I woke up this morning, and as it has it has for every day over the last six weeks, my thoughts turned towards the stolen election. I've a news junkie since I was a boy. I used to read all the headlines in the Des Moines morning daily newspaper when I was in third grade. In 1975, while delivering the afternoon paper, I followed the fall of South Vietnam province by province in the maps they published almost daily on the front page. With presidential elections, of course, no amount of information could sate my appetite.
Yet here I am in 2020, with the world connected so completely to each part of itself, and finding good solid news is as hard as news. Of course everything on television is as phony as movie. Twitter has let me see all the news I can find via my feed, but I feel were are the point where I am not getting much of the real news, which about the war.
From one random post in my feed I found a blog post that broke down Trump's Wednesday speech I mentioned in the previous post. Yes, the author said, it was partly to educate the public, to bring us all up to speed on the known parts of the election theft. The author said, however, that 95% of the speech was filler. In reality the important part was about 5% where Trump used specific language invoking sections of his Sept. 12 executive order for operations to secure the nation's election system. The language was meant for Chris Miller in the Department of Defense to use as the authorization for certain military operations.
I had gotten the same impression from the speech---that about 5% was the important part, as had Wictor. Wouldn't it be nice to have actual news reporting at this hour of history, to know anything that is really going on?
The details of state legislatures are fascinating, and I want to follow it all, but by Twitter feed is full of folks reacting with emotion to every development, sometimes without context. The Pennsylvania legislature did what? Oh, no! But wait, it's not really what you think. It's good for side. Same with a court decision in Wisconsin. Rinse and repeat. Some important things make their to folks whose opinions and analysis I can trust, like Ron Coleman, but it emotionally wearying. Moreover we learn more and more than certain deadlines I assumed were hard Constitutional requirements and not such at all, such as the December 14 meeting of the Electoral College being the date at which the votes must be counted.
It reminds me how in the days after the election I was obsessed with the vote counts themselves. Could Trump catch up in Arizona? Now I know what a farce it was. We didn't even have a real election. So I know I was wasting my time worrying about that. I get the same sense now about some, but not all, of what is going on in legislatures and courts. Some of it is important, of course, but it's hard to tell what.
Trump makes it easy to disengage from this, knowing he is fighting whatever fight is necessary to save the country. Today will be a very interesting day, with the rally he is holding in Georgia. Some very weird things are happening in Georgia. Yesterday one of the aides of Kelly Loeffler, one of the Republican Senate candidates, died in a very fiery car explosion. Supposedly he had been dating the daughter of the Republican governor. The explosion happened just before Mike Pence was supposed to meet with them. The explosion was heard by residents from a great distance away. The car was utterly burned, as if it forest fire (at least I saw the photos). Lots of speculation. Lin Wood tweeted that from hard data he has seen, Loeffler actually lost her race outright, and that the other Republican, who got aced out in the primary, won outright. Loeffler, he asserts, is neck deep in Chinese money and as dirty as they come.
Gee, if only we had real news journalism at this moment, we might know more. Instead we hear an update from Biden's campaign. Turns out he didn't injure his foot in Great Falls Park playing with his dog, as was first reported last weekend. He injured it coming out of the shower pulling on his dog's tail. Uh, ok, whatever.
Thankfully Thomas Wictor is one of the world experts on analyzing photographs of exploding cars, so maybe he will weigh on the photograph of the car explosion. Maybe he'll say it was nothing, just a horrible accident. It's good we have the analysts to give us this kind of information, for which some of us are hungry, as we are hungry for justice.
And Trump will do what he has to do, whether the news covers it. They are going to look like utter fools by January 20 (the only Constitutional deadline in all of this), and some of the media organizations may not survive at all. That's just private opinion.
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