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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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violently disrupt the 2017 inauguration

There is simply no comparison here. Here is what Hillary said on it becoming clear she would lose;

We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.

There is nothing Trump ever said with one hundredth the degree of grace and humility in her concession, and it wasn't even a particularly exceptional concession speech.

Further, Democratic-allied members of the government bureaucracy both supported false information (e.g. the Steele dossier) and falsely denigrated true information (the Hunter Biden laptop)

Again none of this is on the scale of Trump's contempt for the democratic process. This is not really much different from the general rough and tumble of political life - the Republicans had been dishing out similar nonsense for years. Members of Congress openly indulged birtherism! While I would no doubt question your interpretation of the Trump/Russia or laptop episodes, even if I accept Democrats were knowingly lying, politicians lying is not something new. Major politicians refusing to concede elections is.

When a Democrat says 'I just want to find [the number of votes it would take to change the outcome]', then I'll worry about them as much as Trump.

It's not the politicians lying that was the problem. It was the intelligence agencies covering for them and joining in on the lies. As well as other parts of the machinery of government that we expect to be non-partisan and stay out of elections.

It goes both ways. Comey re-opening the emails investigation could well have cost Hillary given the slim margins involved.

That is a valid point. I do feel like there is a major difference in scale. And that the Hillary email investigation was not based on a fabrication by her political enemies.

Not investigating a real thing is bias. But investigating a fake thing is bias. And obviously you might not know which is which until afterwards. But the investigators should have figured out which was which sooner. Their failure to do so in the trump Russia thing was either massive incompetence or willful bias and political favoritism. Normally I'm willing to assign incompetence to the government, and maybe I would have if it had only dragged on for a year, but three years beggars belief.

To your understanding, how did the emails investigation get closed, and why did he have to re-open it?