He kept talking about voter fraud attempts and we laughed, and now a woman was arrested in Iowa for attempting that very thing! Guess we have to stop laughing now.
Oh. Wait. Turns out she was a Trump supporter who believed her first vote would be magically transformed into one for Hillary so she attempted to go elsewhere and vote again.
Can we go back to laughing?
PAD
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The truly sad thing here is that this doesn’t even come across as intent to defraud the process as much as it does stupidity.
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Trump has been screaming the lie at every stump stop that the polls are rigged, the vote is rigged, there are millions of fraudulent votes being cast out there for the Democrats, and that the rigged election will be stolen. When a hack rag political website makes up stories about votes being flipped, he repeats the stories as the unvarnished truth and embellishes it with claims of credible sources having investigated and proven it to be true.
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He preaches fear, ignorance, and stupidity to the truly stupid. Well, meet one of the truly stupid.
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She thought her vote was going to get flipped or rigged away at her polling place, so she cast her vote, worried that his fake stories were true and that her vote was being stolen, and went somewhere else to vote for Trump again.
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Trump’s entire deal at this point is preaching lies, ignorance, stupidity, and fear to his followers, and this woman is unfortunately a victim of a combination of his bûllšhìŧ and her own stupidity. It’s also unfortunately a sign of what’s to come. Some of her counterparts are both stupid and potentially violent, and I have no doubt that they will act on their uninformed and ignorant impulses just as she acted on hers.
What’s that saying, Jerry? Say something loud enough and long enough and eventually people will believe it? Something like that.
I thought my party was full of smart voters and stupid politicians. And then this happens. Le sigh.
But it shouldn’t be this bad, Charles. When a demagogue can scare people into making delusionally foolish choices that only hurt them…
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As much as I ragged on the stupidity in where the Tea Party movement was taking the Party with people like (now big Trump supporters) Palin and Bachmann, I would never have predicted something like Trump this soon. I figured something like this was 2024, not this bad, and only after a more noticeable period of fracturing in the party.
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When it cam to that point, I genuinely thought the more traditional and sane Republicans would end up running a candidate as an independent to rally the sane base around in a way similar to what we’re seeing Evan McMullin trying to do on his own.
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Of course, I also figured that by 2024 to 2028 we’d see enough fracturing in the Democrats that we might see a third party formed out of fiscally conservative moderate Democrats and socially moderate Republicans joining together.
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I never figured a carnival barker like Trump would rise to power in the party this soon, and watching him do it I assumed that most Republicans would have found a viable option like an Evan McMullin of their own to try and shift support to. I can’t imagine all of Trump’s base are longtime Republican voters by any stretch of the imagination. The Republicans could have brought sane voters back into their fold and maybe even some of the independents.
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Instead the Republicans are lining up behind Trump. I see people I know- friends, family, coworkers -creating these alternate world narratives they’re replacing reality with where Trump is a good, altruistic leader of men doing this out of a sense of noble self-sacrifice and nothing more than the desire to serve his country and be an instrument of the greater good. You know, just ignore the nonstop lying, the misogynistic bullying of any woman (like Megyn Kelly) who dares to question him, the egotistical crudity…
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I actually feel bad for any true conservatives and true Republicans out there right now. No one who says things like “The Party of Lincoln” or “The Party of Reagan” and actually believes and means it can be happy with what they’re seeing with the growing Party of Trump. There are papers like South Carolina’s The State- a paper that has not endorsed a Democrat for President in 40 years -begging Republicans to vote for Hillary over Trump. Doing it not because they see her as so great, but because they recognize Trump as that vile, petty, and dangerous.
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http://www.thestate.com/opinion/editorials/article111181492.html
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We basically have two bad choices. One, Hillary, will be a crap-shoot. The other, Trump, will basically destroy the Republican party and trash our country.
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Either way, not a great four years ahead of us.
If they knew more about the real Reagan (as opposed to Saint Ronaldus Maximus) and especially how he got the Presidency and just why the hostages were freed the minute he was sworn in, they might not be so keen on calling their Party that, either.
On a lighter note, a certain 1990s Jim Henson TV series appears to have predicted Trump amazingly accurately.
If it was true that her first vote would be changed to one for Hillary, then wouldn’t her second one have likely ended up for Hillary too?