Scenes From a Brief

 

Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller, enthroned, with the Hand Sanitizer of State. Actually, that's an illusion, he was walking into the US Capitol when this was taken, during Trump's second impeachment in January 2021. Photo by Andrew Harnik/AFP via Getty Images, as seen at CBS News.

Miller, P4 in the Jack Smith cast of witnesses (I'm reading his wonderfully vivid brief on the January 6 case and the theory that the president is immune from prosecution if he stages a coup in the course of performing his official duties), was among those who advised the president that the 2020 election had not in fact been stolen by Democrats, that there were not more than 10,000 votes from dead people in Georgia's returns but more like 12 total, which "could not be outcome-determinative" as Smith dryly points out, and that the video of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss during the tabulation of ballots at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta did not show them pulling ballots from suitcases under the tables and counting them multiple times or "quite obviously surreptitiously passing around  USB ports [presumably containing fraudulent vote counts] as if they are vials of heroine or cocaine" as Giuliani put it in testimony before the Government Affairs Committee of the Georgia House of Representatives. 

Miller even got a little tetchy about it (p. 25):

(P26 is apparently the Georgia attorney general Christopher Carr, whom Trump had called on December 8, asking him not to discourage the other state AGs from joining in the lawsuit pressed by Texas's Ken Paxton against Pennsylvania and other states including Georgia, to stop them from certifying their elections.)

Sue me, sue me, what can you do me?

Faith Prince and Nathan Lane. If you don't know the show, what makes it sublime is that he really does have to go to a prayer meeting, not because he's got religion but because he's lost a bet.

All right, explain this to me like I'm a five-year-old. I mean with a fairly big vocabulary for a five-year-old, but some innocence:

Rudy Giuliani, who served as a lawyer for former president Donald Trump, is no longer contesting as a legal matter that he made false and defamatory statements about two former Georgia election workers — but argues in a new court filing that what amounted to false claims about vote-rigging in the 2020 presidential election was constitutionally protected speech and did not damage the workers.

"So I made a bunch of false and defamatory statements about you, that's some kind of reason for taking me to court?"

Yes, Rudolf, that's supposedly how it works. He was sued by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the mother and daughter working on the Fulton County ballot count who were seen on video doing something Giuliani described as pulling fake ballots out of suitcases, like drug dealers "passing out dope", and "crooks" who "obviously" stuffed ballots, an accusation subsequently taken up by then-president Donald Trump, with the result that the two women's lives were completely upended, as they told the House January 6 committee a little over a year later: 

Overly Civil War

A post from Steve M ("A Civil War With No Gunfire") argues, I think correctly, that the real coup Republicans are putting together for next time isn't going to be an assault in the style of 6 January but the completion of the attempts to rig the voting system conservatives have been working on since forever, I guess especially since Bush v. Gore, by writing Republican dominance into the design of state and federal legislative districts instead of depending on the whims of voters, and taking away what power voters still have in appointing the electors in presidential elections and delivering it to the state legislatures to overturn the ones they don't like (unilaterally deciding they're "fraudulent").

It struck me that the base, used to bloodthirsty Trumpiness and really gearing up for a proper war, might not be too roused by this strategy—as I was noting the other day focus on dubious cases of election fraud seems to bring down Republican turnout—and Steve's rhythm brought me a visit from the Muse, with apologies to Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern, to the tune of:

A civil war with no gunfire
A crashing bore, a no-fun fire
We should be dressed like seventeen-sev'nty-sixers
Instead we're led by dozens of K Street fixers

A civil war with no cannon
Is just a snore for Steve Bannon
If you don't spill some unpatriotic gore
What is it even for?
Overly civil war

A civil war with no bleeding
Is not the score that Trump's needing
You may have found an argument that convinces
But not the ones from wherever Erik Prince is

A civil war with no bullets
Is not for guys who wear mullets
If you don't spill some unpatriotic gore
What is it even for?
Overly civil war

 

How to Steal a Horse Race: Get to the Finish First

Ruidoso Downs, New Mexico.

 

How to rob a bank: go to your bank, make a withdrawal not exceeding the available funds in your personal account, walk out counting your cash. pic.twitter.com/ruDFpgge7q

— Tyler Hansen (@tjhansen) December 27, 2021

Speaking of ignorant tweets by contenders for the Most Obnoxious Republican Senator title. Paul doesn't seem to notice that the process he describes as "done in a legally valid way" is done in a legally valid way, or, in short, is legal. Like, he's waxing indignant at the way Democrats win elections by getting more votes.

In reality, the article he links to, by somebody called William Doyle at Rod Dreher's American Conservative, does have a suggestion of some nefarious and possibly illegal activities, but doesn't make it very explicit, possibly because he knows he's lying, and poor Rand evidently can't follow the argument,  so he just posts this quote from it, hoping the sound of it will be scary enough.

The story Doyle is trying to convey is not what the extracted paragraph seems to be saying, that Democrats somehow cheated by successfully getting out the vote in 2020, but rather that Mark Zuckerberg, that well known radical leftist firebrand, did it:

Literary Corner: Easter Message

Down the bunny trail https://t.co/UmwLqJEX7A

— Jumpin Jack Flash It's a Yas Yas Yas (@Yastreblyansky) April 3, 2021

Why Is It?

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

Why is it that every time the 2020 ELECTION
FRAUD is discussed, the Fake News Media
consistently states that such charges are baseless,

unfounded, unwarranted, etc.? Sadly, there was
massive fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election,
and many very angry people understand that.

With each passing day, and unfortunately
for the Radical Left CRAZIES, more and more facts
are coming out. Other than that, Happy Easter!

Schrödinger's Poker

 

Tubalcain Alhanbra, via Shine.

The Senate impeachment trial was suddenly thrown into some kind of turmoil by the surfacing of some sort of new detail on the 6 January siege, from Rep. Jaime Lynn Herrera Beutler (R-WA and one of the ten Republicans who voted to impeach in the House), on the story Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told her of his call that afternoon to Trump to beg him to call off his thugs and stop the assault.

It wasn't going to change the outcome of the trial, though it probably should have, but it could have prolonged it beyond bearing: the House managers wanted to call her and, I thought, McCarthy as witnesses, and Trump's lawyer Michael Van der Veen threatened to come back with a call for 100 depositions, just for starters—effectively, to turn the impeachment into Benghazi hearings. 

In the end they made a deal: Herrera Beutler's story will be added to the record, but suppressed from the closing statements, and won't be part of the case on which the senators vote. 

I'd like to spend some time on it all the same. The story also does offer some important clarification for our understanding of what happened, alongside the reporting of Tommy Tuberville's conversation with Trump of around the same time, in which Trump had been urging him to do something to delay the certification of the election results after Pence's announcement that they would be certified in spite of Trump's complaints. In the call Tuberville is said to have told Trump he had to go because the Capitol police were evacuating the Senate chamber as the Senate's president, Mike Pence, was being whisked out of the room.

Literary Corner: And They're Going to See What Happened

Francis Picabia, Ideal, 1915, via Khan Academy.

Give Me a Break

by Donald J. Trump

So what are we going to do here, folks?
I only need eleven thousand votes. Fellas,
I need eleven thousand votes. Give me a break.
You know, we have that in spades already. Or
we can keep it going, but that’s not fair to the
voters of Georgia because they’re going to see what
happened, and they’re going to see what happened.

Some Republican operative was telling BBC that Trump wasn't asking the Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote, but he certainly was advising Raffensperger to say he'd recalculated and doing whatever it was Trump was asking him to do in the Saturday call:

there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, that you’ve recalculated. Because the 2,236 in absentee ballots. I mean, they’re all exact numbers that were done by accounting firms, law firms, etc. And even if you cut ’em in half, cut ’em in half and cut ’em in half again, it’s more votes than we need.

Why would he want them to recalculate? Every time they do that it just nets more votes for Biden. 

He wants them to invent a number larger than 11,779 and then claim to have recalculated. For instance, they could choose any or all of 2,236 absentee ballots, 4,502 voters who were not registered, 4,925 voters from out of state, 5,000 dead voters, 18,325 "vacant address voters", between 250 and 300,000 ballots "dropped mysteriously into the rolls", and "at least a couple of hundred thousand of forged signatures of people who have been forged", and between 300 pounds and 3,000 pounds of shredded ballots, and then, as he says, divide the total by two, divide it by two again, and divide it by two a third time, and if that's more than 11,779, as it probably is, tell the world "I recalculated" and we're cool. Or if that's too much math, make it easy on yourselves, boys: "All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state." 

Literary Corner: Really Sad!

 

From Stan Brakhage, Dog Star Man, 1961-64.

Floating in Limboland

by Donald J. Trump

Can’t believe how badly
Fox News is doing in
the ratings. They played
right into the hands of the
Radical Left Democrats, & now
are floating in limboland.
Hiring fired Donna Brazile,
and far worse, allowing endless
negative and unedited commercials.
Fox News is dead. Really Sad!

From the Twitter feed.

"Unedited commercials"? I'm imagining some kind of experimental non-narrative commercial from the 1960s, by Stan Brakhage or Nam June Paik.

Literary Corner: What's First and What's Last?

Image via Steemit.

Sonnet: On the Poet's Plans for his Last White House Thanksgiving

By Donald J. Trump

Q: Mr. President, do you have any big plans for your last Thanksgiving at the White House?

Well, we don’t know what is last, if you look

at what’s going on. You have to really take a look

at what’s going on. They’re finding tremendous

discrepancies in the votes. Nobody believes those

numbers. Those numbers are incorrect numbers. A lot

of numbers have already been reported that's incorrect.

You’re going to see things happening over the next

week or two that are going to be shocking to people —

if you look at the numbers in Michigan, if you

look at the numbers in Pennsylvania, if you

look at fraudulent voting and fraudulent votes.

So I can’t say what’s first and what’s last, in

terms of is this the last one or is this the first

one of a second term. We’ll see what happens.

That's just the beginning, of course, It was an enormous explosion of Trumpian analysis of the election fraud alleged in the 35 or so lawsuits his campaign had lost to date (last I heard it was 40 and no signs of slowing down) and no word whatever on what his Thanksgiving plans might be. I'm convinced he and his lady ("Who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff and decoration, but I need to do it, right?") don't particularly recognize Thanksgiving as a part of their American lives, and I'm not at all convinced Melania and her son are even in Washington at this point. The White House announced that the president celebrated with his "immediate family", but declined to say who was there, while his children by his first two marriages and their partners showed up at Camp David, Maryland, which they seem to have come to regard as their party place; Big Donald doesn't much like the place (too summer-camp primitive, and anyway he prefers to work during presidential time off, schmoozing with the customers at his businesses, since he gets plenty of relaxation on official work days at the White House, lying in bed with the TV and a cheeseburger or two), but flew in to say hi on Black Friday, perhaps in the hope of selling them something, such as an election fraud narrative.

For the Record: Bad Numbers and Conspiracy Theories

Alphabet Bad Student. Hand-drawn grunge font by Arkady Kazantsev via dreamstime.

Wait until Charlie learns people die pic.twitter.com/lQdlIbnP4B

— jordan (@JordanUhl) July 11, 2018

Not only that. I don't know where young Charlie's getting his numbers from, but they're totally wrong: there were

• 224,603,562 US citizens of voting age in 2016 and
• 200,081,377 registered voters the same year

—24.6 million being a lot more than minus 3.5 million by most calculations. Just so you know.

I'm surprised there are that many registered, almost 89%. Let's get those people off their asses in November.

Thanks, Rich, for cluing me in. Even if it was unconscious.

Starbursts for Rich Lowry! The original bombshell, Hedy Lamarr, via Nerdist (because this one was a lot smarter than Sarah Palin, you might be astonished to learn how much smarter.)

There was another bit of Rich Lowry/National Review idiocy I wanted to write about that has suddenly turned much funnier, or more serious, depending on how you look at it:

Meanwhile, the New York Times has another “bomb-shell” report about Russia, this time a meeting between a shady Russian operative and Donald Trump, Jr. and some others from the campaign.

Uh, Rich, are you entirely sure you want to dive into this?

Two quick points.

One, this jumped out at me given that we are about a year into this thing:

While President Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and Russians, this episode at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, is the first confirmed private meeting between a Russian national and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle during the campaign. It is also the first time that his son Donald Trump Jr. is known to have been involved in such a meeting.

The first!

Oh, Rich! What's betraying him here is his authoritarianism. When he sees "first confirmed private meeting" he thinks that means "confirmed by the authorities". He thinks nobody really knows if any of the other ones took place at all—it's all beastly rumors! Maybe nobody met anybody at all!

But what the Times means is, in fact "confirmed to a Times reporter by one of the participants in the meeting":

The quid for the quo

Evromaidan, November 2013, via Wikipedia. Of course some people will still tell you this was arranged by George Soros and Victoria Nuland. But they're the same people that think Putin is a leftist.

So the stakes Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is playing for just clarified themselves, in a big way, in this Times story by Megan Twohey and Scott Shane: It's not just relief from sanctions imposed on the Russian Federation over its seizure of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine, though that's included; it's really the restoration of the Russian Empire (not the USSR, which aspired toward socialism, but the older, murkily religious and violently patriarchal thing, where Moscow used to refer to itself as the "Third Rome", the successor to Byzantium, the uniter of Europe and Asia under the banner of Christ and Orthodoxy).

Which has to go somewhat beyond the story Twohey and Shane (constricted by the rules of proper journalism) are telling, which is basically about palace intrigue in Washington, and a proposal for lifting sanctions that was working its way through the National Security Council at the time old Flynn got himself fired:

If you can't find it in your own back yard...

...then you never really lost it to begin with.

Via Crooks & Liars:

"I wouldn't know where to go look to find real voter intimidation and real discrimination," [Iowa Representative Steve] King opined. "So I think there is more damage that comes to our election system from lack of voter ID then might come from voter intimidation."

I'll tell you where to look if you tell me where to find the damage that comes from lack of voter ID.

No, the hell with it, I'll tell you anyway. It's called the Internet, Steve.

http://www.examiner.com/article/romney-s-project-orca-dirty-tricks-and-voter-intimidation

http://qctimes.com/news/opinion/mailbag/iowa-victory-program-tries-to-intimidate-voters/article_2e14bb46-078f-11e2-9729-001a4bcf887a.html

http://abetteriowa.desmoinesregister.com/2013/01/07/espey-why-is-our-state-government-targeting-immigrants/

http://www.blogforiowa.com/tag/voter-intimidation/

http://amestrib.com/sections/opinion/columns/league-women-voters-iowa-must-be-vigilant-keep-elections-free.html 

Oh, and the New Black Panthers showed up again in Philadelphia. Or the New Black Panther—there was only one of them.

And voter fraud in Iowa? Not really.

From Blogging Blue. "This is so racist!" complains someone in the audience; "How come the intimidated voter is always portrayed as black?"