The New Lost Cause

     Representative Elise Stefanik was on Meet The Press today, serving up a selection of warmed-over rhetoric about the 2020 election,* in particular claims about the Constitutionality of states making changes to election law that indeed would have been big if true -- but they were not true then and they still aren't.  These claims (along with many others) were tested in court and lost.   In particular, Donald J. Trump for President v. Boockvar et al., on the constitutionality of Pennsylvania's changes, was put in front of the conservative-majority U. S. Supreme Court, with three members appointed by Donald Trump himself, and the Court dismissed it.

     There isn't any "there" there.  It's a farrago of self-serving nonsense dreamed up by former President Trump and his co-conspirators to save face over an election they lost fairly and squarely.  His Administration's own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency described the election as "...the most secure in American history."  This is not some ragtag assortment of opposing-party elected officials, but an agency under the Executive Branch.

     The Trump campaign hired two different private firms to investigate possible election fraud.  They found nothing.  At least one of the firms was (and is) run by a Republican with a history of combating fraud and waste in government, and of disillusionment with conventional party policies.

     And yet there the Chair of the House Republican Conference sat on live coast-to-coast TV, repeating Donald Trump's lies about the 2020 election and refusing to commit herself to accepting the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election, no matter which way it went.

     This relentless retconning of established historical fact resembles nothing so much as the South's persistent -- and partially successful -- effort to respin the Civil War's cause and conflict away from the open, avowed effort to preserve slavery that Confederates proclaimed at the outset of the war.  Most of the GOP's prominent politicians keep hammering away in support of this set of falsehoods and with every repetition, the lie is further transformed into false memory.

     The years may crumble Mr. Trump's election lie away, especially if it continues to translate into failure at the ballot box.  But the Lost Cause slowly heaved itself up from the swamp of memory as a heap of deceptive monuments and stood, stinking, in public squares for nearly a century; it was only with the last ten years that the worst of them are being pulled down by a public disgusted by the lie.  2024 is a critical year.  Will a majority of Americans embrace the lie, or turn, clear-eyed at last, to the truth?
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* The persistent way many politicians will return to their chosen topic and talking points in an interview, no matter what questions they are asked, never ceases to amaze me.  Democrat Claire McCaskill is a particularly frustrating example but Congressperson Stefanik gave her style a run for the money this morning.  As Machiavelli would have observed, "Gold will not always get you good soldiers, but good soldiers will always stretch way out for the brass ring."  Gotta keep those free rides coming!