Kansas City Chiefs Won in a Landslide

Chiefs Super Bowl Victory. Stop the steal! 

Ridicule can do what argument cannot.

     

Lincoln Project mocks in a tweet: "We may never know who truly won."

 Ha!  

Twitter erupted with comments following Senator Josh Hawley's tweet. Hawley is a U.S. senator from the state of Missouri, the home state of the Kansas City Chiefs. He became famous for being the first Republican senator to break with Mitch McConnell, who had urged GOP senators not to perpetuate denying the election results. Hawley refused. He led the effort to stop certification of the vote, and thereby opened the field for other objectors. This lent legitimacy to Trump's claims, and it gave hope to the thousands of people Trump summoned to the Capitol to demand Congress or Pence not count votes cast for Biden. 

Hawley tweeted "LETS GO CHIEFS."  

Twitter erupted with ridicule of Hawley.

"Too bad the Senate doesn't get to certify the score, huh, Josh? Another grandstanding opportunity slips through your fingers"

And: "Josh will be leading a challenge to the certification tomorrow morning. Something something penalty irregularities something something" 

And: "I am surprised that they didn't try to rush the stadium and prevent the trophy presentation!"

And: "Trump supporters: At the end of the Super Bowl, look at the scoreboard. The team with the most points won."

And: 'The score count was fraudulent because the Bucs points all came later in the game!" 

Twitter: STOP THE COUNT!

And: "The algorithm broke or KC would have scored 3 in the 4th. What else was manipulated?"

And: "Hawley wanted to stop the count when the Chiefs were ahead."

And: 'Is this the part where you tell your constituents the Chiefs actually won and encourage them to attack the NFL commissioner?"

And: "Giuliani says the Venezuelan scoreboards are to blame. The whole super bowl must be replayed."

And so on.

Ridicule works in politics. Trump called Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas." It labeled her a phony and it established that Trump could get away with showing his contempt. "Pocahontas" stuck. Humans like knocking big shots off their pedestals. 

But ridicule isn't Biden's style. Biden is trying to be the unifier, the guy who brings respectability back to the White House. No problem. The Lincoln Project is set up to do the ridiculing for him, making ads that puncture the Trump-authoritarian-demagogue wing of the GOP. The Lincoln Project members are Republicans attempting to steer their party back toward a party of Reagan, not Trump. There are also countless volunteers, happy to pile on. They showed up in volume to respond to Hawley.

Hawley has a weak spot. He looked like a showoff, with the raised fist, and things worked out badly. It was a gesture that reads as pugnacious affirmation, and the people who saw him did not march to the Capitol to give calm testimony. They went there to overturn an election and they killed people doing so. The moral foundation for the insurrection was denial of the results of an election. Hawley represents die-hard validation of that denial. 

The tweets define Hawley, Trump, the Stop the Steal rally attendees, and the people in the Capitol as sore losers who won't accept reality that took place right in front of them.

Not everyone will agree that the election was as clearcut a victory as the Super Bowl game, but the meme defines it that way. Ridicule isn't subtle. Ridicule doesn't argue the point of ridiculous-sore-loser. It assumes it as a premise. 

The ridicule defines Hawley as someone who would deny the Buccaneers won and would make up some crazy excuses to justify it. That makes him some mixture of blind, deluded, dishonest, and crazy.

Hawley. Ha!