May 22, 2021: Cyber Ninja Audit Drags - Right-Wing Lawmakers Clueless

 

5/22/21: If you watch right-wing news for amusement, no doubt you have heard of the big Arizona vote audit. According to the zany crew at One America News, and other far-right outlets, this recount of one county is going to blow the lid off the conspiracy to cheat Donald J. Trump out of 300 million votes, give or take fifty million. In other words, back that moving van up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Joe Biden is leaving. Don and Melania are back, baby! (See: 5/19/21.)

Bamboo in the ballots???

 

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“I feel like we’re in this fantasy land. I still have yet to see any evidence [of voter fraud], and I don’t think it’s coming.”

 

State Senator Paul Boyer, Arizona Republican

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Unfortunately, as The Hill reported this week, even Arizona Republicans are growing weary of the antics of the Cyber Ninja crew, the organization hired to audit the vote in Maricopa County. 

First, the recount has dragged on longer than the Ninjas promised, and they’ve only counted a fourth of the votes. 

Second, they’ve been mocked mercilessly for their efforts to find bamboo in the ballot paper – which would “prove” that ballots were fake and shipped from China. Now former Arizona governor Jan Brewer, a Republican, has chimed in. “I think they should maybe just call it quits. I don’t think that it’s going to serve any purpose. It’s not going to change the election,” she said. “The votes have been certified. Biden is the president. It’s not changing. I say move on.” 

Apparently, Brewer doesn’t believe in bamboo bamboozling. Neither does current GOP governor Doug Ducey, who has insisted that the vote count in Arizona was accurate all along.

 

Even one Republican state senator, Sen. Paul Boyer, told The Hill he believes the audit has become an albatross for his party. 

“Who wouldn’t support an audit?” he asked rhetorically, while failing to mention that Maricopa had already conducted two official recounts. “But the way they’re doing it, it’s embarrassing,” he added. “It makes me embarrassed to be a state senator at this point. I feel like we’re in this fantasy land. I still have yet to see any evidence [of fraud], and I don’t think it’s coming.” 

Senate Leader Karen Fann, who initially insisted on the Cyber Ninja recount, has been forced to waltz away from her brainchild. 

This is partly due to the fact that the five members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors – which includes four member of her Republican party – have been threatening to file defamation suits against anyone who says the vote was fixed or that they conspired to break the law. Fann lamely admits, “I have said from the get-go I am relatively sure [we] weren’t going to find anything of any magnitude that would imply that any intentional wrongdoing was going on,” she told GOP lawmakers in a closed session earlier in the week. “I believe that we were going to find what we’ve known all along and some of the things is we could do a better job.” 

According to The Hill, this lame-ass recount idea is likely to cost the taxpayers of Arizona $3.3 million.

 

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SPEAKING OF LAME-ASS, can we insist that all Republican lawmakers take at least a basic course in U.S. history? 

In just the last few days, Rep. Madison Cawthorn has asked right-wing believers to imagine, when General George Washington asked the British to “capitulate” at Yorktown in 1781, that he had been wearing a mask. 

Well, said Rep. Bonehead, “that’s not who we’re descended from.” 

Apparently, Rep. Bonehead was not aware that a large French fleet had chased away a British naval force protecting the supply lines of the 7,000 Redcoats penned at Yorktown. Nor did he seem aware that Gen. Washington might not have had a mask – but did have more than twice as many men as the British commander. We had the enemy surrounded on the land side, too. 

George could have shown up dressed as Martha and demanded that the British surrender and they would have had to raise a white flag.

 

Meanwhile, we had another Marjorie Taylor Greene sighting. The imbecilic lady from Georgia appeared on the Christian Broadcasting Network and said that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s rule, requiring members of the U.S. House of Representatives to prove they had been vaccinated before appearing on the House floor, brought to mind the Holocaust. “You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star,” Greene babbled, “and they were definitely treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany. And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.” 

Yes, exactly! Minus the psychotic dictator, the trains full of prisoners crammed in cattle cars, the gas chambers and furnaces for bodies, the sadistic guards, the summary executions, the towers and barbed wire, the mass starvation, the use of slave labor, the tattoo numbers, the medical experiments on twins, the forced sterilization of gays, and death on an industrial scale.

 

Not to be denied a place in the limelight, Sen. John Cornyn decided to weigh in on news that Loser Don, while president, had made a habit of spying on reporters that had the nerve to criticize his policies or personal behavior. The new team at the Department of Justice released records this week to show that Team Trump gathered phone records and emails from reporters at the Washington Post, CNN, and other news outlets considered unfriendly.

That meant President Biden felt the need to address the matter and go on record to say that he would never spy on news outlets while president. 

Missing the simplest possible point – that we do not want government leaders spying on practitioners of the free press, no matter who those practitioners work for or what they say, because the free press helps keep check  on our leaders – Sen. Cornyn offered up this snarky tweet.