This second excerpt from my interview is more interesting and longer.
This is the second clip from my interview with Ian Welsh (Ian blogs at ianwelsh.net). For this segment, we went on a wild ride discussing the big picture mess that is US politics and society more broadly. I asked Ian what might happen if Trump lost and refused to leave and the resulting discussion meandered through a variety of interesting topics, including the 2000 Bush-Gore election debacle and the problems it enabled, the hope embodied in the squad, whether and what sort of help people want, and the specter of twelve more years of neoliberal politics. (Perish the thought.) All of this was couched in the shadow of the increasingly problematic nature of climate change.
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Ten Bears
Thank you. ‘Bout like I expected but after how many years of visiting here unsurprised. Indeed a bit, ahhh… complimented. The hook, the opening is excellent. It was probably January of 2001 when I first penned, and published at now dead blogs and in the ensuing years at my house, here and elsewhere history, if there is a history, will record the appointment by an ideologically stacked court of non-elected partisan activist judges of the scion of old school, Hitler financing blue-blooded Robber Baron money with limited intellect, no education and no practical experience a puppet in highest office of the land as ‘The End of America’.”
We’ve gotten this far on momentum, and that momentum has run out.
And, uhhh… run uphill. Straight up the hill. Run. Uphill.
Joan
I tend to view the military as effectively all pro-Trump. There are some officers who are Democrats, the one I know was pro-Hillary in 2016 and especially hawkish, but I don’t think these people would come out in force should things go south quickly. I don’t think it’s up in the air whether the military would support left-wing protests or right-wing ones.
Ché Pasa
Well, yeah.
Re: the 2000 electoral coup. Ian describes part of what was going on and blames Gore for “not fighting” and thus as fully responsible for the disaster(s) we face now. Blaming Democrats, of course, for everything that’s ever gone wrong since 1980 is de rigueur on the interwebs, right, but it’s incomplete and denies any agency on the part of others who might have something to do with current and past situations.
The situation in 2000 was more complex. No, Gore did not fight, and he actively prevented others from fighting (for example, shutting down the Black Caucus objections to accepting the Electoral College results, and many other interventions against those who objected to the coup). But there was another side to it. Teamsters might have stomped on the Brooks Brothers Rioters in Florida, but other members were armed and assembling every week, sometimes daily, at state capitols demanding that the Florida recount be stopped forthwith and the presidency be handed to Bush.
This is what I was told was driving events in Washington. Scalia took the Bush v Gore case (lawlessly) under what he perceived (or at least said) was a threat of insurrection, possibly civil war, and convinced a wavering SDO’C (the 5th vote) that the only solution to this immediate peril was to rule in favor of Bush. This belief became conventional wisdom almost immediately throughout the political shops in DC, and it was adopted by almost all the media as the only solution to the present predicament.
Gore’s capitulation was stunning and seemed really out of character, as up till then, he was not considered a wimp (except by some of the haters in the media.) What happened? Well, it was the same threat of rightist insurrection and civil war, combined with underlying knowledge that if he fought or encouraged others to, the military would side with the coup. Checkmate.
Gore did what he thought was right under the circumstances. Yes, it’s led to where we are now. But is Gore solely responsible? Far from it. He could command no troops, and he could protect no one in the streets protesting the coup. He had no fallback, and from every indication, there had been no preparation for the possible uncertain outcome of the election by the Gore team. It never occurred to them. In the end, their feeble efforts at a recount were slapdash and ineffective. They were convinced (why?) the System would work, and when it didn’t work in their favor, they said OK, that’s it then.
Should they have fought harder/better? In the end, they couldn’t. They didn’t have the insight or the resources.
The denouement is a tragedy, yes.
The rest of us should have learned from that (and the rightists did learn, if they didn’t already know) that there would be no salvation in electoral politics. No, seizing and using Power, raw and naked, would be the ticket to the future, and they’ve been doing it ever since, very effectively and successfully.
We’ve long sensed that in the vast, eternal scheme, it won’t matter if Biden wins the vote. It will matter on the margins if he wins and Team Biden and the Dems are able to rule. But we’ve had enough experience to know that their better natures can be thwarted with just a glance from the rightists. Effectively, they are captive to their fear.
The rest of us get to make the best of it how ever we can.
Plague Species
It’s clear the answer to climate chaos, to resource depletion, to irreversible environmental degradation, is more growth. It’s what got us here and it is what will save us. Save us from ourselves via collective suicide.
Ian Welsh
Nothing better is expected of Republicans. “In this interview Mr. Welsh does not blame the Nazis for the Holocaust, but instead spends all his time talking about those who did not resist or aided the Nazis”.
Yeah, ’cause everyone with sense knows that Nazis did the Holocaust, what is interesting is those who could have stopped or mitigated it and didn’t.
As usual, one reason Americans are so badly lead is that they make constant excuses for bad leaders.
Ten Bears
Occured to me this morning we are past, perhaps well past, the point of talking about Revolution, no one has any idea what to do on the other side of one anyways, and start talking about Resistance, if it’s not too late. Some of us have, of course, been talking the talk, albeit overtly and with guarded tongue. It’s not like there’s a long history of “successful” Resistance to look to.
I do like that line about the holocaust. There’s no denying it happened, though it were but a pale imitation of greater genocides fore and aft. We don’t hear near enough about those who fought it, but couldn’t stop it, and those who could have fought it, but did not.
The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery.
GlassHammer
“As usual, one reason Americans are so badly lead is that they make constant excuses for bad leaders.” – Ian
Politically engaged Americans see themselves in their leaders to unhealthy degree which means they defend them reflexively as if it were a type of self-defense. Non-politically engaged Americans can’t be bothered to care who is in charge because they don’t see abstaining as a choice with consequences.
With each election more Americans fall into these two groups.
If there is a story to tell regarding the past two decades of elections it’s the growth in Non-politically engaged Americans and how they create both a more polarized form of politics and minority rule.
GlassHammer
“start talking about Resistance” – Ten Bears
Look,
One of the great weakness of American politics is that it is extremely vulnerable to “impostors” and “faking it”. This is because electability has become a “check list” of buzzwords, gestures, and references. In general our politics is even dumber than our leaders and that is why the current stock of morons are in office. If a political movement can’t see this and other obvious weaknesses in our political system then it doesn’t deserve political power.
But not only do Resistance movements not see these glaring weaknesses, nearly all of them want to make a spectacle of themselves. It’s is laughably easy to deal with a Resistance movement that is not only out in the open (and yes major tech platforms count as being in the open) but constantly showing you all their cards.
To put it bluntly Resistance movements show less tactics than our countries enemies and we routinely stifle our countries enemies.
StewartM
Interesting take, Ché. Both you and Ian offered insights on 2000 I had not read before.
Ian–about the Nazis–who could have stopped them?
The only people who saved their honor and who were genuinely democratic and and in practice mildly progressive, the SPD, *did* try to stop them. They just didn’t have the power.
The conservatives (corresponding to today’s Republicans) *invited the Nazis into their governments to share power*. This included the DNVP.
The center parties didn’t have enough votes. Many of the centrist parties (being vaguely for ‘democracy’ of some sort by also economically ‘neoliberal’) lost votes to the Nazis.
The Communists for their part, like some of today’s leftists who voted for Trump because they hated Obama and Hillary, hated the SPD for not being revolutionary enough and often cooperated with the Nazis, justifying their actions using an “accelerationist” argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1933_German_federal_election
If you’re going to blame anyone, to me in order would be:
a) the conservatives, who were willing to play with fire to get their goals;
b) the neoliberals, who sacrificed political liberalism for economic neoliberalism;
c) the Communists, who pooh-poohed the risk of a dictatorship by wishful thinking that Hitler would be only a brief prelude to a glorious communist revolution and victory
There is a point about the German machinery of government too–courts, army, and civil service. The reason we fought WWII to ‘unconditional surrender’ is because we recognized that had happened–the rightist German machinery of government had survived the defeat in WWI and had pressed its thumb on the scale against the Weimar Republic and for whomever rightist opposition would kill it. Pershing was right, we should have fought WWI to unconditional surrender and did what we did after WWII–we went in and disassembled that machinery and replaced everyone en masse (think of it as ‘de-establishing the police’). Germany had a democratic elements, but Weimar never had a chance to weather a crises like the Great Depression given the odds stacked against it from the start.
StewartM
As for your interview, Ian.
I agree with most of what you said, Ian. I just think that preserving some form of democracy matters. Biden/Harris by inclination will be bad, but there will be pressure against at least some of their badness from within (and, unlike 2008, the progressive bloc will be stronger just because of demographics). Moreover and most importantly, there will continue to be free elections–more free, in fact, if the Civil Rights Act is restored and restrictions against voting lifted and greater ballot access is allowed.
Still, we probably won’t have a chance of good leaders for another decade. By then, even good leaders doing their best will just be managing the many crises they will face—chances for stopping may have ended with Reagan/Bush, of mitigating may have ended with Obama, so we’re left with managing bad things. But even that is better than the Right’s deliberate mismangagement.
The reason I say this is that most of our problems are not the result of too much democracy, but not enough:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/
Most of our environmental problems are not a ‘tragedy’ of everyone working for short-term common gain oblivious to the danger; in fact, egalitarian societies tend to manage limited resources better. The problem is when elites who have insulated themselves against the downsides of anything (or so they think) control resources and then they tend to loot and pillage the commons. This is why preserving democracy is important; if you think things are bad now, under essentially a Wall Street dictatorship the looting of the commons will be far worse.
Ten Bears
Please correct me if mistaken GlassHammer, bit I’ve the distinct impression you didn’t read past “talk about Resistance” to if it’s not too late, and “It’s not like there’s a long history of “successful” Resistance to look to.”
I lean towards the throw a monkey wrench in it approach, avoiding if we can senseless acts of violence while engaging in random acts of sabotage. My point is if something is to be done someone will have to do it, and most likely whatever it is to be done will require stepping over some kind of line.
The students who did best in my classes were the ones who figured out the answers were always in the question. Just gotta’ look for it.
GlassHammer
Please correct me if mistaken GlassHammer, bit I’ve the distinct impression you didn’t read past “talk about Resistance” to if it’s not too late, and “It’s not like there’s a long history of “successful” Resistance to look to.” – Ten Bears
I did, there could be a successful Resistance movement but it’s not the current proponents, not the current tactics, and not the current targets for change. There are success stories but they come from some pretty awful groups who had sound methods and mad ends.
“I lean towards the throw a monkey wrench in it approach, avoiding if we can senseless acts of violence while engaging in random acts of sabotage.” – Ten Bears
Random flailing without both a strategy and structure means you get all the negative consequences with no pay off for it. This is why current movements fizzle out, they are just individual spasms which are very easy for the state to deal with.
“My point is if something is to be done someone will have to do it, and most likely whatever it is to be done will require stepping over some kind of line.” – Ten Bears
My point is you can stay in the lines and do it but you have to understand why that would work. Plenty of wiggle room in lines drawn so wide any political player or grifter can be contained within them.
“The students who did best in my classes were the ones who figured out the answers were always in the question. Just gotta’ look for it.”
The students who did best in my class fed the teacher the answer they wanted to hear, (the one in the book that made grading easy, the one that matched their beliefs, etc…) the answer itself didn’t matter. They played the game in the most effective manner.
Frank
Ché Pasa- Wow that is thought provoking. I’m wondering if it should be distributed more widely. Maybe people would be better served if they moved out of denial.
nihil obstet
Che pasa, there’s also the fact that Bush senior had been the director of the CIA, and no doubt knew what operatives he could call on if he needed to.
Nonetheless, I still blame Gore for failure to fight. The leader is never the sole actor in an event, but he’s responsible for directing the movement towards its goal, and Gore failed.
Ché Pasa
Yes, many factors and many players, some of which have been mentioned here, had a role in the 2000 electoral coup. It wasn’t solely one thing or one player responsible for what happened, it was a confluence of factors and players, failures and motives, and I’m not convinced that anyone was in a position to stop it. For whatever reason, Gore felt he wasn’t. He put up a pro-forma fight in court, and nothing more. He was a product of the System, as Bush was, so whatever was going on was at root a struggle between factions of that system, only one of which was prepared to do whatever it took to win.
We may be facing something similar again. I’ve said I don’t expect the Supreme Court to intervene to determine the outcome of the election as they did in 2000, but they will grease the skids. This time, though, I don’t think it matters as much to the real powers behind the throne who sits on it in the end, as long as they have control over events that matter to them — which are not necessarily the ones that matter to us.
I’m seeing more and more not-quite-mainstream speculation that there will be insurrection/civil war no matter wins. Most of the focus is on the rightist “bois” because everyone knows the sheeple will get in line when and where they’re told (90% or more wear masks after all — as they should) and “Antifa” acts defensively not offensively. We’ve already seen plenty of street violence in connection with the demonstrations. Count on more.
Police are almost all aligned with the “bois” as are Trump and his fans. Military is divided. Not clear they would back the rightists in a fire fight. The problem is that the cities are not particularly friendly to rightist mobs. And that’s where most of the population is.
Who is truly prepared to lead? At this point, no one. Or rather, someone(s) we’ve never heard of…
mago
Nitpicky note: it’s led, not « lead ».
Seattle Resident
@Que Pasa, very valuable background re Gore’s backdown to Bush and the GOP in 2000, However, at the risk of taking away from Gore’s pragmatism, I suspect that Gore’s stiff performance as a campaigner put him in a position to have the election decided on a fraudulent vote count, which was aided and abetted by massive black voter disenfranchisement by Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris.
Comparing the year 2000 to the present, I believe that if there is a scenario where Biden gets above the 270 electoral vote threshold and Trump is able to eradicate it through having the courts stopping the count of mail in ballots or stopping the vote count past a short time frame, or is able to turn electoral college electors from Biden to Trump and ends up as the winner, the democratic party leadership establishment may lie down like 2000……….but the street action from the left will get very very real, militias with guns, national guard be damned. We may well see riots that dwarf those of the 1960’s. Like StewartM said, their is a stronger progressive bloc that we didn’t have in 2000 or 2008 in the down tickets and very much on the grass roots in the streets…a lot of youth got active in the wake of the Floyd murder and they are going to roll hard imo if Trump steals his way to a second term.
Thomas B Golladay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc_3d6OElXY&ab_channel=Dr.SteveTurley
No wonder they pulled Joe out of the basement. It won’t help though. Trump has this in the bag and will win at the ballot box and win the popular vote as well.
Make your peace with this fact and activate your contingency plans. Activate them now, don’t wait. Election night will be utter chaos and you do not want to be getting supplies on that night, so get whatever you need now.
Willy
At this time in 2016, Hillary’s polling lead was shrinking down to its eventual 3%, which was just a shade over her actual popular vote count win. The polls had actually been reasonably correct, within margin of error. Biden is currently holding fairly steady at 9%.
Trump n Turley best get cracking with that October surprise. Leaving supplicants in the snow and Tucker losing the Hunter files isn’t gonna help.
Ten Bears
Thank you Thomas, I needed a good laugh first thing this morning.
Frank
Ché I liked your post so much I stole it and put it on another blog. I feel like the discussion is usually pretty good a Charlie’s Diary. He’s one of my favorite science fiction writers.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/10/countdown-to-crazy.html
StewartM
Ten Bears
To give Thomas his due, there has been a slight decrease for Biden and a slight increase for Trump (maybe the faked Hunter Biden email/laptop story has given Trump a little traction?). That happened in 2016 in the two weeks before the election too:
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Images/RCP-national-Oct29.jpg
Still, look at the difference in the margins between 2016 and 2020 in MI, WI, and PA:
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Pres/Maps/Oct26.html#item-4
The races were always much closer in 2016 than they have been this year.
Moreover, Thomas is neglecting that now most pollsters *are* calculating, whether rightly or wrongly, that there will be an influx of Trump-loving high school or non-high school white males to boost Trump’s numbers. And besides, why should there now be “shy Trump voters?” when he’s Prez?
Trump’s best strategy and most likely one will be to try to a) get in-person election day voting counted first, then b) try to get the mail-in/absentee votes thrown out, because of “China” or “Iran”. That actually is what his operatives have been trying to get done in WI and PA, but it won’t work in some states, as in FLA, or NC, they have already started counting the mail-in and early votes. Even in PA some counties will start counting the mail-in vote at 8 am sharp Election Day while others will wait until the doors close, or even the next morning, so it will be hard to predict how the vote totals will change over the night.
After that, it’s try to get Republican legislators to override the actual vote and install his electors anyway, or at least not approve Biden’s electors, in the hope of throwing the election to the US House of Representatives, where the voting is done by state and the Republicans hold a 26-24 advantage. Maybe declare a national emergency November 3 will be just the end of the opening, to use a chess analogy.
Plague Species
I’d enter a comment about the election like everyone else has in this thread, but I know it would disappear because it’s off topic like several of my other comments have disappeared on other threads. Not that it matters either way. Nobody cares. That’s the truth. No one cares. What will be, will be. None of us, alone or collectively, can stop what’s coming. So be it.
Plague Species
Jack likes a man who grabs pussy and leaves his rental crowd out in the cold with no ride home. Jack likes what he sees in Donald Trump. Nixon did too. What a f*ckwit Jack is.
https://sports.yahoo.com/golf-legend-jack-nicklaus-endorsement-president-donald-trump-044845076.html
Hugh
For Thomas, der Führer ist unbesiegbar (invincible). So Trump’s losing is unfassbar (incomprehensible). Therefore it’s reality that is wrong. This is completely unsurprising. Trump knew about the coronavirus, how serious it was, and essentially fought any reasonable response to it. Nearly 230,000 Americans are dead as a result. But to the true believer, either this never happened or it is someone else’s fault.
Trump’s narcissism will not allow him to admit that he lost an election fair and square just as it hasn’t let him see that he lucked out when he won in 2016. So now that he is behind and by a fair amount, he has to claim that it’s not his fault and that the system must be rigged. That is the lifelong cheater must be getting cheated. Trump will contest the legitimacy of the election because he’s already doing it. But unless the election is razor thin, Trump, an extremely lazy person, will mostly be going through the motions. Trump has already started signaling that he knows he’s toast. There is the executive order trying to burrow in his political appointees and fire regular government employees. Winners do not engage in this kind of last minute revolution stuff.
I would say that for cultural/institutional reasons the US military is not going to get involved in the election. SCOTUS would but only if the margin is razor thin. Again unsurprising, SCOTUS is and has always been deeply anti-democratic, just not suicidal.
different clue
If JoeMalaBama wins the election, will it reverse the last-minute Trump burrow-infestation of Trumpie left-behinds in the Civil Service? It would be cheap, easy and painless to do. It would be an interesting first test of whether the Joemala Bamabeast has one little shred of honor or whether it doesn’t.
Hugh
different clue, kick it into the courts until next year where most or all of it can be reversed by the next Administration.
Willy
I wouldn’t wait and see if there’s integrity in Joe. He’ll be under all the same pressures from dysfunctionally greedy entities as Obama was, and do all the same rationalizing after capitulating. Political reality. Never quit harassing him, his friends, his handlers and minions that we don’t ever want another, smarter nutjob “populist” Trump ever again. I still don’t think it’s common knowledge (better word “wisdom”), that things are the way the are for clear reasons which most everybody can eventually be led to understand.
Hugh
My point with Biden is that he is Establishment. The Civil Service is part of that Establishment and so he will likely support it. For Trump, it’s just another place for him to throw gasoline and a match at.
Trinity
Well, I’m positive about one thing.
Selecting a scapegoat, as a group or individual, allows one to lay all the blame at their feet, conveniently removes all responsibility from everyone not in that group, removes nuance and complexity and shuts down any further discussion because the problem has been solved! The problem is the scapegoat!
This is guaranteed to solve exactly nothing, because it does not propose or even approach a solution, it merely redefines the problem in new terms (“if only they would …” or “if only he had …”).
Which is exactly why scapegoating is such an effective tool, and utilized so often.
It would be so much more effective to define a given problem in terms that don’t involve any finger pointing at all. That would truly be something new. (Although, actually it wouldn’t be exactly new, it’s just something we’ve forgotten along the way.)
Anyway, it’s way more fun to endlessly discuss problems than actually solve them. Right?
bruce wilder
the faked Hunter Biden email/laptop story
What was fake about it?
And what is the truth of the matter and how do know?
(I am reflecting on how much disinformation interferes not just with common knowledge but even relieves all the players of the need to lie. I spent time with a Trump supporter and the information bubble was impressive as was the networking going on — calls back and forth about a Trump rally underway at the time)
nihil obstet
Daily question — what’s the difference between a scapegoat and a wrongdoer? Should we avoid the question and just assume that we’re picking scapegoats? That at least would solve the problem of the carceral state.
metamars
“maybe the faked Hunter Biden email/laptop story has given Trump a little traction?”
BWA HA HA HA HA HA!
Faked, eh? Was it Putin who faked it, or did he command his little FSB elves? Are the porno videos starring Hunter deep fakes?
Is Bobulinksi working for Putin, too?
Today, Steve Bannon was arguing with Rudy Giuliani about whether Christopher Wray should be fired immediately, or the morning after Election Day? I’m with Steve Bannon. His FBI sat on the laptop for a year.
metamars
Glen Greenwald quite the Intercept, today, which he helped found. The last straw for him was the suppression of his reporting on Hunter Biden:
Antiwar.com:
““The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression.”
Read the rest of the article at Greenwald’s new home at Substack.”
Hugh
Wray too is something of a traditionalist/Establishmentarian. He would not have sat on Hunter Biden materials or interfered (or could have interfered) with an investigation into them. It is a mistake to assume an impossible to conceal conspiracy. To what end? We already know that Hunter traded on the Biden name in his business dealings. Nepotistic grifting permeates Washington. See the Trump family or pretty much any other officer holder’s family in DC for further examples.
As for Greenwald, I never forgave or trusted him for not moving to release the Snowden papers. Instead he milked them while he could, parlayed them into the deal that created the Intercept, and stuck them into an increasingly out of date “archive” which the Intercept, before all this hit, was moving to mothball.
StewartM
Bruce
What was fake about it?
Putting aside the problem of why Hunter Biden (who lives in California) would what?–get in his plane to fly to New Jersey?– just to drop off one–or three, depending on the story–water logged Macbooks to a legally blind desk working at a computer shop, on a day where it just happened that the store security camera wasn’t working, and never to return nor never to answer emails or phone calls. MacBook(s) which had all this unencrypted stuff on it (MacBooks have encryption option built-in, and that is the standard for business laptops) and moreover the supposed incriminating emails had time/date stamps showing that the file were created months after the laptops supposedly were dropped off…
Well, what would you say just from that. There’s more, but I’ll leave it there. Oh and BTW, the legality of computer repair shops rifling through your personal files is questionable (though discoveries of child porn are allowed). And besides, most of the times (see below) for this specific work it’s not necessary.
The FBI has the laptops now. If the emails were legit, you don’t need a laptop to retrieve, they can be retrieved directly off email servers (a common misconception of criminals who think deleting or even wiping emails destroys the evidence; it doesn’t).
People as connected as Hunter Biden don’t need to take their computers to seedy computer shops on the other end of the country, then forget them–they have trusted IT departments to do that work (or simply replace them with new ones). Business laptops are encrypted by default, there would be no access to the files, period. I also have had the same problem twelve years ago (water-logged computer) and had to take it in to be worked on, and for that you don’t even need the customer’s hard drive except to see if it boots (mine didn’t it was dead).
Willy
Is Greenwald what happens to once-honest and decent reporters who just need more dough?
metamars
@Stewart M
What is your source for:
“Putting aside the problem of why Hunter Biden (who lives in California) would what?–get in his plane to fly to New Jersey?– just to drop off one–or three, depending on the story–water logged Macbooks to a legally blind desk working at a computer shop, on a day where it just happened that the store security camera wasn’t working, and never to return nor never to answer emails or phone calls. MacBook(s) which had all this unencrypted stuff on it (MacBooks have encryption option built-in, and that is the standard for business laptops) and moreover the supposed incriminating emails had time/date stamps showing that the file were created months after the laptops supposedly were dropped off…”
The only thing I’ve heard about the laptop story, that sounds very much like disinformation, is a photo of lines of white powder next to a credit card bearing the name of Malia Obama. That just strikes me as extraordinarily unlikely.
It had occurred to me that the laptop may have been stolen, and the repair shop story is a cover story. Since Hunter can be stoned out of his mind, it was nonetheless plausible that the laptop would be taken to a repair shop, then forgot about.
Ché Pasa
Glenn’s story of why he left the Intercept is largely hyperventilating and hyperbole. It is his way.
Cut through the bullshit, and you see he’s been building toward the break for a long time, as apparently has the Intercept. Literally, they don’t need (or particularly want) each other any more, and the best solution is Glenn’s departure — if the Intercept is to survive, and I’m not sure that’s possible with or without Glenn.
Marcy Wheeler does a deconstruction of all this huffery and puffery on the Twitter.
https://twitter.com/emptywheel
Plague Species
It turns out Nicklaus is a socialist every bit as much as Trump is. Trump received $72 million in tax credits (coerced wealth redistribution) and golfs on the taxpayers’ dime to the tune of $141 million and counting and Jack will receive $20 million in taxpayers’ dollars for his children’s hospital project to bolster his “legacy.” Your “legacy” is now forever tarnished, you Nazi bastard. What is it with Germans and fascism? Is it in their blood? Nicklaus is of German heritage as is Trump and here they are, goose-stepping in synchronicity once again as their ancestors beam with pride in hell if only there was one.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/11/trump-jack-nicklaus-1259949
But hey, Hunter Biden, right, so it’s all good.
StewartM
Metamars:
I posted a reply on the Glen Greenwald threat that has some of the tech-y links. Other elements of the story I found here and there, researching it, because my Taiwanese friends were writing me and asking me “is this true?” as Trump has a undeserved reputation as being Taiwan’s friend.
At most, the “laptop repair shop” story is a cover story and to whatever extent true material was obtained, it was probably hacked. I don’t even think the laptop was stolen. As I said, *all* laptops sold today come with a data encryption option; it is enabled by default on business laptops, and moreover on a water-logged unit a tech wouldn’t need to login to a user account (a successful bootup would result in a phone call to the customer of “ok, we have it booted now, can you come in and log in and look at your account to see if everything’s ok?”)
In fact as someone who did have and lost a computer to water damage, and where the hard drive was not bootable, then there was no easy way to peruse the hard drive, encryption or no. Attaching the hard drive to a working computer as a remote hard drive would result in….nothing. It wouldn’t “see” such a damaged hard drive. I suppose you could give a damaged unit to facility who had the capability of disassembling it, removing the magnetic media and re-assembling it with working electronic components (a clean room environment?) and/or performing magnetic force microscopy to attempt to reconstruct the files on it by reading the 0s and 1s off the disk one-by-one. By that time we’re way beyond the capabilities of some little New Jersey computer repair shop,, we’re talking intelligence agency capabilities, and need I add that reconstructing an entire hard drive file-by-file by reconstructing the binary code is very tedious?