Twitter has blocked sharing the NY Post piece, saying it violates their policy towards distributing information gained by hacking.
Trumpy’s, of course, are livid.
Oddly, I am feeling quite good about this NYPost piece.
Didn’t the House impeach Trump because he was illegally planning some October surprise? And here it is, courtesy of Rupert Murdoch and the NY Post. Right as scheduled.
I’m feeling better about the impeachment, actually, as it’s immediately relevant again, 3 weeks before the election.
The man who gave “Hunter Biden’s” laptop to Giuliani didn’t see Hunter Biden because of a “medical condition” that prevented him from seeing who it was, but assumes that it was him. And is an avid Trump supporter who spouted Seth Rich conspiracies.
I find it sort of a reach to assume that “my guy” refers to Joe Biden, especially if you read the whole thing.
Especially #12,13 and 14. The US foreign policy position was widely known and very strongly anti-Yanucuvich - he was the corrupt dude that laundered money with Manafort. And why would Biden need to be concerned with weathering the period before the Ukrainian election?
I really suspect that “their guy” is whatever individual recommended them to Burisma, possibly the oligarch that owns the company. Contextually, I really doubt it’s Joe Biden.
It looks like Hunter and Archer had a fairly well thought out strategy for how they could help Burisma, a strategy that had very little to do with Joe Biden. That kind of puts the lie to the entire narrative.
I agree completely. However, it’s worth remembering that the GOP’s goal was not necessarily to provide convincing evidence of anything that would keep someone from voting Biden/Harris.
The goal, instead, is always to give people who want to vote for Trump but are troubled about it, a rationalization they can employ to do what they want to do.
‘I don’t like Trump and I don’t like a lot of what he’s done, but this Burisma thing sounds pretty bad, so I guess whatever Trump has done is less bad, so I’ll vote for Trump’—that’s the kind of “reasoning” Trump’s enablers are hoping to inspire with stunts like the Laptop story.
There’s no equivalency with what happened in 2016.
The Trump campaign have tried EVERYTHING to drag Biden down. From attacking his family, to making him out to be on his deathbed, to portraying him as a radical riot sympathizer who wants to abolish law enforcement, introduce communism and sharia law and turn America into a 3rd world country.
In spite of the smears Biden’s lead has only grown. He was perceived to have won the first debate. Even people like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Ben Shapiro and other conservative media bobbleheads came out of it saying Trump screwed up. Trying to spin it by blaming the moderator but ultimately conceding they set expectations so low that a bad night for Trump was a great night for Biden.
Moreover Biden’s FAVORABILITY numbers on average are almost breaking even. He has some polls recently on this regard that see him come out net positive.
This is significant because we are in such a partisan and polarized climate right now. Mud-slinging has become the norm. Tribalism has been championed. Your opponents are not just opponents anymore but the enemy. For him to come out as acceptable this close to election day on favorability vs unfavorability is another good factor because that’s one thing Hillary was severely lagging. She did not have a single poll registering net positive in favorablity from July 2015 onwards. I don’t think many people love or admire Biden very much. But there isn’t anywhere the level of hatred for him.
Trump loves to bring up that Biden has been around for 47 years. But in a way that is why Biden is doing well. Not because of what he did in those 47 years necessary but simply due to the fact that because he’s been around so long it makes him a known entity. You can’t redefine an ex Vice President four years removed from office who before that had been in the Senate for over 30 years into a caricature beholden to extremists. These older voters don’t buy it because they know him for so long. A lot of younger voters actually probably wish Biden was more like the anarchist Trump is trying to sell. It doesn’t work.
And finally there is no equivalency because in 2016 it was President Barack Obama’s appointed FBI Director who reopened the investigation into Clinton’s emails making the distrust into her even deeper. The Democratic nominee being under suspicion by the FBI operating under a Democratic president added a veneer of legitimacy because then people can’t say it was partisan intended to help the opposition.
You’re just not going to get that with Trump toads like Barr in charge of the justice system and Giuliani acting like a freelancer.
If any one of trump’s kids was involved in a scandal, you know what they’d say “Well, that’s not the Prez, it’s a adult child. Nothing to do with trump.”
The problem is that it’s not enough of a surprise; they tried the Hunter Biden thing before, and it’s
Boring - no one really cares about what the hell happened with Burisma or whatever,
Confusing - there is no clear narrative, and
Indirect - by being about HUNTER Biden, it’s not primarily about JOE Biden. The Clinton email thing was at least about the person actually running for President.
Hard core Trumpists love it but that doesn’t win Trump any votes.
I’m honestly amazed that there hasn’t been a parade of women alleging sexual misconduct from Biden. I was absolutely certain that the Republican hate machine had that lined up and were just waiting until the election got close, but I haven’t seen anything like that, and at this point it seems like it’s too late in the cycle to make that work.
I know for me (I probably don’t qualify as ‘younger’ unless you mean 'not in AARP yet) a lot of the Republican ads that I’ve seen make me cheer for their opponent. Talking about how X supports “Law and Order” to someone who has had friends tear-gassed doesn’t really work, and the counter-factual stuff like ‘Trump is protecting pre-existing conditions’ just makes me roll my eyes. Also, pretty much all of my ad-viewing is either online ads (which I mostly scroll past) or on youtube and hulu when I’m watching shows, so it seems like it should be better targeted since that’s not really an ‘old-timers’ demographic.
In typical years I can see how the campaign ads might work and how they’re focused, here they just seem scattershot and badly aimed.
There have been attempts at such. Tara Reade, for instance.
But, the problem is, is that it’s actually not as easy as many Republicans think it is to create a credible accusation. There are not many women who are willing to lie about such things.
That’s because all they have is fearmongering to fall back on.
As you are not part of their terrified base, it seems scattershot to you. If you were one of their intended targets, then all of that is meant to make you fearful and desiring of an authoritarian to protect you from the ebil libruls.
This is the real crux of it – from the get-go, this “scandal” required a flow chart and Cliff’s Notes to follow, and it’s never clear what benefit Hunter or Joe Biden accrued for this supposed malfeasance. Kind of staggering that out of nearly 50 years of Biden’s political career, this is the worst story they can come up with. Either Biden really is that squeaky clean, or these guys have fallen off their game since the days of Karl Rove and Swiftboating.
Well, there is the mostly out-of-context, really old (70’s? 80’s?) quote trying to paint Biden as a racist that pops up on my conservative FB friends’ feeds every now and again. Apparently it is the slam dunk that would swing the African-American vote away from Biden to Trump if only the lame-stream media would report on it.
And they tried to paint Joe as some sort of eviiiiiiiil racist as he did and does Eulogies for fellow senators, even tho some of them were pretty nasty dudes where Joe damned them by faint praise. Because Joe is a decent, kind man who will step up when a fellow senator passes away.
I have this fantasy that QAnon is the Dems’ October Surprise. What if he, her, it was a Democratic operative grooming Trump’s supporters to believe everything they say only to turn on Trump a week before the election?
Every Trump supporter I know personally believes that this story is not only 100% true, that it is 100% damning despite the fact that they have no idea what is true or damning about it. But, it proves that Joe Biden is corrupt, and everything Trump was accused of (but was totally innocent of) is what Biden has done.
