If a Republican Loses, It’s Not a Valid Election

Filed in National, Open Thread by on December 28, 2017

Point and laugh at hapless clown Roy Moore’s latest step in his refusal to acknowledge reality. He filed a lawsuit in federal court, the one he was twice kicked off of, alleging voter fraud in the election that saw him repudiated by a margin of more than 20,000 Alabama voters. Take a careful look, because this is the playbook the national GOP was going to follow if, as had been expected, Hillary Clinton won the Electoral College.

Here’s what people who long for centrism don’t get: You can’t achieve it unless both sides want it, and one side obviously doesn’t want it. Too many Democrats, including all of Delaware’s Congressional delegation, refuse to see this. Republicans are not interested in sharing power, unless the alternative is having no power at all, and they will not hesitate to destroy the country’s institutions in order to gain and hold onto that power.

It’s been clear for a generation that the Republican Party is in a death spiral. Only once in the past six presidential elections has it won a majority of the popular vote, and given the unpopularity of the party’s positions that’s unlikely to change. It has therefore concentrated its efforts not on appealing to voters but in gaming a system that was set up to reflect the will of the majority. It’s been doing so, on every front available to it, for a generation.

The 2016 elections marked a new low point, in which the GOP, incapable of rigging elections on its own even with the voting machine manufacturer in the fold, turned to Russia for help in putting a minority government in place, taking oligarchs’ laundered money and technological aid to capture the presidency for a megalomaniacal dotard.

From the available evidence, it appears the plan worked better than expected, so we never got to see the chaos Republicans had prepared to unleash after a Clinton victory. All the signs are plain, though; Trump spent the last month before election day claiming the election was rigged, and the days after his unexpected triumph he still maintained that he won the popular vote as well. These claims have been written off as part of Trump’s mental infirmity, but Moore’s turn toward the same tactics shows that the strategy is widely shared among Republicans.

The future is clear: Republicans intend to take over the governments of the United States by whatever means necessary, popular sovereignty be damned. For now they are doing so under the guise of democratic elections, but if that proves untenable, I am convinced they will go farther towards autocratic rule, as they respect the nation’s institutions only so far as they prove useful to that takeover.

Think you’re living in a democratic republic? As the peasant Dennis in “Monty Python’s Holy Grail” says, “You’re foolin’ yourself. We’re living in a dictatorship! A self-perpetuating autocracy.” And there’s some lovely filth down here.

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  1. puck says:

    I’m guessing Repubs will use Moore’s lawsuit as an excuse not to seat Doug Jones.

  2. puck says:

    Our estranged blog-friends are now reposting an anti-white extended Twitter rant by “Propane Jane.” No wonder they needed a safe space.

    At least the rant is equal opportunity – it disparages all white people and not just white males. Who have been falling for Repub racist trickle-down crap since Reagan.

    There’s a little Bernie-hate thrown in too. And to be fair, who among us can forget Bernie’s deplorable proposal for $15 white minimum wage ? Or his free college for whites only?

  3. puck says:

    McConnell on Paul Ryan’s plan to slash social spending via reconciliation:

    “The sensitivity of entitlements is such that you almost have to have a bipartisan agreement in order to achieve a result,” McConnell told reporters at a news conference last week.

    Translation: “We’re going to need Democratic votes to slash social spending.”

    Tom Carper, answer the phone, it’s Mitch.

  4. Alby says:

    If they want Democratic votes, they’ll have to apply Democratic remedies: Cap payments through means testing, remove cap on earnings to which tax applies.

    That would solve the problem, but not the way Republicans would do it on their own. If the proposal is to do it just as Republicans would if they had the votes, well, only a brain-addled doofus would fall for that.

    Paging Sen. Carper!

  5. Alby says:

    @puck, re Propane Jane: As I said over there, let’s grant that it’s mostly true, that racism motivated the majority of Trump voters. I don’t actually believe this — the vast majority of the 63 million who voted for Trump also voted for Romney, McCain and Bush before him and racism wasn’t needed to explain their vote totals.

    So, for the sake of argument, America is racist and that’s why Trump won. As a datum of political interest, what do you do with that in the service of future elections? Highlight it, so that the white majority has reason to doubt Democrats’ motives, or look for issues on which race and gender take a back seat — jobs?

    The ones intent on relitigating the election are the ones who lost it — the Hillary supporters, the bitter dead-enders like Propane Jane, who point to her as “the most admired woman in America” without noting that she “won” that poll with a plurality of 9% of respondents, while 61% currently disapprove of her in a straight up-or-down poll.

    It’s a real stumper, all right, why black women, who make up roughly 17% of the electorate, can’t win elections without support from other groups. If only a field like math could explain it…

  6. mouse says:

    “megalomaniacal dotard” I like that

  7. Paul says:

    Re: Roy Moore “They think he’s a fool, but he’s OUR fool” (emphasis added)

  8. Alby says:

    The devil doesn’t wear a name tag.

  9. puck says:

    You know, with all the well deserved opprobrium Moore received for pursuing teenage girls, I haven’t heard anyone on either side calling for Alabama to raise its age of consent from 16. If you don’t want adult men pursuing teenage girls in your state, maybe you should make it illegal.

  10. Dave says:

    ” I don’t actually believe this ”

    Yeah. I don’t either.

    The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. J. Carter 1979

    The general malaise of which he spoke afflicts us still. But wait! Surely you jest. The economy is doing well, employment numbers were up, the housing bubble crisis, and other sundry crises were handled. What the heck does anyone have any business suffering from malaise?

    Well the picture weren’t so pretty in the heartland (wherever that is). Vast swaths of America was and is depressed. The long time factory, mining, and other by the sweat of your brow, jobs were gone (ain’t never comin back no matter what anyone says). Make America Great Again? Sure why not. I don’t have anything, so I don’t have thing to lose. I’m so far in the hole the only place to go is up.

    The problem is, no one spoke for them – or to them – until Trump. He gave voice to their frustration and sure there were the racist dog whistles but really most of them, if they are racist, are very passive about it. Call them hobby racists. When they are working they don’t have time for racism. When they aren’t, well white supremacy is kind of like a job.

    Is the above pretty simplistic. Yeah, but the “heartland” is pretty simplistic in thought, word, and deed. Get up. Go to work. Come home. Eat dinner. Go to bed. SSDD.

    What the nation as whole failed in doing is managing the transitional economy and moving the workforce to the next growth arena AND creating work by investing in infrastructure. Now I suppose some element of racism in the mix, but the reality is, it’s classism. As long as somebody is worse off than me, I can feel good about myself. But when my lot is the same as everyone else’s, then I know life sucks. Many of us maintain our esteem by being better than someone else. It used to the Italians, Irish, etc. (but it’s always been the blacks).

    Classifying any of that as simple racism is ridiculous.

  11. Mitch Crane says:

    Judge Moore did not file “in the same court he was kicked off of”. He was never a federal judge. He was twice elected to the Alabama State Supreme Court as Chief Justice and was twice removed by a judicial review board.

  12. Mike Dinsmore says:

    At this point, I’m wondering who is going to have the honor of pulling the name out of the hat in that Virginia House of Delegates election. The way things are going, they’ll probably decide to make it a coin toss, let the rethug call it, and use a two headed coin.

  13. Dana says:

    Alby wrote:

    Point and laugh at hapless clown Roy Moore’s latest step in his refusal to acknowledge reality. He filed a lawsuit in federal court, the one he was twice kicked off of, alleging voter fraud in the election that saw him repudiated by a margin of more than 20,000 Alabama voters. Take a careful look, because this is the playbook the national GOP was going to follow if, as had been expected, Hillary Clinton won the Electoral College.

    Al Gore could not be reached for comment. Neither could Jill Stein.

    The problem for Mr Moore is that, even if he had iron-clad evidence of vote fraud, with a secret ballot he would not be able to demonstrate, conclusively, how many fraudulent votes were for Mr Jones. The only possible ‘win’ for him would be to have the whole election thrown out, and revoted.

  14. Dana says:

    Mr Dinsmore wrote:

    At this point, I’m wondering who is going to have the honor of pulling the name out of the hat in that Virginia House of Delegates election. The way things are going, they’ll probably decide to make it a coin toss, let the rethug call it, and use a two headed coin.

    Maybe they’ll have somebody pull a legislator’s name out of the hat to determine who pulls the next name out of the hat. 🙂

  15. Rufus Y. Kneedog says:

    I think Dave has hit the nail on the head.
    This is an issue that will only get worse. There is a USA Today article in the News Journal on truck drivers causing accidents. One of the last and largest remaining blue collar areas and they are going away in favor of automation, probably in the next 10 years. The only reason we aren’t at 100% self driving vehicles right now is that there are too many stupid human drivers on the road and our stupidity is tough to program for.
    Lower tier white collar jobs are also at risk. Profits up, Stock market goes crazy, lower level jobs disappear.

  16. Dana says:

    Mr Kneedog: What was George Jetson’s job? One hour a day, one day a week, pushing a button at Spacely Sprockets. Thing is, Mr Spacely could have put in a robot to push that button, butting Mr Jetson completely out of work.

    In the future, you’ll either have to own your own company — think Cogswell Cogs here — or you’ll be unemployed and starve to death.

  17. Alby says:

    “In the future, you’ll either have to own your own company — think Cogswell Cogs here — or you’ll be unemployed and starve to death.”

    Which shows the reason late-stage capitalists are so devoted to the practice of getting all they can while they can — the system is unsustainable in its current form, and they’re trying to cash out before the casino goes bust.

  18. Alby says:

    @Mitch: Thanks for the correction.