Again With the "Massive Voter Fraud" Thing

Now comes Steve Miller, the 31-year-old presidential advisor and a hot-eyed ideologue whose thinking on foreign policy is based not on what he knows but on what he believes – in charge of the handling of, and waving nukes at, North Korea. Horrifying. And this week he also jumped on the “massive voting fraud” bandwagon, citing -- just like Trump, Spicer, et.al. -- no evidence.

Imagine if Donald Trump had won the popular vote and “the media” then published stories – stories that included no evidence or sources or actual facts -- alleging that as many as 5-million fraudulent votes were cast in the election. No body copy to explain the story – just a headline: MILLIONS OF FRAUDULENT VOTES CAST, GIVING TRUMP POPULAR VOTE WIN.

“We have no evidence, no reporting, no examples,” said the editor of the Daily Planet. “It’s just something we believe.”

Of course, Trumpists and the Republicans would be strangling on their anger, raging about the corrupt and dishonest media, and demanding that multiple heads roll.

But that’s pretty much what Sean Spicer, White House Press Secretary, cited as validation of the president’s contention that he would have won the popular vote had it not been for massive voter fraud. "The president does believe that,” Spicer said. “He has stated that before.”

That, then, would be their evidence -- that they believe it. If the inhabitants of Planet Trump believe something to be true, it is true. End of story.

Following that surreal declaration be Spicer -- and only after being challenged on the fact that they felt no compulsion to look further into the biggest electoral scandal in the country’s history -- the Trump team announced a “major investigation.” The betting out here in Flyoverland is that this is an investigation that will never happen.

But let’s save the White House the time, trouble, and expense. If it will simply point any one of a thousand news outlets, friendly or unfriendly, in the right direction on this, they will be more than happy to track this amazing story down and publish it; and, having uncovered the biggest voter fraud in history, collect their Pulitzer prize. Show us your evidence. Tell us where to look. Give us your sources. We will be all over this. And “we” absolutely includes GOP friendlies like the Wall Street Journal and (I may be going out on a limb here) Fox News. Both the honest and dishonest media want this story, Mr. President, and are eager to tell it. We have no interest in covering it up. Ready when you are.

More recently, Trump said he would have won in New Hampshire if not for voters bused in from out of state. Like so many other things he says, this is a lie. He simply made it up on the spot.

"There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of major voter fraud in New Hampshire's elections," Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said in a statement. "President Trump continues to spread a dangerous lie and it's long past time for Republican leadership in New Hampshire to stand up and defend our state's electoral system."

Ellen Weintraub of the Federal Election Commission called on Trump to "immediately share his evidence with the public and with the appropriate law-enforcement authorities so that his allegations may be investigated promptly and thoroughly."

"The president has issued an extraordinarily serious and specific charge," the commissioner said in a statement. "Allegations of this magnitude cannot be ignored."

Same with the Trumpian contention that terrorist attacks have been under-reported or not reported at all. If there have been terrorist attacks that he knows about but which have not been reported to the public by the media, then he absolutely owes it to us tell us where, when, and how these incidents occurred, how many people were killed/injured, and the identities of the victims.

Meanwhile, Trump true believers will just have to sit themselves down and come to grips with a few things: (1) Reporting what Donald Trump says and does is not “negative coverage;” (2) newspapers don’t make stuff up or cover stuff up; (3) three-million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for Trump; (4) regarding massive voter fraud in the election: It. Didn’t. Happen.

Eternal Vigilance

(Ed. note: In observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, and in light of the Trump administration's contention that the Third Reich's "final solution" was not overwhelmingly about the murder of Jewish people, Flyoverland is re-posting the following from December and adding a link to an article in the Washington Post that further examines anti-Semitism)

“There’s a sucker born every minute” is an observation widely attributed to the flamboyant 19th-century showman P.T. Barnum, and it says this: The folks of a given generation may catch on to a con, making it more difficult to pull off. But there’s always a new generation coming along whose members are unaware of it and therefore susceptible to it. The perennial scam favorites appear and fade with regularity, but they never stop coming back.

That’s how the anti-Semitism con works. Destructive characterizations of Jews as a people, some outlandish and totally demented and some with a certain surface plausibility,(for the simple-minded, at least) come back again and again, and are given wide-eyed acceptance and dissemination by the incoming wave of the uninitiated.

The current political climate appears ripe for just that phenomenon. Thus, Flyoverland confidently predicts the resurrection, for example, of something called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a pseudo-scholarly and completely bogus early 20th-century document that purports to be the minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders laying out their plan for world domination through control of the press and the world’s economies, and through subversion of the morals of non-Jews. It was long ago shown to be fraudulent but it’s still around and still widely available, and repeatedly comes back into favor with a certain segment of the population when the climate is right. It’s coming soon to an alt-right Web site near you. If it’s not there already.

An article in Wikipedia lists other tropes and canards about Jewish people that have come into fashion repeatedly over centuries, all designed to justify vilification (and blame) of the hated “other.” Some of these, including the Protocols, were favorites in Germany before and during WWII. Among the things Jews as a people have been accused of:

• Control of the global financial system;
• Control of the media, Hollywood, and the music industry;
• Hatred of non-Jews and the intention to destroy Christianity;
• Ritual murder and bestialiuty;
• Host desecration;
• Poisoning wells to spread disease;
• Causing wars, revolutions, and calamities;
• Lack of patriotism and allegiance to “world jewry” instead of to their country;
• Usury and profiteering (This one, or forms of it, enjoys fairly widespread casual acceptance even among people who do not see themselves as anti-Semitic);
• Playing an important role in the slave trade;

Lest we forget: Millions of people – young and old, tall and short, fat and thin, smart and dumb, handsome and ugly, blonde and brunette, factory and office workers, doctors and lawyers, artists and writers, street sweepers, teachers, small business owners, grocery store clerks, soccer moms, gawky teenagers, little kids, and babies – were murdered by Germany’s Third Reich with bullet and rope and fire and gas, because they were Jewish.

That kind of savagery is the culmination of a process that begins with the demonization of a population through stereotyping -- often, to the casual observer, innocent -- then blaming. It can happen to any population that is identifiable – skin color, ethnicity, religion -- and has happened to Jews time after time over centuries.

Something like the Holocaust can‘t happen again? Maybe not. We certainly want to think so. But…

Such a thing could never happen is exactly what the German people thought, before it happened and while it was happening. And, as we speak, we are seeing a dramatic rise in anti-Semitic activity in the United States and in the world, particularly Western Europe, according to the Anti-Defmation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, both of which keep careful track of these matters. Historically, such activity has ebbed and flowed – it’s always there but occasionally bubbles to the surface and becomes more noticeable, and more frightening, before dying back again. Will the current “flow” coalesce into something bigger, more sinister, more dangerous?

Does this uptick have anything to do with Donald Trump? Is Donald Trump anti-Semitic? Not overtly. But he has enthusiastic supporters who could not be more overt about it, and he has said this: “[Hillary Clinton] meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty, in order to enrich these global financial powers…” Not an open reference to Jews but unquestionably part of the vocabulary of anti-Semitism over the years. And speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition a year ago, he said, "Look, I'm a negotiator like you folks; we're negotiators.” A perfect example of the casual acceptance of a stereotype. Trump didn’t know any of those people personally, so as far as he knew, not a single person in the room was a good negotiator. But they were all Jewish.

Flyoverland cannot recall a time when xenophobes, ultra-nationalists, racists, and haters of every stripe seemed to feel as empowered as they do now. Of all these hatreds, anti-Semitism, though it's intertwined with all the others, stands out as the most sinister, if only because we had a vivid demonstration just a few decades ago of the horror to which it can lead.

It's said that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Just so.