Friday, December 11, 2020

GOP snowflakes aren't "fighting" the election. They're setting things up for more rigging

If this was what Friday's hearing about how things proceeded in Wisconsin during the 2020 election, I might have been OK with it. Hey, I'm all for discussing how we could have elections work better, because they're pretty poorly done in this state and country these days. And if you want to have all communities run absentee ballots at the election sites (like in Madison) instead of having one "Central Count" in a community (like in Milwaukee, Kenosha, Green Bay, and other places that ended up reporting later on Election Night), I think it's worth talking about.

But let's be real. That's NOT what this was about. Here's one of the members of the committee that held this charade today. A "rogue agency" that was set up by Brandtjen's fellow Republicans, carrying out election laws that were set up by the Republicans in the gerrymandered State Legislature over the last decade. Nice going Menomonee Falls. Way to go Richfield. You picked a real winner right here.

Adam Serwer of the Atlantic wrote an article in The Atlantic yesterday that summed up the GOP mentality perfectly. The piece was titled "If You Didn't Vote for Trump, Your Vote is Fraudulent."
Trump has claimed that the outcome reflects a “rigged election,” publicly indulging nonsense conspiracy theories. He has pressured officials in Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victories in those states. His attorneys have filed baseless, tendentious lawsuits in those three states as well as in Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin, only to be rebuffed in every case but one. From the beginning, the only acceptable or legitimate outcome for Trump and his hard-core supporters was a victory—with the description “landslide” appended no matter how narrow or wide it happened to be....

Yet the rubbish claims of fraud continue. Trumpism demands the profession of beliefs that are neither strictly literal nor exactly figurative, but instead statements of ideological values that don’t fit neatly in either category. These statements are not amenable to journalistic fact-checking, because they are not factual claims; they are assertions of identity and political legitimacy that are incontestable on their own terms. To announce loudly that you accept the proclamations of the Church of Trump, no matter how false, contradictory, or exaggerated, is to identify yourself as a member of that faith community; to deny them is to risk excommunication. As long as devotion to the Trumpian creed remains a central tenet of membership in the Republican Party, precious few elected officials will risk the brand of the heretic.
This is correct. GOPs are the political equivalent of meatball sports fans who always thinks their team will win regardless of circumstance, and that there is always an excuse for a loss - usually something about "the refs screwed us/They cheated!"

But Serwer notes it goes even further than that. Serwer says that Republicans think that they are the only group that should be in power, and the only group whose opinions should matter. Which isn't how a democracy or republic is supposed to work.
The conviction that the rival political constituency cannot, under any circumstances, legitimately hold power has not yet resulted in widespread violence. But it remains incompatible with democracy, which requires the assent of its losers and the peaceful transfer of power between factions. Enough local Republican officials in 2020 have recognized that their civic obligations outweigh their partisan identities. But if Republicans continue to believe, and assert as a matter of their partisan identity, that the rival party’s victories are fraudulent, their claim to power illegitimate, and their holding office an existential threat, at some point, the tension between partisan identity and democratic function will become irreconcilable. Next time a president seeks to stay in power after losing an election, there may not be enough Republicans who place duty above party to make a difference.

When they say the 2020 election was stolen, Trumpists are expressing their view that the votes of rival constituencies should not count, even though they understand, on some level, that they do. They are declaring that the nation belongs to them and them alone, whether or not they actually comprise a majority, because they are the only real Americans to begin with.
And they call liberals self-absorbed snowflakes. Riiight.

Even if some Republican politicians acknowledge that Trump lost and that a majority of voters chose Biden, they see an opportunity in trying to complain about the result. And that opportunity is in raising money for the next election, and in changing the rules when that next election comes around. The only difference between now and prior versions of the "illegitimate election" gambit is that instead of passing the script onto their AM radio spokespeople, the GOP politicians are saying this BS themselves. Then they plan to use these false claims and BS investigations as their "proof" to promote bills that will try to rig elections even more into their favor.

But what do you expect from a party that stopped trying to win on ideas at least a decade ago? This scene from today's sham hearing sums it up. As a soon-to-be State Rep from Madison rightly put it. If they live inside their own Bubble of BS, they would be an eye-rolling annoyance, and little more. But they continue to screw things up for us in the reality-based community, and I'm beyond done with it, and the type of lowlife that would vote for trash like them.

PS- Now WisGOP is trying to violate their own laws on paying for recounts, and stiffing people like me with the bill for Trump's racist PR stunt. This is from the Chair of the Dane County Board of Supervisors. There are no "good ones." There just aren't.

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