First off, as a public service, here are some key election certification dates according to this page:
- November 20: Georgia
- November 23: Michigan and Pennsylvania
- November 30: Arizona
- December 1: Nevada and Wisconsin
On these dates, the election result of the state is declared official. The Electoral College votes on December 14.
I bring this up in case there are more shenanigans about not certifying elections, as in Wayne County, Michigan, last night. The Republican holdouts eventually relented and the county results were certified. I take it yesterday was a county deadline for certification.
I don’t know that the fact of certification will discourage Trump and Giuliani from their doomed quest to flip the election. For a good laugh, do see Here’s what happened when Rudolph Giuliani made his first appearance in federal court in nearly three decades.
See also Charles Pierce, 40 Years of Republican Politics Came to a Head at the Wayne County Board of Canvassers and Paul Waldman, We came much closer to an election catastrophe than many realize.
Trump is being Trump. He's always considered a contract to be the starting point in negotiations, fully aware the other party who signs the contract thinks it is the actual deal. What Trump is obliged to pay is the starting point of negotiations after Trump has what he wants. There's a long line of people he's stiffed over decades who can attest to Trump's style.
Trump considered the election to be the same as cheating a subcontractor. He's going the legal route, the same as he's done in NYC. Gaming the system, delaying, forcing the cost up for the victim… isn't working the same here. He's trying to win an election through litigation – I'm sure we'll hear in a few days that Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania can't certify the election until all appeals are exhausted. Trump thinks he can use the certification deadline to his advantage.
What's mind-boggling is that otherwise nice, moral, upstanding people endorse the chicanery that Trump is openly deploying. IMO, it comes down to hate. They are *only* cheating liberals and we're pedophiles so we deserve it. They're only cheating because liberals always cheat – so it's not cheating. Bells went off in my head after I saw the first "Dirty Harry" movie. The hero (police detective) tortured the bad guy after shooting him. I enjoyed the performance but I had concerns – if cops are allowed to torture according to their evaluation of who is "bad", then citizens have no protection from police brutality except to surrender in total acquiescence to every blue uniform. Anything else justifies torture.
This is the moral frame we have to undo – somehow. I know it's not all Republicans because a LOT of mid-level Republicans have stood up for free and fair elections this week, but among the cultists, it's axiomatic that they are good – therefore the opposition is evil. Within this simple "White hat vs black hat" morality, anything goes if they are doing it to us. (And there are screams of outrage when the shoe is on the other foot – like when black demonstrators show up en masse with AR-15s.)
I'm open to suggestions but I favor a dual approach. Be prepared to meet fascists in protests with mace. However, on the political front, liberals need to bring liberal solutions to problems in red states.
tRUMP is doing what it (yes, it) does best: Suing and whining. The prior's not a resounding success, and the latter now has wailing on top of the ceaseless whining.
On top of the continuous onslaught of pointless lawsuits holding up the critical transition period, there's another problem: The longer the RepubliKKKLANS take to tell him that he lost, and that he needs to go sit in a corner and STFU, the more that gives credence to the MAGAts and others to believe that the election truly was tampered with.
Frankly, if I'm alive 10 years from now, and America is still a representative democracy, I think I might be shocked.
I really wish that I could say that I think that the next 4 years will see us return back to some form of "normal," but that would be a lie. I think we're closer to a civil war now than at any time since our first Civil War ended.
I don't know what form(s) it might take, but I can't shake the feeling that there's going to be blood.
I hope I'm really, really wrong.
Charles Pierce is quite a writer and a scholar. His disdain for those who elevate stupidity to a virtue is admirable. He seems to have gone to a biological basis for RPD which I guess could stand for Republican Psychiatric Disorder or Republican Prion Disorder.
That Mad Cow disease is a prion based disease is even more apt, and it is good to wrestle a term from science to use when it is appropriate.
(Credit CDC government publication.)
Mad Cow disease, if you recall, was linked to a practice of feeding of waste cow parts to cows in a cannibalistic farming error that supported the idea that one should not eat their own kind. This is always a tough lesson for Republicans to learn, figuratively for sure and, only by hearsay literally.
Organic Brain Damage due to prion disease could explain Rudy Giuliani of late, who's mental opacity is frequently on display. I fear not only stupidity has been made a virtue in this country, but now crazy has been elevated to a similar level. Must we witness the decay of another dying diva? He needs and WE REALLY NEED some asylum from this sort of rot.
Well said and your written word is right up there with Charles.
I believe I've written before that Giuliani has considerably deteriorated from the guy who used to be mayor of NYC, and I wasn't a big fan of him back then, either. But he wasn't the blubbering mess then that he is now.
Been injured in an election? Call Rudy Giuliani now! – a good laugh courtesy the funny and formidable Alexandra Petri.