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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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  • Spying is an overblown talking point. They spied on like, one guy? Maybe a second, and neither of them big deals?

  • The campaign didn’t get meaningfully “bogged down” by any investigations, not anything special counsels don’t normally do

  • Russiagate actually did fade pretty quickly after the Mueller report in the news and from Democratic politicians

  • They tried to impeach him over something almost explicitly a quid pro quo - you could argue that some presidents get a pass for that kind of thing (Nixon sure as hell did it but that wasn’t what his impeached for) but it’s still, um, bad. And note that after the effort failed in Senate vote, they dropped it. You don’t see Kamala whining about it on the campaign trail

  • If you think that was abnormal lawfare you have not been paying attention to politics the last several decades

Scope and scale matter. My point stands.

  • -20

Spying is an overblown talking point. They spied on like, one guy? Maybe a second, and neither of them big deals?

Catching one instance of sleazy behavior from a large group over a period of time generally implies that there's more than one instance, but that that was the instance that was easiest or luckiest to catch.

Your point doesn’t stand in the least. You’ve marshalled zero evidence for your dismissal nor addressed most of my points

The campaign didn’t get meaningfully “bogged down” by any investigations, not anything special counsels don’t normally do

I meant the administration, and of course it did. The news covered the mueller investigation breathlessly nonstop, over an essential nothingburger. How do you think that affects an administration?

Russiagate actually did fade pretty quickly after the Mueller report in the news and from Democratic politicians

sure after about 3 years of nonstop coverage and rampant speculation (Steele dossier? Never even existed)

If you think that was abnormal lawfare you have not been paying attention to politics the last several decades

It’s true, the Dems have been terrible on that for decades, but it reached a zenith.

Spying is an overblown talking point. They spied on like, one guy? Maybe a second, and neither of them big deals?

No.

The ruling party in 2016 used multiple intelligence agencies to target opposition campaign personnel, on the basis of unfounded allegations presented by the ruling party candidate whose role in its generation was hidden due to its disqualifying nature, and subsequently overturned citizen-protection measures designed to protect American citizens from just such intelligence abuses, which enabled illegal leaks what would inherently have been classified information, to fuel election-year and then multiple post-election year conspiracies intended to undermine the opposition campaign and target up to cabinet level officials, conspiracies which were publicly pushed by party-affiliated media and legitimized by the party's leading member of the Senate Intelligence community.

...while campaigning that Trump would be an authoritarian who would commit security state abuses, and thus organizing the #Resistance that dominated media coverage for years to come and would help organize riots in several major American cities, including the US capital.

Russiagate actually did fade pretty quickly after the Mueller report in the news and from Democratic politicians

The original Russiagate lasted nearly half of Trump's time in office, and its narrative themes were later re-used to justify the first Trump impeachment and which remains a regular theme in Democratic C-lane social media campaigns since.

They tried to impeach him over something almost explicitly a quid pro quo - you could argue that some presidents get a pass for that kind of thing (Nixon sure as hell did it but that wasn’t what his impeached for) but it’s still, um, bad.

One of the presidents in question being Biden, who publicly boasted in his success to squash the corruption investigation the subject of which was the basis for impeaching Trump, not including the many other credible quid pro quo of the Biden dynasty.

If you think that was abnormal lawfare you have not been paying attention to politics the last several decades

The Trump experience of lawfare was abnormal precisely because it surpassed what any candidate had received in the last several decades, and on multiple grounds were highly reminiscent of mid-Cold War abuses that spurred the US Intelligence Community reforms of the 1970s and 1980s that were ignored in the process of targeting the Trump campaign. The abnormality of it was the subject of multiple extensive discussions and even deliberate justification articles posted in major media outlets and a post-2020 victory lap on the degree of cooperation required to 'fortify' the following election.

Scope and scale matter. My point stands.

Scope and scale mattering is precisely why your point falls to a basic Russel conjugation critique.

'My favored party accepted the results reasonably and mostly peacefully despite legitimate reasons to believe they were unjustly denied their rightful victory, your party unreasonably refuses to accept the legitimacy of their defeat and threatens everything in ways that should be disturbing to all...'