The right-wing outrage over the Hunter Biden nothingburger is a tried-and-true propaganda tactic

What I heard is that Rudy Giuliani likes to pee on his dog. Just wait… we’ll see if it’s nothingburger or not… but as of now… it seems pretty credible.

(What is with these guys and their ellipses?)

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Too confusing, as Fox Entertainment Group is now a part of Disney.

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Hey…don’t blame the ellipses…ellipses are just a tool…like our new friend…

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It bums me out that ellipses have become a signpost for bad-faith arguments on the internet. I think they add to written communication and are more appropriate than a semicolon for inferring a sort of trailing off of thought…

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Perfect example of how rumors get garbled as they spread. It’s actually the other way round.

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Back in the 90’s conservatives used to complain that liberals always portrayed themselves as victims. At some point they realized this was a good tactic, adopted it wholesale, and started inventing controversies to be victims of.

Twenty years after Bill O’Reilly popularized “the war on Christmas”, 93% of Americans are still celebrating Christmas. And ten years after Obamacare was introduced, still no reports of anyone going in front of a “death panel.”

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Yeah, the death panels argument was such nonsense, especially given that HMO’s literally ran death panels for years prior to that, deciding what coverage they would provide and when to cut all coverage off for their sick customers. Liberals complain about actual “this is happening” and conservatives complain about “here’s something scary I just thought up you guys!”

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Except for those from their own private insurance companies.

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I used to use a lot of ellipses, but then people started mocking the practice, and although I don’t think I was necessarily the target of that, it made me wonder if I was using it as a crutch to get out of articulating myself properly.

So now I police myself, and I’ve discovered that mostly when I use ellipses it’s because I’m writing a message and can’t get the tone quite right – exclamation points (to say nothing of emoji) sound like an excited fifth grader, but periods sound like a strict Victorian governess, and it’s hard to chart a course in between.

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Most of my ellipses here are when I haven’t noticed that I have typed .. by mistake.

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Don’t the tr ll factories know that it becomes very obvious when they just add more new users? Is this one of those Nigerian Prince things where they deliberately let it be obvious that they are Russian (or Chinese?) disinformation agents in order to see if the forum is dumb enough to accept what they are saying?

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2020-10-21T04:00:00Z EDIT: (removed “The story is not utterly without truth.” Unintentionally conflated the laptop story with the Ukraine misdeeds story. I blame sleep deprivation. My apologies.)

I like the analysis provided by Jerri-Lynn Scofield on Naked Capitalism re HB’s alleged corruption:

TL;DR Hunter did have a position on a board that presented a conflict of interest; however, no laws were broken, which illustrates how the system is corrupt in that this type of arrangement is normal among the privileged elites.

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If not long ago, now is the time for all televised news networks to plaster “OPINION” (in big text) onto the screen for the entirety of all such airings, and likewise “NEWS” for news reports. Make it obvious for the fact-challenged.

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I think that really is exactly how they work.

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His job in the Ukraine is not the story here. The story here that he dropped off a laptop with illegal content clear across the country from where he lives and it got picked up by the FBI. That is completely without merit. Stop muddying the waters here.

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That’s the simple conservative double standard- and if you point it out then they hit back with “well if the entirety of Trump’s family being involved in nepotism is bad, then why aren’t you upset about Hunter Biden?”

Actual misdeeds on their side hold no weight, especially compared to theoretical misdeeds committed by the other side.

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So there is no misunderstanding…

Just a small taste:

But the owner of the computer store, John Paul MacIsaac, was unable and unwilling to answer key questions about how the laptop supposedly arrived in his store, and eventually, how the data was shared with Giuliani. CBS News interviewed MacIsaac for almost two hours on Wednesday and throughout the interview he contradicted himself about his motivations, raising questions about the truthfulness of one of the central figures in the story.

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The original story also left out the step where the Republicans set up a House investigation that lasts for 5 years and spends millions of dollars and finds nothing. I guess that part no longer applies.

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Then the GOP should make that the story. Oh, wait, they can’t given the insane levels of nepotistic conflicts of interest amongst Il Douche’s children. People might stop thinking that Biff is the totally non-elite hero of the working class they think he is.

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No - you can’t be both innocent and guilty of the same alleged crime. Whatever it is.

And you can’t have a legal conflict of interest if no legal conflict of interest exists.

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