When you lose your own attorney general …
“The election was not stolen. Trump lost it. He was repeatedly warned by his advisers — and the data showed it clearly — that a significant segment of voters who supported him in 2016 had grown tired of him. They liked his policies, they liked the results of his policies, but they hated his obnoxious behavior.” — Bill Barr.
Today, as the second hearing into the January 6 attempted putsch plays out in Congress, the Werkes excerpts from former attorney general and Trump loyalist William P. Barr in his engrossing book, One Damn Thing After Another.
I realized that the President’s combative, frontal style had many pluses. But too often, especially during the worse of the Covid crisis, he yielded to his impulse for pettiness and pointless nastiness. He would get into idiotic name-calling spats with every minor celebrity who called him a name … If he could manage just a little reticence, he could make himself a little less odious to voters put off the the Left’s inanity but equally repelled by Trump’s erratic egotism. …
Not that the President was solely responsible for the rancor. He was under a constant barrage of heinously unfair attacks from his Democratic opponents and their allies in the media. … Jared [Kushner] … responded by reviewing the most recent polling and analysis. “The bottom line is that I have the same concerns.” he said. “As they say, there is only one man who can beat Donald Trump and his name is Donald Trump.” …
At the end of April I went to visit the President, meeting one-on-one in his small dining room area adjoining the Oval Office. … I said I was not speaking to him as attorney general but as a friend who wanted him and his administration to succeed. I said I believe he was headed for defeat. A substantial number of voters in the suburbs had given up on him, I said, because they’d concluded — I was explicit — that he was an asshole. …
He didn’t listen.
A form of political suicide
Trump, through his self-indulgence and lack of self-control, had blown the election. … I found it impossible to believe, thinking back to the singularly unimpressive roster of Democrats who had run for the nomination, that any one of them could have beaten Trump. Only Trump could have beaten Trump, and he did. …
I was also frustrated over the President’s reckless claims of fraud and the ugly way he brought his presidency to a close. … I was saddened and disgusted to witness … the President’ despicable treatment of Vice President Pence …
Voter fraud has a specific meaning. It involves knowingly nullifying legal votes; or knowingly casting or counting the votes of persons who are ineligible, nonexistent, or whose votes ere procured by improper inducements. The President repeatedly claimed he had “won by a lot” and the election was “stolen” through “major fraud,” but he never substantiated this claim. …
I was angered, too, by the President’s spiteful conduct concerning the Georgia Senate runoff elections. … He actively sabotaged Republican chances … … He made clear that he planned to purge the Republican Part of those he considers insufficiently orthodox or lacking in “loyalty.” … Purges are a form of suicide for political parties. …
Bill Barr’s Bottom Line: “Donald Trump … deserves enormous credit for sparing the nation a Hillary Clinton presidency, exposing the hypocrisy and hackery of [the] mainstream news media, and pursuing sound conservative policies. … [But] as I watched the sad end of Trump’s administration, the prospect that he’d seek the presidency again was dismaying to me.”
Education
Blaska Policy Werkes 
I’m glad for each one of these posts.
They reinforce that clear-eyed reasonableness is the way forward.
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My (our?) deepest hope now, of course, is that he somehow decides not to run again. How might that come about? I’d guess it would be a “You don’t deserve me” speech. It would be accurate, but for the opposite reasons. We deserve a President who embraces much of Trumpism, but is the anti- Trump; Gov. De Santis
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No candidate is perfect. So what if Trump is an arrogant braggadocio. So was Teddy Roosevelt. But the idea that 81 million people (15 million more than the Obama vote in 2012!!) voted for a guy who had two aneurism brain surgeries, has trouble reading the teleprompter and campaigned from his basement is ludicrous. I didn’t read his book but, it’s obvious that Barr doesn’t like Trump and refuses to listen, (just like 61 judges) to the idea that American elections have been corrupted. You’re not a critical thinker if you refuse to look at the evidence! Watch the movies “2000 Mules” and “Rigged”. Study up on Hammer and Scorecard and learn who Dennis Montgomery is. Let me know if you can find solid evidence that these documented allegations are somehow wrong. Note, opinion does not offset evidence.
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“The video relies on surveillance footage supposedly showing “mules” dropping off ballots at drop boxes. But the footage doesn’t show this. The biggest issue, as Garrett Archer, data analyst at ABC15 in Phoenix and former senior elections analyst at the Arizona secretary of state’s office points out, is that we don’t see any surveillance footage of the “mules” going to drop boxes more than once.
“Ballot drop boxes, by definition, are placed in high-traffic areas. So, if someone goes to a library or a store near a drop box twice a day, their cell phone data may make them look like a “mule” under True the Vote’s criteria with no way to prove otherwise.
“Even if a vote is illegally harvested in a state where harvesting is illegal, but the vote itself has not been tampered with in any way (i.e. it is signed and sealed) the vote itself would still be considered a legitimate legal vote.”
https://factcheck.thedispatch.com/p/fact-checking-dinesh-dsouzas-2000?s=r
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LOL. The soundly debunked 2000 Mules!!! Critical thinking does NOT mean drinking the koolaid!!
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Jack, you beat me to the punch: Squire, have you seen the movie “2000 Mules”?
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After not finding any bamboo ballots in Maricopa County, after Sidney Powell told the judge in the defamation suit against her that no one should take seriously her claims about Dominion voting machines, after 61 state & federal courts (many judges appointed by Republicans), after Republican state officials in Georgia and Arizona said their elections were honest, after his own attorney general said stolen election claims were b.s., after “Hang Mike Pence” — hope springs eternal among the RITOs that somehow their man is not such a lying loser after all.
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He isn’t. Let’s agree he’s human and may require a mulligan.
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You get a mulligan only when you ask for one after making a bad shot. Trump is still lying and you are still enabling him.
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A MULLIGAN???? You have got to be delusional. I hope trump does run again. He’ll get crushed like the cockroach he is.
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You would delete this reply if you watched the movie which DOES NOT rely on surveillance footage. The Factchecker is simply wrong. The core construct of 2000 Mules is the cell phone data tracking “mules” from drop box to drop box. Surveillance footage is a bonus affirmation of what the cell phones are telling us. “With no ways to tell otherwise…” is simply not true. The cell phone data nails it. Watch the movie.
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Rudy, a bottle of scotch and a porn store parking lot; what could go wrong.
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Squire, what lie am I enabling. Be specific.
Did you believe WaPo and its genius fact checkers when they totaled up 6,778 lies Trump told?
And by the by, were any cameras filming the drop boxes?
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What lie(s)? That Trump won the 2020 election. That Trump did not encourage and abet the riot/insurrection/ at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That Trump is not guilty of dereliction of duty by fiddling (figuratively) while the mayhem was on-going? That Trump did not attempt to falsify Georgia’s election results, suborn the vice president to violate his oath of office and unconstitutionally overturn the election … need I go on? What lies?!!! Trump’s lies!
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I do not trust WaPo, Hammer, Montegomery, CNN, Fox, Newsmax or any other so-called news source. They all make fortunes selling clicks to articles; entertainment that is loosely fact-based and slanted various ways. But I do trust that most judges and juries do their jobs: to sift through evidence and come up with the truth.
Republicans filed 71 Lawsuits related to 2020 Election-Fraud. They won exactly zero of those cases. Here is an analysis of each case:
Click to access Post-Election_Litigation_Analysis.pdf
If your true priority is Democracy — then you should trust the judicial process, rather than entertainers trying to pass themselves off as The Truth.
There most certainly was fraud in 2020. But to my knowledge — no one has presented proof of election-changing fraud (in front of a Judge/Jury) that has been substantiated.
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An excerpt from the paper you provided. Judges simply refused to allow standing so, they refused to hear the evidence. Then you and everyone else assume the courts passed judgement on evidence THEY NEVER HEARD! The evidence of fraud and a stolen election is damming if any court would listen to it.
“Standing problems took a variety of forms. Judges determined that plaintis could not sue in federal court over state election claims. They determined that plaintis who had not voted at all could not have sued the harm they alleged. But most standing issues stemmed from one of two sources: a generalized harm or an improper defendant. In cases led by individual voters, judges reasoned that private citizens, when stating a grievance with the way in which their state administered its Election Code, are not articulating a personal harm but a generalized one (e.g. Lin Wood v. Raffensperger). In cases led by the president, judges held that the parties were wrong—that the plaintiff had not suered a harm and the defendant had not caused one.”
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If a judge determined that there was no standing — in what way does that support that there was fraud? If the evidence was truly damning, the cases would have been refiled with legitimate plantifs.
If this^^ demonstrates anything at all, it is that some Republicans were willing to throw every possible dart against the wall, hoping something would stick.
In cases where the evidence was heard — how many found fraud?
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Legal “standing” is not trivial. Sidney Powell bringing a lawsuit in Antrim County MI would not have standing if no one in Antrim County alleges wrong. (It’s an analogy.)
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Let’s hope that the second installment of the Jan. 6th Snake Oil Extravaganza reveals that Chairman Bennie has learned the difference between “axed” and “asked.”
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Go on “Truth Social” and mention Jan. 6 and your account will be suspended. So much for your freedom of speech.
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The question remains: have you seen the movie “2000 Mules” or are you relying on others to view/interpret for you?
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No I have not because not even Dinesh D’Souza alleges that the ballots themselves are fake; only that they were harvested. That and any delivery truck driving past a collection box multiple times a day would be counted (as one example). I.E., the premise doesn’t even make sense, never mind the execution.
Or that, in many states, ballot harvesting WAS LEGAL!
That is the main reason no one is taking it seriously except dedicated Trumpbots. That is why no prosecutor, no state government official is acting on this nonsense.
Now I ask you: have you watched the House Committee hearings? Any of it? Why have you succumbed to each and every debunked conspiracy theory that comes down the road?
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Again, your opinion would change if you watched the movie with an open mind. The cell phone data makes the fraud clear. It cannot be explained away by a deliver truck running a route when the surveillance footage collaborates the mules stuffing the ballot boxes. They have have many hours of surveillance footage of people stuffing multiple ballots into the boxes in the early morning hours, wearing gloves, taking photographs for payment. Who and why would anyone take photos of the drop box they just voted at? Normal people don’t run around from ballot box to ballot box stuffing multiple ballots at each drop. Election criminals do. Why are you so resistant to the obvious? Go watch the movie! Then tell me what’s wrong with it or whether fact checker arguments hold up. They don’t.
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Sorry, I hit “post” prematurely. The critique you mentioned of the movie previously is incorrect. We see several security feeds from several different drop boxes with questionable activity. In one of them the mule removes surgical gloves after depositing her load in the Dropbox. The authors noticed surgical gloves in footage a day after it was reported someone had been caught in Arizona by analyzing the fingerprints on the faulty ballot. If you haven’t seen the movie I do suggest you watch it. It doesn’t mitigate all of the critiques of Trump and his personality but I think your black-and-white view of the election will be tempered.
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…someone removed their surgical gloves after touching a public grab handle during the height of a pandemic – and that is incriminating?
With the number of video cameras everywhere – why would a court of law have to rely on fingerprinting to determine motive?
It might be that The Mule was guilty of fraud, but the facts above don’t automatically incriminate them.
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Agree. But within the aggregate, it certainly looks suspicious.
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No doubt. And each facet of this *should* be examined. Everyone should be in favor of a critical review of the facts.
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Trump all along preached that in sales and business you just tell people what they want to hear – people don’t want THE truth, they want THEIR truth. Too many Americans want myths rather than reality.
It’s obviously really tough for people to believe that they were just plain old ripped off – Trump flat out lied and lied, and people were so invested into the MAGA identity and how powerful it made them feel that they literally can not mentally allow that balloon to be pierced. Many probably gave away their hard earned money towards this lie. It’s hard to admit it when you’ve been ripped off, you feel like a dupe, and that’s the opposite of what MAGA heads were signing up for – they were supposed to be the ones to dupe “them”!
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David, calm down. I’m hardly a Trumpbot or some of the other names you like to use on people who disagree with your conspiracy theory of insurrections and so forth. Given your journalistic background I find it disettling that you rely on others for your viewpoint instead of going directly to the source material– especially when some of the others you cite are outright wrong. I think there is enough data out there to at least look critically at how this election played out. I have seen enough of the ABC-produced hearing to know it’s political theater. I like to see the source material directly before passing judgment.
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You’re going to review the thousands of interviews, depositions and documents yourself! Did you review the source material for 2000 Mules or just accept the preferred narrative? Did you review the transcripts of the 61 court decisions adverse to Trump? Read the Dominion lawsuit vs. Sidney Powell? Start by reading the Bill Barr book. It’s a good read.
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Of course not. But I will try to review some of it. Its better than reviewing none of it.
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I think its time for a major (dirty) martini.
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I was saddened and disgusted to witness … the President’ despicable treatment of Vice President Pence …
To simply clarify & reinforce what Bill Barr thought of Trump’s behavior, let’s consider these descriptors:
execrable,
loathsome,
offensive
repulsive,
contemptible,
reprehensible,
shameful,
vile,
beastly,
wretched,
ignominious,
infamous,
low-life,
mean,
no-good,
pitiful,
slimy,
sordid,
worthless,
RE: The D’Souza Documentary? VERDICT by Reuters:
“The documentary “2000 Mules” does not provide any concrete, verifiable evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Technology and election integrity experts consulted by Reuters also did not find the geolocation, surveillance or any other information presented showed plausible evidence of fraud.”
“This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.”
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I predicted long before the first ballot was cast that the winner of this election was going to be determined by turnout. I further predicted that hate (of Trump) was going to out vote love of policy. More legitimate ballots were cast for hate, no matter how circuitous their path to the point of counting, than were legitimately cast for the love of Trump’s policies. The fraud that affected this election was the four years of intense, intentional lying about “Russia” and the stifling of any whiff of scandal, irregularity, incompetence or criminal activity by the Biden family, all suborned by the CIA, FBI, Democrat Congress and 99% of the media. In the face of all that it’s a wonder that the election was as close as it was. Hate won this one….
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If there’s one word that jumps to mind about Republicans it’s “love”. Like Jesus, they love migrants, they love different cultures, they love people of different races, they love all gender expressions, the love for the poor is just overwhelming sometimes. Don’t get me started on the deep love of the earth, the environment and the love of animals and their welfare. Yep.
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Heh! Despicably TOLERANT Lefties are the paradigm for LUV OF EVERYTHING**
**EVERYTHING which has been preapproved by the Lefty World-View Cafeteria and filtered through WEAPONS_GRADE_HARDENED_INDUSTRIAL_STRENGTH_TEMPERED Ideological Blinders.
It gets worse.
“You’d find these potentates from down in Africa, you know, rather than eating each other, they’d just come up and get a good square meal in Geneva.”– Senator Fritz Hollings
Blacks and Hispanics are “too busy eating watermelons and tacos” to learn how to read and write.”– Mike Wallace
“In the days of slavery, there were those slaves who lived on the plantation and [there] were those slaves that lived in the house. You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master … exactly the way the master intended to have you serve him. Colin Powell’s committed to come into the house of the master. When Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than what the master wants to hear, he will be turned back out to pasture.”– Harry Belafonte
“A handkerchief-head, chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom.”– Spike Lee on Clarence Thomas
“Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”– Senator/Hillarity Clinton Mentor Robert Byrd
“I am a former kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan in Raleigh County and the adjoining counties of the state …. The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia …. It is necessary that the order be promoted immediately and in every state of the Union. Will you please inform me as to the possibilities of rebuilding the Klan in the Realm of W. Va …. I hope that you will find it convenient to answer my letter in regards to future possibilities.”– Senator/Hillarity Clinton Mentor Robert Byrd
“I’ll have those ni***ers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.”– Lyndon B. Johnson
“You f*cking Jew b@stard.”– Hillary Clinton
‘Hymietown.’– Jesse Jackson describing New York City
“Jews — that’s J-E-W-S.”– State Senator Bill McKinney on why daughter Cynthia’s 2002 election loss.
“Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them.”– Mary Frances Berry, Chairwoman, US Commission on Civil Rights
The white man is our mortal enemy, and we cannot accept him. I will fight to see that vicious beast go down into the lake of fire prepared for him from the beginning, that he never rise again to give any innocent black man, woman or child the hell that he has delighted in pouring on us for 400 years.”– Louis Farrakhan
“White folks was in caves while we was building empires… We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.”
– Rev. Al Sharpton
“The white race is the cancer of human history.”– Susan Sontag
These negros, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they’ve never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness.– LBJ
“I am not going to use the federal government’s authority deliberately to circumvent the natural inclination of people to live in ethnic homogeneous neighborhoods.”– Jimmy Carter
I mean, you’ve got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”– Joe Biden (referring to Barack Obama)
Ah Lefty; so MUCH intolerantly RAYcist hatred, so little time!
The Gotch
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Your blanket “Leftie” is fun. Now since I’m not a Democrat I don’t feel a need to knee jerk defend anyone. Like I’ve said before, Democrats and Republicans are essentially the same in many ways. Many Democrats are also terrible people. I really don’t understand the need to self-identify with these political parties. Sure, we’re forced to vote for one or the other, and we’ll hold our nose and pick who best aligns with our position, but we don’t need to act like “us” and “them” unless you’re trying to get in on their gravy train. Gotch, are you a party member or consultant who personally benefits from this “us vs them” paradigm? Honest question. We already know the blog world depends on this paradigm for clicks and ad revenue.
What we really need is actual democracy and an end to our 2 party, the-rich-always-win, good cop / bad cop paradigm. Neither party cares about normal people, and power will always use division to keep us distracted. I don’t hate “Righties”, Trump supporters, etc., but I do disagree with many of their positions. I want everyone to step back and think occasionally as they’re attacking groups of people as filled-with-hate, the-enemy, evil, no-possibility-of-compromise-with, etc.
So many are correctly identifying the empty corrupted nature of our politics, but contriving to replace it with something even worse. Perhaps we should funnel our discontent towards building and living democracy.
Now a couple of those quotes could be interesting to discuss in context, but no time left today unfortunately 🙂 I don’t work for political parties or a PAC and I’m not living off investment income (aka other peoples’ labor).
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Rollie has a strange definition of “love.” We Republicans do love migrants, when they come here legally. We love different cultures and races — there’s a reason hispanics, Asians, and blacks are increasingly voting Republican. We do love the poor but not poverty! That, we help them overcome. You keep them in poverty by making them reliant on government giveaways. The environment? No one purchased more conservation land than Tommy Thompson. Pls to tell how lithium mines are more environmentally responsible than pipelines. My Republican farmer friends are great stewards of the land and their livestock. Richard Nixon started the EPA.
As for “gender expressions,” Rollie appears to want to bring Wisconsin 8th graders up on charges if they don’t conform to the educrats’ latest dictate. Or if their parents object to drag queen story hour at kindergarten.
Because Rollie is so full of … love.
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You tell me that “you keep them in poverty”, but I’m not sure why I am being accused of this. I do have views on policy, but “I” am not a party member or anything. I’m not here to say lithium mines are great, in fact I’d support a system by which energy is stored in gravitational potential energy, and I’d advocate dramatically reduced energy usage overall.
Good sales pitch on the unending love of the Republican Party. I disagree, and that’s ok. No time for more, back to work!
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Scott F makes some good points. The Werkes has been on top of the leftist news media’s distortions, Hillary’s Russian Collusion hoax, etc. Bad press, however, is no cause to overturn an election. The People have spoken — the ingrates! That said, the press hated Ronald Reagan, too.
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