What a Fool Believes

 

The Kraken Herself, Sidney Powell, has responded to Dominion's $1 billion-plus defamation suit against her with one of the all-time best (by which I mean "worst") answers, which is all the more damaging because it probably is the best defense she has: "No reasonable person" would have believed her. 

As with all funny/sad things, it's funny because it's true, and sad because it's true. On the face of it, off-gassing about the Dominion machines being Hugo Chavez's way of striking at the heart of America from beyond the grave was obviously batshit back in November. But she nonetheless filed court cases (really awful ones with weird spelling mistakes and all) and fundraised off of the idea that rather a lot of people aren't reasonable where politics are concerned. Maybe a few cases would go her way on the basis of that unreasonableness. But definitely, there could be profit.

So as far as she's concerned, "Whooooops, that's just how the freedom of speech cookie crumbles."

Except. 

Except in order to make that argument, she has to admit she took people's money and filed court cases on the basis of claims she knew to be utter meritless batcrap, and that's a bit of a problem, because people are unreasonable, and they did believe. They stormed the Capitol. People died. This wasn't some penny-ante grift about fake diplomas or fakakta vitamin pills (scams that Donald Trump himself pulled off before, if not without some small settlements along the way).  This was about our government and the will of the people. Not just the unreasonable ones who were willing to buy a load of guano, but regular folks who care about whether they or others are being taken for a ride by deeply, maliciously, dishonest people. 

You know, people like Sidney Powell, who on her website still references her now ironically-named book, Licensed to Lie. 

Because she's pretty much just as good as told us she thought being a lawyer meant being licensed to lie in the cause of her bogus stop the steal claims. She asked people to please support her lying efforts.  She used the court of public opinion by presenting the inadmissible and nonfactual things that never would have flown before the bench, and asked people who did not necessarily know the law to reach conclusions with her own outlandish set of facts and bent interpretation of the law. Her case to the public was intended to undermine our faith in the system and our faith in the idea of "good faith" that some tables were too big to rig and therefore, not worth the trouble (a concept that someone better versed in the logic of casinos than Powell or even Trump would readily understand).

Ultimately, she is defending herself by asking you, "What fool would believe the words that came out of my mouth?" when for all the world, she seemed every bit fool enough to have believed, herself, and certainly, Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, the Schlapps, and any number of other fools still want to have people believe that they believe in the thing that never happened: that Trump somehow won and got diddled. (By Joe Biden, supposedly infirm, who beat Trump like a drum while allegedly barely leaving his basement and who now has had every week of his presidency a higher approval rating than Trump ever did--such a shame!)

Trump even wants people to still believe, and to subscribe to whatever his next big thing is--a social media platform, a new vision for the GOP in the form of fresh smart young turds crapped out in Trump's mold. 

But what a fool believes (or wants other people to believe) he sees, as the song says, no wise man has the power to reason away.  And if one is not unreasonable, one could pretty well wonder whether Powell should honestly be in a cell for her duplicity. But the damage has certainly been done.