Baloney

 

Why is “Phoney” (Like in PERFECT “PHONE” CALL, get it?) Fani Willis, the severely underperforming D.A. of Fulton County who is being accused of having an “affair” with a Gang Member of a group that she is prosecuting, leaking my name in regard to a Grand Jury pertaining to Election Fraud & Irregularities that I say took place in Georgia. I made a PERFECT PHONE CALL OF PROTEST. What does Phoney Fani have to do with me?
-- Donald Trump, Truth Social, 8/13/2023

"Phoney"

Phoney. Like Phone. 

Phone call. Phoney. Phone. See? And then Phoney is like Phony. Get it? Ha ha. Phoney. Hilarious. 

I am very clever. 

Oh yes, very clever indeed. 

You know, a perfectly normal, rational, adult message from a man who used to be President of the United States and wants to be again. Like that. Sure. Go ahead and have the lawyers put that on the legal documents and sing it in court Foney Fani bobani fofanny nanni mo nanni bonana...

What?

Yeah, you're right. I'll stop. 

Besides, you probably don't get it anyway. Too intellectual for us poor chumps, am I right? That's the Wharton Business degree talking right there. You gotta be well bred, Ivy League, upper crust...

What? 

Fine.  

A former president, currently under more than 70 felony charges, screaming online about how the election was stolen (or as he puts it "stollen") from him yesterday morning, and threatening witnesses and court officials today in advance of even more criminal indictments for attempted election fraud, is just how democracy works in America now. 

He claims to have "Massive and Conclusive Proof" of election fraud. 

Massive and Conclusive Proof [sic].

Gigantic, colossal, immense, tremendous, the most massive Brobdingnagian proof like no one has ever seen before!

Proof. 

Except so far the only proof Trump has managed to produce is an amateurish YouTube movie made by a convicted felon who was put in prison for committing election fraud and who Trump himself pardoned and some random gibberish from a failed pillow salesman who is mostly famous for cocaine benders and unhinged conspiracy theories. 

Which is weird. 

Really weird. 

Because despite millions of dollars and endless accusations and repeated promises of earthshaking evidence, these sons of bitch still can't prove election fraud in even the most sympathetic court of law. 

I mean, it's just astounding how far up their own assholes these Trump cultists are. Absolutely astounding. I honestly don't know how they're getting enough oxygen to keep what little brains they have operating. 

Or maybe they aren't.

Look here: Trump himself when he was president, first thing he did after being handed an office he didn't deserve by the Electoral College, formed the Advisory Commission on Election Integrity -- because he was mad that he'd lost the popular vote and was determined to prove that America loved him more than Hillary Clinton. 

You remember this, right? 

Sure you do. The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. That's right. But a lot of other people seem to have forgotten all about it. Include the Press. 

And who did Trump put in charge of his big giant enormous Commission? 

Former Kansas Secretary of State (now Kansas State Attorney General), Kris Kobach, a hardcore Republican partisan who was absolutely convinced there was chicanery afoot and who was determined to prove it. Which is always what you want in an AG, a guy who starts out absolutely convinced of the conclusion and then goes looking for evidence to support it. No chance of a legal system going completely haywire with a guy like that in charge of Death Row, am I right? 

But I digress. 

AND EVEN WITH THE FULL POWER OF THE US GOVERNMENT BEHIND IT, THE FULL WEIGHT OF THE PRESIDENCY, KOBACH COULDN'T FIND A SINGLE CASE OF ELECTION FRAUD.

Well, I mean, he couldn't find a single case other than than a bunch of old white Republicans double voting, but somehow that doesn't count (see the previous note about forgone conclusions). Oh, and lest I sound too dismissive, a Republican "election" investigator hired by the commission was indicted for possession of child porn. So, you know, at least they got one arrest out of it. 

But again, I digress.

Trump's commission made repeated claims of voting by non-citizens. They told America with absolute certainty that millions -- not just one or two, but millions -- of illegal aliens were voting for Democrats. 

Millions. 

That was their count, not mine. Millions. 

But in the end, they could produce exactly zero evidence of this astounding claim. They couldn't even find one bedraggled Mexican fence-jumper to pin the whole thing on. 

Not even with the full power of the federal government behind them. 

And, ironically, even grossly openly-racist red states like Mississippi told Trump to "go jump in the Gulf of Mexico" and that their election systems were secure. The commission folded up and closed its doors in less than six months and Kobach slunk back to Kansas in defeat. 

Here we are, seven years later, and this ongoing lie about election fraud cost Fox News nearly a billion dollars in a lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems. Probably over a billion when you total up the settlement and the lawyer fees. 

And again, with all the resources, all the money, all the lawyers, all the billionaire backers and the complete and utter lack of any integrity or belief in any actual truth, Fox News still couldn't prove a single case of voting fraud or any exploited vulnerability in Dominion's electronic voting systems in any fashion whatsoever in any state including those controlled by political organizations sympathetic to Trump himself and more than willing to give Republican operators like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell illegal access to their machines. Fox News couldn't show any compromise to the systems and had to admit in public that they were wrong. And then they had to pay. $787.5 million dollars to Dominion. 

And looks pretty certain that Fox News is going to lose a similar lawsuit to Smartmatic as well, maybe even harder. 

And speaking of Georgia, that state will likely cost Republicans engaged in this conspiracy theory dearly. 

For Trump, Georgia may very well be his Waterloo. 

Foney Fani bobani fofanny nanni mo nanni bonana...

What? 

Right. Sorry. 

Anyway. In every state, the integrity of the elections has been examined down the molecular level. In no case is there any evidence whatsoever of any significant vote tampering or voter fraud. There are minor isolated cases of corrupt voting officials attempting to change results and a few people voting illegally either on purpose or by accident (and in Ron DeSantis' Florida, "accident" and "illegal" have very questionable definitions, but still...), but in almost every case those votes were for Trump and/or Republicans and were never, ever, enough to change the outcome of any election in either direction. 

Not even close. 

Here's the thing: The real threats to democracy aren't at the ballot box and never were. 

The real threat comes from those like Trump who would ignore democracy and the will of the people altogether and who daily attempt to replace democracy with disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, intimidation, dark money, and when all that fails: seize power with violence and insurrection. 

Trump is the inevitable end result of that loathsome trend started by Nixon and Reagan.

It's the ideology of racism, selfish saber-rattling nationalism, endless corruption that is never held to account, slathered over by a thin veneer of the shallow aw-shucks John Wayne patriotism of those who themselves never served. 

It is the dimwitted paranoid maladapted knuckle-dragging inheritor of McCarthyism, Jim Crow and the German/American Bund, the distilled unhinged essence of violent cowardice whored up and presented as strength and manliness to the brawlers and the goons and the shouting mob too damn stupid to realize they're being used even as they are gleefully thrown into prison for the crimes of their leaders. 

It's not some foreign nation.

It's not some army at our border or some navy on our shores. 

It's this. This rot. This corruption. This cancer. This swollen orange carbuncle on the ass of humanity, sitting on a toilet in Mar-a-Lago right now, shitting his colon inside out in rage and furiously tweeting  hate and threats and fascism with his tiny sausage-like thumbs. 

This is always how democracy dies. 

This violent selfishness from those too lazy and stupid to do the basic grunt work of citizenship. 

When you demand the population swear allegiance to a flag but give your own fealty to party and ideology without a shred of self-awareness; when you demand business be given the same voice and rights as a citizen but then punish that corporation when it doesn't say what you want; when your prisons are full to bursting with the poor but not the rich; when justice and liberty are hereditary birthrights of privilege and increasingly unobtainable to the lower classes and when even violence can no longer change this condition, well, the end of the Republic isn't far away. 

The worst part is that in every case -- every single case -- the collapse is never a surprise. 

When it all falls apart, well, the warning signs were there all along. Loud. Obvious. Laid out in plain order, one after the other. Stop! Go Back! Danger! Danger! And in every case, the course of the fall could have been altered, or reversed, at any time, at any point along the way, if only the population had the will to do so.  

The greatest strength of a democratic republic is the citizen. 

Ironically, that's also its greatest weakness. 

It doesn't take much to bring down the mightiest Republic. 

You just have to stop believing in it. 

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.
― Plutarch