The Monsters On Maple Street

Georgia GOP’s civil war explodes out into the open as secretary of state blasts party chairman https://t.co/rtrCe1syJl

— Raw Story (@RawStory) December 8, 2020

I keep thinking about that last scene from “The Monsters Are Coming To Maple Street,” as the camera pulls back to reveal the chaos of one street and the cause of it. The focus is on how easily people in modern life are manipulated, how scared we are beneath the surface, how easily we are tipped into madness.

But the rest of the city is quiet 

If the residents of Maple Street, even just a small group, had walked to the next block, they’d have calmed themselves. The rest of the city is quiet.

I’m old enough to remember when protesters against Covid lockdowns filled the news because they were on the streets and some were armed (always an attention grabber) and it seemed like the cities were about to burst into flames. But pull the camera back and it was a handful of cranks being ignored by the passing traffic. The rest of the city was quiet. And as the aliens said about Maple Street, the pattern repeated itself from city to city across the country.

The Georgia GOP may be setting itself on fire, but the rest of the country isn’t.  Today every state in the Union save Wisconsin has certified its vote count.  Wisconsin is holding back awaiting a court decision in one case.  Today is not the drop-dead date for electoral votes, and Wisconsin will no doubt send its electors to the college meeting on the 14th.  Once that pro forma action is held, the election is over.  Any disputes in the Congress in January must be raised in both houses, and debated by both houses, in order for Congress to actually reject the electoral college slates.  No Senator has said they would file a formal objection, and the House won't go along with Mo Brooks or anyone else who tries to invoke the Electoral Count Act in the House.

Trump, of course, will keep on grifting.

I really think I should point out, somewhere, what the federal court said in a recent ruling on another attempt to throw out the votes and install Trump by judicial fiat.  As the court noted, after discarding every rationale put before it by entirely irrational lawyers, there is no precedent for a U.S. court to void an election and declare a winner.  Courts literally don't have the authority to grant that relief.  It's never been done, and it will not be done.  (Bush v. Gore involved stopping the recount in Florida.  The decision did not discard the vote count in Florida and award the state's electoral votes to one candidate.  The vote count in Florida did that.)  There was never the scintilla of a chance that the lawsuits would achieve their stated ends.  And I'm fairly certain, for all their delusional bleating, all the lawyers involved knew that.  There's plenty of fools parting with their money to go around.

There are no monsters coming from Maple Street.  The rest of the city is calm.  The contagion isn't even spreading.  For the rest of us, this fight is not only over, it never even really started.