"Will you shut up, man?" US Politics October 2020

I'm sure Rudy Giuliani, who regularly gets rolled by Russian disinformation sites, bought the contents of a seized laptop with a convenient Beau Biden charity sticker months ago, and that it's legit, even though the laptop was allegedly provided to the FBI who hasn't uttered a word about it.

oh cool, so we've already moved from "this is obvious BS" to "this is Democrat hypocrisy for not condemning it" in 5 minutes.

― LaRusso Auto (Neanderthal),

and to an atmosphere shift! Sorry, map.

We've known about the makework jobs attained because of his last name for years, nothing to do with the possibility we have video of him smoking crack while getting a blumpkin. It's always been shitty.

― Donald Trump Also Sucks, Of Course (milo z), Wednesday, October 14, 2020 4:51 PM bookmarkflaglink

cool, none of us are talking about that bruh

and we know that Democrats are held to a different standard anyway

This is the key. Of course Trump has like four scandals a month that are far worse than this, but the media will jump all over this. It sucks and it's such absolute bullshit, but this is where we are. The media is "exhausted" by Trump's continuing implosion of norms and laws, but even the remote whiff of a possible Biden scandal is a shiny new object.

Democrats can have a little influence-peddling, as a treat.

cool, none of us are talking about that bruh

Oh, so you're talking about a different Hunter Biden e-mail scandal than the one involving him using his connection to the VP of the United States to make money.

i've never seen any evidence that joe biden was influenced, while in office, by his son working for burisma. i'm sure burisma was hoping that by hiring hunter they'd have "access" but it's not clear that they did. so this whole scandal just seems irrelevant.

to some degree yes, but while a maddening amount of the media still hasn't learned its lesson from 2016, we saw a lot less of the disproportionate coverage this year than we did in 2016, because journalists have been actually commenting on the veracity of many scandals.

a large part of that is also sexism, but there's a reason the Hunter Biden scandal didn't blow up bigger - the media actually didn't give it the level of coverage they gave the bullshit "is Hillary dying?" scandal, for one, and also repeatedly commented how the larger claims were unfounded.

hunter biden isn't running for president, basically.

Shiny maybe but also, how you say, incoherent:

Here's the audio of the extremely odd interview with the guy who claims he gave Hunter Biden's laptop to Rudy Giuliani. https://t.co/jHen27j6W9

— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) October 14, 2020

Wait -- have y'all seen evidence this NY Post story has taken off? Haberman backtracked this morning, and when an Establishment solon like Howard Fineman has a temper tantrum about the terrible reporting on Twitter, I tend to think nothing's a-stirring.

brb though I'm gonna text bank for Biden at 5 p.m. for an hour. My first time.

Isaac appeared nervous throughout. Several times, he said he was scared for his life and for the lives of those he loved. He appeared not to have a grasp on the timeline of the laptop arriving at his shop and its disappearance from it. He also said the impeachment of President Trump was a “sham.” Social media postings indicate that Isaac is an avid Trump supporter, and voted for him in the 2016 election.

Isaac said he had a medical condition that prevented him from actually seeing who dropped off the laptop but that he believed it to be Hunter Biden’s because of a sticker related to the Beau Biden Foundation that was on it. He said that Hunter Biden actually dropped off three laptops for repair, an abundance of hardware that he chalked up to the Biden son being “rich.”

Throughout the entire interview, Isaac switched back and forth from saying he reached out to law enforcement after viewing the files in the laptop to saying that it was actually the Federal Bureau of Investigation that reached out to him. At one point, Isaac claimed that he was emailing someone from the FBI about the laptop. At another point he claimed a special agent from the Baltimore office had contacted him after he alerted the FBI to the device’s existence. At another point, he said the FBI reached out to him for “help accessing his drive.”

Isaac referenced the infamous Seth Rich conspiracy theory—which holds that a DNC staffer who police say was murdered in a botched robbery was actually killed off by Clinton allies because he leaked committee emails—as reason for his paranoia. He said he made a copy of the hard drive for purposes of personal protection.

“They probably knew I had a copy because I was pretty vocal about not wanting to get murdered,” he said, “so I’m going to have a copy.”

Isaac refused to answer specific questions about whether he had been in contact with Rudy Giuliani before the laptop drop-off or at any other time before the Post’s publication. Pressed on his relationship with Giuliani, he replied: “When you’re afraid and you don’t know anything about the depth of the waters that you’re in, you want to find a lifeguard.”

Seeming to realize he’d said too much, he added: “Ah shit.”

So, Rudy was your lifeguard, the reporters asked. “No comment,” he replied.

Democrats are held to a different standard anyway

Damn straight. I thought it was plenty bad enough back when Billy Carter openly traded on his position as the president's brother to sell his name to Billy Beer and The People In Charge let him get away with it! Anyway, Hunter Biden is so transparently corrupt that I will refuse to vote for him, ever, for any political office.

The issue is also really easy to avoid - if you know that your side is held to a stricter standard, don't do even minor corruption. When faced with a lineup of candidates, pick the one with the least corruption baggage!

Pointing fingers at the other side doing something even worse never works, as I'd hope everyone figured out by kindergarten when they tattled on another kid.

hunter biden isn't on the ballot

have we forgotten the part where these emails aren't authenticated or are we going to keep pretending this is a real issue

Lotta Wohl/Burkman vibes offa Isaac there.

why are we talking about Hunter F. Biden while Amy F. Barrett is being fawned over in the Judiciary Committee in preparation for ramming her onto the Supreme Court under the Gorsuch/Kavanaugh Rules?

i realize the FBI isn't going to do what it did in 2016 and Hunter isn't running for President but this does involve Biden and they've had the hard drive from this doofus since December.

willing to bet they weren't impressed.

The issue is also really easy to avoid - if you know that your side is held to a stricter standard, don't do even minor corruption.

I'm still confused - what corruption did Joe Biden do again?

xxpost cos this is ILE and it's the politics thread

why are we talking about Hunter F. Biden while Amy F. Barrett is being fawned over in the Judiciary Committee in preparation for ramming her onto the Supreme Court under the Gorsuch/Kavanaugh Rules?

currently because Milo?

Call me crazy but I doubt Joe was completely unaware of Hunter's entire life and career. Bad dad if so, IMO.

he isn't in charge of him. hunter biden was in his 40s when this happened.

Isaac said he had a medical condition that prevented him from actually seeing who dropped off the laptop but that he believed it to be Hunter Biden’s because of a sticker related to the Beau Biden Foundation that was on it.

Isaac said he had a medical condition that prevented him from actually seeing who dropped off the laptop but that he believed it to be Hunter Biden’s because of a sticker related to the Beau Biden Foundation that was on it.

Isaac said he had a medical condition that prevented him from actually seeing who dropped off the laptop but that he believed it to be Hunter Biden’s because of a sticker related to the Beau Biden Foundation that was on it.

Isaac said he had a medical condition that prevented him from actually seeing who dropped off the laptop but that he believed it to be Hunter Biden’s because of a sticker related to the Beau Biden Foundation that was on it.

yeah, this is bogus

yeah why is that the evidence? why not the fact that hunter's emails were allegedly on the device.

Wait -- have y'all seen evidence this NY Post story has taken off?

yeah, that's why I mentioned its placement on the Drudge page--far below a ton of Trump stories. I mean it gets top billing on Brietbart...

Personally I just see the dispiriting, predictable trail of this. The laptop shit is fake and/or a nothingburger, but Trump keeps yelling about it on his death march campaign tour and the media keeps reporting on his anger about it in a way that manages to effectively erase the meaningful difference between it being real or fake for the not insignificant number of absolute morons that populate our country.

Basically, to Trump it doesn't matter. The self-generating Facebook olds outrage machine is cranked up and get gets to yell about it at his rallies, beyond that he doesn't give a shit how real it is.

2016 isn't 2020, and Trump is the incumbent.

keep up the despair, y'all!

People are voting as we worry about Breitbart's placement of the story and the president yelling hoarsely about it on Thursday.

taking off on Breitbart/Drudge/Post does not = "taking off" IMO.

there are tons of stories that circulate in right wing spheres that never hit mainstream or do and then have the impact of a damp fart. (I know cos I'm sadistic enough to keep up with their lunacy).

whereas Comey's memo was national news and it landed on the Friday before an election, so there was no way to escape its fumes.

Speaking of which, the count is about to hit 15 million even sooner than I figured -- Elections Project has it at 14,945,734 less than an hour ago.

good lord.

yeah, comey had more standing in 2016 than mr. john paul isaac has in 2020. when comey trashed clinton, it had an impact.

I almost wonder if it would reach 16 million by some point this evening. Which isn't out of the bounds of possibility as reports come in, and would mean ramping up the projected numbers accordingly. Essentially almost one-third of the early vote total of 2016 has occurred.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5a5wHV8SC0

The issue is also really easy to avoid - if you know that your side is held to a stricter standard, don't do even minor corruption.

I'm still confused - what corruption did Joe Biden do again?

Call me crazy but I doubt Joe was completely unaware of Hunter's entire life and career. Bad dad if so, IMO.

I won't call you crazy but boy howdy are you full of shit. How are you not embarrassed to post this rubbish?

Just to be clear, I don't at all mean to insinuate that this is going to swing the election at this point, but I'm just not feeling super confident about laughing things that shouldn't matter off. Given, y'know, the last four or five years of American politics.

milo, do you blame your grandfather for stuff your uncle does, or whatever?

So NY Times, Wash Post, etc are FAKE NEWS but NY Post is always to be believed what a world what a world

to Ned's post, this seems like an extension of 2018. people (on all aisles) are fired up, pissed, and want to take care of the vote early. and more are voting by mail than previously.

promising. hoping Trump voters filled out their early mail ballots in crayon

Meanwhile in 'well yeah, *shrug*' news

#BREAKING: @MassGovernor releases statement saying “he “cannot support Donald Trump for President” #wcvb pic.twitter.com/SPV2MY0ykh

— Sharman Sacchetti (@SharmanTV) October 14, 2020

I initially read the 'Mass' as 'Miss' as in Mississippi and thought "Okay THAT is news," but alas.

to Ned's post, this seems like an extension of 2018. people (on all aisles) are fired up, pissed, and want to take care of the vote early.

Right, and the best argument I'm seeing -- which I agree with -- is that while both sides are riled up the numbers break towards Biden overall.

Ole Mass.

that's what it appears like too and what i'm hoping for.

I won't call you crazy but boy howdy are you full of shit. How are you not embarrassed to post this rubbish?

It's not rubbish to think that it's bad for scions of the powerful to make money from their last name.

milo, do you blame your grandfather for stuff your uncle does, or whatever?

If my uncle gets a job because of his access to my grandfather and my grandfather doesn't tell him to knock that shit off, yes, both are in the wrong.