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!
The MAGA Cult had two options in 2021- either acknowledge that their idol wasn't that popular, or pretend that the Ebil Globalhomo Conspiracy sabotaged their landslide.
ReplyDeleteOf course, they went with the latter, as it doesn't require any of that self-reflection & soul-searching nonsense. Plus, Denouncing the Cucks & Owning the Libs is a whole lot more fun than consensus building, plus one gets a big dopamine hit from it.
The really funny part is how Cult 45 believes that their 3-time loser, the guy who gets regularly fooled & duped by stupid incompetents* is The Guy to Drain the Swamp.
*notice that pretty much every single person he's appointed inevitably turns on him? And how then they suddenly become 'the worst, the stupidest, ect'
Machiavelli also had some choice words about mercenaries: if they are lousy, they will lose your state for you, if they are good, they will take it away from you. Don't use mercenaries.
ReplyDeleteAnd a more mercenary bunch than the clowns of the Right you will never see.
Of course, the whole farrago of selling American industry out overseas was selling our industries and intellectual property to those who ran away with it.
The parallels to the Lost Cause myth are striking.
ReplyDeleteRemember that Nikki Haley is of an age with me and we both grew up in the South where you are steeped in argle-bargle about “well it’s complicated because states’ rights and something or other” that’s just institutional, or it was up until relatively recently. I mean, it’s only since she and I were well into adulthood that southern states began removing the segregation-era symbols of racist defiance from their flags.