Literary Corner: Rudolfo's Solliloquy

Via Jacobean Tragedies.

Just when America needed a new poetic voice, a sound out of Jacobean tragedy, violent and baroque—

I Can't Give You All These Affidavits

by Rudolph Giuliani

Now, I don’t know. You’re going to tell me

that sixty people are lying? They didn’t just

tell me this. They swore under penalty of perjury,

which is something no Democrat has ever done.

You don’t even ask Biden about this. You don’t

put them under penalty of perjury. He doesn’t

even get asked questions about it. He doesn’t

get asked questions about all the evidence

of the crimes that he committed. These people

are under penalty of perjury, the names that are

on our affidavit. They swear that they weren’t

allowed to carry out their function as inspectors.

And it’s not just a technical thing. There’s a

reason they did it. Why would you not allow

people to carry out the function they’ve been allowed

to do for fifty years, sixty years? Why wouldn’t you

allow inspections of those ballots? Because you knew

you were going to use those ballots to catch Biden up.

And you had a big road ahead of you. You had to catch him

up for seven hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand

votes that he was behind. And the only way you were going

to do it were with the mail-in ballots. You couldn’t

have a Democrat and Republican inspector around.

They don’t even have Democrats watching, because

they’d be afraid that they’d be honest Democrats

who would say, “You’re cheating.” So, that takes us to

Michigan where there was an honest Democrat

who said they were cheating. And we’ll show you her

affidavit because I know you keep reporting falsely

that we have no evidence, that we have no specific

acts of fraud. That’s because the coverage of this

has been almost as dishonest as the scheme itself.

The American people are entitled to know this. You

don’t have a right to keep it from them. You don’t

have a right to lie about it. And you are. I mean,

you don’t report to them that a citizen of this country,

a very fine woman who was willing to allow me to

give you her name. I can’t give you all these affidavits.

Because, if I do, these people will be harassed. They’ll be

threatened. They may lose their job. They will lose their friends.

We’ve lost lawyers in this case because they’ve been

threatened. We’ve had lawyers that need protection.

What's going on in this country is horrible. And

the censorship that you’re imposing is making it worse.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that no Democrat has ever sworn under penalty of perjury?

Answer: Don't make me laugh. Some Democrats have even committed perjury, though I think Republicans have the edge on that, at least currently. In fact Giuliani claims, later on in the piece, to have a Democrat of his own among the affidavits, "an honest Democrat" in Michigan, so I think he must mean something else, if he means anything, which I can't guarantee. One Michigan affidavit was from a Bay City nurse called Angela Eilf who drove to Detroit responding to a call as Biden began to take the lead:

“There is no way Joe Biden won this fair and square, I would put everything I own on it,” Eilf claims....

She heard the call that Republican vote watchers or challengers were needed at the TCF Center in Detroit the day after the election. She took video of an election official explaining why more challengers were not allowed into the vote tabulating area, one of her complaints in the affidavit. She also believed more Democrat challengers were watching the vote count process than Republicans.

“Of the five people at a table, there were four Democrats to one Republican, or non-partisan,” she says.

How does she know that?

“I was told from inside the ballot room, by a supervisor,” she says.

Or perhaps it was the affidavit from Anita Chase, whose son Mark, who died in summer 2016 at the age of 38, which is a horrible, sad thing to happen to a mother, seemed according to state records to have voted in November 2016 and November 2020, only she'd read the records wrong, because in fact her son's registration had been canceled in 2016 and it's pretty evident that the Mark D. Chase who voted this year was a different one, in a different county and born in a different year.

Or it could have been Sarah Stoddard, who sued the Detroit City Election commission and Wayne County Board of Canvassers for injunctive relief to a somewhat chilly reception from the judge on 6 November

Plaintiffs' pleadings do not persuade this Court that they are likely to prevail on the merits for several reasons. First, this Court believes plaintiffs misinterpret the required placement of major party inspectors at the absent voter counting board location. MCL 168.765a (10) states in part "At least one election inspector from each major political party must be present at the absent voter counting place ... " While plaintiffs contends the statutory section mandates there be a Republican and Democratic inspector at each table inside the room, the statute does not identify this requirement. This Court believes the plain language of the statute requires there be election inspectors at the TCF Center facility, the site of the absentee counting effort. 

Pursuant to MCL 168. 73a the County chairs for Republican and Democratic parties were permitted and did submit names of absent voter counting board inspectors to the City of Detroit Clerk. Consistent with MCL 168.674, the Detroit City Clerk did make appointments of inspectors. Both Republican and Democratic inspectors were present throughout the absent voter counting board location. 

and dropped the case today.

Or perhaps it was one of these hundred affidavits

He claimed that he had more than 100 affidavits alleging voting improprieties in a federal lawsuit the campaign filed in Michigan, Donald J. Trump for President Inc. v. Benson. But the campaign’s own lawyers voluntarily dismissed that suit just hours before Mr. Giuliani held his news conference.

Distinguished journalist Barton Gellman showed up on TV again to say that although he now has no reason to think his Pennsylvania informants will succeed in tossing the elected presidential electors and replacing them with Trump electors in defiance of state law and the Democratic governor who has to sign off on any legislation they pass if they don't have a supermajority, which they don't, he's nevertheless deeply concerned that he hasn't been convinced it can't happen, and Lincoln Project ex–executive director of the Michigan Republican Party Jeff Timmer showed up too, to say that even though Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield have announced that they have no intention of trying to overturn Biden's victory in their state

“Michigan law does not include a provision for the Legislature to directly select electors or to award electors to anyone other than the person who received the most votes,” Shirkey’s spokeswoman said last week. On Nov. 6, Chatfield tweeted: “Whoever gets the most votes will win Michigan! Period. End of story. Then we move on.”

he's unable to trust them to resist Trump's entreaties at tomorrow's Oval Office meeting, and it occurred to me to start up a new paranoia, that journalists and talking heads with a profitable line in being afraid of an eternal Trump presidency are pumping that up for all it's worth because it's worth a lot to them (Gellman, in the Snowden days, as the most respectable exponent of the theory that NSA was fixated on the dick pictures of private US citizens, got a huge amount of career mileage landing him at The Atlantic where he no longer needs to do any reporting at all). There are people who want us to be living in this fear that The Donald will turn into Mussolini after four years of failure because it's good for their own branding.

And it leads to us ignoring the terrible crimes comnmitted by these people against our planet, against brown and black people, against our constitutional order, in favor of obsessing over something (a crazy horserace finish out of a 1980s movie comedy) that's not going to happen. It's really a problem.