It's time for Trump to concede and move on

Editorial by the Washington Examiner 

November 20, 2020 

www.washingtonexaminer.com

 

 

When President Trump refused to concede the election to Joe Biden in the immediate aftermath of Nov. 3, we argued that he had the right to mount legal challenges if he believed there had been irregularities, mistakes, fraud, or all three. Democratic objections and outrage were as hypocritical as they were inevitable, coming as they did from a corps that refused to accept the 2016 election result not for days, weeks, or even months, but for four years.

But although fair-minded people know there are legitimate procedures for litigation, and that these should be allowed to play out, there is also wisdom in the phrase “put up or shut up.” If you are going to mount legal challenges and allege on national television that there has been massive and systematic election fraud, you had better provide evidence in addition to assertion. Trump’s legal team has not done that.

When more than 150 million voters participate in an election in 50 states that, in our federal system, decide their own rules for balloting and vote counting, there are bound to be irregularities and mistakes, even if there isn’t fraud. And, contrary to what Democrats repeatedly say, there have been plenty of well-documented cases of fraud in elections over the years. Doubtless, there was some of it this year, too.

But not remotely enough to change the result. The vast spread of American democracy, which makes error and malfeasance inevitable, also makes it plain that neither of these regrettable concomitants of mass voting robbed Trump of victory. No fraud or error produced tens of thousands of additional votes for Biden in battleground states.

Take Georgia, for example, which Trump needed to win in order to retain the presidency. If he had been denied victory in that state because of fraud or faulty machines, it would have been discovered in the complete hand-count of ballots ordered and run by Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger. But when the hand-count was complete, Biden had won by 12,284 votes.

In addition to Georgia, Biden's lead stands at about 10,000 votes in Arizona, 20,000 votes in Wisconsin, 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, and more than 150,000 votes in Michigan.

The Democratic nominee didn’t win the presidency by a lot, but he did win it.

The attention Trump has drawn to our flawed election system, which needs reform, has merit. But only up to a certain point, and that point has been reached and passed. The president’s legal team increasingly looks as though it is flinging mud to see what sticks, rather than pursuing a coherent course of litigation. Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell asserted, "What we are really dealing with here, and uncovering more by the day, is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China in the interference in our elections here in the United States." She claimed that voting systems used in the U.S. "were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election," and that Trump actually won more than 80 million votes, meaning 7 million Trump votes were switched to Biden. If voting machines were switching that many votes, they would have been uncovered in the Georgia hand-count.

At this point, Trump's efforts are more likely to damage the Republican Party, and more specifically, undermine its chances of winning the Jan. 5 runoff elections in Georgia for the two Senate seats that remain undecided. GOP control of the Senate rests on those races; the party must win at least one of them to retain its majority. And that majority is all that stands in the way of a Congress dramatically more capable of passing damaging and extreme left-wing legislation after Jan. 20.

The president’s efforts to reverse the election result and stay in office for a second term are not going to succeed. Without a chance of succeeding, they have become distractions from the really important task of keeping the Senate in Republican hands. In Georgia, Trump is setting Republican against Republican.

Beyond these political concerns, an extended refusal to concede will do damage to the country. The longer he digs in, the more Trump will undermine faith in our elections and make it harder to unify as a country. In more practical terms, Trump is not cooperating with Biden's transition team, a crucial part of making sure that the executive branch runs smoothly as it is handed off from one administration to the next.

If Trump wishes people to believe he has the good of the country and the legitimacy of its elections in mind, the president should concede that he lost and should do all he can to help his party win the two Senate battles in which it is still engaged.

 

We Should Fight the Biden Administration, Not Biden’s Election

By Dan McLaughlin

November 19, 2020 

www.nationalreview.com 

 

 Conservatives have more constructive places to channel their anger.

Conservatives and Republicans should be uniting right now, leaving behind the arguments of the past five years about Donald Trump’s personality and character and focusing on how to oppose the Biden administration. Instead, the Right seems to have split once again into two camps. One camp believes that Joe Biden was not the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and sees the drive to “Stop the Steal” as an existential test of both conservatism and American democracy. That movement drew a large grassroots crowd to Washington this weekend in what became known as the “Million MAGA March”; Sidney Powell, one of the president’s lawyers, today called the election fight “the 1775 of our generation and beyond.” The other camp accepts that Biden actually won the election — or, at a minimum, that no legitimate pathway exists to prove otherwise — and is looking ahead to how conservatives can defend and advance their goals over the next four years and plan on recovering the White House

Why are many of us not on board to “Stop the Steal”? I can only speak for myself, but I have four reasons that I think are pretty broadly shared.

First, I do not believe the stolen election theory is true. I believe that Biden got more votes than Trump in the six decisive states that he won by margins ranging from 0.28 percent to 2.83 percent. Yes, voter fraud and election misconduct happen — including lawless actions by courts and election officials to count illegal votes and obstruct observation of the vote counts. Yes, American elections can be stolen — there have been at least two elections thrown out for fraud in recent decades (a North Carolina House race, due to fraud by Republicans, in 2018, and the East Chicago, Indiana Democratic mayoral primary in 2003), but those were both very close races where a few hundred votes were decisive. Stealing a statewide election is harder, but possible if the margin is small enough. I still believe that the Democrats got away with it in the Washington gubernatorial race in 2004 and the Minnesota Senate race in 2008 (the latter of which provided the decisive vote for Obamacare). But again, those races were decided by a few hundred votes. (If you really pushed me, I confess that I still suspect that the Democrats may have gotten away with another in the Connecticut governor’s race in 2010, but I would not claim to be able to prove that.) I do not believe it here

The margin of victory in this race is at least 44,872 votes across three states (Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia). Had Trump won all three, there would have been a 269–269 electoral college tie, and the House would have voted Trump another term. To get Trump to 270, the margin expands to 107,587 votes across Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia. Biden won each of the six closest states by at least 10,000 votes; at present count, he won Pennsylvania by 83,182 votes and Michigan by 156,643 votes. Fraud on that scale across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously is mind-bogglingly difficult to pull off without leaving significant footprints. The 1982 Illinois governor’s race — almost stolen by Democrats by virtue of 100,000 fraudulent votes in Chicago — was still concentrated in a single city with a well-oiled machine with many decades of experience in such shenanigans. It was still not truly that well-hidden: A grand jury was shocked at the “boldness and cavalier attitude” of Chicago Democrats. With the aid of “a unique tool in the investigation of vote fraud, namely, the use of a computer,” the FBI obtained sufficient evidence to convict 63 people of fraud.

And yet, this supposed fraud in 2020 failed to save numerous Democrats below the presidential level. In Arizona, for example, you can complain about the Democrat who serves as Maricopa County recorder, but if he was in on the fix, you might also ask why he lost his own reelection race. In Pennsylvania, Democrats lost two out of the three statewide races, both by agonizingly small margins. In Georgia, the Republican secretary of state fought to ensure a hand recount and other protections for the integrity of this election; it does not seem likely that he and his predecessor, the state’s Republican governor (Brian Kemp, a longtime hate figure on the left), are in on the conspiracy. The theory of fraud here is not only vast in scope, it is strangely narrow in its target.

Why am I not fighting this battle? Because I am not in the habit of saying things I do not believe to be true. I confess that I have not yet tracked down the details of every stolen-election conspiracy theory bouncing around; there are too many, and every time you debunk one of them, four more spring up. The theories of methods, participants, and locales are different, but somehow the conclusion is always the same. What I do know is that every time I have looked into a theory of rigging of this election, or read other serious efforts to get to the bottom of one, it turns out to be either shot full of falsehood or pure speculation, or it focuses on too few votes to make the difference. What I do know is that the president’s legal team has had the time, manpower, and resources to scour the key swing states for two weeks now, and they have yet to unearth and present enough evidence to overturn the outcome. And I specifically do not believe in the various theories that voting machines were rigged, a rabbit hole that I regularly mocked Democrats and progressives for going down in 2004 and 2016. Such theories have the convenience of being vast and relying on technological concepts most Americans do not well understand, but they invariably crumble upon close interrogation.

 Second, and related, I cannot prove it is true. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The stealing of this election would be the largest crime in American history — an extraordinary claim indeed. I share the suspicion that widespread mail-in balloting led to unusual opportunities for fraud in this election. But as a lawyer, I am inclined by training to think not in terms of suspicion, but in terms of what can be proven. If I see evidence that supports the theory, I will change my mind. I have tried to keep as open a mind as possible in that regard. But if I am going to put my credibility as a writer behind the assertion of a stolen election, and if I am to demand extraordinary action by or against our government, it will be because there is publicly available evidence to support the theory, not just because I have suspicions, or because I would like it to be true, or because I want the approval of others who want me to join them.

Third, it is not going to work. There is simply no workable plan to change the vote totals in enough states before the electors are certified. Andy McCarthy ran through the most recent state of play in Pennsylvania yesterday, and Jim Geraghty covered the situation with state certifications this morning. Could the legislatures step in and choose Trump on their own, as anonymous sources claim the president is requesting? There are legal impediments to certifying a slate of Trump electors in states that held a popular vote, where a result was certified showing that more votes were cast for Biden. Yes, a state can constitutionally choose to pick electors without conducting a popular vote, but once that vote is held, it cannot simply disregard the results. At a minimum, the state legislatures would need to change their laws, and the Democratic governors of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are not going to let them. Republican state legislators are not likely to immolate their careers to push such steps through, especially knowing that it will not succeed in the end. Yes, there are times when you pick a fight you know you cannot win, in order to stand for principle and proclaim the truth, but why should anybody press a step as destructive and doomed as this if he does not actually believe in it or think it will succeed? The reality is that Joe Biden will be sworn in on January 20, and nothing anybody does can prevent that. Our job is to plan for what comes next.

In fact, even leaving truth and falsehood aside entirely, claiming that the election was stolen while knowing that you cannot stop it is a show of weakness that is politically self-destructive. “Democrats tried to steal this, and we beat them anyway” is a strong message. So is “Democrats tried to cheat and we caught them and prevented it.” Telling Republican voters that shadowy forces made their votes pointless, successfully installed a new president, and eluded capture is a message of weakness, impotence, and despair. Republican voters have nothing to be ashamed of: As a share of all eligible voters, even amidst a pandemic, they turned out in larger numbers for Donald Trump in 2020 than for any Republican presidential candidate since 1984. Trump got a larger share of all eligible voters than any candidate of either party in 1944, 1948, 1960, 1968, 1976, 1980, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2012, or 2016. Because of Republican votes down the ballot, if Republicans can retain the Senate, Biden takes office as a hamstrung president on borrowed time. Why should any conservative want to discourage those voters from believing that their participation matters?

Fourth, this is a dangerous step. Accepting electoral defeats is a crucial virtue without which our democracy cannot survive. Of course, if it was genuinely clear that an election was stolen, it would be incumbent upon believers in democracy to disregard that norm in favor of the higher value of preserving the integrity of the vote. But actively taking steps to stop an elected presidential transition is fraught with risks for the collapse of our system. Yes, Democrats have done all sorts of mischief in recent years, up to and including efforts to thwart Donald Trump’s exercise of the presidential powers to which he was duly elected in 2016. But again, stopping the presidential transition of power is a drastic step that should only be undertaken on the basis of evidence of a stolen election, not mere suspicion.

None of this means we do nothing. I have continued to advocate the lawsuits and recounts and audits to continue down every plausible avenue, because it is better to have a legal process that examines these kinds of challenges to election integrity on the basis of law and evidence than simply to have theories running loose with no way to contest them and no venue in which to develop and present evidence. If there are 100 bad votes in an election decided by 10,000, those 100 may not have stolen the result, but they are still a problem, just as Russian meddling was a problem in 2016 even though it did not decide the election. So yes: Let the process keep going, let the sunlight in, and make every case that one can for exposing genuine misconduct and improving our election systems in the future. But the real fight ahead is for the Senate in the January 5 runoff in Georgia; with the Biden administration in the next four years; and ultimately, for reclaiming the White House in 2024. Those are the constructive places to channel conservative anger. If you think otherwise, I bear you no ill will, but my open invitation stands: Prove it.

 Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online. @baseballcrank

 

South Africa World Toilet Day

 

South Africa: World Toilet Day

By Wilson Mgobhozi Africartoons• 17 November 2020

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-11-17-world-toilet-day/

 

          OBiden’s Promised Land

Identity fraud plus voter fraud equals tyranny.

Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/obidens-promised-land-lloyd-billingsley/

Tuesday November 17, two weeks after the election, will mark the release of A Promised Land, the first of two volumes by former president Barack Obama. As he explains, the 768-page book will provide “an honest accounting” of his presidential campaign and thoughts on “how we can heal the divisions in our country going forward and make our democracy work for everybody.” If anybody thought the author still considers himself president of the United States it would be hard to blame them, and there’s a lot more going on here.

In late October, former vice president Joe Biden boasted of the most “extensive and inclusive” voter fraud campaign in American history. Democrats are banking on that massive voter fraud to win the day for a corrupt influence peddler less astute than a broken clock. The addled Biden would surely give way to Kamala Harris, already touting a “Harris administration,” but A Promised Land flags the real shot-caller. That invites a look back to the Democratic National Convention in 2004.

“My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya,” Illinois state senator Barack Obama told the cheering crowd. “He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.” The rousing speech prompted a new release of the 1995 Dreams from My Father.

The author moved on to the U.S. Senate and in 2008 was elected president of the United States then reelected in 2012. The president chose for his biographer David Garrow, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Bearing the Cross and other books about Martin Luther King Jr. Garrow’s 2017 Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama dropped a bombshell revelation.

“Dreams from My Father was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction (Garrow’s italics). It featured many true-to-life figures and a bevy of accurately described events that indeed had occurred, but it employed the techniques and literary license of a novel, and its most important composite character was the narrator himself.”

To spot-weld Garrow’s point, Dreams is a novel and the author was the first fictitious character to serve as president of the United States, the most powerful person in the world. Skeptics couldn’t check with the Kenyan Barack Obama, who died in 1982. As it happens, in all his written communications from 1958 to 1964, Barack Obama mentions nothing about an American wife and Hawaiian-born son.

Dreams from My Father includes more than 2,000 words about the poet “Frank,” as the author later acknowledged, Frank Marshall Davis, an African American Communist on the FBI’s security index and a pornographer to boot. As Garrow noted, Davis’ kinky exploits and Communist background made him radioactive, so if Barry Soetoro was going to be a rising star in politics, he needed a new narrative.

Davis duly disappeared from the audio version of Dreams and made no appearance in The Audacity of Hope. As Garrow explains, the Dreams author had strong disagreements with Rising Star, which failed to appear in 2018 books by Michelle Obama and Ben Rhodes. Readers might check if it shows up in A Promised Land. The erudite Garrow aside, any unhypnotized reader could easily peg Dreams as fiction.

The book has no index, no photos, and the fakery leaps off the page. Even so, critics swallowed it whole and journalists smeared skeptics as “birthers,” a charge that traces back to Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primaries. As the late Barry Rubin noted in Silent Revolution, journalists abandoned their craft and worked to ensure the composite character’s election in 2008.

From then through 2016, establishment media served as sycophants to the composite character and inquisitors to his critics. The same dynamics are now on display in 2020, as Democrats deploy the massive voter fraud openly celebrated by Joe Biden. If the voter fraud succeeds, the result would not be the “healing” the Dreams author now promises going forward.

Democrats are already “archiving” Trump supporters and panting for an American gulag. An establishment media on board with identity fraud in 2008 and voter fraud in 2020 would look the other way or cheer the oppression against those they have already branded as white supremacists, Nazis and such.

In the current correlation of forces, the establishment media and deep state – particularly the Fatal Bureau of Investigation – stand arrayed against those who support the Constitution, the rule of law, and back their country as a beacon of liberty and opportunity.

At this writing there’s still reason to hope for the best, a true vote count and four more years for President Trump. On the other hand in 2020, the year of living dangerously, it is wise to prepare for the worst. 

If Democrat voter fraud succeeds and the heat comes down, everybody will have to decide whether they go out with a bang or a whimper. As President Trump says, we’ll see what happens.

Reflections on the American vote

Marcel Gascon

The Daily Friend, South Africa, 17 November 2020

https://dailyfriend.co.za/

The fact that you are reading this article means you don’t rely exclusively on the so-called mainstream media to get your news.

The Daily Friend would likely be classified as inappropriate content by the mandarins of morality who rule the roost on most public spaces today. See, for an example, how Abigail Shrier’s book on the ripple of dysphoria diagnosis among teenagers has been received pretty much everywhere.

But imagine for a moment that you only read South Africa’s Mail & Guardian and the British Guardian. Or that you were paying a subscription to the New York Times and rounded off your share of news by listening to the BBC.

Should you fit this description, you would most likely have a certain view of what happened (and is still happening) in the United States presidential election: that Americans woke up in timely fashion to vote en masse for a reasonable candidate and correct the historical mistake that was the election in 2016 of a quasi-fascist as president. (Have you seen CNN’s Amanpour equating Trump’s presidency to the Kristallnacht?)

According to this line of argument, Donald Trump was propelled to the White House by a wave of racism, chauvinism and every other conceivable form of bigotry lurking in the depths of US society. The proponents of this view also assume as a self-evident truth that his four years as president were a succession of disasters with all sorts of dreadful consequences for America and the world.

While it is hard to establish the motivation of Trump’s average voter (does this even exist?), we can easily weigh the concrete results of his term in office. We can look, to start with, at the economy. You might remember the periodic news reports that even media outlets most hostile to Trump have run on the successes of the US economy in the past four years. To sum them up, I’ll quote from an article by Karl W. Smith published on 30 October by Bloomberg.

Unemployment

This is what the big picture looks like, and we’ll immediately go into the details: ‘Between December 2009 and December 2016, the unemployment rate dropped 5.2 percentage points, from 9.9% to 4.7%. By December 2019, it had fallen another 1.2 percentage points, to 3.5%.’

The author also reminds us that ‘(by) 2016 … the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve had concluded that the economy was at full employment and that further improvement in the labor market was unlikely’, but that Trump ‘ignored this consensus’. He went on to implement ‘a program of tax cuts, spending increases and unprecedented pressure on the Fed to cut interest rates to zero’ – dismissed as ‘reckless’ – to achieve a ‘goal of 3% growth’, widely ‘derided as delusional’.

But Trump’s recipe proved spectacularly successful. ‘Not only did the unemployment rate continue to fall, but the percentage of Americans aged 25 to 54 either employed or looking for a job saw its first sustained rise since the late 1980s. This inflection point changed the character of the labor market.’

Smith continues: ‘In 2016, real median household income was $62,898, just $257 above its level in 1999. Over the next three years it grew almost $6,000, to $68,703. That’s perhaps why, despite the pandemic, 56% of U.S. voters polled last month said their families were better off today than they were four years ago.’

Although the pandemic truncated this trajectory, the US economy has already given strong signs of a healthy rebound. (Trump has been severely criticised for his volatile and tardy response to the coronavirus. I believe he has reacted no more erratically than most world leaders, although his shortcomings might have been more evident due to his strident communication style. He has not been outsmarted in this by his political foes at home either. Remember Joe Biden decrying travel bans as xenophobic, and Nancy Pelosi’s walkabout in Chinatown.)

Hardly consistent

No doubt, an economist might raise objections about Trump’s economic policies and their long-term consequences. But the numbers presented by Smith’s Bloomberg article are hardly consistent with the disaster for the American people most of my colleagues in the media pretend to see in all the outcomes of what Trump did.

Trump has also been presented as an inveterate racist. He certainly is one by critical race theorists’ standards (who is not?). According to most media articles, black and brown people are among the groups worst affected by Trump’s 2016 victory. But let’s look again. The numbers tell us a completely different story.

Even evidently malicious fact-checking efforts by leftist publications such as Vox have been forced to admit (far down in the text and with an impressive display of mitigating arguments) that ‘(before) the pandemic hit, the unemployment rate for Black Americans reached an all-time low (since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping track in 1972) at 5.9 percent in May 2018’.  Moreover, black household median income reached the highest levels on record during the Trump years.

Biden’s preliminary triumph has been saluted by most of the media as a huge relief – not only for America but for the rest of the world. Days before election day, Spain’s state news agency produced a piece with the following headline: ‘Human rights before the abyss of another Trump term’. Trump’s threat to human rights, we learnt in the body of the story, was global in scale. ‘The world breathes a sigh of relief after Biden’s victory,’ wrote Spanish centre-right daily El Mundo on 7 November. Despite all this hysteria, the world is a somewhat more orderly and peaceful place than when Trump took over from his predecessor Barack Obama.

ISIS was the creature of George W. Bush’s democratic imperialism. It came to grow unimaginably strong under Obama’s indecisive rule and has been crushed by the Trump administration, without a new war being started. Besides defeating the once seemingly unstoppable caliphate, Trump achieved unprecedented successes in normalising the Arab world’s relationship with Israel. And let’s not forget his very reasonable efforts – deviously undermined by the establishment that profits from it – to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan and put an end to its pointless presence in that country.

Eye-opener

Among his many foreign policy successes, I also count his taking on China’s disingenuous trade practices. Trump’s fighting back in the commercial war China had been waging for decades has been an eye-opener for a global elite who are mostly in denial about the threat posed by the communist giant. Even the European Union is now confronting this uncomfortable truth – although it needed the pandemic to face reality. Trump’s demand that European NATO members contribute their fair share to keeping peace and security in the West is another example of the bold political realism that Trump brought to breaking the mould of what most had accepted as chronic, unsolvable anomalies and crises.

A dispassionate look at the facts of his presidency that goes beyond the adjectives and labels usually employed by the media to judge Trump shows that his presidency was far from a catastrophe. In fact, it bore eminently positive results in the fundamental fields of political action. Such a look beyond labels also helps to understand that eight million more Americans than in 2016 voted for him after his four years as president.

At the time of writing, Trump was still resisting the pressure to concede. In my opinion, it was clear that Democratic Party administrations were tampering with the electoral law in several so-called swing states weeks before the day of the vote. The legality of some of the amendments they made to facilitate mail-in ballots, that were known to overwhelmingly favour Biden, has still to be upheld by the courts.

While I don’t believe the Trump camp is succeeding in presenting a strong case for the fraud they are claiming, I think we should wait for the courts to resolve pending issues over the election before declaring Biden the new president. I also think Team Trump should be given the chance to challenge the results where it identifies signs of irregularities, and that it is nonsense to call on the president to expedite a transition while there are ongoing court processes affecting the vote.

Narrative

In the meantime, the mainstream media would do itself a favour by putting an end to the blackout it applies to virtually everything that contradicts its narrative. The latest example is how it is ignoring the beatings to which Antifa and BLM militants subjected Trump’s peaceful supporters who were leaving a march in support of the president in Washington DC. The slightest micro-aggression is treated like a major crime – if it is perpetrated by conservatives. Yet the very same journalists completely shun actual violence when the victim is a rightist, or violence comes from the left.

School asks parents to stop throwing late students over closed gate

 

Nov. 13 (UPI) -- An elementary school in France put up a pair of posters outside their fence with an unusual request for parents: Don't throw late students over the closed gate.

The Trillade school in Avignon put up signs outside its gate showing a cartoon of a parent sending a small child airborne to get over the fence. The text on the sign asks parents not to throw their children, and instead wait for the gates to be opened again at 10 a.m. or 3 p.m.

Principal Sanaa Meziane told La Provence that parents "literally threw their children" over the gate when they arrived to find it closed.

Meziane said there were only a few scattered incidents, and no reported injuries, but there were enough tossed children to inspire school officials to take action and post the warnings as a "reminder."

www.upi.com 

By Ben Hooper