The main target of a strategy of tension is the public opinion, to manipulate votes, generate the impression of a national threat to legitimate war, to call for a strong leader or tolerate surveillance and denounce peacemakers as ‘unpatriotic’.
….to inculcate a climate of
fear among the general populace. This was known as the ‘
strategy of tension‘ which was intended to generate a pervasive sense of fear which would encourage the population to appeal to the state for protection.
Rule by Decision Rule: Why bother with an election
Trump has called the election "rigged," argued that the media and establishment politicians are conspiring to sink his campaign and warned supporters that the presidency could be stolen from them due to voter fraud -- instances of which are extremely rare.
The keys, which are explained in depth in Lichtman’s book “Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2016” are:
- Party Mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.
- Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.
- Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.
- Third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign.
- Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.
- Long-term economy: Real per-capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.
- Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.
- Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.
- Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.
- Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.
- Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.
- Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.
- Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.
Now, that’s just a story, not yet a model. But we created a model using that theory, by looking at the political environment in every American presidential election from 1860 — the horse and buggy days, when Abraham Lincoln ran against Stephen Douglas — to 1980, the modern era of television, polls and jet planes, when Ronald Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter. And we came up with a model which involved 13 keys — 13 key factors. These are simply true-or-false statements that can be answered prior to an upcoming election. They test the political environment, and they’re primarily based upon the performance and the strength of the party holding the White House.
And we came up with a decision rule, a very simple one: If six or more of the 13 keys went against the party in power, that is, the answers to the questions were false, the party in power lost. If fewer than six keys were false, the party in power won. And that held, retrospectively, for every election over 120 years.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
Of course Trump will win, can’t you see all those flying pigs...
Comey’s first brush with them came when Bill Clinton was president. Looking to get back into government after a stint in private practice, Comey signed on as deputy special counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee.
In 1996, after months of work, Comey came to some damning conclusions: Hillary Clinton was personally involved in mishandling documents and had ordered others to block investigators as they pursued their case. Worse, her behavior fit into a pattern of concealment: she and her husband had tried to hide their roles in two other matters under investigation by law enforcement.
Taken together, the interference by White House officials, which included destruction of documents, amounted to “far more than just aggressive lawyering or political naiveté,” Comey and his fellow investigators concluded. It constituted “a highly improper pattern of deliberate misconduct.”
Comey may have provided early access to his innuendo-filled letter to Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz, enabling him to tweet about it and frame the media narrative before Democratic Senators even received copies of the letter.
- Interview with Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, The Hill, June 24, 2004: "The fact that Republicans currently control every branch of the federal government is only part of the reason why the subtitle of our book talks about the right wing 'turning America into a one-party state. ' We're also alarmed by the increasingly bellicose tone of right-wing rhetoric. And it's not just empty rhetoric. In our book, we detail cases in which people have been subjected to intimidating FBI visits, fired from their jobs, and even subjected to arrest and physical violence simply for expressing views that the right wing abhors."