The Boy Who Cried Wolf Effect

Some Trumpian smears have been effective. Or rather, Dems have been ludicrously ineffective at knocking them down. 

 

To some degree, "commie-baiting" the D party has worked in Florida. Why won't the Dems counter by bringing up Trump's embrace of Kim Jung-Un, or his financial ties to China? 

 

Senator Mike Lee's recent "We don't need no stinkin' democracy" declaration was pretty damned Stalin-esque. Why won't Democrats say so? Why not commie-bait the Republicans?

 

Another smear: Through sheer repetition, Trump has convinced millions that "the collusion thing" was a complete hoax. Demolishing Trump's claim was always pretty easy. Dems just needed to memorize four brief statements:  

 

1. The Republican-led Senate report confirmed that collusion was real. 

2. Trump's campaign manager secretly worked with a Russian spy. 

3. Trump lied about his business dealings in Russia. 

4. Mueller proved that Trump obstructed justice, and obstruction indicates guilt.

See? Simple-dimple.

Trump has been pushing his own version of  the "Russia" hoax -- the Durham Report. Fortunately, this report won't come out until after the election. There is no there there.

 

Basically, the Trumpers want us to believe that Hillary, Obama and Biden conspired to frame Trump in 2016. They're still pushing this smear, which is easily debunked. The most recent variation of this smear is based on a report by DNI John Ratcliffe, a Trump loyalist who is literally pushing Russian disinformation. (Also see here.)

 

This accusation, in all its variants, has been around for a while, and it never made a lick of sense. Everyone knows that the Obama administration could have stopped Trump in his tracks by revealing before the election that the FBI was investigating Trump's Russian connections. But the administration never disclosed that perfectly-true information. 

 

Some conspiracy!

 

Question: Even if Barr were to launch some major new smear against Biden, would it change any votes? That is precisely the question D-Jay addresses in the following piece (which he sent to me as I scribbled the above, as if completing my thoughts). 

 

The following words are D-Jay's...

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Subtlety has pretty much never been Trump’s thing…and that might be a very good thing for us.
 

As regular readers of Cannonfire are well aware, for months now our host, Joseph, has been warning of “The Big Smear” to come – something, be it sexual, financial or political,  spun out of whole cloth or based on the thinnest of fabric, but supported either way by state-of-the-art Russian military intelligence level deep fake audio and video technology, forged documentation and, most likely, well compensated (and/or pressured) “witnesses.” 

 
But was that far too subtle for Trump?

Or, if not, has he gone so far already with his idiotic, evidence free accusations that nothing that comes out now will be believed by anyone not already addicted to Fox “News” or QAnon – no matter how well-crafted the fakery might be?

In short, has the Boy Who Cried Wolf effect come into play?  Has Trump lied so much, so obviously, so ridiculously, and now, so predictably, that everyone just tunes it out – and will keep on doing so, even if something comes out that really does look rather convincingly like a wolf eating the sheep?
 

And, was Trump far too unsubtle in the smear he wanted to push?

Did looking at how much his fans loved chanting “Lock her up!” cast doubt on Hillary and  how the relentless pursuit of her completely non-consequential email “scandal” damaged her campaign convince Trump that any legal-seeming brown stuff thrown at the wall would stick?

Was the Barr-Durham investigation into some sort of nefarious something related to the investigation into Russia’s interference in the last presidential election really supposed to have been it – the dreaded big smear?  This despite the fact that the matter has already been investigated ad-nauseum - and exactly nothing has been found?  

Trump’s utter derangement at Barr and/or Durham’s reluctance to issue any indictments – or even a critical report – in advance of the election leads one to hope that it might have been. 
In the words of an excellent article in the Washington Post, 

President Trump publicly pressured the Justice Department on Friday to move against his political adversaries and complained that Attorney General William P. Barr is not doing enough to deliver results of a probe into how the Obama administration investigated possible collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.

The delayed report is “a disgrace,” and Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, should be jailed, Trump said in a rambling radio interview, one day after he argued on Twitter that his current Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, is a criminal who should be barred from running.

Imagine it if you can – even Bill Barr won’t run with this one.  The evidence must either be so thin that releasing it now would be counterproductive or – perhaps more likely – even a wholly partisan investigation like this one has come to the same conclusion as all the others.  Russia DID interfere illegally in the 2016 election to benefit Trump, and it would have been a complete dereliction of duty if the Feds had NOT investigated it.

The only real scandal was that they didn’t let us know what was happening when it mattered – BEFORE our votes were cast in 2016.

Our great national tragedy is that back then we DID had a very big, very bad, very real Russian wolf…but no shepherd boy shouting out warnings.

Fast forward again to 2020 – we’ve come now exactly half-way round the circle.  A deranged little man-boy is screaming from the rafters, desperately trying to make us believe that the phantoms in his head are real.  

They aren’t.

The message voters need this time, before casting their ballots, is simple.  Whatever Trump says, whatever Fox alleges, whatever QAnon cultists might believe – it’s all a sham. 

Don’t believe a word of it.