Trump, yesterday:
"Dr. Oz should declare victory. It makes it much harder for them to cheat with the ballots that they “just happened to find.”
This morning Trump added:
"The Pennsylvania Oz race is ridiculous. . . . Stop FINDING VOTES IN PENNSYLVANIA! RIGGED?"
Trump is doing it again. He will be rewarded for it.
Mehmet Oz and David McCormick are within about 1,000 votes, with many precincts to be counted, plus some absentee and military ballots. The news stories are all about the uncertainty. It is too close to call. No news network posits a guess who will win.
In the midst of that Trump says Oz won, period.
The establishment media is presenting this as a flagrant example of Trump's election denialism. Now, finally, they suggest, Republicans will realize and resent what Trump does. After all, it is a preemptive strike against Republican voters. Surely this will hurt him.
I think not.
Republican voters will take a different message. This re-confirms that Trump is a fighter and a rule-breaker. He fights dirty for his team. He looks for an edge and grabs it. He is a trickster. It is a character we see in life, myth, and in literature and we like it--mostly--when the trickster is on our side. Life is war and all is fair. Fair play is for suckers.
Americans are not consistent in what we see as heroic. A few people remember that George Washington, at his moment of greatest power, resigned as General of the Continental Army and returned power back to civilians. He did the right thing. He put the country above self. We honor that, especially in military matters. Except we also respect--or at least tolerate--people who used draft deferments (Biden) and bone spurs (Trump) to work the system to personal advantage.
We enjoy the scamp character, the guy who pulls off the sting against the stuffed shirt or the naive. The Greeks used the Trojan Horse ploy. Odysseus tricked his way back across the Mediterranean. The allied armies set up a fake invasion spot at D-Day. It was smart--as Trump described himself for not needing to pay taxes. Republicans understood and respected Mitch McConnell's straight-faced assertion that it was a matter of principle not to give a hearing to Merrick Garland within a year of an election, and then to rush through Amy Coney Barrett. He had the power and he used it. Smart. Cynical.
Trump acting boldly and selfishly isn't a bug. It is a feature. It is the counter to the self-imposed feebleness and self-regulation that is part of the criticism of political correctness and wokeness laid onto Democrats. Democrats cannot get things done because two of their members oppose ending the filibuster. The have to power to do it, but don't. Democrats could announce right now that Vice President Harris fully intends to use exactly the technique asserted by Trump, Trump's attorney Eastman, and many Republican officeholders, that the Vice President is empowered to disallow electoral votes--but of course they won't do that. That would be unfair, unconstitutional, and against the rules.
Democrats are the goody-goody party now. Democrats tie themselves up trying to be punctilious about pronouns. They try to be internally consistent regarding identity and bathroom use. They say they want to reduce fossil fuel use, so they advocate policies that raise the price of gasoline, which may cost them an election.
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| From Trump's "Truth Social." |
A new Republican insult for Democrats has emerged: "cucks". They call Democrats cuckolds, men whose wives have sex with other men. Democrats are un-manly, weak, self-constrained. Democrats are the party that says "believes the woman." Democratic senators shamed Al Franken into quitting, so he leaves. Donald Trump handles accusations differently. He calls female accusers liars, and moreover, too ugly to interest him.
Of course Trump is being outrageous and unfair in saying Oz should declare victory now. It is OK because Trump fights to win. That is his brand. If Trump is on your side, you have a protector. He will smash Democrats. He will fight the Chinese. He will fight "illegals" at the southern border. Darn right he will cheat. He's not a pussy. He's a barbarian and it is better than being a wimp.
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| From Trump's Truth Social site. |
9 comments:
This is not a joke.
“WASHINGTON - Donald Trump-style Republicans in more than 30 states are pushing new laws that basically would make it easier for them to steal future elections, according to a new report provided to USA TODAY by a group of voting rights organizations.”
--- https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/05/19/voter-subversion-trump-republicans-push-laws-change-elections/9824186002/
In lieu of a platform, the GOP announced in 2020 that it would support whatever Trump wants (I am not making this up). Thus, it now stands for election denial, xenophobia and gun worship. Republicans that fail to embrace these values risk being excommunicated as Whackos In Name Only.
No surprises! Trumpism has taken hold of a vast swath of the American electorate and political thought. The bottom line in the Trumpian manifesto is "There are no rules for our members but one, loyalty to the Trumpian cult."
Our ridiculous absentee ballot/vote by mail policies create the appearance, if not the actual fact, of a complex and easy to hack vote counting system.
A simple fix: require all ballots to be submitted by 8:00 PM on election day. Counting could take place in a few hours, and we would know the results late that night.
Do it this way, and there would be much less opportunity for accusations about the corruption of vote counting.
Oregon used to have this rule, but for some reason the Democrats decided to screw it up.
Fortunately, former President Cheeto is 75 and not 55. He also loves fast food, is overweight and not very active. Being an aggressive, hateful person is not healthy either.
Maybe Dr. Oz has a mental disorder and has gone off the deep end.
Peter, you are right on with this post. and democrats had better heed the warning. People want authoritarian leaders, it seems. I even admit that I want a democratic candidate who is a powerful and forceful speaker.
I disagree with Michael that Oregon has screwed up the election deadline process. People were having trouble knowing the mailing deadline, and this way it is all one deadline, at 8 pm on election day. Simple.
Peter, could you please put a link to this blog post in your daily emails? It would save time looking for it, and there are comments on both pages from your readers.
I personally preferred the 8 pm election day deadline because of its simplicity, but I am also OK with any rule that is simple and well announced in advance. The rule that allows postmarked ballots with questions about the signature to be cured within a two week approximate period strikes me as fair. If the signature is doubtful, contact the voter to get it confirmed. A zero-day deadline to get that fixed would provide huge incentive for a corrupt election official to say a bunch of ballots from an unwelcome area to be considered "questionable." Any system is susceptible to a firmly partisan election official. That is the weak spot in any system.
Peter Sage
One thing we know for sure from experience: No matter how reasonable the rules or fair the election, conspiracy theorists (i.e., Republicans) will pitch a fit and probably get violent if they lose.
Ballot fiasco delays results in Oregon, vote-by-mail pioneer (Source)
> Elections workers must pull the faulty ballots from batches of 125, transfer the voter’s intent to a fresh ballot, then double-check their entries — a painstaking process that could draw the election out until June 13.
> The glitch will force election workers to hand-mark fresh ballots... (Source)
I don't care what side you are on THIS IS CRAP. Count the damned votes by hand? Nope, copy them by hand for the machine to count.
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