Trump told people to vote twice! Illegally!

Only that isn't what he said when he encouraged people to make sure that their mail-in votes were actually counted. The media is doing everything that they can (as expected) to frame the conversation in a way that makes it sound like the President is encouraging people to do a mail-in vote and also an in-person vote, which is a felony.

Nobody is going to accuse Trump of being an excellent wordsmith, I definitely don't and even though I agree with more of what he does than not, I do believe that he tends to go on and on saying the same thing over and over again and this more often than not will end up throwing too many words out there in a convoluted way that is pretty easy for the media to take out of context. This is something they have specialized in for the past 4 years.

The end result of the media attempting to blow these things up is of little consequence and the only reason why it is happening is because all news sources have this need to fill up the internet with "breaking stories." Therefore, we end up with a lot of half-truths and dumb news.

Here is Trump's actual quote:

On your ballots, if you get the unsolicited ballots, send it in and then go make sure it counted, and then if it doesn’t tabulate, you vote. You just vote. And then if they tabulate it very late, which they shouldn’t be doing, they’ll see you voted and so it won’t count. So, send it in early, and then go and vote. And if it’s not tabulated, you vote, and the vote is gonna count. You can’t let them take your vote away. These people are playing dirty politics. Dirty politics.

So if you have an absentee ballot, or as I call it a solicited ballot, you send it in. But I would check it in any event. I would go and follow it and go vote. ...

To anyone not consumed with Trump hatred, this is an innocent statement. A weird statement, yes; but not a statement encouraging people to knowingly break the law. Even if someone did pull this off and later was caught they could very easily make the case that the system allowed them to vote twice, which it is not supposed to do. Ballot counting varies from place to place and this is a big part of the problem with voting in general. The fact that the system is so archaic (anyone remember the "hanging chad" fiasco during W vs. Gore?) is a testament to the inefficiency of government since any sort of private industry probably would have modernized this system a long time ago.

He isn't wrong about how people should make sure that their votes are actually counted because if certain politicians succeed in making it so that masses of people end up voting by mail, you can take it to the bank that there are going to be a lot of problems. Any government system is run in the most inefficient and incompetent way possible, and while I am not going to get involved in any sort of fraud debate, there are plenty of examples of exactly that sort of thing happening.

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In a number of other news stories such as this one the press are trying to get Press Secretary McEnany (who I think has the toughest job in America) to denounce the President's statements, which is basically the opposite of what her job is and naturally she refused to do so. She simply stated "the president is not suggesting anyone do anything unlawful."

And that is really all she has to say about the issue as she moves on to the next question. This upsets the press in that room in what has become an all-too-common experience with any presser that she undertakes. When she doesn't give them the "gotcha" sound byte that they are looking for, they instead write disparaging articles about her, even though she is doing a pretty fantastic job considering that almost every exchange she has with the press is a hostile exchange.

The fact that the press goes after a statement and continues to ask stupid "clarifying questions" that have no journalistic intent is a testament to how dead journalism is in this country. The above article by The Week (whatever TF that is) is just one in a long line of examples of how almost all news in this country has become......

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