“Red Wave” that Wasn’t - 2022.
__________
“I find the people strangely fantasized,
Possessed with rumours, full of idle
dreams,
Not knowing what they fear, but full of fear.”
William Shakespeare
__________
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The red wave proves to be a dribble. |
IN THIS SECTION we continue to follow the trials and tribulations of the election deniers who afflict the Republican Party like clouds of stink bugs.
(I don’t mean for that to be dehumanizing; stink bugs are just dumb.)
Rejected-President Trump remains their undisputed leader, but faced with disappointing results in the 2022 midterms, a new crop of deniers was hatched. Like their Orange God, they made all kinds of absurd claims. And like their leader, the stink bugs have been repeatedly squashed in court.
(Again: meant humorously. We don’t ever squash human beings.)
It’s the moment of truth – if there ever was one for Donald J. Trump. He’s so excited, he can hardly sleep:
11/8-9/2022 – Election Night: As always, the blogger is studying returns as they are reported.
The hours tick past. 8, 9, 10 p.m. In New Hampshire, Sen. Maggie Hassan scores an easy win, 53.4% to 44.6%, and holds onto a seat in the U.S. Senate that Republicans truly believed they would grab.
Donald Bolduc, an election denier endorsed by Donald J. Trump, slowly sinks below the not-very-red waves.
A really terrible night for at least one terrible man.
As the results continue to come in, Donald Trump is growing restive. On Truth Social, he posts:
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Let the lying and whining begin! |
In at least one key race, where “the people will not stand for it,” it didn’t take days to find out who would win. The Democratic choice for governor in Pennsylvania routs Douglas Mastriano, another candidate endorsed by Mr. Trump. Trump assured voters that Mastriano was his boy, that there was “no one in Pennsylvania who has done more, or fought harder, for Election Integrity.”
Josh Shapiro thumps Mastriano by fourteen points.
This blogger might be a liberal, but he loves the U.S. Constitution as much as if not more than any self-proclaimed “patriot” in MAGA-style cap. He was happy to see two Georgia Republicans win reelection. Both Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had stood up against Trump when he tried to get them to say votes were stolen in 2020 in their state.
With results rolling in nationally, it became clear something unexpected was taking place. Democrats were winning a good share of competitive races for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Trump-endorsed candidates for governorships were being destroyed. The Democratic candidate won in Maine by 12 points.
In Maryland, the Republican candidate, Dan Cox, enthusiastically endorsed by Mr. Trump, lost by 23 points.
It didn’t help when the outgoing Republican governor, Larry Hogan, refused to campaign with Cox, and called him a “whack job.”
So another election denier got trounced.
By midnight, it seemed likely that John Fetterman, the Democrat running for an open seat in the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania, would knock out Mehmet Oz, another one of Trump’s boys.
In Georgia, where Kemp (a man Trump had called on voters to defeat in the GOP primary) won by eight points, Herschel Walker, his fellow Republican, anointed by the former president himself, couldn’t get traction. Senator Ralph Warnock edged him out. (Since neither man seemed likely to reach the 50% threshold, according to Georgia law, a run-off election on December 6 would be required.)
(Warnock would prevail, and will serve until
2028.)
In fact, as the hours passed – midnight – 1 a.m. – 2 a.m. – and I finally tried to go to sleep – back up at 3 a.m. to check the latest results – I couldn’t help but notice. It was a really terrible night for at least one terrible man.
Donald J. Trump.
November 11, 2022: The “idle dreams” of Republicans of the red-baseball-cap-variety have been dashed.
The “red tsunami” they fantasized about
crashing over Biden & Co. in the midterms, brought on by the gravitational
pull of the Moon of Mar-a-Lago, came and went. Nary a sandcastle was disturbed.
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The Cult Style. |
Across the country, sanity triumphed.
In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (once labeled “Half Whitmer” by the Moon himself) cruised to a second term. She defeated Tudor Dixon, a Trump-anointed election denier, by 11 points.
Other Moon-backed dopes went down with whimpers, and sighs, and moans. Democratic candidates for secretary of state in Michigan, Minnesota, and New Mexico faced Trump-backed deniers who dreamed of controlling future elections, as part of their jobs. (Motto: “Trump 2024 – This Time He Can’t Possibly Lose.”) None of Trump’s choices – because they were Trump choices – had a chance. In Michigan, Jocelyn Benson won a second term by 13 points. In Minnesota, Steve Simon won by 9. Maggie Toulouse Oliver thumped Trump’s pick in New Mexico, 54.4% to 42.8%.
Oliver’s opponent, Audrey Trujillo, had parroted the Moon’s “Stolen Election” line during her campaign. “The core of a strong nation is free and fair elections, which we don’t have anymore – Republican or Democrat,” she warned. Like any denier, Trujillo made plain. She would not concede if she lost – unless in a landslide. “Definitely, if it’s a close race, we will definitely not concede [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] and make sure we contest it,” she promised. “But if it’s a blowout, and [Oliver] totally wins then yes, definitely I would concede and respect that.”
A blowout it was!
In Nevada, there was good news for normal Republicans, with Joe Lombardo winning the governorship. Sadly, for Trump fans, during the campaign Lombardo was asked if he believed the Moon had been cheated out of a win two years ago. No, he said, adding that Trump’s rhetoric “bothers me.”
In Michigan and elsewhere, sanity triumphed. Normal Republicans, like Gov. Mike DeWine in Ohio and Gov. Chris Sununu in New Hampshire, cruised to victory. Neither had resorted to coining childish nicknames for foes.
“Either I win or you cheated.”
Logan Patmon, 30, a Detroit voter, spoke for many sensible Americans, who cherish free elections – but never fell for Trump’s horse doo-doo. Speaking to a reporter for The New York Times, he explained, “I don’t feel like you can have a democracy where it’s like, ‘Either I win or you cheated.’ Sometimes you win,” he continued, “sometimes you lose, but when people have that ‘Our winner was cheated,’ that’s like a developing, barely democratic country to me. I don’t like that.”
Patmon was not alone. In Michigan, voters gave Democrats control of both houses of the state legislature for the first time in four decades. The winners plan to get right to work, protecting abortion rights. Their victory in that state was facilitated in large part when an independent commission was created to untangle a system of gerrymandering that had been in place for forty years.
Get rid of gerrymandered districts.
LET’S DROP a bomb on Democrats, for a change. Voting district maps were also changed under court order in New York before this election.
As a result, the party lost several seats they expected to hold. And I’m sorry. If you’re an American voter, and you don’t understand that gerrymandering always plays into the hands of professional politicians who love representing safe seats, look at Ohio, where Republicans have elections all but locked up.
That’s how the Buckeye State ends up sending dimwitted Rep. Jim Jordan back to Congress every two years, despite the fact he has never passed a single piece of legislation, preferring to spend most of his time shouting at Democratic colleagues and witnesses who appear before committees and testify under oath.
Which Jim specifically refused to do when subpoenaed himself, as part of an investigation into the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill.
So. Too bad, New York Democrats. Do a better job of running your state and country in the next two years.
(Sensible Americans should work to end
gerrymandering, no matter the party.)
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The first "gerrymandered" district in Massachusetts - 1812. |
Then again, in New York, Republican George Santos wins a seat in Congress, which makes for endless mockery of the party.
(We know now that Santos will go on to be charged with 23 felonies, including credit card theft. And get kicked out of Congress!)
OKAY, to be fair, Democrats are stuck with Sen. Robert Menendez – as we now know, who stands accused of taking all kinds of bribes.
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Sen. Menendez goes for the gold. |
In fact, Senator Gold Bars has ripped a page out of the Moon of Mar-a-Lago’s Denial Playbook. He’s not really guilty, he says.
He describes his indictment much as Trump might, minus all the random capitalized WORDS, and all the juvenile insults. “The government is engaged in primitive hunting,” Menendez insists, “by which the predator chases its prey until it’s exhausted and then kills it. This tactic won’t work.”
(His legal problems will multiply when, in March 2024, he is hit with fresh felony charges, including obstruction of justice.)
In Wisconsin, yet another election denier, Tim Michels, promised, if elected, that the GOP would never lose another election once he took charge.
Wisconsin voters decided that sounded ominous and incumbent Gov. Tony Evers scored a 3 point win.
Michels did concede graciously in the face of a narrow defeat. “Unfortunately, the math doesn’t add up,” he told a gathering of supporters on Election Night. “I just called Governor Evers, I wish the Evers family well.” He went on to say, “We love this state with all our hearts. I hope that some of the problems that were identified will be taken very seriously by the Evers administration.”
(Normal. Another bit of hope.)
“I had the privilege to concede this race.”
I think one of my favorite moments from these midterms may have come in the wake of a loss for our side. After Tim Ryan, who earned my vote for a seat in the U.S. Senate, was defeated, he stood up and swallowed the bitter pill like a man. He didn’t complain about “rigged” mail-in voting – which Ohio uses extensively. Said Ryan, with wife Andrea wiping away tears at his side:
As someone who was the Democratic nominee, I had the privilege to concede this race to J.D. Vance. Because the way this country operates is that you lose an election, you concede. You respect the will of the people. We can’t have a system where if you win, it’s a legitimate election, and if you lose, someone stole it. That is not how we can move forward in the United States.
As for Republicans, generally, who had planned to celebrate the “red hurricane” smashup of Biden and friends, they were left casting about for someone to blame. Rupert Murdoch, the Emperor of Fox News, had finally had his fill of Trump and the rope-a-dope losers he backed. The New York Post, also owned by Emperor Rupert, ran this front page story the day after the election:
In a similar vein, Gov. Mike DeWine had landed near the top of Trump’s Shitlist after the January 6, 2021, attack in Washington D.C. As the Associated Press reported at the time, DeWine blamed the president for the violence. He said Trump “poured gas on the fire.”
The president’s continued
refusal to accept the election results, without producing any credible evidence
of a rigged election, “has started a fire that has threatened to burn down
our democracy,” DeWine said.
“This incendiary speech
yesterday, the one he gave preceding the march that he gave to the protesters,
served only to fan those flames, encouraging the mob behavior that ensued.”
DeWine went on to label the actions of the Trump-loving rioters shameful. “All Americans must denounce them, even those Americans who feel, incorrectly, that Donald Trump won.”
John Husted, Ohio’s Lieutenant Governor, who had served two terms as Ohio Secretary of State, expressed equal disdain. In his previous office he had had oversight of state elections as one of his duties.
“The presidential election of 2020 was not stolen,” he explained.
If you weren’t paying attention, after DeWine blamed Trump
for the January 6 riot, the soon-to-be-ex-president hinted darkly that the
governor needed to be “primaried” in 2022. Ohio voters paid no attention, either
in the primary or general election. DeWine won a second term, prevailing by
26 points.
Here in Ohio, my wife and I could have voted by mail had we desired. We’re retired and had all day, so we doddered off to the polls and performed our civic duty. More than a million Ohioans asked for mail-in ballots, and at least 850,000 turned them in. Another 550,000 voted in-person early.
And this kind of system continues to work.
If you listened to angry voices on the right, you could already hear the howling about how elections should be settled and done, preferably, five minutes after polls close.
When I checked to finish this post [a few days after the election], only 99% of votes in Ohio had been tallied – but it didn’t make headlines because we didn’t have any razor-close races that might affect control of state or federal government.
Certainly, the “patriots” who clustered round Trump like flies on a manure pile cooking in the sun, must have wanted to count military ballots that came from overseas?
(Again: intended as humor; not to dehumanize Trump fans.)
Our servicemen and women in foreign lands, and their spouses, and any adult children living abroad, always vote by mail.
(Somehow, it’s safe!!!!!)
(You probably missed it, but Gov. Chris Sununu, who easily won a fourth term in New Hampshire, mocked Trump at the Gridiron Dinner this past April. “He’s f***ing crazy,” Sununu joked, adding that if Trump were ever committed to a mental institution, “he ain’t getting out.”)
November 12, 2022: The fat guy down at Mar-a-Lago isn’t taking the news well, as one election denier after another goes down in blazing defeat. When in doubt, don’t wait for proof of election fraud.
Demand a new election!
Trump thumps the denier drum on Truth Social: “Idiot, and possibly corrupt, officials have lost control of the tainted Election in Arizona,” he screams. Then he adds an all-caps howl: “MACHINES BROKEN IN REPUBLICAN AREAS. A NEW ELECTION MUST BE CALLED FOR IMMEDIATELY.”
“It takes courage to uphold the law.”
November 13: Imagine that you are a faithful MAGA, meaning you stand for family values, law and order, and election denial. When you hear former Vice President Mike Pence call former President Donald J. Trump’s actions leading up to and including the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill “reckless,” you must come to a decision. In an interview today, Pence told ABC’s David Muir that Trump’s actions “endangered me and my family and everyone at the Capitol building.”
“It angered me,” Pence explained, “but I turned to my daughter, who was standing nearby, and I said, ‘It doesn’t take courage to break the law. It takes courage to uphold the law.’”
Do you believe Pence?
Or do you believe Pussy-Grabber Trump?
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Mike Pence. |
November 15: Tonight Donald J. Trump has a big announcement to make! Will he run for president again in 2024?
Might he reveal his long-lost healthcare plan?
Did Mexico finally send that check to pay for the Wall?
Knowing Trump, and having seen how he thinks, I expect him to say he’s running again in 2024 and simultaneously declare victory. He will brag about winning the popular vote by 500,000,000 and remind us, once he’s in office again, that he will have the power to pardon himself.
While we wile away the minutes, waiting for the big reveal, we already know what transpired in last week’s midterms.
Donald’s picked band of election deniers was all but snuffed out. Kari Lake, running for governor in Arizona, was one of the last to stare down the inevitability of math, when a final batch of ballots left in Maricopa County was tallied last night. She did well with the final drop, but ended up 17,000 votes short.
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Kari Lake and her battle flag. |
“In the back room with ballots.”
It is true that deniers won a number of lower-profile races in almost every state. But that has much to do with how grotesquely gerrymandered most districts already are. In Wisconsin, Derrick Van Orden, a retired Navy SEAL who was at the Capitol when rioters stormed the building, did capture a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. But he may not be crazy, having written in an opinion essay, that he did not go into the building that fateful day. He said he left Capitol grounds after watching “what should have been an exercise of free speech devolve into one of the most tragic incidents in the history of the nation.”
(True, that, sir.)
As for Kari, that lady is definitely crazy. One of Donald’s favorite deniers (someone described her as “Trump with better makeup”), Lake made clear during her campaign that she intended to keep up a drumbeat of attacks on the free press when she won. “I’ll be your worst nightmare,” she warned reporters.
(Reporters expose corruption that politicians try to hide.)
Lake also made clear she wasn’t going to accept defeat. If they counted all the votes and she won? Then she won!
Now that we know, and she knows that she lost, she insists that everything about voting in Arizona was rigged. At 10:25 p.m. last night, facing but refusing to accept inevitable doom, she tweeted: “Arizonans know BS when they see it.”
(That’s why she lost.)
The humble blogger may not agree with them, but he does not fear good Republicans, true conservatives, or candidates who won’t whine if they lose. By contrast, he was thrilled to watch as one Trump-endorsed misfit after another suffered humbling defeat. He particularly enjoyed seeing Lake’s election-denying pal, Mark Finchem, a man who never listened to a conspiracy theory he didn’t fall for, come up short in his bid to be the next Arizona Secretary of State.
Watching the votes go against him, Finchem had only one choice. He would have to accept defea…
Okay. No.
Instead, he began complaining about “shenanigans that are obviously happening and have happened.” Democrats, he hinted darkly, were hard at work “in the back room with ballots” in Pima and Maricopa counties. Finchem didn’t explain why an election board in Maricopa, Arizona’s most populous county, headed by a longtime Republican activist, would let Democrats come into a “back room with ballots” and cheat.
The head of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors was blunt. “This isn’t about partisan politics,” Bill Gates said. “It’s not about conservative versus liberal. This is about truth versus lies.”
At that same time, Finchem trailed by 122,000 votes, but he made clear, he was not about to concede.
(We have shown that recounts rarely turn up even a hundred missed votes.)
What kind of extremist kook is this guy – and how does that help explain his loss? Finchem, a self-proclaimed member of the right-wing Oath Keepers, was photographed outside the Capitol Building during the January 6 attack, while many other members of the group were beating hell out of police and chanting, “Hang Mike Pence.” Since then, he has steadfastly refused to say that Biden was fairly elected. Naturally, Trump backed him completely during his campaign. Finchem, Trump said, was “a patriot who has fought for our country right from his earliest movements in government. Mark was willing to say what few others had the courage to say.”
Yeah. Because Mark had that rare capacity for lying, and
believing his own lies. Thankfully, he was rejected by almost 53% of Arizona voters.
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Finchem also claimed he won. (He didn't.) |
The race for Arizona Attorney General is closer, with Abraham Hamadeh, another Trump endorsee, and another denier, trailing by only 3,087 votes, with 95% of nearly 2.5 million counted.
So the deniers have faint hope; and we can expect a recount, either way, in his race – which is as it should be in races so tight.
If there’s “rigging,” as Krazy Kari insists, it should be easy to find. But there isn’t, and it won’t be.
UPDATE: When all the votes are counted after the election, Hamadeh finds himself trailing by 511 votes. A recount was completed, and Hamadeh still lost, although by only 280. So, yes, recounts prove mistakes are made.
They don’t prove (so far) that rigging is a big deal. The blogger promises: If he finds a recount that proves an election was fixed, he will shout the news to the hills and valleys. But he keeps checking because he likes facts.
A total of 2,509,338 votes were cast in the race Hamadeh lost (to Democrat Kris Mayes), So the error rate ends up being 1 vote per 10,863 votes cast. And if you like conspiracy theories about Democrats cheating every time there’s a vote – including what kind of pizza a group of friends wants to order out – the Arizona recount nails the coffin lid a little tighter. A total of 623 more votes were recorded in the recount; but 500 of those came from Pinal County, where Republican officials were in charge.
They’re all legal votes once they’ve been counted.
In another blow to the fantasies of the MAGA faithful, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly thumped another denier, and will return to Washington D.C. for a second term. When I checked back to see how he was doing, as the last votes were tallied, Kelly had piled up an insurmountable 125,000-vote lead over Blake Masters, another “patriot” who thinks Donald Trump deserves to be sitting in the White House right now. Masters hadn’t conceded, but said he might after every single legal vote was tallied.
Here, we should point out that unless somebody can provide evidence to the contrary – a sticking point that Trump and Masters, and all their denier pals fail to grasp – they’re all legal votes once they’ve been counted.
The news for deniers in Nevada wasn’t much better. First-time Democratic candidate Cisco Aguilar turned back a bid by Jim Marchant, organizer of the “America First” movement, a man beloved by Rejected-President Trump and all the dopey QAnon folks, to become Secretary of State.
Again, the race was tight, with Aguilar winning by 23,000 votes. But no recount in any race that this blogger has found, save the full state recount in Georgia, has closed a gap of more than a few hundred votes.
In other news, Connecticut voters chose to legalize early voting, and sent five Democrats to fill seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, and zero Republicans.
In Michigan, Democrats had a wonderful time. Voters not only rejected an entire slate of election deniers, but also passed term limits for members of the state legislature – twelve years, total, per person. That idea passed by 66.5%.
(It’s a good idea to limit the power of politicians of any party, or none.)
Proposal 22-2 also passed, with 60% in favor, closing the door on Team Trump’s dream of stealing Michigan’s electoral votes in 2024.
That measure,
Amends the Michigan
Constitution to create early voting and right to sign an affidavit as an
alternative to showing photo ID to vote. Requires state-funded return postage
and drop boxes for absentee ballots. Clarifies that the state canvassers board
has a nondiscretionary duty to certify results.
In other words, if Michigan voters pick a president next time around – as they did in 2020, when Biden won the state by 154,000 votes – no canvassing board can just ignore the totals and refuse to certify results.
That was part of Team Trump’s plan in the last presidential race.
(It will be fun, later, to discuss how sixteen “false electors” who tried to come forward in 2020, and pretend they were Michigan’s true electoral slate, end up charged with multiple felonies.)
The guy who called the Nineteenth Amendment a mistake.
In a race to represent Michigan, in the Third Congressional District, Team Blue captured a seat previously held by Peter Meijer. He was one of ten Republicans who voted to impeach President Trump the second time the House of Representative voted for impeachment. Naturally, the former president targeted Meijer and all the other lawmakers who crossed him, backing Joe Gibbs in the GOP primary.
Gibbs, a denier who said he thought it was a mistake to grant women the suffrage, did win. In the general election, however, he was wiped out, with tens of thousands of women proudly voting against him.
In defeat, Gibbs wallowed in self-pity, just like his hero, Donald “Whiner” J. Trump. Gibbs blamed the Republican “Machine,” for his loss. He told supporters defeat was “no fault of our own.” He cried over how the “media” and “the wealthiest liberals” from New York and California donated money to support his opponent, Hillary Scholten. Gibbs went on to hint that because “precinct-level returns per candidate in Kent County” went dark after midnight on Election Night, his campaign was unable to track “local anomalies,” an “unacceptable situation at a time when people are losing faith in the security of our elections.”
(Dude, blame Trump for that! And now your dumb ass self!)
Gibbs claimed his campaign pitted “Crazy vs. Normal,” imagining he was the “Normal.” He failed to explain how Meijer won the same seat in 2020, by a 53%-47% margin – over Scholten.
Whereas
Scholten garnered 54.8% of the vote two years later. Versus 41.9% for “Normal,”
the guy who called the Nineteenth Amendment a mistake.
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Gibbs only wanted to turn the clock back a century. To roll back progress for women. |
November 23: We should also mention the high court’s decision to allow a congressional committee to get its hands on Trump’s tax records (which he fought for years to keep beyond reach). Trump had previously lost a case in a federal district court, and another in a court of appeals. Now, Trump decided the best way to “Make America Great Again,” would be to question the motives of the nine justices. “The Supreme Court has lost its honor,” he howled on Truth Social. What Trump had lost were three more legal battles.
November 24: Donald Trump’s nemesis, Sen. Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, has won another six-year term. She defeated the former president’s hand-picked candidate, Kelly Tshibaka.
Trump had promised to go to the ends of the earth to ensure Murkowski’s defeat, after she voted to impeach him in 2021.
Also known as: Normal behavior in a democracy.
Naturally, Tshibaka went on to declare her defeat a result of election “shenanigans,” such as more people preferring Murkowski over her.
For even more fun, Sarah “Momma Bear” Palin was sent back to hibernation, despite Trump’s can’t-miss endorsement. Palin will not be heading to D.C. to represent Alaska in Congress, and shout, “Drill, baby, drill,” at random passers-by on capital streets.
In a hotter corner of America, defeated Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has commenced wailing about how she was robbed (by a majority of the voters) who elected her opponent, Katie Hobbs. Lake has refused to concede, warning that she’s going to take everyone who voted against her to court.
Alas, outgoing Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican himself, brushed aside Lake’s claims of election-time cheating, and congratulated Ms. Hobbs. Ducey met with Hobbs and offered full support during the transition from one administration to another. Also known as: Normal behavior in a democracy.
December 5, 2022: Let’s keep it simple today and say that Rejected-President Donald J. Trump is nuts. Still unable to admit he got toasted in the 2020 election, still unable to show any evidence in court to prove his claim that he deserves a second term – right now – he offers up a remedy for his pain.
On Truth Social, Donald suggests the following course of action, to rectify the error Americans made in giving Joe Biden seven million more votes.
F**k the voters!
And f**k the Founding Fathers, and the f**king horses they rode in on. To Philadelphia, I mean.
He wrote:
“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
(We decided that deserved to be in a larger font.)
You read that right. F**k
the U.S. Constitution!
This, dear Trump fans, is the guy who has already announced he is running for president again and who cherishes your vote. He’d like your permission to terminate the three branches of government, rid himself of checks and balances, and drive over the Bill of Rights in his golf cart.
(Come ON, MAGA types – you can’t miss this one!)
In other depressing news, for the MAGA crew, the U.S. Supreme Court throws out a case filed by eight Trump-friendly voters. They had claimed that Dominion Voting Systems and Facebook illegally “influenced or interfered” with the 2020 election.
The Supreme Court was the last best hope of Trump fans, who believe, like children believe in Santa, that their hero won in a landslide two years ago. The nine members of the court – three of whom Donald selected himself – could not be bothered to ask Dominion or Facebook to respond to the petition filed by the “aggrieved” voters. Not even Justice Clarence Thomas cared – and his lovely wife is a full-time election denier, herself!
So, another challenge to the results of the 2020 election landed in the dumpster, not worth the paper it was printed on.
December 7, 2022: Even toddlers now know that Trump is running for president again, like COVID, which never goes away. And you may have heard he wants to terminate the U.S. Constitution. (See above.) In other words, he wants to finish the job he started when he said he could pardon himself.
While sane Americans condemned Trump’s latest threats, one unscrupulous member of Congress, Rep. Paul Gosar, heard the siren song of authoritarianism and found himself seduced! Then both Trump and Gosar realized they might need to deny they supported what they said they supported.
First, let’s take a look at exactly what Trump posted on his website Truth Social last Saturday:
So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD
& DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the
Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Elections Results of 2020 OUT and
declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of
this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations,
and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great “Founders” did
not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!
My liberal peepers tell me that the word “termination” does appear, and using my stellar reading skills, I see Trump did insist all rules, “even those found in the Constitution” may be swept aside when necessary.
(“Necessary,” as defined by the Orange God.)
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| My eyes prove correct. Even if I squint. |
The Founding Fathers, he claims, would not have “condoned” his loss (by seven million votes) to Joseph Biden.
The results of the 2020 election should be “OUT,” and the “RIGHTFUL WINNER” should be declared.
As for Rep. Gosar, a man who has clearly spent too much time baking his brain in the Arizona sun, he posted Trump’s screed on Twitter, commenting in response: “Unprecedented fraud requires unprecedented cure.”
Then Gosar lost his nerve – because he’s not only a dimwit, but a sneak, and a coward – and deleted his tweet.
As for what the Founding Fathers had to say about “terminating” the results of fair elections, we will leave it up to the former president, Congressman Gosar, and all their obtuse fans, to peruse the U.S. Constitution in search of wisdom.
(This is where the people in the MAGA cult become dangerous to the rest of us.)
(And, in the end, to themselves.)
Seventeen fresh felonies for Team Trump!
While Gosar and Trump were busy talking about trashing the Constitution, a jury in New York was equally busy, delivering an additional kick to the former president’s ass. The Trump Organization, they decided, was guilty of seventeen counts of felony tax fraud. Trump wasn’t charged in that case. He simply founded the crooked company – and along with his sons, Don Jr. and Eric, and daughter Ivanka, helped run it – so that no one who has watched the Trumps in action should have been surprised. A fine of $1.6 million is likely – peanuts to the former president. Still, even Trump fans might admit, seventeen felonies for one business are quite a lot.
December 9: Have we mentioned “election fraud” recently? The bugaboo Trump and Trump fans obsess about? Well, we finally have a serious case to report, this one involving voter suppression.
NPR explains the scam:
Jacob Wohl and Jack
Burkman robocalled roughly 85,000 voters across Michigan, New York,
Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio in the summer of 2020, falsely telling them
that voting by mail would risk “giving your private information to the man.”
Prosecutors say the pair
were targeting neighborhoods known to have a high percentage of Black voters.
The robocaller, who
claimed to be with a non-existent group called “the 1599 project,” falsely said
that voters’ information would go into a database accessible to police, debt
collectors and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which would use
the information to impose vaccine mandates.
Trump fans will no doubt be thrilled to learn that…wait, WTF???...the two Trump fans pled guilty last October!
They were each sentenced this month to spend five hundred hours registering real voters, and don ankle bracelets for six months.
December 10: The right-wing fringe is having a devil of a time accepting electoral defeats – whether they be the red wave that wasn’t in 2018, or the thumping Trump got in 2020, or the other red wave that wasn’t last month.
“We would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”
At a gathering of haters on Saturday, Gavin Wax, the president of the New York Young Republicans Club, offered up thoughts on how the right could finally start winning. Or maybe copy a page from the 1933 Nazi playbook. “We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena,” he told a black-tie crowd. “In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets.”
“This is the only language the left understands. The language of pure and unadulterated power,” Wax added.
Actually, what we understand is math. And candidates that matter. In 2020, for example, our side, in the person of Joseph Biden, got seven million more votes than Wax’s side.
SEVEN.
MILLION.
In November, our side managed to hold control of the U.S. Senate, because the right put up candidates like poor, pitiful Herschel Walker for office.
And, Mr. Wax, if you want to win elections, stop hobnobbing with white supremacists, like Peter Brimelow, who attended your gala, and no doubt approved of your call to battle in the streets.
Also, get rid of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. At this same gala, Rep. Greene suggested that if she and Steve Bannon, the pardoned fraudster, had been in charge on January 6, 2021, the attack on the nation’s capital would have succeeded. “I will tell you something,” Greene told happy guests. “If Steve Bannon and I organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”
Yep.
I am totally voting next time for the people who want to win elections by cracking fellow Americans’ heads in the streets, or shooting them dead.
Sore losers in Trumpistan.
December 13: It’s official. We have results from another recount regarding a close race in the midterms, this time from Colorado. If you are a Trump fan, you are thinking, aha, more voter fraud!
In this particular battle, with a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as prize, more than 370,000 ballots were cast. The margin of victory was a little more than five hundred votes. So you know Democrats must have cheated!
Nope.
The winner, by that slender margin, was Rep. Lauren Boebert, the right-wing nincompoop who loves guns, hates liberals, and almost makes Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene sound smart.
Under Colorado law, any race decided by less than half a percentage point is subject to automatic recount. Boebert’s opponent conceded even before the final tally was complete – because he’s not an election-denying idiot. He knew how accurate results in U.S. elections are. The state folks counted all the votes a second time and proved again that significant voter fraud is about as common as Trumps volunteering to serve in the U.S. military during wartime.
(Which is never.)
As it turned out, Frisch gained one vote. Boebert lost three. The final results:
Lauren Boebert 163,839
Adam Frisch 163,293
___________
Margin of victory: 546
 |
Boebert won. The election was close but fair. Also, she loves people who joined in the January 6, 2021 attack. |
Unfortunately, election deniers are like zombies, who like to feast on human brains, and can be nearly impossible to kill. Down in Arizona, where old people go to retire and shrivel like prunes in the sun, the deniers were demanding recounts, and possibly gunfire as solution to defeat.
Kari Lake, who lost a close race for governor, with more than 2.5 million Arizonans going to the polls, thinks she should be declared victor. She doesn’t care if her opponent beat her by 17,116 votes.
Fellow denier, Mark Finchem, who dreamed of becoming Arizona’s next Secretary of State, and running future elections, decided his race had to have been rigged. Because his right-wing ass got spanked.
In a Twitter rant, he insisted, “the results from the machines defy all math.”
What really defied all math was Finchem’s feeble grip on reality. The math in his case was entirely clear.
Adrian Fontes: 1,320,619
Mark Finchem 1,200,411
_____________
Margin of victory: 120,208
Finchem looks like a model citizen compared to fellow Republican Keith Douglas Casey, who ran for a seat in Congress from Texas. Three times, Casey has run, in an effort to unseat the Republican incumbent, Rep. Randy Weber. Three times Casey has been creamed in the primaries – last time losing by, cough, cough, eighty points.
Copying a page – or maybe an entire chapter from the Donald Trump Election Denier’s Handbook – Casey claimed that Weber and Gov. Gregg Abbott, also a Republican, had conspired to cheat him of a win.
A recount obviously wasn’t going to help, so Casey decided to start telling people he was going to kill Weber, instead.
December 14: It turns out, back in January 2021, that Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) had a few undemocratic instincts he wanted to share with President Trump.
Today, we learned that on January 17, with Trump set to leave office in three days, Rep. Norman had a thought on how Donald could secure a second term. It was time to text White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
“Mark
[Norman wrote], in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the
Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a
point of ... no return ... in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking
Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!”
He meant “martial law,” of course – but whatever he meant, he was really calling for a coup.
As of March 20, 2024, when I do my final edit on this post:
1,237 days
have passed since the last presidential election. No significant election fraud has been proved.
In fact, as we now know, in April 2023, Fox News was forced to pay Dominion $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit, having claimed, without a smidge of evidence, that Dominion helped rig the vote.
Or, to put it in starkest terms: Rep. Norman was ready to watch Trump declare martial law, and overturn the results of a fair vote.
Norman made multiple statements in the wake of the 2020 election, leading supporters to believe Biden and the Democrats had to have cheated to win. Then he justified his refusal to accept the final electoral vote, saying “tens of millions” of Americans believed the vote was unfair. This had much to do with the fact that they listened to a steady diet of lies on Fox. And because they listened to people like Trump – and Rep. Idiot – help spread and validate those lies. If you have time, and a fondness for stupidity, you can read hundreds of comments about the “Stolen Election” made by Norman and 164 Republican members of Congress, who voted to challenge the final electoral count on January 6, 2021.
As for Joshua Russell, he is unlikely to enjoy his Christmas, even if someone does get him a set of Trump’s new digital trading cards – featuring pictures of a heroic-looking … Donald J. Trump.
“A war is coming for you.”
With only seven shopping days until Christmas, Russell has been arrested and charged with sending death threats to an unnamed Arizona official, because he didn’t like the way voting turned out in 2022. Or 2020. “The only reason you’re still walking around on this planet,” Russell warned, “is because we’re waiting for the midterms to see you prosecuted for the crimes you have done to our nation.”
Watching one Trump-backed candidate after another get stomped last month, Russell called the unnamed official a “traitor,” for failing to clean up the imaginary corruption. Then he added: “We will not endure your crimes on America another day. You’ve been busted, over and over again.”
“A war is coming for you. The entire nation is coming for you,” he promised. Now he’s spending the holidays in jail. It turns out, Russell, who hails from Bucyrus, Ohio, could be facing twenty years in prison.
(By the way, the “entire nation” is not coming, dude. I guarantee, I’m not.)
(Because I’m not a fool.)
December 19: Arizona election denier Kari Lake isn’t about to wait for results from a recount to see if she lost her bid to become the next governor of the state.
No one needs to start shooting redcoats.
She’s calling for Maricopa County officials, by far the most populous county in the state, to be jailed. “These people are crooks,” she told a crowd of ill-informed admirers on Sunday. “They need to be locked up.”
(If this sounds familiar, keep in mind, that someone has described Ms. Lake as “Trump in heels.”)
The failed and furious candidate also cited various Founding Fathers and said their blood was coursing through her and her supporters’ veins! “They were fed up with tyrants,” she said of George and Tom and James, “and they weren’t going to take it anymore,” she told fans. “I think we’re right there, right now, aren’t we?”
No, we’re not. No one needs to start shooting redcoats. You have access to a recount, Ms. Lake.
You can gather any evidence you can find of fraud and take your case to the courts and try to prove your point. Even you know that, as you told your supporters. “We’ve seen judges dismiss cases, I don’t want you to get discouraged,” you told them. “It could happen. We’re going to kick this right up to the Supreme Court, and I will not stop fighting.”
This is the opposite of tyranny. You’re going to have your day (or days) in court. And you’re going to get shellacked.
(As we shall soon see, she does.)
December 21, 2022: Today, we learn that Katherine Friess, a Team Trump lawyer who may have information relevant to efforts to steal the 2020 election, has been dodging a subpoena for months.
As Bloomberg News has reported,
Over the past four months, the plaintiffs’ attorneys tried six addresses in three states to serve the subpoena on Trump lawyer Katherine Friess, with no luck, court papers show. They messaged five email addresses, receiving notice that one email was repeatedly opened but never getting a response. A lawyer who represented Friess in another case wouldn’t accept service on her behalf.
(The blogger can’t even find a picture of Friess on the internet.)
At any rate, if anyone knows Katherine, tell her that “the rule of law” is looking for her and she should answer her phone.
In a lengthy report, Politico notes that Friess had extensive contacts with many of the key players involved in the wide-ranging plot to overturn election results. Eventually, she had to send several emails, asking to be paid for her work. According to Politico, the Trump campaign cut her a check for $905, which she said was “$15,000 short.”
Since Team Trump is always looking for voter fraud, and finding nothing but dust bunnies under Democrats’ beds, we should note the “fine work” of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Some weeks back, he touted his success in rounding up twenty illegal voters.
To this point, at great expense, Team Ron has secured one (1) conviction. Massive!! Unfortunately, Team Ron has had to drop three (3) cases, because the supposed criminals hadn’t committed fraud.
Most of those arrested had been issued voter registration cards by officials of the State of Florida.
Which Ron runs.
UPDATE: When I check the website for the conservative Heritage Foundation on August 9, 2023, I see that Florida, to that point, has racked up eight (8) convictions for voter fraud since 2020.
Yes, almost enough to form a baseball team!
For comparison’s sake: In an average year 10 people are killed in Florida, and 40 injured by lightning strikes.
And this: In 2022, Florida had 16 shark attacks – down compared to an average of 22 per year.
“Lawsuits without factual basis or any cognizable legal theory.”
December 24: “But wait!” as they say in late-night infomercials. “There’s more!” Out in Arizona, where election deniers are as thick as cacti, Kari Lake, who lost the race for governor kept insisting she won. She was going to prove it in court! She was going to reveal some massive voter fraud. By God, she was going to convince the judge to declare her the winner and wax her car for good measure.
First, the judge dismissed eight counts in the lawsuit Lake filed, even before the case went to trial.
That left Lake with two counts to prove. The judge ruled against her once more. Lake’s not going to be governor anytime soon.
Mark Finchem, who lost the race to become Arizona’s next secretary of state (by 120,000 votes), had also filed a challenge in court. I’m not a lawyer, but I think he wanted to be declared winner, and also be awarded $1,000,000,000,000,000 in damages, because losing was depressing.
Finchem’s case also got tossed.
“Without factual basis.”
That left Abe Hamadeh, who ran to become the state’s next attorney general but also lost, but by a narrow margin. Not content to wait for a recount – which is automatic in a race as close as his – he also filed in court, asking to be declared victor. The judge let the case go to trial, and then ruled against. “The bottom line is you just haven’t proven your case,” he told Hamadeh’s lawyers.
(As noted above, Hamadeh also lost the recount.)
So let’s wrap this up and find a few leftover Christmas cookies. Mike Lindell, the Trump-loving CEO of MyPillow got sanctioned in court for filing a supposed voter fraud suit, which a judge described as a “fishing expedition,” one in which, this blogger should note, no fish have been netted.
Kari Lake got socked with a bill for $33,000, to be paid to the victor in the race for governor, after she lost again in court.
Another case, filed by Trump, seeking damages from Hillary Clinton – because she accused him of being a Russian agent – went nowhere in court. The lawyer who filed it, Alina Habba, had the fun of being sanctioned herself.
In that lawsuit a gentleman named Charles Dolan had been described by Team Trump lawyers as “a Clinton campaign official and a chairman of a national Democratic party organization.” The judge found that Dolan was a humble “door knocker” and described the suit filed by Habba and others as an effort “to advance a political narrative through lawsuits without factual basis or any cognizable legal theory.”
Team Trump must now pay Dolan’s legal fees.
Sanctioned, along with Habba, were Team Trump lawyers Michael T. Madaio, Peter Ticktin, and Jamie Alan Sasson.
(Getting sanctioned is a rite of passage for a Trump lawyer.)
 |
Anyone want to guess why Donald hired Habba? |
And we can toss in an ethics charge filed by the D.C. bar, against Jeffrey Clark, an official at the Department of Justice, who was in cahoots with Dr. Eastman, in his plot to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
That matter is pending.
We could easily run this tally out to fifty or sixty recent Team Trump losses; but the blogger is hungry, and a leftover Christmas Tree cookie is calling from the pantry.
Blogger’s recap:
Suppose you are a diehard Trump fan. If so, 2022 has been grim, with a sustained record of courtroom defeats.
Election deniers by the dozens went down to defeat at the polls – insisted they hadn’t lost – and then got blown out of court.
Another 365 days passed. Donald Trump continued to insist he had been cheated out of victory in 2020.
He even suggested terminating the U.S. Constitution and said he should be “reinstated” as president.
Cases of significant voter fraud proved against Democrats in court for the year:
ZERO.
(Since we are editing this post on March 20, 2024, we can further note that 2023 proved even more disastrous for Team Trump and the Orange God who lives in and hides classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.)
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