Ah - Robot Arm popped in. Thanks to you both.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to be obscure, I used the term without definition because it had been mentioned in a previous post (by JRDelirious in #1156). Easy to miss, though.
The first thing that pops in my head is the show Wings.
(Yes I am white.)
This crosses from “schadenfreude” into “outright hilarity”: Sidney Powell’s lawyers are arguing that her statements about Dominion were so outlandish that no “reasonable person” should have believed them.
Mind you, the intersection between “Trump supporters” and “reasonable people” may well be null.
ETA: It occurs to me that this is basically the civil suit version of an insanity defense.
The trump admin blocked nine key oversight probes, some of which may soon be released. Let the damaging revelations about the whole corrupt, incompetent nest of snakes come out!
I was pretty sure this was the same gambit Tucker Carlson’s attorneys used, and … yep:
Attorney Sidney Powell is defending herself from a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit using the same tactic successfully deployed by Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show last year.
This is maybe the apotheosis of cynicism: the Democrats don’t think Trump supporters are idiots to nearly the degree that Trump and his organization do.
Even when it’s shouted to the heavens that “WE’RE GULLING THE RUBES,” the rubes seem incapable of even noticing, much less comprehending.
[Rube, watching the story on Fox: “Those idiots. SO gullible …”]
#Murica
Well - that excludes ALL MAGAtrash.
When the case came to court in 2020, U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil accepted the Fox News attorneys’ argument that no reasonable person would flatly accept Carlson’s claims to be factual rather than opinion.
“Fox persuasively argues . . . that given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer arrives with an appropriate amount of skepticism about the statements he makes,” Vyskocil wrote.
“[W]hether the Court frames Mr. Carlson’s statements as exaggeration, non-literal commentary, or simply bloviating for his audience, the conclusion remains the same—the statements are not actionable.”
Looks like the courts are going to have to redefine “reasonable.”
The key difference between Carlson and Powell is that Carlson is a talking head presenting op-ed material on television, whereas Powell used her claims as part of the basis for actual lawsuits. Carlson can get away with a 1A defense; Powell will likely have a much harder time of it.
And this is the irony of the whole “The Democrats are driving away Trump supporters by saying mean things about them” argument - Trump literally comes out and declares how much he loves poorly educated people and how they’d follow him no matter what crimes he committed, and their response is “Ha ha - boy, I’m glad I’m not one of those gullible idiots he’s talking about!”. Nothing the Democrats could say or do is worse than what the right-wing political and propaganda machines have been doing to these people for decades, but they’ll still vote “R” in every election.
“Animal House” (specifically, Kevin Bacon) understood well this dysfunctional dynamic far in advance of it playing out on a grand scale:
I would hope that we have slightly stricter rules for a professional in the legal system than a television personality. I hope.
If her defense is successful, does that mean that she can be prosecuted for each of the suits she filed in the election? Of course, there’s a difference between “can she be…” and “she is being…”
It’s Schrödinger’s facts all the way down!
“If I get away with making this ridiculous claim then it’s an assertion of fact, but if I don’t then obviously it was merely a personal opinion.”
Not prosecuted, but certainly disciplined by the bar or sanctioned by the court.
That is my thought as well. Her court filings in defending herself from the defamation claim amount to admissions of professional misconduct.
:: steeples fingers ::
Excellent.
From the motion filed by his lawyers:
“The psychological burdens of being detained pending trial are very real for Mr. Young. Since he has no previous experience with the criminal justice system, being detained is taking an extremely high toll on his mental well-being… Because he is such a strong family man, locking him up away from his wife and children with the prospect of an extremely long period of time before trial is even scheduled is causing potentially irreparable psychological and emotional damage to Mr. Young.
I guess that means nobody should ever go to jail until after they’ve already had the experience of going to jail. 
That particular argument is pretty weak, but reading over the motion as a whole, this guy probably deserves to be out on reasonable bail and conditions. (granted, I haven’t seen the government’s position on bail).
This doesn’t mean he shouldn’t face trial and an appropriate sentence if convicted, but I’m not seeing the need for no bail.
Was he the guy who told his kids that “snitches get stitches?*”
*Paraphrased. I think what he actually said was closer to: “People who inform to the FBI are traitors, and traitors get shot’”