It's been a few weeks since I've written anything here. As President Harding once said, a sense of "normalcy" has returned. We have a President who is acting like a President and Commander in Chief. He's getting things done, even with a narrow window to get things passed in the Senate and in that regard, he is doing what a President should do in making sure the members who are in his party are brought along so they can see the benefits of getting things done. The President enjoys the highest job approval rating since the Reagan administration and as each day goes by, the chances of a Democratic party landslide in the mid-term elections grows like a genie coming up our of a lamp.
But if you're still looking for political comic relief, there's plenty to choose from.
Arizona Republicans Finally Get to Count Ballots Their Way
Republicans in Arizona have finally got their hands on ballots to count from the election in their state. After four complete audits, several recounts, and a lot of noise, they are counting the ballots their way. No observers who are independents or Democrats are allowed inside also no reporters, just hard-line partisans with ballots on tables spread out across the floor of the old Veteran's Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, armed with sharpies (I had to giggle at that) and black pens to correct mistakes. Yes, that's what they're doing.
It's an exercise in futility. Arizona's vote totals were verified in accordance with the law, with Republican, Independent and Democratic poll watchers and vote counters approving unanimously. There were four recounts of ballots in Maricopa County, where Biden got a decisive majority of votes. With the exception of the first recount, which found a few additional ballots in Biden's favor, all of the recounts and the audits of counting machines, four of those in all, found Arizona's reported vote totals to be exactly correct. I'm not sure what Republicans hope to accomplish by counting piles of leftover ballots that are nothing more than scraps of paper now. More than likely, they have discovered that a majority of Arizona voters supported Biden but that's not what they will announce when they are finished.
Yes, they really do have sharpies and black pens which are not allowed anywhere near a legitimate ballot-counting operation, but this one isn't legitimate. Go ahead and laugh, it is funny when people do stupid things. This, among other statements and actions regarding the election from Arizona Republicans in recent months, is doing more to ensure that Democrats take more seats from them in 2022 than just about anything else
Congressman Louie Gohmert is Writing James Bond Movie Scripts
Someone probably needs to tell Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert not to accept invitations from "left-wing" media sources to comment on voter fraud anymore. He doesn't seem to realize that the reason they call him is because they can't find anyone else who sounds as ignorant or looks as baffled and confused as he does. Seeing him on television begs the question, "How in the world did this guy ever get elected?" Go to the district in "deep East Texas" that he represents and you'll figure it out in a minute or two.
Gohmert is laying out some wild scheme that sounds like the plot of a James Bond movie. It comes complete with spies, commandos, gun battles and a trail of mysterious intrigue to places like Barcelona, Spain and Frankfurt, Germany where international conspirators, all Trump haters of course, figure out how to change millions of ballots from Trump to Biden. Someone had to help him with that, because he is clearly not intelligent or imaginative enough to come up with something like that on his own and of course, he doesn't give any information that would lead to any kind of verification.
Of course, the fact that there was no "massive voter fraud" in the 2020 election, and that Trump and his legal team was lying through their teeth has now been exposed by none other than Sidney Powell herself, the attorney who spend weeks filing court cases in six states to try and stop the process of counting ballots and certifying electors. Neither Powell nor Rudy Giuliani actually put much evidence in front of the courts because, as Powell has now admitted, they knew that it was fabricated. Now that she is being sued by people whom she slandered in the courts, her defense is that she can't be sued for something that wasn't true.
Trump lost. Get over it. His attorney has admitted the whole thing was a big lie. It certainly was that. It was also an anti-American attack on the Constitution and the Rule of Law. The Constitution provides for the American people to elect their President, in an indirect way, but they still do the electing. Trump was attempting to stay in office by subverting an election. He failed and the American people got the President and Vice President they preferred.
A More Plausible Conspiracy Theory
So I'm going to throw in one more "conspiracy theory" about the 2020 election. Maybe there was, indeed, some massive voter fraud. How else could an unpopular failure of a President like Donald Trump rack up 74 million votes? We know that the Russians interfered on his behalf in 2016 and there is a mountain of hard evidence proving that. And we know that they were working to accomplish the same thing in 2020. Did they succeeded in helping Trump pick up millions of votes in the count that were not actually cast by voters? That's a far more plausible possibility than attributing Biden's win to voter fraud.
The possibility of just that sort of "stuffing" of the ballot box was a reality ever since Trump was elected and started spouting the big lie that there was voter fraud back in 2016 when his ego fractured over the fact that Hillary Clinton got more popular votes than he did. That's one of the reasons why the Democrats kept encouraging people to turn out. They needed to make sure they got enough votes so that the Republican attempts at cheating wouldn't matter. And there is far more evidence to support this conspiracy theory than the ones claiming Trump really won.
A sixth grader with a computer could find plenty of evidence to prove this conspiracy theory.