I don’t understand why election-deniers/Trumpists/MAGAs/right-wingers/whatever are so hopped-up on the military running elections, and otherwise being in charge. Remember, before 1/6, there were (as I recall; I may be wrong) calls for a do-over election with the military running it. Then, on 1/6, various groups wanted Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, and call in the military. Now, Kari Lake supporters want the military to redo the Arizona election.
More like try Non-Tribalism. NO Republican politician or supporter ever really bellieved, deep down, in the Big Steal. If they had, they would have been camped out in droves on the National Mall for 2 straight years waving their signs. But now they’ve pulled all of their punches, and whatever nefarious means was used by the Dems in 2020 no longer seems to be in operation in 2022, despite the Dems somehow defying the Red Wave? Yeah, right.
They only started saying it because Cheeto did, simple as that.
In Georgia, the vote thief, Jody Hice, lost in the spring, when he was defeated in the primary by Brad Raffensperger. Partly due to Democrats like my wife and I, who crossed party lines to vote for Raffensperger and Governor Kemp. Both of them won in the general election. I’m not thrilled about that, but both of them demonstrated at least a shred of moral courage, standing up to the Groppenfueher, so I’m not as unhappy as I could be. Frankly, a Hice win would have been intolerable - having a Trumpie overseeing elections is like asking Jeffery Epstein to chaperone a middle school sleepover.
Seriously, there are two threads of thinking here.
One is that the US military is absolutely incorruptible. If the US military runs the elections they will be honest.
The other is that since it’s an article of faith (at least on the right) that 90+% of military members are right-leaning, there is no way they could be suborned to throw the election to the Ds. There’s just nobody who’d countenance taking such a bribe.
So of course the Rs would win a military-run election. Not because of any cheating, but because all Rs know (wrongly as it happens, but they’re dead certain nevertheless) that they are the vast majority of US citizens; Ds are a tiny minority whose numbers are inflated by pure chicanery.
So that’s why they like the idea of a military take-over of the ultimate covilian function: control of the make-up of the government.
As a former military officer myself what I enjoy most about this silly line of thought is that the DoD is by far the most socialist feature of the US government or the US public.
If we really did model our larger society along the lines of the military, everyone would pe provided housing, medical care, food, clothing, and a job. The head honcho would earn less than 10x what the lowliest streetsweeper does. And all would hobnob together at the same recreational and shopping centers.
A true socialist paradise: that’s life in the DoD.
Maybe the champion denier is Dan Cox who ran for governor of MD and lost by 62% to 35% and claims to have internal polls that guaranteed he would win. If he did have polls, they likely avoided Baltimore.
Josh Hawley was certainly a prominent election denier, even whipping up the insurrection crowd at the Capitol on January 6. (after which of course, he ran away from the mob in terror)
Well, Mister Election denier seems to have jumped off the Trump train:
“I think that this election was the funeral for the Republican Party as we know it,” he said at the US Capitol as he headed to vote. “The Republican Party as we have known it is dead –– and voters have made that clear.”
“We need to be thinking about what the future here is. I like a lot of what President Trump did as president. I think we’ve got a lot to talk about there. But we need to have a conversation about our core convictions to the party and clearly this party is going to have to, actually it’s going to have to be different, or we’re not going to be a majority party in this country.”
On whether he supports Trump running in 2024, Hawley said, “I’m not gonna give him advice, he’ll choose to do what he’s gonna do.”
At least as to this part, that’s a rather sphynx-like pronouncement. One can read into it almost whatever one wants. I don’t follow JH’s blather much, so without further context I can’t tell if he’s being cagey and dog-whistly, or whether he genuinely meant that recent events have conclusively proven that Trumpism was too far-right (and too far-klepto) to actually work for mainstream America.
I’d like to believe that a lot of people who aren’t paid media shills have been comparing and contrasting the actual results of calm Establishment Biden-ism versus chaotic carnival Trump-ism and are seeing that calm works better. Even if they’d prefer a right-leaning version of calm Establishment to the current left-leaning one.
Can the far–right “deplorables” be induced to crawl back under their rock to be ignored for another 30 years? Will they be so induced?
One of my guilty pleasures is reading the Breitbart comments. Some people like horror movies, I like this.
Over there it’s nonstop “Tehy Stoled Teh Elexion!” and they’re especially upset that neither Breitbart nor McConnell seems to want to carry that water.
Yeah, Hawley is not really “breaking with Trump” there and his call for a change of direction can be interpreted both as needing to be more moderate AND we need to be more radical depending on who’s listening
But I would tend to agree that while their vile sociopolitical goals stay the same, they may just have noticed that chaos and disorder and people waking every morning dreading “OMG what now?!?!?” is bad for business. And that they had plenty of success using “regular order” politics for decades and normalizing Trumpian disruption means nobody has a secure career any more.
Just for the record, our least-favorite-vice-denier-in-chief is still singing the story, but people are paying a lot less attention to him while Trump is in view:
Lindell shared a graphic on Instagram and in a video showing Warnock receiving a sharp spike in votes around 9 p.m.
“They are currently stealing Herschel Walkers race with the machines!” he wrote on Instagram.
“Oh wow, look at this everybody. This is real-time crime, our first one of the night,” Lindell said in the video, which shows the graph at about the 43:00 mark. “This is exciting. They are caught!”