23 days since the National Day of Patriotic Devotion
(Evening Edition)
“Miller also repeated the false claim that Trump underperformed in the general election because of “massive voter fraud.” Miller repeated claims Trump made privately to senators this past week that he narrowly lost the general election in New Hampshire because thousands of Massachusetts residents were bused into New Hampshire to vote illegally there. “I can tell you that this issue of busing voters into New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics,” Miller said. “It’s very real. It’s very serious.”
Miller went on to say that there is “enormous evidence” of people being registered to vote in more than one state, of “dead people voting” and noncitizens being registered to vote. At that, Stephanopoulos intoned: “For the record, you have provided zero evidence that the president was the victim of massive voter fraud in New Hampshire. You provided zero evidence that the president’s claim that he would have won the popular vote if 3 million to 5 million illegal immigrants hadn’t voted — zero evidence for either one of those claims.” The Washington Post, 12 February 2017
“The reason voter fraud has become an issue in American politics is because there have been a slew of bills introduced (and often passed) at the state level alleging voter fraud that needed to be curtailed. That legislation generally makes it harder to vote, with the effects of that increased difficulty felt more among populations that tend to vote more heavily Democratic.” The Washington Post, 12 February 2017
“One of the great achievements of free society in a stable democracy is that many people, for much of the time, need not think about politics at all. The president of a free country may dominate the news cycle many days — but he is not omnipresent — and because we live under the rule of law, we can afford to turn the news off at times. A free society means being free of those who rule over you — to do the things you care about, your passions, your pastimes, your loves — to exult in that blessed space where politics doesn’t intervene. In that sense, it seems to me, we already live in a country with markedly less freedom than we did a month ago. It’s less like living in a democracy than being a child trapped in a house where there is an abusive and unpredictable father, who will brook no reason, respect no counter-argument, admit no error, and always, always up the ante until catastrophe inevitably strikes.” New York Magazine, 10 February 2017
“The United States has its very own Mad King to cope with, even if, by some measures, they elected him. In stabler times, questions about a politician’s sanity are either offensive, irrelevant or both – usually, when people say ‘that man is mad’, what they actually mean is ‘I don’t agree with him, and I don’t like him’. These are not stable times, however, and some brave souls are already starting to raise the mental health question we’ve all been dreading because we don’t want to hear the answer … The problem, however, is not that Donald Trump is mentally ill. The problem is that he is unstable, vengeful, sexually predatory, misogynistic, racist, unscrupulous, notionally in charge of the world’s most powerful country and, possibly and incidentally, mentally ill.” New Statesman, 11 February 2017
This Is Drivel 