Here are the results of a new CNN/SSRN poll about Joe Biden's involvement with Hunter Biden's business dealings. I had to interpolate a few numbers because CNN inexplicably provided only some of them, but they're all pretty close.
It's almost impossible to overstate how completely nuts this is. There is literally zero evidence that Joe Biden was involved in Hunter's business affairs. There is, if anything, less than zero evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegal. And there is about negative infinity evidence that he even remotely influenced the investigation in any way.
Every allegation against Joe Biden has been nothing but a malignant stew of innuendo and insinuation. Mysterious hard drives! Offshore accounts! Diamonds the size of your fist! Phone calls between Joe and his son! Emails sent under pseudonyms! Arguments between DOJ investigators! Getting a Ukrainian prosecutor fired! VP meeting notes sent to Hunter!
Every one of these things is either flatly untrue or, at most, implicates only Hunter, not Joe. I just don't know how much more clearly you can say that the entire Republican jihad against Hunter has produced nothing—absolutely nothing—implicating Joe Biden in any way.
Nothing.
It's just endless smoke intended to convince everyone there must be a fire somewhere. But there isn't. There is nothing.
If the numbers for independents are actually true, then the Republican propaganda machine, as clownish as it looks, is extremely effective.
Forget the introductory clause in your sentence--the one that starts with "if."
The main clause in the sentence is incontrovertibly true, beyond any possible doubt. Perhaps after all these years, the Dems could learn something from that.
The term "dittohead" existed for a reason.
Humans don't give a shit about abstract truth, they care about feedback from others. If enough of those others are conspiring to gaslight you, it will work.
They're Republicans, they always have nothing.
But they do have the gullibility industry dedicated to expanding the plausible for the uninterested. As a public service.
What's most insane about all of this is that for four years under Trump, Trump never once even pretended that he had extricated himself from his businesses, which were being run by his two sons, and which we're now learning from the cases currently being tried in New York, were in fact riddled with fraud, tax evasion, and other shennanigans. He spend tens (possibly hundreds) of millions of taxpayer dollars having his staff and secret service personnel stay at his own country clubs every weekend, charging them full fare. This is bonkers. But no, apparently it's the Bidens who are corrupt.
The mind reels. WTF is wrong with people?
You could probably add things to this list until the cows come home, but there was also the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C. which was *clearly* being run with an eye towards attracting wealthy foreign visitors who wanted access to the White House. *Everyone* knew this. Again, insane corruption. But, as always, IOKIYAR.
Exactly. Even his own stupid cabinet members were doing things like buying secondhand mattresses from Trump hotels as a way of currying favor with Trump. Tawdry grift and graft every damn day of that administration.
Yes. And these things were even reported in the regular news! Does nobody read/watch/listen to "news" anymore??
I have read (which apparently sets me apart from normal Americans) that most people these days get their newslette factoids from their social media feeds. Selected by algorithms which privilege controversy and paid feeds.
Democracy dies in darkness. I read that somewhere....
Watching the “regular news” isn’t going to solve this. Too often they do a terrible job — bothsidesing, repeating Republican talking points, covering the trivial and not going into enough substance, etc. Dan Froomkin of Presswatchers.org addresses these problem in his last column. Other media critics are also sounding the alarm, pointing out our mainstream “liberal” media is failing our country:
James Fallows:
https://fallows.substack.com/p/media-world-part-1-let-us-see-how
Jennifer Rubin:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/01/trump-media-reporting-criticism/
Margaret Sullivan:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/24/vivek-ramaswamy-demagogue-in-waiting?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
The media should have stopped the Biden/Ukraine propaganda in its tracks. They knew it had originated with Steve Bannon’s sidekick Peter Schweitzer who created the fantasy and wrote about it in his book “Secret Empire”. Schweitzer is also the guy who started the smears of the Clinton Foundation with his book “Clinton Cash”. In both cases the NY Times willingly published his accusations although there were a little more skeptical about his claims.
WTF is wrong with people?
Trump is given them license to be the out and proud racist, anti semitic, gay bashing/hating people they really are. They need him around for cover.
charging full fare.?
I suspect he RAISED the prices when his staff and the Secret Service stayed at his properties.
What does "inappropriate" mean for these independents? I mean Hunter did use his father's status as VP to further his business dealings which isn't illegal. But by that standard trump should have been impeached for allowing his family and government employees to still work for his company. His daughter got patents from China only because of who she is
Not only that, he overruled Homeland Security about giving Kushner top-secret clearance. Can you even imagine what would happen if Biden tried to hire his son, the security clearance was denied because of his past drug use, and then Biden *overruled* it and made him a top aide anyway? He would have been impeached 20 times over.
Agreed. FFS, Trump doubled the mar-a-lago fees after he got elected. Mar-a-lago didn't coincidentally get twice as luxurious (or half as tacky) in November 2016. From top to bottom, he tried to make money off of his status as President.
Remember when he tried to host a world summit at his own golf club?
So, one quarter of Democrats buy-in to all this? Really? That is even more disturbing than the GOP figures.
Because CNN runs a poll with those results but pretty much ignores the question of what's true, i.e., the context you're giving. It's all he said / she said journalism unless of course Bill Barr is the one to say it
I am a Democrat and I almost fully agree (there is some vague items and COULD be an indication of something) with "There is literally zero evidence that Joe Biden was involved in Hunter's business affairs. There is, if anything, less than zero evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegal. "
Where I leave the Kevin line of argument is as follows. Biden knew, or should have known, Hunter was robustly using his last name to his economic benefit. Joe should have taken more active public steps to distance himself from Hunter. For example,
- Tell Hunter NOT to call him when with business associates
- Not take Hunter on formal governmental trips
- Not share his official schedule with Hunter: his son only needs to know when his father is available, but not who the VP is meeting with etc/
I believe Joe messed up on the perception side of his relationship with Hunter.
The problem was you might as well ask Biden to cut off his own head. He'll do things like bend his knee to Saudi Prince Bonesaw to keep gas prices down so fascists don't win but he can't push away his son even if it dooms the world. I predicted this day would come in 2020 btw.
Low hanging douchebag Peter Navarro convicted on two counts, one for each of his douchebags.
Tried to edit this with two seconds to spare and it wouldn't do it. Is that freedom and dignity, I ask you?
The poll isn't surprising at all. It's EXACTLY what you'd expect to see, given the way that the media reports on the topic.
The media ALWAYS leads with the lies. Often repeating the lies for paragraph after paragraph. For the media, the lies ARE the facts - at least they think the only relevant fact is the repetition of the lies, which the media always thinks the public has to know in detail. The actual truth? Well, that's not particularly interesting. Leave that for the last half of the article, which most people will never read.
Just look at the structure of the article announcing the poll results. CNN has spent most of the article detailing how many people believe the (wrong) statements. When it finally bothers to get into the question of the legitimacy of the statements at the end of the FOURTH paragraph, it says "President Biden has denied being involved in any of his son’s business dealings, and House Oversight Republicans have not presented any direct evidence that the president personally benefited from any of them." No "direct evidence." That is pretty mealy mouthed.
News reporting today is designed to spread misinformation. Any expert on the spread of misinformation will tell you that they're doing the reporting all wrong if they want people to actually believe the truth. The truth always has to come first, and it has to be prominent. Lies should rarely be repeated, and only after people have been inoculated with the truth. But that style of writing doesn't get as much engagement as making juicy lies the most prominent part of reporting. I'm commenting on Drum's comments about the article, so clearly their tactics work.
Oh, it's more than just looking for engagement. The MSM is actively hostile the Democratic agenda in general and to Joe Biden in particular (and for the same reasons they particularly disliked Obama. Sally Quinn wannabes the lot of them.)
Just had a short conversation with a right winger who still sees Susan Rice's Benghazi statement as one of the most vile acts in American history.
So, yeah, this poll is not too surprising.
Bingo
Enrique Tarrio probably wears the same t-shirts every day for a month then tries to have all the masculinity wrung out of them and made into a romantic mood candle to sell in his Etsy store,
https://i.redd.it/vg0wyjhlbtmb1.png
I subscribe to The Washington Post & wish that they'd acknowledge that it gives a forum to too many illiberal pundits, publish some editorials that could be improved, & even occasional reporting that isn't much better than CNN, whose reports I accept only confirming with other sources.
The Post needs to rethink its current slogan; much of the worst of the Republican Psrty & trump administration weren't exactly occurring under cover of darkness.
And US citizens can't be expected to turn to ProPublica for their information, nor can it cover (in depth) everything that needs good reporting. NPR, with few long interviews in which reporters really probe for actual answers, ask follow-up questions, & aren't afraid to lose a source by doing so, is a poor substitute know- they'll just let Jim Jordan steamroller on without interrupting his set speech. I do appreciate the 1A programming & hope that it continues.
I ignore polls like this with which Americans are inundated day after day. I'm inclined to believe there is a tiny sliver of the population which loves to "just answer a few questions" about anything under the sun, regardless of whether they know anything at all about the issues involved, and they are the ones whose (often uninformed) opinions we get to know.
CNN's pollster is pleased to call its tame group "the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative panel of U.S. adults ages 18 or older recruited using probability-based sampling techniques." I'd love to know how those techniques were applied in practice; the act of volunteering to be on the panel in itself means the members are not representative of the population, because most people tell pollsters to get lost.
A giveaway of the flaws in polls like this is the negligible number of "don't know/no opinion" responses. I'd bet a majority of the general population, asked in casual conversation if the president was involved in his son's business affairs, would answer "Fucked if I know," and that would be the truth.
The clearest example was in 2004. Kerry vs Bush.
John Kerry was a genuine war hero. He volunteered for one of the most dangerous jobs in Vietnam: driving small, lightly armed boats up enemy-held rivers at night, drawing fire. He won a silver star for bravery in combat, still has Vietcong metal in his body.
George Bush was a draft dodger whose daddy got him a plum job flying jets stateside with no risk of combat. He was drinking a lot at the time and often didn't even show up for work.
But in the pre-MAGA telling, Bush was the patriot and Kerry the coward. They're really really good at this.
It just proves, for the zillionth time, that the general public decides what's true based on how many times they've heard it in "the news," multiplied by the number of different people they've heard it from. This is why it's baffling that Democrats fail to push back on this bullshit, apparently based on the oft-cited notion that refuting a lie "amplifies" it. This may have had some validity 30 years ago before talk radio, cable news, and social media. But I think this post is pretty solid evidence that nothing is more foolish than being SILENT in the face of a blizzard of lies.
No one -- not a single one of you -- reads the actual polling data, do you?
If you go back to their March 3-8 2021 poll, it does not identify the political split but it does identify the landline/cell split, and it identifies which question was asked first.. In this August 25-31 2023 poll it does not identify the landline/cell split, and it does not identify which question was asked first.
IDK why you would trust a poll that shifts its methods and poll design over time, and may have been designed as a push poll.
My understanding is they over sampled GOP for primary questions and for non-primary questions they reweighted to get the right demo-breakdown. This is right there in their methodology. Maybe they reweighted wrong but listing the over sample as some sort of nefarious thing is incorrect.
However, they changed methodology in-between polls.