UPDATED: Election Hoax Aftermath
As usual I'll be heading out soon--worshipping the Creator in spirit and truth is a good thing even in bad times. Herewith, a few observations gleaned in the last few minutes.
The other day a reader reminded me of a story from Maricopa County, AZ, where the local officials are refusing to respond to a legislative subpoena to turn over the Dominion voting machines for an audit. I remarked to him that this illustrates the inherent weaknesses of our voting "system", which were unfortunately not foreseen by the Founding Fathers. Turning exclusive responsibility (but for the date) of elections over to the locals turned out to be a Bad Idea. The legislature has no credible way to enforce their subpoena, and the local authorities--having seen the results of an audit in Antrim County, MI--have every reason to not turn over the voting machines. Because they probably have an excellent idea of what would be found.
Clarice Feldman (2020: The Year of the Big Fraud ) sums up the intuitive conclusion that there was a Big Steal, and why a plurality of Americans aren't going to buy into the absurd alternative. I like the title, although my preferred expression is Hoax rather than fraud--I remarked the other day that the Trump years have been marked by a succession of Hoaxes:
Merriam Webster: Hoax definition is - to trick into believing or accepting as genuine something false and often preposterous.
Wikipedia: A hoax is a falsehood deliberately fabricated to masquerade as the truth. It is distinguishable from errors in observation or judgment, rumors, urban legends, ...
The distinction is that "hoax" refers to a pretend phenomenon rather than just some dishonest manipulation--although that certainly happened in conjunction with the hoaxes. Anyway, Clarice Feldman:
Election Fraud With No Apparent Judicial Relief
Many Americans -- according to some surveys, a majority -- believe that the presidential election was marred by massive fraud in five states without which the President would surely have been re-elected.
The short version of this disbelief in the integrity of the election results is this by Kenekoa the Great on the unrealistic belief that the frail, corrupt Joe Biden won:
When you win a record low 17% of counties, lose Black & Hispanic support, lose 18/19 Bellwether Counties, lose Ohio, Florida, & Iowa -- and lose 27/27 House "Toss-Ups" -- but you shatter the popular vote record
Roger Kimball rightly observes, in a strikingly subtitled article,
A Betrayal of American Freedom
It is a mournful, and usually sanguinary, alternative that awaits those who barter freedom for the simulacrum of normality .
that it is just such phenomena that convince him--beyond all the usual reporting--that this was a giant hoax, a simulacrum as it were of an election: an Election Hoax. And he warns those who advocate accepting the results of this hoax as normality--the usual Establishment suspects, but also confused persons of good will:
I fear that John Adams was right when, writing to his wife in 1775 , he noted that while destroyed cities might be rebuilt and “a People reduced to Poverty, may acquire fresh Property,” a “Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever.”
Many people, including some smart people of good will, are impatient with Donald Trump. They are impatient, above all, with the 2020 election. They want it to be over. They want to get on with “normal life.” They believe that ceding a stolen election to a geriatric talking mannequin represents normality because it wears a familiar face. In fact, it is terra incognita . Or, rather, it is unknown only in an American context. History provides us with many, many examples of what we may expect from acceding to such a betrayal of freedom. It is a mournful, and usually sanguinary, alternative that awaits those who barter freedom for the simulacrum of normality. I think that Donald Trump understands that. I am convinced that many of his 75 million supporters do, too.
This is why my fervent hope is that Trump declines to solemnize an Inauguration Hoax. If it does, indeed, come to that. Do not barter away our freedom with a dishonest acceptance of unreality.
UPDATE: H/T TGP re Bill Binney's great tweet. Binney backs up the KanekoaTheGreat's more impressionistic expression of unbelief with some relatively simple math. Binney is working off a WaPo article. You can read a deeper dive at:
(39)With 212Million registered voters and 66.2% voting,140.344 M voted. Now if Trump got 74 M, that leaves only 66.344 M for Biden. These numbers don’t add up to what we are being told. Lies and more Lies!https://t.co/pY3n6DEWzPhttps://t.co/5FSNfJw992
— Bill Binney, Constitutional Patriot (@Bill_Binney) December 19, 2020
Maybe disgraced soon-to-be-former AG Bill Barr can explain all this away.