The elections and the certifications of those elections, except for congress, have come and gone. Over 60 phony lawsuits have been considered and dismissed for lack of evidence or just plain sanity by various courts all over the country. Election officials, even Republicans, have sworn that these were the cleanest elections in memory, the electoral college has voted for Biden and still Rand Paul and Ron Johnson continue to lie to the American people about who really won the election.
We know that both these guys along with Kevin McCarthy, Mark Meadows, Ted Cruz and a few others are trying desperately to promote the big lie. The question is why? It’s over. Even Moscow Mitch McConnell admits it’s over. And yet Paul goes in front of a Senate Committee and lies about a few thousand votes in Nevada. A few thousand? Biden beat Trump by over 7 million votes. You just can’t fake 7 million votes. Not even a bunch of crooks like the Trump administration could pull off a heist like that. Trump just got his ass handed to him but because of a concentrated effort by a bunch of anti-democratic Trump sycophants and the lies they continue to spread, we are facing a severe test of our democracy. Even more important we are facing obstacles to fixing the awful mess created by Trump and his incompetent followers. Hundreds of intelligent former Republicans have left the party. A staunch group of former GOP members who want to be part of a functional, logical political party have formed The Lincoln Project, now a year old and fully stocked with the kind of people who once led, the but are now in direct confrontation, with the GOP.
They understand what democracy looks like and they know that it doesn’t look like Donald Trump, who was trying in true fascist style, to have his opponent arrested by the justice department two weeks before an election.
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The question was asked last Sunday morning: “Will we make it to January 21 before the forces that be destroy the country?” Before you scoff, consider the following facts.
We have a former Secretary of Defense, convicted of a felony and pardoned by the President, who is calling for Marshall Law.
Then we have a President hiding in the White House convening delegations of disenfranchised lawyers to advise him on how he can upend the election results and hold onto a job he clearly doesn’t want to do.
Trump is fighting to hold onto the Presidency but he isn’t doing the work of the Presidency. He has never responded functionally to anything about the pandemic even though he admitted on tape to Bob Woodward that he understood it was worse than we thought. Now he refuses to address the hacking of our government agencies by the Russians, an event that has been equated by many to be a declaration of war.
While all that is going on, the economy is crashing, people are getting evicted from their homes, children are forced to settle for insubstantial meals and the government itself is about to shut down, all while congress continues to function at a barely minimum level and that, only because they want to get the hell out of Washington and get home for Christmas.
And with all this going on, you wonder why people are worrying about getting to an inauguration?
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Watched Jennifer Granholm, Biden’s newly appointed Secretary of Energy today and what a vast difference when compared to Trump’s choice of Rick Perry. Granholm launched into the hack, listed several plans to work on nuclear superiority and added economic goals that would advance our trade position vis-a-vis renewable manufacturing. Perry, of course, had no clue when he took office that the job even included oversight of our nuclear force. ‘Nuff said.
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It has always been clear that GOP strategist Sara Fagan was an illogical observer of the political scene but this weekend she adjusted her categorical positioning from illogical to loon crazy when she responded to a Rahm Emanuel statement by assuming the position that Donald Trump will leave office with equal pluses and minuses on his record.
Emanuel had just made the point that Trump was, to a great extent, responsible for the health and financial devastation wrought by the pandemic. Fagan started babbling about how he had been responsible for the incredibly swift vaccine development by demanding that the FCC accelerate the clearance of any drug just to get one on the market before the election. Emanuel didn’t bother to point out that such action would be beneath any normal president or that it was laughable for any sentient human being to accept that as a good thing. Everyone knows Trump did everything he could to screw up the handling of the pandemic. In any sensible country he would be tried and then put up against a wall and executed for his dereliction of duty.
It was when Emanuel checked off every major area in which Trump had left the country worse off then when he entered office that Fagan should have just faded. Instead she kept yammering nonsense, proving once again that she is far too stupid for any functioning network to pay her to babble her idiocy.
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Why are we currently living in a world where significant portions of Americans believe suppositions about the state of the nation that an equal or larger number think are ridiculous?
Two days after Trump was sworn in as President of the United States, Kellyanne Conway went on Meet the Press and talked to Chuck Todd about “alternative facts.” For those of you who haven’t digested the new GOP Trumpspeak Dictionary, “alternative facts” is the current definition of “lies.” It’s as simple as that. Conway, then the new president’s communications liar, had entered into the discussion with Todd because of Trump’s description of his inauguration crowd as far larger than Obama’s even though it was obvious to even a casual observer that the opposite was true. What soon became obvious to anyone who cared to pay attention was that Trump and his administration had little regard for the truth or even the appearance of truth. In fact the president lied so often that various fact check publication’s stock went through the roof at each one of his new pronouncements until now, after four years he has been credited with over 30,000 lies to the American public.
The result of this avoidance of the truth is simple and obvious. Nothing Trump says means anything. He puts no value on truth and so nothing he says has any credence except that which the individual who hears it wants it to mean.
So four years after his seemingly unimportant evaluation of the crowd size at his inauguration, and when he states “The election was rigged,” Trump’s true believers who want the election to have been rigged feel that they have heard the truth and that no amount of reality or logic will sway them from their belief.
That’s how one stupid, insignificant lie, followed by myriad other incursions into falsehood eventually ends up producing a universe where there is no truth, only the wishes of prejudiced listeners. So only that which individuals “wish” really exists. That’s how a rigged election, which Ron Johnson really “wishes” comes to exist as a reality in his mind. He hasn’t had to consider the concept of truth for four years because he hasn’t heard any truth from the only man he has listened to for four years, so now he knows the election was rigged. He is still listening to Trump and Trump is saying what he wants his followers to believe and since Johnson no longer has an intellectual mechanism that can function well enough to tell the truth from a lie, he is officially brain dead.