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.
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.
Going to ruin the USA. All while gasping for breath on 100% Vapotherm. They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that “stuff” because they don’t have COViD because it’s not real. Yes. This really happens. And
— Jodi Doering (@JodiDoering) November 15, 2020
I can’t stop thinking about it. These people really think this isn’t going to happen to them. And then they stop yelling at you when they get intubated. It’s like a fucking horror movie that never ends. There’s no credits that roll. You just go back and do it all over again.
— Jodi Doering (@JodiDoering) November 15, 2020
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
I always will remember reading about the 58,000 who died in Vietnam.
The author claimed that that number made it probable that most everyone knew of someone who died in the war. (I knew 2)
And now today I know of 3 who have died of covid and maybe 20 or 25 who have become infected.
Of course, Graham went with the time-honored response: "Hey, all I did was say this neighborhood can be dangerous, and that I had a gun, and I liked his watch. If he think that means I was trying to rob him, that's on him."
They WANT to be Mob bosses, but they're too stupid and lazy.
Lindsey is quite the Trumpian ingenue.
Graham is a pilot fish, dependent on a shark for his existence. He's terrified of losing his current alpha "shark" and is doing all he can to save him, otherwise his continued existence makes no sense. Not many alpha sharks left in the GOP.
Every politician not named Trump knows the election is lost. They continue to pretend that the election can be won/stolen for 2 reasons:
Michigan rePuknicans are bragging about blocking the certification of voting results in Detroit so it looks like Michigan is their 3rd target to prove that The Donald really won re-election.
The link at the bottom should allow one to see a CNN interview with the South Dakota nurse. Dealing with both the deadly virus and this prevalent patient mindset must be quite the emotional drain for her. She must certainly be up against “folie à millions” (madness by the millions) or shared psychosis. It seems this would agree with the view of Dr. Brandy X. Lee of Yale University and the author of " The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump " .
Never have I seen and heard of this level of denial by so many. She talks of a patient who insist he had lung cancer not the COVID as if a lung cancer diagnosis is less frightening so the COVID must be denied. It is like a reverse hallucination. When one has hallucinations they see or hear things that are not there. With this madness, they refuse to see or hear things that are there, like the COVID or a lost election. I guess Rudy Giuliani spun quite the giant conspiracy theory to deny the lost election to a court today. I have not yet read or saw details. I must accept the possibility of group madness as a possible explanation supported by evidence although as Carl Sagan once said, outrageous claims demand outrageous levels of supporting evidence.
https://www.dcreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/trump-supporters.jpg
.https://www.bing.com/search?q=CNN+South+dakota+nurse&form=QBLH&sp=-1&pq=cnn+south+dakota+nurse&sc=1-22&qs=n&sk=&cvid=F66D2972833A40699C38A544EBFF5D98#
Oops on that Dr. Brandy Lee piece link…this should work better.
https://www.dcreport.org/2020/11/05/what-is-wrong-with-68-million-americans/
Since major political parties such as the Federalist, Whig and Know Nothing parties in American’s past, after being riven by internal dissension, reassembled into new parties, it seems it’s time for the Republican Party to reform under a new banner which would clearly recognize what has happened to the Grand Old Party.
Let’s call that new association, the Retrumplican Party.
The entire RepubliKKKLAN Party is guilty of the sedition.
It is full of treasonous traitors, fomenting real, actual, actionable sedition!
Benedict Arnold was a piker.
In Wayne County MI, two Republicans on the Board of Canvassers refused to certify the results of Detroit without citing any reason. (Somebody check their bank accounts.)
I think Rudy has a plan. Prevent certification in the critical states. If they get it down, bribe enough members of the Electoral College to go rogue. Get Biden under 270 to get the election into the US House of Representatives. Holding up PA and GA would do it exactly. So would PA and MI. If they get it down to 270, just one rogue vote will defeat Biden even if Trump is forty votes behind Biden.
This isn't going to work, but working the system ruthlessly is still frightening to watch.
It is going to work, Doug, Rudy is going to go full Cray-Cray and something will fall out of the sky. It is kind of like a rain dance for Republicans. You must believe to receive, though. It will just start trickling down.
I believe what we're seeing, with all these evidence free fraud charges, and moves like the Wayne County board — those two commissioners had one job, to hold out long enough for the publicity to take hold, then fold — are not strategic but tactical moves toward a larger goal, and that is delegitimizing the democratic party as a "real" political party, and Biden's presidency in particular, before it even starts. Everyone is in on the fun, from Trump to McConnell, down to the lowliest republican dogcatcher in Podunk. They all know their fraud allegations have a snowball's chance in Hades of bearing any serious legal fruit. Practically all of these challenges; the bogus affidavits, made up evidence, easily verifiable false claims of republican poll watchers not being in the room — they're identified in the room in news reports, are based in the standard right wing conspiracy theory fantasyland.
But their utility is in their propaganda effect, to have the "man on the street" (in America, that's a synonym for idiot) believe and repeat for all within earshot to hear, with a tone and tenor as if he's knowledgeably saying something, that the election was fraudulent and Trump was the "real" winner. This stuff reaches down and seeps in at the level of people who are casual news consumers, the people who tirelessly parroted the nonsense that "Joe Biden is in his basement" because this is what gets through.
That's the point of all this stuff, and its worth it to those who are risking careers by pushing fraudulent claims to courts that are getting tired of it and ready to start sanctioning people, for the end goal: delegitimization of the democratic party altogether as a viable institution. McConnell learned his lesson when the blackness of Obama had even him saying the quiet part out loud, that he would work to make Obama a one term president, by thwarting him at every turn, and then blaming him for the failure of not getting anything done. This time, they're going to have a delegitimized Biden presidency ("he's not even the 'real' president; why should we do anything to work with him?) out the gate, and a democratic party full of cheaters who helped him get there.
This is the goal, I believe. Biden and the democratic party will have their hands full. Its going to be a tall order to overcome this to get enough done for the bottom not to drop out in 2022.
Paul Waldman, We came much closer to an election catastrophe than many realize