Have you not been watching? They literally manufactured a Russia collusion story and then spent 4 years beating Trump over the head with it. Then they orchestrated a hijacking of the Democratic primary to prevent Bernie from being on the ticket. Trump is a despicable human, to a degree only surpassed by the folks running and representing American media.
You're getting down-voted without anyone else actually providing a rebuttal. But what you're saying matches, roughly, my understanding of what happened. Perhaps their issue is with the way it is phrased, sounding sort of like rhetoric.
So I'll add because I'm more or less with you: I'm sincerely confused how we can spend years alleging Russian interference and now that on a really close election, with contention over the way the ballots were counted, it's being called by the media without presenting doubt despite polling being pretty off? The inconsistency is concerning, in my opinion. What am I not understanding?
If I'd introduced a new system in at work (my understanding is the mass mail-in ballots are new at this scale, but please correct me if I'm wrong) and was testing it and it gave a weird result, I'd at least double check it.
There is no contention over how the ballots were counted. There are allegations which have been repeatedly thrown out or debunked by judges and press across the country, including those friendly to the parties making said allegations.
So I’d say that’s what you’re not understanding, though I’m puzzled as to how you could have missed it if you spent any time looking into it at all, since every reputable source has reported the rebuttals right alongside the allegations.
There is no question in this election. The margins are not close. They are not surprising. They were not even terribly unexpected. The only party alleging any of those things is the party that has repeatedly eschewed facts for 4 years and longer. The one that has repeatedly pushed useless investigations that they themselves conclude are baseless. And in fact it’s not even the whole party, it’s mostly the parts of the party working directly for the loser.
Yes, that helps, thank you. I'd read of some officials denying it, but the information around judges is new to me and I will explore it further.
Who do you consider to be reputable sources? I will include them in my reading.
I'm also interested in why it was necessary to refer to the president as a "loser." I thought your point stood without it and all that did was clue me in on the possibility of bias in the rest of the response. Staunch supporters would likely discard your reasoning entirely because of it.
I did indeed mean loser as the opposite of victor, as mentioned in the sibling response, rather than as an ad hominem.
Reputability-wise I focused on the American press in general (Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NYT, etc). My main through-line during the week was following the 538 live blog, which did a good job of linking out to a variety of sources as several of the cases unfolded during the week. A decent summary is the one at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/election-2020-trump-campaign... . You'll find the legal challenges so far are largely about technicalities rather than actual allegations of voter fraud, despite claims otherwise, and that the ones that have been heard have mostly either been dismissed or they have resulted in minor adjustments to procedures, at times to the frustration of the presiding judge (finding in-person recounting of the proceedings requires digging deeper than the above article).
Not featuring in the legal proceedings are other allegations, such as those that certain people who were supposedly deceased had submitted votes. These have mostly turned out to be clerical errors, many of which were already fixed but hadn't necessarily propagated to the systems that the allegers were looking at. As a bonus, here's a 538 feature from 2016, when the groundwork for this kind of argument was once again being laid just in case now-president Trump lost: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/voter-fraud-is-very-rar... .
Taking your question in good faith, it's because the argument isn't that "Russian interference" happened. It's that the argument is "Russian interference in favor of Trump" happened. So clearly, if Biden won, the belief isn't that Russia helped Biden, it's that Biden's victory was able to overcome whatever interference was still trying affect things in favor of Trump.
For those who don't recall, Russia had big reasons to endorse Trump over Hillary in 2016: Hillary was bellicose about Russia and Syria, to the point where people echoed worries she'd plunge us into "WW3". That, compared with Trump's contrarian sympathies toward Russia and irreverence about the U.S.'s moral highground (and conservatism AND clear, probable incompetence) of course motivated Russia to support him.
They also hoped that he would come to the table and legitimize Russia as a fellow superpower and usher in a new era of diplomatic relations. The fact that Trump utterly failed to do that probably chilled Russia's interest in the 2020 election though.
China has good reason to endorse Biden; should we assume that Biden has colluded with China in efforts to “hack” our election (whatever tf that means)?
Not solely because of motive, no. You'd need evidence, which is different than motive. Russia having a motive wasn't the only reason to suspect collusion, either.
Because the polling majorly favored Biden and the results showed far more Trump votes than anticipated could rationally be interpreted to mean that mail-in ballots were flawed in a way that favored Trump.
I'm not claiming this is the case but providing an example of how subjective and spinnable any set of facts can be made.
The downvoting could also be because I asked a very basic question and they responded to it with a non sequitur that did not even attempt to answer the question.
Comments like these reinforce my conviction that comment threads like these are ultimately useless.
I believe that an exchange of views is possible in a way that will be illuminating to both "sides", but it just isn't possible in a forum like this.
"They literally manufactured a Russia collusion story" is an assertion presented as fact. It obviously has a very deep argument behind it that has convinced the author. But given the context of the discussion, it's impossible for the author to explain why he thinks that is true, in a way for a counterpart to verify and explore.
Similarly, those on the other side who believe the Russia collusion isn't a "manufactured story" also have very deep arguments that can't be included here.
It's the same with "orchestrating a hijacking of the Democratic primary". It's an assertion that comes across as completely ridiculous to people who don't believe it, based off of counter arguments that are also very deep having to do with the intricacies of how the primaries work.
And so then of course the conclusion is that Trump is bad but the media is worse, based off of those previous two assertions being true. And the discussion goes absolutely nowhere.
I am literally highly interested in the thinking behind why the Russia collusion story is manufactured, and how the Democratic primary is hijacked. Yes because I believe those conclusions are false, but I want to respectfully explore where in the argument I think it falls down. But to do it would take a long exchange, probably with time in between to research, that just isn't supported by forums like this.
Manufactured? you should really read the Mueller report and see that there was plenty of wrongdoing. Saying it was manufactured is pretending like all of the evidence, meetings, etc... didn't happen.
I see russian bots commenting on Facebook all day every day for the last 4 years. Today one glitched and commented on a completely unrelated post under the name "hispanics for Trump" on a post for a car.
Dude, there actually are Twitter bots every where. I see multiple accounts posting the same exact tweet over and over. You look at their profile and its a obvious its manufactured history. Have you even tried looking?
Trotting out conspiracy theories and insinuations is rightfully not the business of mainstream news. And racial injustice is not something to sweep under the rug.
That is rich after 4 years of non-stop Russia colusion coverage. As to racial injustice, no one is arguing it should be swet under the rug, but neither should cherry-picked examples of bad interactions between police and black people be used to build a narrative that justifies looting, murder of police officers and calls to defund the force. The US is a large, violent country, with guns everywhere. You can build a narrative about anything if you simply select, out of the millions of encounters betwen citizens and the police, the ones that go bad and victimize one particular demographic. And that is exactly what the media does. For good measure they also distort the facts to support the narrative. Relentlessly, blatantly, shamelessly. The consequences are dire: a divided country, racial hatred, violence. This isn't going to stop just because Trump is out of office. Its too profitable.
