"Hmmmmm...if I believe it, it has to be real! Else I am insane and need a straight jacket!"
"The rehabilitation of reason is urgent because it is only through the proper use of reason that we can find our way out of the quagmires in which many big issues of our time have become stuck. Without a clear sense of what it means for one point of view to be more reasonable than another the position one adopts is ultimately based on nothing more than personal opinion or preference.
When we give up on reason, the only tool we have left is coercion."
- Julian Baggini, 'The Edge Of Reason', p. 3.
Let us concede that reason is an indispensable tool for arriving at truth. Many, such as Philosopher Julian Baggini - quoted above, would agree it's the best method we humans have for arriving at the facts, the objective reality of a situation. By the same token, those who would scorn reason in favor of pure opinion, random tweets or regurgitating fantasy travel outside the foundations of truth and make a unified governance all but impossible. The situation we have arrived at now in this country is that at least one third of Trump supporters - according to a PPP poll - have no use for reason or facts. See e.g.
http://www.politicususa.com/2017/01/25/poll-shows-americans-support-womens-marchers-donald-trump.html
Consider the claim of Trump then that there has been massive voter fraud that cost him the popular vote, including that "three to five million more voted illegally for Hillary Clinton". Consider this is coming from the guy who actually WON the electoral vote - the only one that counts- and yet his ego is still too traumatized to accept that fewer citizens voted for him than his opponent.
Consider also that there is not one scintilla of evidence to support his fantastic claim - which btw- is negated by 50 Secretaries of State (including from 37 Republican- governed states) that the integrity of their election processes were never compromised Consider then that, also, the singular evidence is that Russian hacking played the dominant role in the 2016 election which actually helped catapult HIM to power. Anyone see anything backwards here? Inverted from reality?
ALL the intelligence agencies agree that Russian hacking at various levels, including of the RNC, was established to their satisfaction, and that is where the REAL voter fraud has occurred. Yet Trump, in his own bubble of flatus continues to pound the conspiracy theory he lost the popular vote because of a "rigged election" when all the data show otherwise - except for the role of Russian hackers to bring HIM to power.
What's wrong with this picture?
Well, the absence of reality and reason in Trump's assorted ruminations. Even Jacob Chaffetz, head of the House Oversight Committee averred "I see no evidence for it", referencing Trump's voter fraud delusions. He asserted his committee would not be taking it up. Remember, this is the guy who went full bore on Benghazi. Clearly, if anything of substance was really there, Chaffetz wouldn't dodge it.
Voter fraud itself, in the sense of being committed on a mass scale by "illegals", is especially an irksome and stupid claim which flies in the face of all evidence accepted by sane people. So is the lamo Trump claim that being registered in more than one state is illegal or dead people being on voter rolls. As exposed regarding the first, there is Exhibit A - his own daughter Tiffany, registered in 2 states, NY and Pennsylvania, as well as his consigliere, Steve Bannon registered in 2 states(FL and NY) and son-in-law Jared Kushner(NJ and NY) . All a big storm in a teacup.
As for dead people on voter rolls, of course! Like a voter can't die (like my mom did) days before a vote (mid-term in 2014) and then be left there until removed by the state (FL). At the time, the last thing on my mind when I learned mom died was contacting FL to have her name removed from the voter registry. Good god, are Trump and his minions totally tone deaf or mentally incapable of processing the vagaries of life - as well as death? And figuring out why a person's name may be on a vote registry long after their demise? WTF is wrong with these fools?
Then take the case of alleged Colorado voter fraud and assorted "witch hunts" for it. Colorado’s Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler has been on the hunt for voter fraud in the state since he took the office in 2011, claiming non-citizens were illegally voting in Colorado elections. But a report from The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel shows that, to date, there have been zero prosecutions of Gessler’s suspects.
After originally claiming more than 16,000 non-citizens registered to vote in Colorado in 2011 and that as many as 5,000 of them had actually voted in 2010,, Gessler’s office finally released the names of only 155 people who they thought of as suspects. ....
Many of those people whose citizenship and right to vote were called into question by Gessler were found to be verifiable U.S. citizens, The Associated Press reported. In some counties, like Boulder, of those questioned, only legal U.S. citizens were found."
As Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett put it, quoted in The Boulder Daily Camera :
“Local governments and county clerks do a really good job regulating the integrity of elections, and I’ll stand by that record any day of the week. We don’t need state officials sending us on wild goose chases for political reasons.”
So Gessler, like another scare monger - Michelle Malkin- were mostly into "wild goose chasing" and stirring up voting fraud hysteria to reinforce the bogus Trump campaign claim that this past election was "rigged". A claim now revived by Trump - aka BLOTUS ("Biggest Liar of The U.S") since he took office, the total irony of his wackjob blurtations being lost on him. But then we know irony can't be processed by the insane, any more than they can reason.As Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett put it, quoted in The Boulder Daily Camera :
“Local governments and county clerks do a really good job regulating the integrity of elections, and I’ll stand by that record any day of the week. We don’t need state officials sending us on wild goose chases for political reasons.”
The actual voter fraud, however, has been voter suppression and the most classic case occurred in Florida in 2000 with that general election. Greg Palast, author of 'The Best Democracy Money Can Buy', documented how 90,000 and probably more like 150,000 legal black voters were removed from voter lists in Florida, using the ruse that they were convicted felons, not permitted to vote in that state. Jeb Bush awarded the contract to the firm that submitted the higher bid, Choicepoint. It then scrubbed from the voter rolls all names that were clearly black (first name Jamail or Kinesha, for instance), that bore an arguable resemblance to a felon’s name. This remains, along with the electronic scrubbing of D-votes in Ohio in 2004 (using electronic machines), the two most massive cases of vote fraud.
But BLOTUS and his febrile followers can't be bothered with facts, or reason. And in this case of reason, they ought to be asking themselves why the person who actually WON and is now in the White House, is making such a big stink over it as opposed to getting the fuck over his little wounded ego. Jeezus, hasn't he bigger fish to fry?
Oh, here's another chestnut one finds on some Trumpie blogs, in the form of the daft question:
"Why would any serious person object to an investigation into this issue of voter fraud?"
Well, a number of reasons! First, it's a waste of time. As in the election is over and the winner decided - by electoral vote not popular vote. SO where the fuck is the injury that merits the investigation? Trump is already in the Oval office so what exactly is the investigation going to settle? It shouldn't take a genius to conclude the whole purpose is to soothe his widdo ego, that's all. In other words, it's a big McGuffin created to salve a wounded ego because the little bastard didn't win both the electoral AND popular votes! (Apart from trying to settle a score with the 3 million more Hillary voters!)
Second, as I noted above, there is NO genuine evidence for any voter fraud of the type the Trumpies are pissing and whining about. All the Secretaries of State have certified so, and that includes 37 Republicans. This "voter fraud" the BLOTUS insists happened has been proven to occur only roughly 0.00000013 % of the time see e.g.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/voter-fraud-real-rare/story?id=17213376
Third, such an investigation will cost money - paid for by Mr. And Mrs. U.S. Taxpayer. I for one don't want to see any more money squandered on fulsome bogus "investigations" by Repuke assholes who use them as the only way to get hard-ons. It's bad enough Trump is going to try to make us cough up the tax money to build his dumb ass wall - another case of detachment from reality.
Here's another choice canard compliments of the pro-Trump bloggers: The images of the Trump inaugural crowds were "artificially reduced" by the use of border frames! Hence, Obama's stills looked as though they had bigger crowds because of being unframed. This is total madness, of course, because one need only go to the actual videos spanning the different events - produced by PBS- to show Trump's crowd was significantly less. But, of course, the Trumpies likely believe these videos are also faked. Such is the way of unreason and insanity.
Chris Hayes this evening on 'All In' brought up another point, ostensibly in Trump's defense, i.e. that he wasn't really a liar. That is, he truly believed in his mind there was actual voter fraud that denied him the popular vote, despite all the stats and evidence showed there wasn't any.
Okay but in this case, he may not be a liar, but he would be certifiably insane, given he is no longer able to separate fact from fantasy. The sort of condition that gets a lot of psychos admitted to Bellevue for ECT and long term therapy.
So ok, he's not a "liar" but then he must be insane. If he is insane he has no business being in the White House or near any nuclear football. He ought to be tied up in a strait jacket in a mental institution some place until they can bring him out of it, say with electric shocks, or lithium therapy or whatever the newest treatments are.
But this is a guy that should not be sitting behind that big desk signing executive orders and shooting his yap off about building giant Walls, torture, violating the Posse Comitatus Act to send troops to Chicago, or going after sanctuary cities.
No, this is a person bereft of reason as well as reality, who needs to be admitted into the nearest mental facility as soon as possible. And if his followers are unable to see that, they merit the same therapy. We cannot afford to have a nation where one third of its citizens are no longer grounded in reality, but tall tales and "alternative facts".
To quote Charles Blow of the NY Times:
"Trump does not simply have “a running war with the media,” as he so indecorously and disrespectfully spouted off while standing on the hallowed ground before the C.I.A. Memorial Wall. He is in fact having a running war with the truth itself. ...Donald Trump is a proven liar. He lies often and effortlessly. He lies about the profound and the trivial. He lies to avoid guilt and invite glory. He lies when his pride is injured and when his pomposity is challenged. Indeed, one of the greatest threats Trump poses is that he corrupts and corrodes the absoluteness of truth, facts and science".
