Like Joseph, I’ve been coming to the conclusion that nothing else adequately explains the extraordinary way the leaders of the Republican Party, especially in Congress, have been falling into line behind Trump.The same idea has occurred to me, and to a number of other people. Mainstream pundits don't like to talk about this scenario, so it falls to us -- the outsiders, the outcasts -- to examine the notion.
What I’ve been wondering about, however, is if personal, one-by-one kompromat – mainly of the sexual or financial variety, one would suppose – is enough to explain such a rapid and wide-spread phenomenon. Do Trump and/or his minders in Moscow just have an extensive dossier of individual misdeeds, or is there something more there? Something party-wide whose exposure would seriously threaten the survival of the whole Republican Party and brand?
One candidate for this might be concrete evidence of the Republican tampering with election tabulating machines and software since 2004 or earlier that many of us have long suspected. Could the Russian penetration of state voter databases and other systems been either aimed at this, or else just serendipitously yielded (or pointed them to) such evidence?
If election-rigging is real -- and we're talking here about hacked vote tabulators, not in-person voter impersonation (which is, for the most part, a myth) -- Paul Manafort would probably know about it. There is good reason to believe that such fraud occurred in the Ukraine, where Manafort ran an election for pro-Russian thug Viktor Yanukovych.
Aided by high-priced Russian political consultants, Yanukovych ran for president of Ukraine in 2004, and seemed to have won.We have no clearer evidence of election hacking. And Manafort was there. Even if he was not party to the actual hack, he surely knew about it.
But the election was tainted by charges of fraud and corruption — most against Yanukovych and the Party of Regions — and an attempted assassination. A month prior to balloting, someone poisoned Yanukovych's main rival, pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko, and nearly killed him. On Election Day, Yanukovych, who had trailed in polls by double digits, won by three points, sparking accusations of voter fraud.
The government voided the election results and scheduled a do-over.
A fixer who knows about electoral fraud there may well know about electoral fraud here.
If cornered, Trump will expose the truth about GOP election rigging.
I put the previous sentence in boldface because it offers the briefest possible summary of my theory.
No, I can't prove it; I can only beg you to consider it. It explains a lot.
How else to account for the obsequiousness of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and so many others? A number of these people clearly cannot stand Donald Trump, yet they obey his every whim. Whenever Trump says "Blow me," each GOP leader falls to his knees so rapidly as to punch two evenly-spaced holes in the concrete. The only first-rank Republican who routinely defied Trump was John McCain, a famous advocate of clean elections.
Ideology fails as an explanation. Much of what Trump has done -- running up a massive deficit, slamming immigration, igniting a trade war, paying billions to farmers hit hard by that trade war -- goes against libertarian ideology.
We keep hearing that Congressional Republicans fear Trump's base, but that explanation also fails. Support from the base would shrink if the truth about Trump seeped into the right-wing information bubble. If the Republicans did not keep strict control over the congressional investigations, the inquiries could uncover Trump's known history of criminality. We know that some Trump officials have offered perjured testimony.
For a while during election season, Fox was "kinda, sorta" anti-Trump. It's clear that Rupert Murdoch disdained the guy. Think about it: Just two people -- Devin Nunes and Rupert Murdoch -- could fracture Trump's base, if they chose to do so.
In short: Congressional Republicans should be in a position to tell Trump what to do -- yet they don't. They take marching orders from him.
Why the subservience?
And why did this happen a month ago? There was a bill to make elections cleaner -- a bill which originally had bipartisan support. Then Trump (who, without offering a shred of evidence, had screamed about rigged elections in 2016) demanded an end to the bill. Dutifully, the GOP leadership killed it.
Now step back and take in a larger picture.
On issue after issue, Americans prefer Democratic policies to Republican policies. They increasingly favor Medicaid-for-all. They even strongly turned against Trump on immigration.
No, I am not sympathetic to those progressive purists who have deluded themselves into thinking that all Americans love socialism, tofu, free abortions, nationwide gun confiscation, taxes on churches, trigger warnings on everything, and the mandatory enrollment of all pale-skinned high school students in White Self-Hatred courses. I'm quite aware that this country is much more conservative than the BernieBros think it is.
I'm simply pointing out the undeniable fact that, according to the polls, Democrats outnumber Republicans.
Yet the Republicans control everything.
We know that election hacking is technically possible -- in fact, some say it is easy. See here and here and here and here and here and here and here and...oh, hell. I could cite another hundred stories, all written by respectable authors. Teevee pundits (even on MSNBC) usually pretend that those articles and investigations do not exist; if those pundits did not maintain that pretense, they would not be invited to appear on TV. I refuse to wear that particular blindfold.
Don't forget this memorable headline:
Russian agents hacked US voting system manufacturer before US election – reportPutin admitted in Helsinki that he wanted Trump to win.
Again: The Republican leadership killed a bill that might have gone some ways toward solving the problem. Why shouldn't I view that action as an admission of guilt?
The principle of Occam's razor tells us that the simplest theory which covers all the facts is the likeliest to be true. My theory has the virtue of simplicity -- without, I hope, being overly simplistic.
I'm not asking for uncritical acceptance of this idea. I simply ask you to consider it.
18 comments:
I affirm that this is an awesome theory. If Trump had kompromot on the GOP (such as knowledge that the votes were altered), it would explain everything. I largely agree that fear of Trump's base isn't enough to scare them into such extreme subservience. If the GOP propaganda machine turned against Trump, they could get the GOP to largely abandon him. But if he had knowledge that could end the Republican party? That would do it.
Not sure if it's covered in one of your links, but another way the votes could've been altered is to hack into the communication between the local voting locations and the Secretary of State offices. That way you could alter votes while they were being reported. My understanding is this is one of the theories about how Ukraine's vote was hacked. Basically intercept and alter the reporting of the vote totals. And given that the vote was never audited, we can't prove this didn't happen.
I lean towards a spine or lack thereof explanation.
If you ever read the late bartcop you know the called them "Pink Tutu Democrats".
I see republicans the same way, motivated by keeping their seat for the most part. Rohrabacher, Nunes, and the Moscow Seven the exception. They sold out for a satchel bag of Rubles.
The republicans have their base that shows up for every election while Democrats couldn't care less unless there a history making minority candidate on the ticket.
BTW: The New York Times and Washington Post couldn't attack Candidate Obama like they did Kerry and Clinton w/o appearing racist.
If Democrats want nice things they gotta get off their fat ass and vote.
Don't know if true that more Michigan voters left the president box blank on their ballots that was Trump's margin of victory.
Joseph, I remember your account some time ago of how Roger Stone put up John Anderson as a third party candidate in 1980, drawing votes from Carter and ensuring a Reagan victory. I mentioned this on a website of Bernie supporters and a respondant claimed that Reagan won by 7% and that Anderson could only have accounted for 1% of that 7%. Hence, that Anderson play had no real effect. Any thoughts?
I never said that Anderson won the election for Reagan. RR won by an electoral landslide, although the absolute vote was, of course, closer. Still, even if all 5.7 million Anderson voters have gone for Carter, Jimmy still would not have won.
Nevertheless, the Anderson appeal (as well as the earlier Kennedy challenge) did much to suppress the vote for Carter. A strong third party run cemented the "malaise" narrative -- the idea that the country was going to hell and that Carter was simply not up to the job.
Look, it's hard to speak of a national mood, since such things cannot be exactly quantified or proven. All I can say is this: I was there. I recall those times pretty well. When I close my eyes, I can still see the stridently anti-Carter covers adorning every political magazine on sale at the UCLA bookstore in October of 1980.
That was my second national election. Though still incredibly naive, I paid more attention to politics in 1980 than in 1976. Many of my college friends favored Anderson, while I went for -- God forgive me -- Barry Commoner. The guys I knew who voted for Carter did so with a clothespin over their nostrils and the faint taste of vomit in the back of the throat. Nobody LIKED Carter. They hated him without being able to say precisely why they hated him.
In 1976, there had been genuine enthusiasm for Carter -- he seemed simultaneously fresh yet old-fashioned and virtuous. In 1980, all liberals viewed him as a corporate liar, a sellout and a warmonger. ALL feminists, without exception, portrayed him as the ultimate Chauvinist pig, as the King of the Evil Penismonsters. Simultaneously, the voters in the middle and on the right saw him as a wimp, thanks to the Iran crisis. The conspiratorial right (which was already becoming into prominent via a guy named Ray Briem, along with the surging evangelical movement) had succeeded in portraying Jimmy Carter as a tool of the Trilateral Commission and/or Moscow. (That was the that era's equivalent of the "Globalist" or Deep State conspiracy theory.) There were schemes afoot (too complex to detail here) designed to insure that black people hated him as well.
Basically, what happened to Carter was a precursor of what happened to Hillary.
The Anderson insurgency played a huge role in this. It wasn't just a matter of votes. It was all about perception management. The idea took hold that Jimmy Carter was unendurable.
Five years later, we all started to snap out of it. We suddenly asked ourselves: "Wait. Exactly WHY did we hate that guy so much...?"
Thanks Joseph. I appreciate your thoughts. I had a feeling it was a lot more than just the vote count. The public contempt for Carter, which persists to this day, has always struck me as irrational. Somehow the US public is a sucker for the cowboy, superhero model from the Republican drawing board, no matter how absurd and contrived. Cheers.
Joseph, very interesting theory. It is clear that some fix is in and that they all share some sort of knowledge.
And you do a good job of portraying those days when everyone blamed Carter for the National Malaise.
And along comes John Anderson with his slogan: "Why not the best?"
What a tool, and what chumps supported him.
I was pretty young, but I could smell a rat.
Such rats have turned up on the left again and again since.
Tom
The effect of the Iran hostage crisis on the Carter/Reagan election was profound. Every night was television coverage of the situation with the number of days these Americans had been held captive posted up in the corner of the screen. And it just went on night after night after night. It was devastating to Carter's presidency. So he gambled on a rescue mission, and the military chose to use helicopters pulled from the hold of an aircraft carrier. Helicopters which were not equipped with sand-shields on the rotor assemblies...
Any discussion of the 1980 election should include The October Surprise in which the Reagan/Bush team negotiated with the Iranians to prolong the hostage standoff. And don't forget the theft of Carter's debate preparations which provided Reagan with an inside advantage in those events.
Back to the 21st century; What to make of Roger Stone's comment during the primaries, that Scott Walker and Reince Priebus had perfected a system to guarantee the vote count in Wisconsin?
Joseph, you seem out of sorts in regards to immigration. I remember my dad, a legal immigrant from way back when, complaining every now and then that he worked full time his whole adult life and made just enough to not qualify for anything. He would occasionally comment, if you don't break the law, aren't addicted to something, aren't a violent person, the government isn't interested in you.
U.S. citizens do compete for government dollars with those newly arrived into the country. So when we tack on those who arrive undocumented and who also receive benefits, people start to worry.
Democrats rely on new life blood voters, no matter how they get into the U.S., to replace the ones they lose as Americans age and realize their nest egg is to some degree and in some ways compromised.
Were American Indians racist for being concerned about the influx of undocumented migrants several hundred years ago?
Was it a good thing to the American Indian's way of life that so many influxed so quickly?
I do think the 2004 election may have been rigged. I think I was watch CBS on election night and they had a continuous popular vote total posted on the lower part of the screen. Kerry spent 90% of the night gaining on Bush, but then Bush's number would suddenly just jump by a million or so votes, and then Kerry's tally would spend the next few several minutes gaining on Bush in small increments, then Bush's number would jump another million, and Kerry's numbers would spend the next several minutes catching up.
Regarding Jimmy Carter vs Ronald Reagan. The media made Jimmy Carter lusting in his heart look like a perversion. But Carter's problem was his reliance on more and more taxation.
Oh, and one more thing.
Fundamentalist Christians used to live lives separate from electoral politics... Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and all that. Then Jimmy Carter ran for president and heavily advertised his born-again identity. This brought out the evangelicals who felt motivated to vote for the guy based upon his religious beliefs. Reagan saw what had happened in 76 and cut a deal with the Association of Religious Broadcasters that if they supported his 1980 election, he would reward them by promoting policies they favored.
Although I was mad at Hillary's campaign incompetence I always felt strongly it didn't account solely for the loss. There is something I haven't seen it been addressed often; what about the machines themselves,not the software, the whole thing can it be for instance be replaces along the way between the voting place and somewhere else? This occurred to me the day I voted. It was in supermarket between two isles just on the floor and there was no security on sight. I left the place feeling been robbed, which was confirmed few days later.
Anom @ 4:10: One of the lesser remarked thefts from DNC computers was the Clinton campaign play book. When you know where your opponent is going to put resources you know how to counter. Had President Obama warned the Clinton campaign of the extent of the rat fuckery Hillary could have taken steps to campaign in areas the Russians were working.
Alessandro, the best coverage I found of the stolen 2000 and 2004 elections were here:
http://www.hermes-press.com/criminal_vote.htm
http://www.hermes-press.com/criminal_vote2.htm
Unfortunately, those links go nowhere now, so if anybody has an archive link of some kind then I'd appreciate it.
Also excellent on the 2004 election is here:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0706/S00165.htm
Congressional Republicans care about one thing and one thing only: Money for the rich. That is why they appear to cave to Trump, as long as they can continue to funnel money to the already obscenely wealthy, they don't really care what else he does. The Republicans need to distract from their economic principles to get elected so they rely on Trump's out and out racism. But they've been doing that at least since 1972.
The problem with that theory, joseph, can be summed up in one word: President Pence. The GOP would probably have an easier time of it right now if Pence had replaced Trump last year.
People leave out the October Surprise, which played a crucial, if not THE deciding factor, in the election of Ronald Reagan.
Obama and Hillary had a quid pro quo, and it just did not work out. Obama asked Hillary not to attack Bernie Sanders, Hillary complied. Obama presumed his record was immune from criticism by Hillary Clinton, she complied. She actually had no choice since if she had criticized Obama in any way, the Bernie Supporters would have used the comments as an opportunity to gain Obama supporters.
At the end of any day, It was up to Obama to blame himself for a couple huge mistakes he did make, and reassure the American public that Hillary Clinton will do better than he did in those specific areas. That would prevented the moderates from leaving Hillary Clinton for Trump.
This youtube video is pretty intense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=634&v=R9T4dGAxtO0
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