Hunter and the Laptop
Nick Caraway comes by for a say …
Last night I got into one of those long and drawn out arguments on the twitter machine. It was fairly benign as far as those go. It started off with someone going out the deep end (or around the bin) on the whole Hunter Biden nonsense that has been circulating in conservative news circles.
Yeah, I know. I should have known better. The difficulty with arguing politics these days is that you are operating with two sets of facts. There are the facts from the mainstream media and then there are the facts from whatever ideological bubble the individual exists in.
So, I calmly laid out the facts from mainstream media sources. We don’t know that the laptop is his. He lives half way across the country from where the laptop was dropped off. I didn’t even go into the inconsistencies in the story concerning the computer itself.
It is the kind of stuff you would find in the National Enquirer or Weekly World News. Of course, this fact is a deep dive into the mind of a conspiracy theorists. See, the mainstream media is in on it. Facebook and Twitter are in on it. That’s why they refuse to publish it. It couldn’t possibly be for any other reason.
Let’s say it’s all true. Let’s say that Joe Biden used his influence to get his son a job at Burisma. Let’s say he knew about Hunter’s attempts to use the family name to make business deals with China. Let’s say his son is a pedophile. Let’s say all of these things are true. What does it really matter?
The first thing we would note is that Hunter is not running. Hunter might indeed be a son of a you know what. Like I told the guy coming into the conversation. I’ll never vote for him. Some of that would fall on Joe though. Using his influence for his kid is wrong. In a normal election it might be a big deal if you could prove it.
We aren’t dealing with a normal election. We have a president that has done all of those things and more. More importantly, he’s killed nearly 250,000 Americans. He is both corrupt and incompetent. That’s a magical combination folks.
So, your tales of standard corruption just aren’t going to fly. The point that they aren’t true is really immaterial. You cannot win an election by convincing us that Joe Biden is a bad guy. There is no way you can drag him down that far. You have to find some way to lift yourself up and you just can’t do that. Everyone knows what you are by now.
True points, Nick. But when ‘deep’ in a discussion with those who are into fact denial, it sometimes doesn’t hurt to drop the “consider the source” bomb into the conversation. In this instance reminding them that Rudy G is both as remote from veracity and as capable of a conspiracy theory as the original conspirators, Quack-a-Non. Draw them a picture that saves your time and energy. Like this:
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-f9R4NgC82Ks/X5IBIs7ggDI/AAAAAAACHiw/43kt8mNxc3MBH6UPA65OCDzfNoyJNkOKgCLcBGAsYHQ/s510/2%2Bgary%2Bhuck.jpg
1Won’t work. My cousin, who is my conduit to all things rightwing, announced that ‘there are documets’ proving Biden’s corruption. This was when the story was only being hyped and even the Post had not yet revealed anything.
It’s a religion and they have a martyr complex. My cousin and i were raised at Our Lady of Perpetual Help school where being eaten by the lions was held out as a good thing.
2Harry @ 2 – what is it about cousins? Mine are hanging from different branches on the family tree who seem to have missed the gene for rational thought. They are sugar sweet little church ladies who have nothing in common with Trump yet they believe he represents them and cares about them. I’m sure they think that I’m the devil’s own.
3But her emails!
4My walk away line to those folks is:
“I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.”
5Yeah, I should have known better. I think he may have used the exact same line Harry at one point. It was to my retort that the GOP Congressional committee had already researched and investigated this and come up with nothing. Oh, but we have new evidence that no one in the MSM media is reporting.
I think what killed me is that he quoted Occum’s Razor. The irony is palpable. Wouldn’t the simplest explanation be that the MSM didn’t print it or broadcast it because it’s BS? Nope. Must be a conspiracy.
6My favorite tidbit from the Hunter Biden visit to the repair shop story – – the shop owner, who fixes teeny tiny innards of Apple laptops, thousands of parts crammed into something the size of 70 sheets of paper – – said he has poor vision so wasn’t able to say what the guy who dropped off the computer looked like, or if it was Hunter Biden.
Because you know, “Hunter” was all the way across a three foot wide counter in his shop.
7Even Putin says the Biden-Ukraine story is so much leftover borscht:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-putin-idUSKBN27A0TA
Strike three, Donnie.
8Before I get into any kind of Twitter “discussion” I always run the name through botsentinel.com. It’s amazing how many times the person (?) comes up with a “disruptive” rating. In that case, I report the tweet, block and move on.
Seriously, why can’t Twitter find the bots and trolls? They’ve got more staff than I have.
9There would almost be NO stupidity if there no Republicans!
What else can one suspect from their dialogue?
10If there were so such thing as ass**** Republicans, someone would invent one. There will always crooks and liars!
11Karen @3 This cousin grew up in a Bircher household (my uncles were Birchers, my father was a Taft Republican) so she hardly had a chance.
I won’t say no chance because at least some of her siblings are conservative but not Trump idolators.
My family tree is like those banyans that drop tendrils from their branches that turn into new trunks and the tree spreads over acres and acres. In 2010 we had a reunion to celebrate a great great uncle, revered because he fired the 3rd shot at Ft. Sumter. (These were mostly 3rd cousins.) There were 150 of them from every obscure little burg in the South and like little Pitchfork Ben Tillmans preserved in amber.
(I could have trumped them; my great grandfather fired the first shot of the Civil war, a piece of history they didn’t know but my mamma taught me manners.)
12As long as you accept that the NSGOP does not operate in good faith – ever – then everything they say and do is exactly what you’d expect…
13It is not about facts. It is not about political policy. It is not about moral values. It is about cult behavior. That’s all.
14I don’t know how many of you read the Bulwark, but one of their writers referred to Trump as the only middle finger available on the ballot. That’s really what this is all about. It’s the last ditched battle against progress, inclusion, and what they call “woke culture.”
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