Washington Post:
Pressure on members of the electoral college to select someone other than Donald Trump has grown dramatically — and noisily — in recent weeks, causing some to waver but yielding little evidence that Trump will fall short when electors convene in most state capitals Monday to cast their votes.The Electoral College is only news because the mainstream media is desperate to somehow find a way to steal this election from Donald Trump. This is the first election year I can remember the media even covering the Electoral College.
Carole Joyce of Arizona expected her role as a GOP elector to be pretty simple: She would meet the others in Phoenix and carry out a vote for Trump, who won the most votes in her state and whom she personally supported.
But then came the mail and the emails and the phone calls — first hundreds, then thousands of voters worrying that Trump’s impulsive nature would lead the country into another war.
“Honestly, it had an impact,” said Joyce, a 72-year-old Republican state committee member. “I’ve seen enough funerals. I’m tired of hearing bagpipes. . . . But I signed a loyalty pledge. And that matters.”
Such is the life these days for many of the 538 men and women who are scheduled to meet Monday across the country to carry out what has traditionally been a perfunctory vote after most every presidential election.
On the bright side, the Leftist bias of the MSM is on full display for all to see. Consider:
The role of elector has intensified this year, in the wake of a bitter election in which Trump lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton by a margin of nearly 3 million votes and the revelation of a secret CIA assessment that Russia interfered to help Trump get elected.The Washington Post is still pushing this narrative? Clinton's entire margin of victory in the popular vote came in California. Personally, I have no desire to allow the bowl of granola that is California (what ain't fruits and nuts, is flakes) to decide presidential elections for the rest of us.
As for the Russian hacking story, even the Democrats cannot get their stories straight:
Fox News:
The interim Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile said Sunday that cyberattacks against the party occurred every day through the end of the election.So maybe Russia was hacking the DNC all the way through until the election, or maybe they weren't. And maybe Putin ordered it, and maybe he didn't.
"They came after us absolutely every day until the end of the election. They tried to hack into our system repeatedly," Brazile added.
Brazile’s comments were made on ABC News’ “The Week” and were apparently contradicting what President Barack Obama said Friday when he revealed that the hacking was halted in September after he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at an international summit and told him to “cut it out.”
Obama stopped short of saying Putin himself orchestrated the Russian hacking of U.S. political sites during the election – but he did say it was done at the highest levels of the Kremlin.
Democrat Hillary Clinton has even more directly cited Russian interference. She said Thursday night, "Vladimir Putin himself directed the covert cyberattacks against our electoral system, against our democracy, apparently because he has a personal beef against me."
Obama didn’t publicly back that theory.
And maybe the Democrats are using this as an excuse to try and invalidate the reality they lost the election to arguably the lamest Republican candidate ever.
Almost as pathetic as the Democrats is the "lamestream" media itself:
New York Times:
Notice the headline? Americans were unknowing dupes in a Russian scheme! Or at least you might think that.Even the story begins with a rather ominous-sounding description of a website:
The Patriot News Agency website popped up in July, soon after it became clear that Donald J. Trump would win the Republican presidential nomination, bearing a logo of a red, white and blue eagle and the motto “Built by patriots, for patriots.”Huh? This man's stories were shared "tens of thousands of times in the United States". All of the hits would have had to have been voters in swing states to have even made any difference. And then you have to prove those tens of thousands of voters actually switched their votes from Clinton to Trump based on this website's stories. This is so far-fetched as to be absurd.
Tucked away on a corner of the site, next to links for Twitter and YouTube, is a link to another social media platform that most Americans have never heard of: VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook. It is a clue that Patriot News, like many sites that appeared out of nowhere and pumped out pro-Trump hoaxes tying his opponent Hillary Clinton to Satanism, pedophilia and other conspiracies, is actually run by foreigners based overseas.
But while most of those others seem be the work of young, apolitical opportunists cashing in on a conservative appetite for viral nonsense, operators of Patriot News had an explicitly partisan motivation: getting Mr. Trump elected.
Patriot News — whose postings were viewed and shared tens of thousands of times in the United States — is among a constellation of websites run out of the United Kingdom that are linked to James Dowson, a far-right political activist who advocated Britain’s exit from the European Union and is a fan of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. A vocal proponent of Christian nationalist, anti-immigrant movements in Europe, Mr. Dowson, 52, has spoken at a conference of far-right leaders in Russia and makes no secret of his hope that Mr. Trump will usher in an era of rapprochement with Mr. Putin.
His dabbling in the American presidential election adds an ideological element that has been largely missing from the still-emerging landscape of websites and Facebook pages that bombarded American voters with misinformation and propaganda. Far from the much-reported Macedonian teenagers running fake news factories solely for profit, Mr. Dowson made it his mission, according to messages posted on one of his sites, to “spread devastating anti-Clinton, pro-Trump memes and sound bites into sections of the population too disillusioned with politics to have taken any notice of conventional campaigning.”
Interestingly, the story links to an Ipsos poll which allegedly proves that fake news was influential in the election results. This poll has more holes than Bonnie and Clyde's last car.
For starters, half the poll's respondents voted for Hillary Clinton. Right there, you already have an overly suggestible base group. (Or as Lenin allegedly called them, "useful idiots".)
But the main thing is the poll doesn't prove voters were swayed by fake news. All it proves is there might be some influence out there. The poll makes no effort to link the fake news to a voter's choice, and then prove it in large enough numbers to sway the election. Applying statistics to a very speculative premise doesn't suddenly make it right. If anything, it only adds unproved gravitas to a speculative premise.
On top of all this, the New York Times seems to prove the lie in their own story:
Mr. Dowson claims to have reached millions of Americans across all of his online platforms in the run-up to the November presidential election, a number that could not be verified, in part, because he would not confirm all of his sites. Online visits to Patriot News did not come close to that, although when combined with several other sites that appear to be connected to Mr. Dowson, the total number edges above a million; most viewers were in Britain.With that piece of information, there is no reason to run this story at all. They just disproved their main case.
Also buried in the article is this worrisome line:
Social media can amplify even the most obscure voices, giving them a stage from which to broadcast a distorted message to credulous audiences.While true, social media can also amplify obscure voices which otherwise would never get heard. Sometimes, those obscure voices might be the correct ones, instead of the ones merely parroting the talking points from certain left-leaning political parties. But we won't name any examples, will we New York Times?
In more positive, and verifiable, news:
NFL.com:
The [Oakland] Raiders (11-3) are playoff-bound after knocking off the injury-riddled Chargers (5-9) on Sunday.I will add that I am a long-suffering Raiders fan, so I will break with my normal news objectivity to say: GO RAIDERS!
No comments:
Post a Comment