Fever Swamp News, Mostly Georgia Edition

The big headline yesterday was that Miz Lindsey called the Georgia Secretary of State to pressure him to lose a few Biden votes. The South Carolina Senator protested that his phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was misunderstood, but Raffensperger says other people were in on the phone call and can back up his claim that Lindsey was strongly suggesting Rassensperger start tossing out legal Biden votes.

Jennifer Rubin points out that whatever was said, it was inappropriate for the Senator from South Carolina to contact the Georgia state official about election results.

Graham denied to The Post that he encouraged Raffensperger to discard ballots, saying he was only investigating signature-matching rules. That raises the question why he would need to know this information and decide directly to contact Raffensperger, who is under death threats and has been subject to baseless accusations of misconduct by fellow Republicans.

Chales Pierce:

I have moved on to being angry and frustrated not with the president*’s enablers, but with the enablers of the enablers: the members of Congress and of the Republican political elite who profess to be upset with the course their party has taken but who won’t take their colleagues to task for being a part of it. I am talking here about the Very Concerned Caucus—Willard Romney, Young Ben Sasse, Susan Collins et. al.—who should be marching into Mitch McConnell’s office right now and insisting he take control of his caucus and force full recognition of the results of the election. (Suspending Graham’s chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee pending a full exploration of his dealings with Raffensperger would be a nice touch, too.) Nobody in that party has any stones whatsoever, except Brad Raffensperger, Hero of Democracy.

I am not sure I see the point. Georgia by itself won’t give Trump the election. Georgia AND Pennsylvania together would still leave him short of 270 Electoral College votes. He would need one more state. It’s over. Republicans are wasting everyone’s time and money indulging Trump’s fantasies. And surely Miz Lindsey knows that. Maybe his call really had something to do with the Georgia senate election, somehow.

The latest “evidence” of vote stealing comes from Floyd County, Georgia, a very rural and very Republican place. The hand recounters there found more than 2,600 ballots that hadn’t been counted before, and most of them were Trump ballots. The uncounted votes gave Trump a net gain of 800, which are not enough to make up for Trump’s current 14,205 vote deficit in the state. Even so, right-wing media went ballistic. They have yet to notice that Floyd County, Georgia, is a very rural and Republican place that went for Trump, 70.3% to Biden’s 28.4%. The uncounted ballots were all traced to the same precinct, where county election officials failed to upload votes from a memory card in a ballot scanning machine, says the Atlanta Journal Constitution. But such is the stuff conspiracy theories are made of, and Floyd County, Georgia, will be blended in to right-wing mythology as the place where Georgia was stolen from Trump.

But not all the craziness is in Georgia. This tweet from a nurse in South Dakota went viral.

Cognitive dissonance, anyone? In an interview, the nurse, Jodi Doering, said that some patients are in denial to the end. “Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real.’”

We’ve reached the point at which there can’t be many Americans left who are unaquainted with someone who tested positive. Anyone still in denial about covid is not someone who can be reasoned with or “reached.” I just hope they can be marginalized enough to minimize the damage they do.

David Horsey, Seattle Times