The headline result from last week’s elections was: Democrats win across the board, none of the elections were close, they won the contested downballot races too, and the wins came across the Democrats’ ideological spectrum from center to left.
If the exact same results came next week, the story would be: Democrats win fluke election amid Epstein scandal, so the win wouldn’t fully count in pundit-world.
OK, the consultants in the know, the ones who are doing polling and strategy for the parties in the key races, they would’ve known that the Democratic candidates were far ahead even before the latest email dump, but in the broader world there would’ve been a bit attempt to attribute to their wins to the Epstein story, indeed so much that I’m sure we’d be hearing from the usual suspects that it was all just one more conspiracy.
Not a big deal, I just wanted to note this as the dog that didn’t happen to bark.
Dude, do you think the timing was an accident?
Total:
I certainly don’t think the Democrats delayed the document release in order to make their election wins look more convincing. If it were up to them, the logical move would’ve been to release the documents a week before the election.
On the other side, the Republicans in Congress have been going through all sorts of contortions to stop the emails from becoming public. So it’s possible they were delaying it until after the election. But my impression was that they were trying to keep the documents locked up forever.
I don’t think it was really in anyone’s interest for the emails to be released a week after the election. My guess is that at some point it just became too difficult for them to keep it bottled up.
After all that happened to rational thinking in US public discourse over the past couple of years, you really think that directional temporal contiguity of cause and effect is sacrosanct and not up for grabs? If someone from the Trump administration has read that 2011 Bem paper on precognition, we’re apt to see arguments for the reverse flow of cause & effect soon…
Wins thread.
Blaming Trump, or Harris, or X, Y, Z for poor recent political discourse
Might truly be putting the cart before the horse
Sure, that might be in line with the 2011 findings presented by Bem
But it may not really make clear from which it all might (partly) stem
Perhaps in recent decades, or even centuries, something has been lost
Perhaps something in the curriculum has been overlooked, or even crossed
However, lights are still burning
See Dorothy L. Sayers’ 1947 paper titled “The Lost Tools Of Learning”
Unravels thread.
Why doesn’t Trump just order the release of the “files”? No one questions his relationship with Epstein –even most MAGA admit this. His minions could just release it in pieces taking plenty of time to do it, claiming that they have to protect the innocent by vetting the documents. I don’t understand the tactics or strategy of allowing it to fester. There can’t be a true “smoking gun” in there because so many people have had access that it’s impossible to believe such a thing would not have leaked by now.
B:
I think your implicit mistake is to think of the concept of a “smoking gun” as having fixed boundaries. With Trump, there have already been many things that would have counted as smoking guns for previous presidents. Even with Epstein there is the famous photo, the birthday card, etc. Perhaps Trump and his advisers are concerned that an accumulation of smoking guns of this sort will hurt him. Various things have been covered up successfully, so it’s not like covering up doesn’t work. There’s a saying, “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up,” but the Trump team has been covering up for a long time, also doing pretty blatant things with the pardon power, so it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suppose that they could think that an all-out approach to stop information leakage could work, or at least could be better than the alternative.
I don’t think that Trump is withholding the Epstein files to block disclosure of something about himself. After all, as has been pointed out many times, there are numerous examples of other disclosures about Trump that would have ended the career of any other president. His base has unshakeable loyalty to him–no matter what he is shown to have done. And it’s pretty clear that the man has no capacity to feel shame about anything. And does anyone doubt that if the disclosures put him in legal jeopardy he would pardon himself? I doubt he personally would be harmed by from full disclosure, regardless of what was disclosed.
But, I think he is covering for others, the wealthy and powerful people who lavish both sycophancy and tribute on him and whose support he needs to sustain his administration’s effectiveness at bending the country and the world to his desires. Remember the first Trump administration, which proved far less malignant than many of us thought it would be. He came into office unprepared, thinking he could get things done just by the strength of his will and word. But he did not have a cadre of loyalists who knew how to work and subvert the bureaucracy and bend it to his will. Now, he does. And he has the financial and political backing of the captains of industry and finance, many of whom are thought to be implicated in the Epstein files. If they suddenly find themselves outed, they, unlike Trump himself, will suffer consequences. And even if, like Giuliani, they remain personally loyal to Trump, their usefulness to him will be degraded or obliterated by the scandal. I think he is trying to protect them.
This must be the name for that alternate reality that leaks into my world only via Palko posts on here.
Not blaming you, but it’s sad that Epstein ruined the very useful “dog that didn’t bark” metaphor. It doesn’t – or didn’t – mean: the thing that didn’t happen. It meant – the thing whose significance lies in that it did not happen. The source – Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “Silver Blaze.” The fact that the dog didn’t bark meant the culprit must have been familiar to the intruder. Causal inference!
Hilarious Andrew, the only victim of this round of the Epstein business is Larry Summers, a Democrat. Of course, that’s what most of Epsteins associates were – Democrats – which is why Democrats weren’t too hot on the Epstein files this time last year. But well you’re probably almost as pleased about Summers as you would be if there were some small scrap of evidence of Trump doing something (maybe he expectorated in public? something?), since after all Summers is both an economist and Harvard faculty.
Oh, but there is the American public, screwed again by the Democrats wasting everyone’s time on this imbecility.
Some good may come of it all, though. After today’s episode of The Unhinged Views of Ignorant Housewives, it looks like Trump may score a few million more in lawsuits. And icing on top of the cake: if ABC goes broke he’ll stop talking about suspending their license. Democrats can stop pulling their hair out and go back to their Epstein home videos and relax for a while.
Ho:
I would hardly call Summers a “victim”! He chose to stay close to Epstein for years after Epstein’s behavior was well known, he and his wife tapped Epstein for $100,000, etc.
I’m not at all “pleased” that Summers was begging Epstein for money, or that Summers was trying to pull strings to have a sexual relationship with a person he was mentoring, or that Summers was trying to intimidate the Harvard student newspaper. I think these are horrible things. They don’t make me happy at all. They make me some combination of sad and angry. I’m also sad and angry about lots of other things in those Epstein files said by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Once these things have been done, I think it’s good that the word gets out. I don’t see that this sort of news, of misdeeds by powerful people, is “wasting everyone’s time.” When powerful people, in or out of government, abuse their power, it’s good for the public to know. Indeed, that’s one of the main functions of news.
Didn’t they release the wrong epstein files anyway? It was some other guys with the same name.
https://x.com/ChuckRossDC/status/1990996259721588838
Anon:
Yeah, it’s just one of those things. We had a Prof. Epstein here at Columbia a few years ago who was a sex offender. And then there was that Prof. Epstein at the Hoover Institution a few years ago who was saying really stupid things about covid.
Epstein is a common enough name that you can have these people to get confused with, but not as common as, say, Smith, for which one wouldn’t even remark upon the coincidence.