Posted on 04/22/2016 2:13:18 PM PDT by Kaslin
One of the biggest stories of the last couple weeks was Ted Cruz's complete shutout of Donald Trump in the Colorado delegate selection at the Colorado state Republican convention. The story, pushed hard by Trump and his zombie followers, is that the election was "stolen" by Cruz in an "unfair process."
Okay, fine, sour grapes and all. But on Sunday I watched Media Buzz with Howard Kurtz, and realized that real story is this: the media has not, and apparently will not, do the tiniest bit of research in order to get the grossest, most basic facts about this correct.
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." -- Mark Twain
There are a bunch of myths that everyone on the show repeated as fact. It started with Kurtz himself talking about the "convoluted process" Colorado uses. Ahem:
Myth #1: "The process is convoluted"
Well, here's the process: there is a caucus, in which any registered Republican may participate, to vote on delegates or to run as a delegate. These delegates go to the county and district caucuses, where some of them are selected by vote to go on as state delegates at the Colorado state convention, where delegates to the national convention are selected. By vote.
Here's where Heidi Przybyla on Media Buzz confidently asserted ...
Myth #2: "The process is 'voteless'"
Colorado's process is hardly "voteless." We've got votes coming out of our ears. Tens of thousands of people voted -- I've seen 65,000 reported, I've seen 70,000. No, they're not "party insiders." I mean, 70,000 "party insiders" in one state? Come on.
In fact, the process is as exclusive as a thunderstorm -- as evidenced by the fact I was elected a state delegate in 1976. Here's the deal: if you want to have your vote count in the delegate selection process, you have to go to the freaking election. In Colorado this year, the election was on March 1.
These two articles helped pushed the nonsense "voterless" narrative that Colorado had neither primaries nor caucuses, providing the opposite service to readers than one might expect by making this easy stuff hard to understand.
Myth #3: "The process is hard to understand"
Kurtz pushed this one, too.
Folks: I just laid the process out without using any big words beyond "convention" and "delegate." What I wrote above is simply a paraphrase of the way it was explained to me by the Republican county chairman in Pueblo County when I was elected to be a delegate to the state convention.
Forty years ago.
At age 19.
I really don't know what to make of this. It wasn't hard to understand then. And since then, nothing remotely significant about the process was changed.
Myth #4: "The process was changed to damage Trump"
Heidi Przybyla hit on this one a little later in the discussion. Again, it's what you know that ain't so that hurts.
The last time the delegate-selection process was changed was in 2002, when we went back to the process we'd used since 1912 after a short experiment with primaries. What changed in 2015 was that we decided to no longer have our traditional non-binding straw poll.
Why? Because the Republican National Committee said if we had a straw poll, it had to be binding.
So we had a non-binding straw poll in the past. Now we don't. Otherwise, the process is essentially identical to what it was when I was elected a delegate to the state convention. Forty years ago.
In fact, the process was established in 1912.
The foresight of the state GOP to establish a process to cheat Trump 104 years before this caucus was amazing.
Myth #5: "A Trump delegate was removed"
On Saturday, April 9, 2016, a man named Larry from Douglas County, CO slandered Douglas County (CO) Republicans on Facebook. In that Facebook post, Larry claimed that he went to his neighborhood caucus meeting on March 1st, at which a precinct captain named Jan Morgan had threatened him about being a Trump supporter, with the implication that Trump supporters would not be allowed to be delegates to the April 9th State Republican Assembly.
The problem? It apparently didn't happen.
Larry didn't show up for the district convention where he would have been eligible to be elected to be a delegate to the state convention -- or at least he didn't check in and didn't sit with the other delegates.
"Jan Morgan" doesn't exist, at least as a precinct captain in Douglas County (of course there is a Jan Morgan who is a fairly popular political personality, but she's not from Colorado).
--------------------
Five myths isn't a bad score when you realize that it was only part of a four-minute segment. If you want more details, I'll recommend to you Ari Armstrong's account. Ari was a delegate to the state convention this year. Follow that link and then follow some of Ari's links, and you'll be able to get up to date on the facts of the matter.
Which is exactly what almost no one in the media bothers to do. Instead, they repeat the prevarications, misleading assertions, and outright lies (viz., Drudge's "no primaries or caucuses" headline) coming out of the Trump campaign. Kurtz had a chance there to have the Fox "brain room" spend ten minutes Googling the facts, and didn't.
That's the real story.
The professional political dopes behind #nevertrump didn’t even have enough sense to throw Trump a couple of delegates for appearance’s sake...
And furthermore, calling us zombies is not going to motivate us to go out and vote for Cruz if he did win on the 2nd ballot.
Yeah, he is a big winner, as long as it’s a question of buying and stealing the delegates and lying about it rather than winning the vote. He’s a real pro.
Nice if you can win an election without anybody voting.
Lenin and Mao did it all the time.
Wonder whatever happened to the “representative republic” form of government???
Represent means vote the way the public citizens vote...
There was no public vote in Colorado no matter how many ways it is spun....
Chris Christie had a $175,000 attack add against Tom Tancredo in the last governor election which turned away many republicans and got John Hickenlooper,(D) elected. The DC GOoP lover knocking out conservatives to get democrats elected.
Colorado was Ted Cruz's pyrrhic victory; he shot his credibility to hell for all of thirty delegates.
Where people have a complaint isn't that there is a process. It's that the process is set up to produce a delegate allocation WAY out of sync with the preference of the people. I'd expect that Trump is probably around as popular in Colorado as he is in the states where the people actually have a chance to vote for a candidate (as opposed to voting for a delegate, who will vote for a delegate, who will vote for a delegate). But yet Cruz got all the delegates.
People can understand winner-take-all primaries. Whoever gets the most votes wins it all. People can understand proportional delegates based on how the candidates ended up when the votes were counted. People CAN'T understand how Colorado became winner take all without any record of who the voters of the state preferred. And they don't need to understand it to know it stinks.
And you, Kaslin, have done yourself irreparable damage here in my eyes for posting every derogatory article about Trump from townhall and pjmedia that apparently exists.
And I don't think I'm the only one that's noticed.
What a f mess. You call this understandable? It is pure BS.
The Colorado dopes made Trump the underdog once again. America loves the underdog and they voted for him in New York.
The delegates that were “voted on” were not bound. They were voted on, and then sCruz paid them off.
It bears repeating.
The delegates Cruz acquired in Colorado and Wyoming were obtained not by the results of an open primary election or caucus, but by the election of delegates by GOP party activists who favor Cruz at the party conventions of the two states in question.
Those delegates were not earned by winning the vote of the people, but by selection by party insiders and activists. Anyone not blinded to supporting Ted Cruz with the “by any means necessary” mindset can see the difference in how those delegates were obtained and we don’t like it.
One needs only to look at Cruz’s polling numbers since for proof that the majority of people NOT supporting Cruz didn’t like the way he got those delegates.
Cruz and his supporters will soon find out that those 48 delegates Cruz obtained at those two conventions where the people of Colorado and Wyoming didn’t get to cast their vote for the candidate of their choice will end up being the most costly delegates in election history.
Showing up at a specific time at some designated location and then voting not for a presidential candidate but for a local party activist who will then go on to a county caucus is not exactly going to be particularly responsive to the will of the people. I have a friend who lives in Aspen who told me that at the caucus he went to, there was not even any mention of which candidate the delegates they were sending to the county caucus would be supporting; it was more of a local popularity poll to select a few people popular in the local party organization. Now you can believe that or not, and I recognize at the end of the day, it is responsibility of the caucus-goers to make sure their opinion is heard.... I get all that but in this day and age with all of the available technology, the only reason to deny party members a binding primary election is to make sure that the party insiders control the outcome.
As I posted before. If there was a vote of the peasants as Cruz claimed, what percent of the “little people” supported Cruz, Trump, and Kasich respectively?
Did the final resulting delegates’ bindings reflect the peasants’ percentage of preference?
Colorado was described as a four step process in another simillar posting - real simple[sic]. The more convoluted the process the easier to cover up machinations.
“Charlie Martin writes on science, health, culture and technology for PJ Media. Follow his 13 week diet and exercise experiment on Facebook and at PJ Lifestyle”
I guess his opinion is impotent.
The lame stream media WANT TRUMP to be the nominee — so he can lead the Republicans to landslide losses in November.
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