If I steal your car then – just to be an even bigger asshole – sit outside your house at four in the morning, the expensive stereo cranked up high, pounding the horn, it doesn’t make me the car’s owner. I can take the registration from the glove compartment and cross out your name (with a sharpie, like Donald) and scrawl in my name instead.
It STILL doesn’t make me the car’s owner. COS I STOLE IT FROM YOU!
To circumvent the Will Of The People is to steal their choice from them. Gerrymandering is (“was” hopefully) legalized circumvention of the majority’s will. Voter suppression is another form of legalized circumvention. That, too, needs to be relegated to the dust bin. The only reason to not want every eligible voter to vote is because you fear how they’ll all vote. IF you thought they’d vote FOR you — you’d drive them all the polls yourself.
That’s not what’s happening here. Do we really have to ask why?
Republicans have been forced into a corner by America’s rapidly changing demographics. Without literally cheating, they cannot win a presidency. Without the Electoral College tying the Democrats’ hands behind their backs, literally handing Republicans political power not merited by the actual slice of America they represent, Republicans wouldn’t get anywhere near winning a presidency.
The GOP — the GOP’s money actually (so we’re talking the Kochs & Mercers etc using Mitch McConnell as their point turtle) — hitched their wagon to Trump even KNOWING how compromised he was. No one’s stupid in this group. Steve Bannon surely hipped everyone with the money (he worked with the Mercers at Cambridge Analytica) — all of them having strange, dark religious bents — to the fact that Vladimir Putin’s end game wasn’t so far removed from theirs.
Make no mistake: the grand plan Vlad Putin launched against us worked better than even he expected only because he founds such a willing collaborator in the far right wing of the Republican Party. Because they let the Russian money flow freely down to every local election (can anyone say where ALL of the NRA’s Russia-originating money landed?), they corrupted every single race every single Republican ran in. Elections are free & FAIR or they ain’t. There’s no middle ground here.
Let’s not worry about voting machines here. No one’s examined them (officially). Lots of hard evidence exists that says those machines are almost instantaneously hackable. No one’s really looked at the strange way 77,000 votes across Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin line up with the proprietary polling data that Paul Manafort handed Oleg Deripaska (of the Russian GRU) that covered Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Let’s worry instead about HOW that weaponized polling data was played back onto DEMOCRATIC voters in those three states (plus Minnesota apparently) as propagandized ads on their individual Facebook pages. A voter who does not go to the polls — because they’ve been lied to in their homes ffs — is a vote for the other side. It is no different than CHANGING their vote in its impact relative to what that voter wanted from the election.
If we don’t get hip to the sophisticated weapon being used against us, we should just turn off the lights now. Before the Russians do it for us.
Look at election night and the way the news of Trump’s victory played in Trump’s own camp. They, too, were shocked by the win — not because they thought they’d pulled it out but because they were suddenly faced with the monstrosity they were now part of — A STOLEN ELECTION.
As Trump himself keeps harping on — an “illegitimate” election. Why, you have to ask, has Trump himself always worried about his own legitimacy.
Because he knows he has none.
Can we please, please, PLEASE cut to the end of THAT chase?
If Donald Trump stole the election — stole the Will of The American People from them, then he does not own either a “winning” outcome or anything that flowed from that “win” that wasn’t his. He can’t claim ownership to our car just because his Russian pal found a way to put him behind its wheel.
If Trump was never actually POTUS then he never had the authority to do what POTUSes do — like nominate judges to lifetime appointments.
And — by the way — every Republican who benefited from that same stolen outcome? Their “wins”, too, need to be seen in the light of treason.
Oh — it is very definitely treason. This is war time — cyber war. I’m quite clear this is World War Three we’re all living through. We just don’t know it yet because we still think wars require bombs, bullets & outright declarations.
If we keep thinking that, we’ll lose every war we ever fight going forward — starting with this one. Russia doesn’t think that — know what I mean?
A presidency stolen because of treason (and greed and stupidity and lots more greed) is not a presidency. Rules made by that presidency have no legitimacy and — like the judges — must be voided outright as if they never existed. They never had a “right” to exist.
If we’re really going to bring the Rule Of Law back — for real and for good — there can be no exceptions ever. It’s exceptions that break the Rule Of Law.
The Rule Of Law is pretty clear: thieves do not get to keep what they stole. I won’t get to keep your car after I’m caught and Trump (and the Reapublicans) shouldn’t get to keep what THEY stole either.