The president generated yet another wave of controversy in his recent call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The winning statement was, “I just want to find 11, 780 votes.”
If you followed the headlines, you would be led to believe the audio was some secret and nefarious effort to rig a lost election. Carl Bernstein made sure we knew that this was “far worse” than Watergate. In other news, the cow goes moo. I listened to the entire hour-long call myself, and I am wondering if these journalists even ventured five minutes.
The call contained nothing surprising. The Trump team is making astounding claims which, if false are delusional. If true, however, there is little action that could be considered too extreme. The quote that is driving the headlines has been taken entirely out of context. The president is alleging there are half a million votes out there (more accurately illegal votes to be dismissed), and he is pragmatically asking the secretary of state to at least find enough of them to win. And truly, it wasn’t even a proper request; it was a rhetorical indictment of Raffensperger’s handling of the election.
In light of the absurd melodrama of the mainstream media, I am tempted to overlook the fact that I really did take issue with this call, albeit for entirely different reasons. They claim Trump is setting fire to our democracy. In truth, he may just be breaking apart the Republican party.
In case you have forgotten, there is Senate runoff in Georgia. Two of them. Tomorrow. If you would have asked me on election night, I would have said the Republicans win 95% of the time. Now, on the eve of the election, FiveThirtyEight has both Democratic candidates leading by two points. If Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff take to the United States Senate, I hold the president entirely accountable. The reasons are all seen in this weekend’s call but have been on full display for the past two months.
President Trump’s anti-establishment demeanor has been refreshing at many points throughout his four years. He has barreled through his term by the sheer force of his personality. Unfortunately, it hurt us in the 2018 midterms, and it has come back to bite us all again. I hate empty suit politicians as much as the next man, but sometimes you just have to exercise some prudence. Instead, Trump has berated the leading Republican officials in the state we desperately need to win. He reiterated this in the call by emphasizing how much the state hates their governor and their secretary of state. This is just bad politics.
The second problem is that the president speaks in headlines even in what was presumably a private conversation. In the call, Trump’s attorneys raised legitimate points that seemed to be going somewhere. Nearly every time, however, he spoke over them with a sensationalist tenor that made it all sound a bit crazy. Specific allegations can focus the support and ensure the problems are eradicated in the future. Instead, he has used language that has demoralized a large swath of his base and clearly suppressed voter turnout.
This is not an indictment on his presidency. He almost singlehandedly revitalized a dying party, and I was looking forward to Trump 2020. That doesn’t excuse him if things go wrong tomorrow. The Republicans hitched their wagon to the president, and he may just take us off the cliff. We need to regroup before it is too late. Trump is not our future. For goodness sake, let’s not run him again in 2024.
Amen and awomen…
In the ongoing effort to make satire superfluous, Rep. E(wo)manuel Cleaver made his entry at the co(wo)mmencement of the 117th Congress. I give the effort 10 of 10 for woke pandering.
The Missouri congressman and ‘pastor’ led the opening prayer in a mostly innocuous (wo)manner. Until the end, that is. The prayer was given “in the name of the monotheistic god, Brahma, and god known by many names by many different faiths.” Interesting. I would ask why the only god an ordained Christian minister can name is Hindu, but I don’t really expect anything else from Democrats (or the United Methodist Church).
As if his woke calibration were off, he decided to double down with the amazing closing, “Amen and awomen.” What a prayer! I am sure the monotheistic god was very pleased. Naturally, this sparked a slew of tweets about the linguistic root of ‘Amen’. True as they may be, they rather missed the point. I don’t believe even these wokescolds are that stupid. This kind of folly is not beaten with facts and logic. They will suffer that like a martyr. The thing they can’t stand is to be laughed at, and that is precisely what we should do.
Iran Announces They Are Enriching Uranium (Again)
Iran announced that it has begun enriching uranium to 20% purity. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, this would slash “the time it would take for Tehran to produce the grade of fuel needed for a nuclear weapon.”
This news comes after several pronouncements by the Iranians that they will take revenge for actions such as the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani. It comes as no surprise that a despotic state would cause trouble. The timing might raise some eyebrows, however. Doesn’t a certain someone take the White House in few weeks?
Iran and the Middle East was one of the most overlooked topics of the presidential election. If it were only for the magnitude of domestic concerns, it would be pardonable, but that was not the case. Corruption and collusion with foreign governments has been in the news, in one way or another, for the past four years. Still, we managed to overlook the one matter of foreign policy that was always most likely to have an immediate effect.
Middle East peace was brokered with relatively little coverage (much to the chagrin of the Iranians). It happened because the US, under President Trump, offered a renewed sense of deterrence. Now we have a president-elect who offers about as much deterrence as a lap dog. If we are dragged into another war in the Middle East, you know who to blame.
The Free Narnian 