Wednesday, September 29, 2021

Happy Days Are Here Again

Trump’s conspiracy theory about elections is credited with Gavin Newsom’s win in the recall election (I know, no longer in the future, so who cares?), and he’s breaking up the GOP into little pieces.

What part of this am I not supposed to be worried about? Maybe this part?
[Doug] Logan [CEO of Cyber Ninjas], who led the ballot review for Arizona Senate Republicans, says he never recommended that Maricopa County's 2020 election be decertified, which is included in an edited version of Logan's report posted on far-right media outlet The Gateway Pundit.

The edited version claims that "57,734 ballots with serious issues were identified in the audit" and, therefore, "the election should not be certified, and the reported results are not reliable."

The real results of Logan's review did not claim an issue with that number of ballots, and did not show evidence of fraud. The hand count of ballots affirmed President Joe Biden's win in the county.

Or this?

"In Arizona, the demands for even more audits occasionally came with lurid fantasies of revenge. State Rep. Walt Blackman, who represents the same mostly-rural district as [Wendy] Rogers, said on Friday that 'we need to find these folks accountable that come up from this audit and this hearing' and, once identified, 'put them in jail, put them behind bars.' State Sen. Sonny Borrelli, the majority whip, suggested that the election might have been hacked — the report didn't show that — and suggested that if it was, the hackers should be put to death," Weigel noted.

As goes Arizona, so goes the world?  Of course, in Texas, they can't find their ass with both hands and a flashlight.  Abbott keeps pushing stories about an "audit" although nobody else in Texas government knows what the hell he's talking about.  Not exactly a hotbed of "lurid fantasies of revenge" down here.  And honestly, "lurid fantasies of revenge" sound like the clowns who wanted to kidnap the governor of Michigan.  I'm still not convinced they were as close to carrying that out as the FBI thinks they were.  As for demands to "Put them in jail, put them behind bars" (it went further; he wanted them all to face the death penalty, and the sooner sentence was carried out, the better), yeah:  that's not gonna happen.

But it'll probably convince even more GOP voters not to vote again soon, because, why bother?  It's all rigged!  (well, the GOP voters who are still alive when the pandemic is over.  I wish I was only being mordantly humorous with that.  I'm actually dead serious.)

Logan’s final report raised questions about 53,305 ballots, although he notes multiple times in the report that there may be explanations for the discrepancies he found, affecting a fairly even split of Republican, Democratic and independent, undeclared or third-party voters.

The county, for its part, offered explanations on social media as Logan presented the report to state Senate leaders on Friday.  

Logan told The Arizona Republic on Monday that the version of the report posted on the far-right media website "is not one I ever wrote, nor was it ever part of our drafts reviewed with the Senate." 

Logan said in a news release on Tuesday that the claim this was his language, but that it was watered down because of supposed threats from the Senate, is "absolutely false."

....

Logan also said he did not write the line about the "57,734 ballots," and did not know where that number came from.

I know Hitler built his government in part on the dolchstosslegende coming out of the loss in World War I.  If I read another "historian" who says Trump is Hitler and we're Weimar Germany, I'm gonna throw something at my computer screen.  WWII was the finale of what started with WWI.  The final proof of that is that the Allies rebuilt Germany (and America Japan) because the carving up and "punishment" of Germany after WWI was clearly the source of the anger that lead to Nazism and WWII.  The nations who fought that war could see that, but 75 years on we just look at Mein Kampf and the Reichstag fire and scream:  "HISTORY REPEATS!"

No; and in this case, it doesn't even rhyme.  And the idea that Trump is going to lead a bunch of brownshirts into revolt is laughable.  His primary concern is staying in their good graces, and getting them to cheer his tired old lines at silly rallies.  He has no plan beyond is own self-satisfaction in the moment.  Will he run in 2024?  If he's under indictment in Georgia or New York (or by the DOJ), probably not.  He may even be facing criminal trial at that point, or fighting appeals of convictions.  2024 is a long way off, and Trump's appeal is to a diminishing base that, if it doesn't save him in 2022, the GOP is going to finally cut off like a gangrenous limb.

Or not, and it takes the entire party down.  Either way, as a yellow-dog Democrat, I'm fine with that.  On the horizon, McConnell's filibuster of the debt ceiling increase and continued funding of the government (a/k/a the "government shutdown") may convince even Sens. Sinema and Manchin that the filibuster has to go.  If the GOP is willing to use it to trifle with the full faith and credit of the United States (and they'd surely filibuster removing the debt ceiling as a thing they have to deal with at all), even those cloth-headed clowns would have to realize they can have their precious Senate traditions, or they can wreck the U.S. economy.  Something their corporate sponsors and grass-roots voters would agree was not at all a good thing.

Future's so bright I gotta wear shades!

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