1968 Mustang GT, not very relevent to this blog, but very cool.
Perhaps trump was right about the election being rigged. To be honest I think it was. I have no actual evidence to support that claim but I now know that making wild unfounded accusations is what winners do. Winners bemoan that an electoral system is rigged to hedge their bets in case they lose, and then when they win they spin around faster than Steve McQueen’s Mustang in Bullitt to praise the system that got them elected. So here are my accusations for the election being rigged, which, in honor of the new president-elect, will not include links to actual factual information.
I believe a case can be made that the media, the same media that trump accused of being disgusting and corrupt, enabled trump’s rise during primaries by televising every time he spoke or blew his nose because it raised their ratings. After trump clinched the nomination, the media was all but silent about the 75 lawsuits that he faces (oops, I just gave you a number which is dangerously close to a possible fact [in fact it is a fact]). Then there are the twin propaganda websites that masquerade as real news media, Breitbart News and Infowars, who belched out the ugliest meanest conspiracies against Clinton, which trump was happy to use and never disavow.
Voter suppression most likely played a role in this election. I would go into it in detail but that would require research and facts, so, forget it. Certainly Clinton winning 2 million more popular votes than trump but not winning the election, points to the election being rigged or at least being a broken system…bigly.
A case can also be made for the FBI interfering in the election to tip the scales to trump by notifying Congress about the emails found on Anthony Weiner’s computer a week before election day. An unnecessary move, only necessary if the FBI was trying to influence the election in favor of trump by giving him more ammunition for his propaganda machine. Combine this with the FBI’s tepid response to Russian hacking and wikileaks feeding falsified information against Clinton, and I wonder if the FBI is looking forward to working with a “law and order” president.
This is all supposition, I admit. But as I heard a congressman say in an interview when responding to a reporter pointing out that fact checking had disproven one of trump’s claims, “You have to take that fact checking stuff with a grain of salt. What really matters is people’s impression of truth.” That congressman was right. Trump was able to give the impression that he had a modicum of interest in helping the working class despite his elite upbringing, his record of cheating contractors, and his promise to lower taxes on the wealthy and not the working class. And by the way, I don’t remember the name of the congressman who said that thing about fact checking being overrated. I think he was from Virginia or some other state — who cares.
soundwords 