Saturday, November 07, 2020

ONE WING OF THE GOP IS CERTAIN THAT BIDEN IS COMMITTING FRAUD. THE OTHER WING ONLY THINKS HE MIGHT BE.


An editorial in The Wall Street Journal is urging the president to be prepared to accept a loss.



But the editorial won't acknowledge that the president's fraud claims are baseless:
As for fraud, the Trump campaign will have to prove it to prevail in court. It won’t be enough to charge that Philadelphia is historically corrupt, though it is, or that state election officials are partisan. The Georgia secretary of state is a Republican, by the way, contrary to Mr. Trump’s remarks Thursday night. The vote counting in Arizona and Georgia has seemed professional and transparent.

The same can’t be said of Philadelphia, where the Trump campaign had to go to court so its poll-watchers could observe vote counting. Incredibly, Democratic lawyers opposed that Trump request. This is exactly the wrong way for Democrats to behave, feeding GOP suspicions. The vote-counting standard should be transparency for both sides to ensure public confidence.

The Democratic Pennsylvania Supreme Court also contributed to the mistrust by rewriting state election law to let mailed ballots be counted until Nov. 6. We warned multiple times that this mess could happen, and the U.S. Supreme Court could have helped by intervening. Chief Justice John Roberts refused.
This is what passes for a "responsible" conservative message: that there's unlikely to be fraud in some states (the ones run by Republicans), but there might be fraud elsewhere, because you know how those Democrats are -- but if it somehow turns out that there wasn't any fraud, well, the president should accept the inevitable.

We're hearing a similar message from Laura Ingraham. She's urging the president to accept defeat if it comes -- but she's also asserting the possibility of fraud, even in red states.


Now, back in August, Republican governor Doug Ducey of Arizona assured us that everything would go smoothly on Election Day.... Oops! Didn't really work out that way. But he's not alone. Republicans also control Georgia. Yet sheer incompetence and perhaps foul play have compromised the integrity of the election results there as well.


Now, losing, especially when you believe the process wasn't fair, is a gut punch. And I'm not conceding anything tonight, by the way.... But President Trump's legacy will only become more significant if he focuses on moving the country forward.

She's urging the president to move on, but she's also "not conceding anything" because it's possible that "the process wasn't fair," and she's saying there should be a better legal team in place, which you wouldn't say if you were satisfied that the election was conducted fairly.


Eyepatch-wearing congressman Dan Crenshaw also seems to be taking a "moderate" approach, but he, too, asserts that there could be something to all this fraud talk:
Marjorie Taylor Greene hasn't even made it to Capitol Hill yet, and she's already being told to behave by a fellow Republican.

The controversial Trump-supporting, QAnon-spreading House candidate who won election on Tuesday night got into a Twitter spat with GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas on Friday after she accused Crenshaw of not supporting the president's bid for reelection.

Crenshaw tweeted earlier Friday that Republicans would accept the outcome of a fair vote but added it “should not be partisan to suggest” an investigation into the 2020 elections amid allegations of irregularities....

Greene, however, jumped on his comments and cast them as capitulating to Democrats.

"The time to STAND UP for @realdonaldTrump is RIGHT NOW! Republicans can't back down," Greene tweeted. "This loser mindset is how the Democrats win. President Trump has fought for us, we have to fight for him. We won't forget. Trust me."

Shortly afterward, Crenshaw called out Greene for apparently missing his call to back the president's election investigation efforts.

"Did you even read past the first sentence? Or are you just purposely lying so you can talk tough?" Crenshaw tweeted in response. "No one said give up. I literally said investigate every irregularity and use the courts. You're a member of Congress now, Marjorie. Start acting like one."
The Republican Party now consists of a Marjorie Taylor Greene wing, which says that there was fraud, and a Dan Crenshaw wing, which says that there might not have been fraud, but hey, we don't know, do we?

No Republican, as far as I know, has said that the election was fair. Even after the courts have spoken, I wonder if any Republican ever will.
at

No comments:

Post a Comment