“You don’t demonstrate your seriousness that Trump is an existential threat to democracy by going through the motions to renominate an 81-year-old with a 38% approval rating who 75% of voters think is too old without giving anyone a choice because that’s just how things are done.”
—-538 founder Nate Silver on Twitter/X, reacting to the Democratic Party attempting to keep RFK Jr. off state ballots
Silver has proven himself to be generally left-biased, but he’s not stupid, and he’s not corrupt. He can see the clear hypocrisy in the party’s conduct and rhetoric, and doesn’t even have to reference its other totalitarian moves, like weaponizing the justice system to try to stop voters from choosing its most feared adversary.
Oh…Nate’s observation was just two days ago, and 75% is already out of date. The first post Hur report and Biden old man rant poll shows 86% of the public convinced that the President has passed his metaphorical pull date.
Ethics Alarms 
The problem with giving people options is that they might choose the wrong one. In this case, the Democrats have to keep everyone unified behind Biden. Either Biden remains the candidate, and Democrats have to make there is no one who would divide the party and possibly cost them votes in the general election, or Biden steps down at the convention, and the actual heir-apparent has to emerge with no clear rivalry.
If the Democrats thought they could beat Trump at the ballots, they would have allowed a primary against Biden. The problem is that their entire platform is toxic, and the last three years have showed how toxic that platform is. High crime in all those major, defund-the-police, sanctuary cities. Inflation that, while was inevitable once Trump approve emergency funds for businesses and individuals, was exacerbated by Biden’s administrative choices. The porous border. The increasingly blatant weaponizing of the justice department, that prosecutes conservative rioters but not liberal, that charges Trump but not Biden, that targets parents but not Hunter. The collaboration with social media, news outlets, and Amazon to censor dissenting voices, even when the those voices have been proved correct time and again. The weak military stance in the world, in which Russia, China, and Iran are emboldened, with new wars breaking out because of the belief that the United States will be unable or unwilling to counter.
So the Democrats have to ensure that Trump is the Republican nominee, so that they can deal him a death blow by securing a conviction before the general election. Then Biden rides the incumbent wave into a second term. Or, if Biden does step down, his impassioned speech endorsing his hand-selected replacement should give his successor all the wind needed to finish the race. Because Trump will be a criminal. But none of this works if there is even the appearance of competition with Biden. Give the appearance of competition, like when Bernie was allowed to contend with Hillary, and when the rug is pulled out from under the competition’s feet, that might snub enough of the needed voters to cost the election.
The Democrats are in a situation where they have to further tighten their grip. The only question is how many star systems will slip through their fingers…
Bullseye. It’s a race between the criminal proceedings and the election. Even if none of them hit before the election, maybe they can flog the fact that Trump has 91, count ’em, 91 felony charges pending to disqualify him in the eyes of enough. Interestingly, for most people if you flogged the number of charges, the media would say innocent until proven guilty, but in this case the media is flogging the idea that with so many charges he must be guilty of something.
If I recall correctly the charges are not different violations of law they are what the prosecutors are interpreting Trumps language as individual occurrences of obstruction.
I am still wondering how an obstruction of justice claim can be made when the original offense is willful retention of documents and the issue is who has the right to keep them. The archives demanded their return. Trump said they are his. Then the archives used the DOJ to retrieve them. Trump told them they are his and the DOJ levels multiple counts of law breaking. When did the court order Trump to return the documents.
Prosecutors seem to pile on charges routinely so when I hear 91 counts I don’t put much faith in their case. This is especially true when favored candidates can steal documents with impunity while disfavored candidates are charged with crimes or are banned from ballots for crimes never charged let alone adjudicated. That has all the hallmarks of a police state.
They are claiming Trump had ‘300 documents’ in his possession and Biden, ‘only 6’. Both cases have similar numbers of pages of classified information. They are counting individual pages in Trump’s case, but they are counting folders/notebooks in Biden’s case.
This is not just a problem of bias and consistency in the DOJ here, I see it in the CDC and FDA data as well. If you try to compare different diseases or rates of death they track, you can’t because they categorize each one differently. If you look at drowning death, for example, deaths of children are recorded in 2 groups, I think 1-3 years and 4-14 years, or something like that. Children end well before 18. Gunshots were recorded using very different age ranges, the child range for gunshots ends at 19 years old. Why? This makes it impossible to make apples-to-apples comparisons. The sole job of these sections of the CDC is to collect the data to interpret. Why don’t they have consistent age ranges they record? Either they all need to be fired for incompetence or they all need to be fired for trying to obscure the data they are paid to produce for analysis.
Don’t even look at the DOJ. The DOJ ‘moved to a new reporting system’ in 2021. Many agencies have not reported their crime statistics since. It looks like 100% of the agencies in my poor state reported data and 89% of it covered the entire year (why did you only report 11 months of data, Stillwater?). However, 30% of the country didn’t report any data for 2022 and 40% didn’t report for 2021. Many of these non-reporters were big cities like LA, San Francisco, and New York City. So, when they tell you the crime trend is this or that, remember, lots of places with a lot of crime isn’t reporting the crime. So, where are they getting the information about <blank> crime is down this year in LA?
They also keep changing how they calculate inflation, unemployment and all the other economic information. You cannot actually compare inflation rates to previous time periods because the information is all completely gamed and skewed. Not to mention how they “revise” the information months or years later so that no one can keep track of what is actually going on. Everything is propaganda. The government just wants to trick the population into agreeing with things they don’t agree to. It is all a game of hide the truth.
It is even worse than that. It has become so commonplace that it is now almost mandatory. For accreditation, I have to keep assessment data. Every 2-3 years, they want me to change my assessment methodology and assessment devices. I refuse, pointing out that if I change them, I can’t compare current outcomes to past outcomes and figure out if there is a problem or if solutions are working. I am told that recording consistent measurements for a long period of time violates ‘best practices’ in the assessment field.
So, I reword things, continue to take the same measurements, and everyone is happy.