Thursday, February 4, 2021

Put Up or Shut Up!


Joe McCarthy liked to use this technique - but it eventually failed, spectacularly.

I am not a complete fool.  A partial fool, to be sure.  A blithering idiot on occasion.  But I can still spot a con-job from 100 yards away.  When the "Auto Warranty Company" calls and says the Warranty on "My Car" is going to expire, I know it is just a come-on to sell a crappy 3rd party warranty, or even just steal credit card data.   Extended warranties are no bargain - even the legitimate ones.  Ones sold over the phone through a call center in India - not even close!

So when I hear this same old story told again and again - that the Trump people have "compelling evidence" of voter fraud but they can't show it to us for some reason, I get more than a little suspicious, I get pissed off.

Put up or shut up.   If you can't produce this "compelling evidence" after nearly three months, it doesn't exist.  You claim to have it, but can't show it to us.  The Pillow Guy says he has it and attaches it to an e-mail.  He "forgot" the attachment.  When pressed on this, he attaches a blank document.  When pressed again, he attaches a document so out-of-focus you can't read it.

We've been down this road before.  Joe McCarthy had his "List of 83 Communists in the State Department!" and waved it around, much as Rudy Giuliani waved around his 100 pages of affidavits.  Can we see them?  No, no you can't.

And what little we do see tells us why we can't see the rest.  The "affidavits" consist of people repeating rumors they heard third-hand and not actual witness statements.   Or the "evidence" consists of a video which shows nothing - unless you read the captions added to it.  We've been down that road before.  Remember the "Collateral Murder" video of Iraq produced by the friendly folks at Wikileaks?  They edited the video, tacked on a different sound track, and then added captions to "tell" you what you are seeing.  And people believed that, too.

But lying is lying.  And the easiest way to lie is a lie by omission.   You claim to have "all this evidence" but won't let anyone see it and won't let anyone analyze it.  Because it doesn't exist or is just bullshit.  And bullshit isn't evidence.

It is time we stopped listening to crazy people - and call them out as crazy.  Whether it is a Congresswoman who believes in "Jewish Space Lasers" or a guy in a buffalo hat who claims to be a shaman.   These are nutjobs, and time was, we put them in mental hospitals.  We didn't give them a platform to broadcast crazy.  And we certainly didn't elect them to government.

This will not end well, for the nation, for the economy, and for the average person.   We are pissing away a good deal.  And for what?

No, no you may not.