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We’re back from the holiday break and have Georgia on our minds. As such we welcome Erick Erickson, host of “Atlanta’s Evening News” on WSB AM/FM, and he joins to us to analyze “suitcase-gate” and give us his take on January’s double US Senate election in the Peach State. (Erick’s podcast is available right here on Ricochet.)
Then we talk to old friend Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. As the Covid-19 vaccination comes to market, what’s the best way to do it? Who gets priority and who shouldn’t be bothered?
Eustace C. Scrubb walks away with the coveted Lileks Member Post of the Week for his essay on the passing of David Prowse, one half of the man behind Darth Vader.
Music from this week’s episode: The Devil Went Down to Georgia by Charlie Daniels.
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The chain of custody and the controls are a joke. That’s the problem.
“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.”
Stalin, 1923
And yes he did say it.
This is the thing that bugs me too. The acceptance of something which you instinctively thing is suspect because someone says there’s nothing to see here. It was disappointing to Peter’s lack of interest and intuition. It’s why Steyn stands tall at the moment. He smells something and won’t just drop it because it’s too hard.
Let’s say I think that the man down the street killed that jogger who went missing last week. I can’t get that man down the street locked up based on what I think. I have to be able to win the case in court.
All of this blathering about vote fraud is getting Giuliani and his crew laughed out of court, even when the judge is Trump nominee.
When Amy Coney Barrett rules against Trump’s legal team in the next week or so, what then? Accuse Amy Coney Barrett of being part of the deep state conspiracy to bring down Donald Trump?
Unlike what appears to be the case with Peter Robinson?
Steyn can stay on this voter fraud issue all he wants. But it’s not going to change anything. The vote counts have been certified. The state and federal courts have ruled against Trump’s attorneys.
Even the US Supreme Court, including Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, is likely to give Trump a good kick in the behind on the way out.
Also, when an election is held . . . . . . . someone loses. It happens all the time. No need to do an Al Gore imitation.
I figure it’s about 99% that Joe Biden becomes President next month. I say 99% instead of 100% because I figure there’s about a 1% chance that Joe Biden will die of natural causes before he takes office.
However, when Joe Biden takes office, he may take office with unquestioned legitimacy and with a mandate to institute progressive policies, or with his legitimacy under a cloud and with no mandate to rewrite the Constitution.
I prefer the latter alternative; apparently, you prefer the former.
And that’s very hard to understand in anyone who poses as a conservative.
You seem to think that if a bunch of conservatives complain loudly enough about the 2020 presidential election being stolen, this will somehow prevent Biden from accomplishing some part of his agenda.
I think the opposite might be true.
Telling conservatives that the election was rigged is likely to persuade a significant percentage of conservatives to abstain from a “rigged” election in Georgia on January 5, 2021, which would hand the US Senate to Chuck Schumer.
That would increase the likelihood that the Biden-Harris-Schumer-Pelosi agenda would be enacted.
So, living in an alternate reality where one own preferred candidates never “lose” but only get “robbed” has its disadvantages.
Who is “living in an alternate reality where one own preferred candidates never ‘lose’ but only get ‘robbed’”?
Democrats possibly, but how often have Republicans denied the legitimacy of an election?
Remember, 2020 is unprecedented, with its vast distribution of mail ballots. Conservative specialists in election fraud warned that there was going to be trouble, but for the most part the Republican Party establishment ignored the warnings.
I’m arguing that insofar as “a bunch of conservatives” can convince the public that the 2020 Presidential election may have been stolen, it diminishes whatever mandate Joe Biden can claim, and strengthens the ability of centrist Senators to oppose his agenda.
Furthermore, the more noise Republicans make, the less likely Democrats can get away with it again. Which they obviously will do, if there are no costs imposed on them. (You seem to believe, as a matter of faith, that voter fraud did not occur.) “For evil to triumph, it is merely necessary that good men do nothing.“
Republicans at the state level have largely wimped out on the issue, because they know that anything they do to make elections more secure will be howled down as “racism”. Now, for almost the first time, there is political pressure on the other side, for election integrity.
It’s conceivable that Georgia Republicans will throw up their hands in despair, believing that fraud by Democrat inner-city machines can neither be controlled nor surmounted. But it is at least as likely that they will re-double their efforts, as President Trump has asked them to. Next month, we’ll see which prediction turns out to be right.
We can hope. But while the Dems might easily bus in a lot of spare voters to another state like they have been seen to do in cities, the GOP is unlikely to do the same. The left is far more willing to cheat, even unabashedly.
I think you have this wrong.
Given the bizarre claims made by people associated with Trump and his legal team, including Sidney Powell, who has been advising Republicans to abstain from the US Senate races in Georgia, the large majority of people have likely concluded that the Republican party is increasingly becoming inhabited by paranoid kooks.
This will make it harder, not easier, to enact common sense legislation combatting voter fraud.
In Georgia, where Trump is raising claims of being “robbed,” you have a state completely dominated by Republicans. The Governor of Georgia is a Republican who was endorsed by Trump. The Lt. Governor is Republican as is the Attorney General, as is the Secretary of State. The Georgia state senate and state house is Republican.
So, Trump is asking people to believe that a state like Georgia, controlled by Republicans, was the location of a robbed election, but the Republican secretary of state in charge of elections there decided to let it go. This happens even though Trump endorsed the Republican secretary of state.
That won’t convince anyone except the bitter enders. For everyone else, it looks like the GOP has become an insane asylum and/or a circular firing squad.
The notion that Georgia Republicans somehow control the Atlanta Democratic political machine seems a little half-baked to me.
The most one can say is that, in theory, the Republicans have some power to restrain the Democrats’ most outrageous behavior — if they’re willing to slog through a sh*tstorm of racism and “voter suppression” charges.
Admittedly, Republican idiots and/or Democrat moles who urge Republicans not to vote could do some damage. However, the argument that Democrats needed to cheat to win is, in the last analysis, a hopeful one for Republicans. Because it implies that, in spite of election returns, the American people are on our side.
The good news, as I understand it, is if Republicans just make strong policy arguments, they’ll win elections. That’s it. Just good policy.
Raw political power > idealism
FIFY
Among the 50 states, most of them have at least one city or county where the Democrats dominate and could conceivably be in a position to put a thumb on the scale. I suppose this problem doesn’t exist in Wyoming. Perhaps every county in the state is Republican dominated in Wyoming. But in most states there are Republican dominated areas and Democrat dominated areas.
Now, let’s say that the Atlanta Democratic machine did decide to engage in massive voter fraud.
Why, then, did the Republicans win majorities in both the state senate and the state house of representatives even though the Democrats are desperate to control redistricting?
Why did Republican US Senator David Perdue receive more votes than Democrat candidate Jon Ossoff? Wouldn’t the Democrats made sure that Ossoff not only receive more votes than Perdue, but receive a majority of votes cast to avoid a runoff?
So, apparently we are to believe that the Atlanta Democrat machine engaged in voter fraud that resulted in Perdue getting about 80,000 more votes than Ossoff but Biden getting about 12,000 more votes that Trump? Really?
Here is what’s happening in Minneapolis St Paul.
https://www.twincities.com/2020/11/22/incarceration-rates-decrease-in-ramsey-county-but-racial-disparities-remain/
https://www.startribune.com/hennepin-county-prosecutor-to-end-bail-for-several-low-level-offenses/573266471/
HHS
No experience.
No. Just part of the country that thinks it is worth papering over Democrat fraud because the country just can’t take it now and Trump isn’t worth it.
Reminds me of a faulty argument I used to hear, back in the day, that liberal media bias is “disproven” by the fact that conservatives sometimes win elections. Of course, all that was disproven was that liberal bias is not infinitely powerful. A crooked umpire can do little if his favored team loses by 15 runs, for example.
You apparently think of election fraud as something like a magic wand — rather than hard and risky work. (After all, the guilty parties risk going to jail if they are caught.)
The Democrats would certainly have preferred to win without it. It was only when it became apparent that the polls had gotten it wrong again, and Trump was threatening to take state after state from Biden, that extraordinary measures were (apparently) taken.
Thus we have the unprecedented result that the losing Presidential candidate’s coattails swept in a dozen Congressmen. This makes perfect sense if the “vote fountains” that put Biden over the top were located in monopoly Democratic districts that already had Democrat Congressmen; while the rest of the states felt a moderate Red Wave.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/07/no-the-georgia-vote-counting-video-was-not-debunked-not-even-close/
So … Eric, is she wrong?
Rob … is she wrong?
How do you ‘splain this?
They won’t even bother. The official explanation has been accepted and they have moved on.
So Republican voters need to get out in Georgia and vote otherwise the Democrats will pack the Supreme Court, bring in more pro D states ending any possibility of the Republicans winning the Electoral vote, double down on Covid lockdowns, diminish the 1st and 2nd amendments etc etc.
But the D’s rig an election? Perish the thought!
I will bother and will ask Erick if he has a response to this.
But you would investigate, right? If you had video of him/her in the area at the time? If he/she had a record, you’d expect the police to consider him/her, right? Or would you “throw up your hands” and, oh well, she probably had it coming anyway, right?
How about you check with Mollie Hemingway who wrote the post? Or is she no longer part of the family.
Because a question was posed specifically to Erick requesting a response. And what exactly would you like me to check with Mollie on? Her piece is quite thorough.
P.S. Mollie is a friend (as is her husband) and as recently as a month and half ago –at my request– she was kind enough to moderate a book event we did with Byron York for Ricochet members. Perhaps you missed it?
So, yeah — she’s a member of the family. In good standing.
Any other questions?
I agree that it is plausible that the Atlanta machine “added” a bunch of votes, enough to hand the state to Biden, but not enough to put Ossoff over the top (50 percent plus 1).
But then you’d have to go to court and prove that there were, say 20,000 fraudulent ballots.
So far the Trump legal team hasn’t been able to prove much of anything.
@peterrobinson, thank you for asking Dr. Jay about the meaning(lessness) of coronavirus “cases”. I have been raging about this for months and some days honestly feel like I shall go mad if one more lazy reporter breathlessly announces that CASES ARE SKYROCKETING somewhere.
It’s a relief to know that my (our) instincts were correct on this, but I still don’t feel like I understand the reported statistics any better.