votes cast in good faith by legally eligible voters, but we also work constantly toward trying to make our elections unimpeachable in both accuracy and legality, and we have no need to lie about particular outcomes.
The role of rule changes in 2020, the role of the media, the role of a “cabal” (in Time magazine’s word) that worked the legal machinery to assure Mr. Biden’s advantage—all this is part of history now and should be spoken of.
Mr. Trump is a liar when he says he was the victim of massive vote fraud. Many media organizations were also liars in 2020. And we can live with this! One thing we should not be prepared to tolerate is former intelligence officials exploiting their standing with the public to spread disinformation to influence an election.
I keep waiting for the bipartisan wise persons to awaken and show they care about democracy, truth and preserving our institutions from voter contempt.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/like-20...ay-11617143389
