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.)
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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.
*
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.
