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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsYou're Not Supposed to Understand the Rumors About Biden
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Jake Tapper
@jaketapper
By @anneapplebaum: The Smears Against Biden Don't Need to Make Any Sense - The Atlantic
Youre Not Supposed to Understand the Rumors About Biden
To raise doubts about the Democratic nominee, right-wing-media smears dont even need to make sense.
theatlantic.com
8:47 AM · Oct 24, 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/smears-against-biden-dont-need-make-any-sense/616824/
On Tuesday, Fox News Laura Ingraham broke some news: An investigative journalist named Matthew Tyrmand had uncovered a cache of 26,000 emails belonging to Hunter Bidens disgraced business partner Bevan Cooney, who is now in jail. Tyrmand claimed that he had gotten hold of the emails via a person in the same facility as Cooney (a federal work camp for white-collar infractions, is how Tyrmand put it). Tyrmand explained that Cooney felt stiffed by Biden, the son of the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, and implied that Cooney had handed over his own Gmail password in an act of revenge.
Perhaps thats what happened. Or perhaps not: I have good reason to doubt the reliability of the source. The last time I saw Tyrmand was in October 2017. I was speaking at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and he was in the audience. Security guards were keeping an eye on him after I warned them that he might show up: Hed come to another public lecture of mine the previous day in New York City, then had turned up in Boston and announced on Twitter that he was following me to Cambridge. His goal, I think, was to shout at me and draw attention to himself while waving a cellphone camera in the air, which is what hed done in the past. But the lecture went off smoothly; afterward, a very gentle and very tall Harvard professor stood firmly between us, engaging Tyrmand in vigorous conversation so that I could slip away unharassed. I didnt hear directly from Tyrmand after thatI block the social-media accounts of tiresome trolls. But I gather that, year in and year out, he continues to post obsessively about me and my husband, a Polish politician, including photographs taken surreptitiously in public places. I have no idea why.
A clue might come from a 2016 New Yorker story in which Tyrmand (who is described as an investor, not a journalist) plays a minor role in a ludicrously clumsy attempt to run a sting operation on the Open Society Foundations, which are funded by the prodemocracy philanthropist George Soros. The deception failed, according to The New Yorkers Jane Mayer, because James OKeefe, the notoriously unprincipled leader of a group called Project Veritas, forgot to hang up the phone after calling the Open Society office. In a long voicemail, he inadvertently recorded himself plotting to embarrass Soros. These are people who think that smear campaigns are politics, harassment is journalism, and online stalking is something you do for fun.
For those trying to follow along at home, the emails produced by Tyrmand are not the same emails that originally appeared on a laptop that Hunter Biden supposedly left at a Delaware computer-repair shop, the laptop that then became a story in the New York Post (and whose contents, according to a report in Time, were circulating previously in Ukraine). This is a different cache, one that is even more tangential to the U.S. presidential campaign and even harder to understand. In order to even make sense of the messages content, the reader must learn the backstories of a whole new cast of characters, not just Cooney but two other convicted fraudsters named Devon Archer and Jason Galanis; the wife of the former mayor of Moscow, Yelena Baturina; and Chris Heinz, John Kerrys stepson, who broke away from the group; as well as their relationships, their jokes (they refer to Baturina as the USSR womans shot put champion), and the rules of the ugly world they inhabit. In order to link them to Joe Biden, you have to turn somersaults, do triple flips, and squint very hard.
*snip*
Thekaspervote
(32,790 posts)Wounded Bear
(58,698 posts)That's the point of gaslighting.
Gothmog
(145,496 posts)crickets
(25,982 posts)I really feel for Hunter Biden. Thank goodness he has a loving family to support him through this.
Gothmog
(145,496 posts)I follow the news closely and I was amused about how trump tried to attack Joe on Hunter Biden laptop. I have read the WSJ, Fox News, Washington Post and other stories covering this story and I had trouble following trump's attacks. I was amused to see on MSNBC that even Eugene Robinson could not make sense of these attacks. Mr. Robinson and I were not alone. trump was speaking in Fox News speak and only an idiot who watched fox news could understand these attacks
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In the comments to one of these twitter threads I found this (yes, I was a star trek =the Next Generation fan)
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trump is campaignng to fox news viewers and not to regular intelligent americans who do not watch fox news. Good luck with that plan
Tom Rivers
(459 posts)The weirdo Trumpers are the only ones that can follow any of this line of BS. Most people want a plan for healthcare, COVID, and the future. Trump's got zilch, so he has to bring it down to the gutter.