Cowardly or Stupid?

Or unprincipled, lying, and hypocritical? Or all five? In case you haven’t guessed, I’m referring to all the Republicans lining up behind Trump’s claims of victory and election fraud on the part of Democrats, although Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security announced that the election was the most secure ever, and state after state has affirmed the same.

One of the latest of the sixty-odd frivolous lawsuits was filed by the Texas State Attorney General (who, by the way, has been charged with securities fraud and just might be hoping for a Trump pardon in return for filing the lawsuit). The Texas lawsuit claimed that election law changes in four states — Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania — which allowed more alternative ways to vote, violated existing law by essentially making it easier for citizens to cast their ballots. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the lawsuit, and that dismissal vote included three justices appointed by Trump.

Not only did Republican attorneys general from 17 states sign on to the lawsuit, but so did 126 Republican members of the House of Representatives, which raises another question. How can a ballot be fraudulent at the top and not at the bottom? If Biden’s election was fraudulent because of the process, how can their election not also be fraudulent?

The Trumpist Republican Attorney General here in Utah signed onto the Texas lawsuit without consulting either the Republican Governor or Lieutenant Governor, both of whom immediately denounced his action. His action was also hypocritical because Utah has had universal mail-in voting for the last two elections, and there’s never been a problem with fraud.

While Trump is stirring up those voters, the fact is that they’re easy to stir up, and that’s why so many Republican politicians don’t want to stand up against Trump’s claims. Most of those Republicans who have stated that the process was fair and without fraud have been subjected to threats, often death threats. So have quite a few electors.

Depending on the poll and the wording, between sixty and seventy percent of Republican voters think the election was “illegitimate.” What this means is that Republicans don’t like democracy or democratic processes when they don’t win. This isn’t a supposition; it’s fact. For last decade, if not longer, Republicans have been working methodically on the state level to restrict voting access to people who are less likely to vote Republican, including reducing the number of polling places in minority districts and “purging” voter registration records in minority districts, even removing the names of people who voted in the previous election and who didn’t die or move.

The United States was founded on the idea of equal opportunity, limited at first just to white males, but over the more than two centuries since its founding, we’ve legally determined that the votes of everyone born here or naturalized as a citizen are equal. Now, because Trump lost the election, Trump has decided that the votes in just certain states or certain parts of those states shouldn’t be counted because he says there was fraud – fraud that no Republican, or anyone else, has been able to prove… or even come up with a shred of verifiable evidence.

That hasn’t stopped Trump or the majority of Republican federal office holders from trying to use the courts to change the election results, something that has never happened before in our history. Why do these Republicans support an attempt at a de facto coup?

Pure and simple, they’re putting their political survival above the national interest, and they seem certain that their supporters won’t call them on it. Unhappily, all the polls and most of the Republican reaction seems to indicate that an attempted coup is all right with the majority of Republicans.

What’s also so sad and amusing about it is that if they all said to Trump, “You lost,” Trump wouldn’t have any power at all because he’d exhaust both his funds and public patience if he tried to attack them all.

So… all of those Republican politicians and officeholders who refuse to tell Trump the truth are either indeed cowardly, stupid, self-centered, unprincipled, or hypocritical, if not all of those… and the voters who support them are at the least stupid or totally ignorant… and if they aren’t stupid or ignorant, then they’re self-centered, unprincipled, and hypocritical.

Unless, of course, that they honestly believe that a right-wing dictatorship is preferable to an elected moderate President.

6 thoughts on “Cowardly or Stupid?”

  1. MRE says:

    The most charitable interpretation I have been able to come up with is an aggressively credulous delusion that the election was indeed stolen, but all the evidence and proof will require too much time to gather for an immediate legal challenge. Once that cognitive trick has been accepted as gospel, all norms and laws can be broken in the name of saving democracy.

    What continually shocks me is how uncritical and willing people are to accept evidence vomited out over the internet by (1) sources with an incentive and past history of lying and providing false proof (looking at you Fox/Newsmax/PJblah blah) (2) random internet denizens, who might be telling the truth, but are not fact checkable, and worst of all (3) “experts” of dubious credentials (YouTube salesmen accountants etc…) who claim to be statisticians/pollsters who don’t understand such basic concepts such as confidence intervals or statistical uncertainty when pointing at district voting results.

    And then there are those who push a lot of these ideas on the angry and credulous masses. I can’t believe they don’t know better. If they don’t, then they have been swallowed by their conspiracies and will follow their fears and fevered imagination wherever it might lead. If they do, then it’s their selfishness and vanity elevated above reason.

  2. Postagoras says:

    You say that the politicians who refuse to tell Trump the truth are cowards, and the voters who support them are (at least) ignorant.

    But, it’s the other way around. The Republican party counts on voters who distrust the government. Voters who blame immigrants for job losses that were emigrated by large corporations.

    These are reliable voters, and politicians who disregard them become targets of primary challenges.

    When it comes to budget time, the Republican politicians pile everything into end-of-the-session huge omnibus bills that “must pass”. They can tuck all kinds of favors for lobbyists in there.

    That’s how the Republican Party works these days. I’d love to hear what you think about it, as someone who knows how it used to be.

    1. As I said, most current Republican voters are either ignorant, if often willfully so (since they won’t accept verified facts that conflict with what they want to believe), or they really don’t believe in democratic government unless it’s controlled by Republicans, and they also have a tendency, as you pointed out, to push out Republicans who have the courage to point out unpleasant accuracies that conflict with their beliefs. As I also pointed out earlier, Republicans almost never have any positive suggestions for improving government except for various forms of tax cuts and business subsidies.

      I’ve expressed it somewhat differently, but I don’t see that we’re that far apart.

  3. Adam Pair says:

    Right now, we are starting to see the beginnings of actual treason. There’s a place very soon that you don’t come back from. Maybe events are already past that point. This is the proverbial frog in a pot. Somebody needs to call this what is is, hopefully people in congress. I truly hope that the military will balk at whatever insanity might be forthcoming.

  4. Alan Naylor says:

    It was my genuine concern that with all of the challenges to the election when the cases came before the Supreme Court we would see not only partisan politics as the judges voted party lines, but that the 3 judges which Trump had personal nominated being the first to champion his cause. I was beyond relieved when the Supreme Court dismissed the case without hearing entirely out of hand without any dissenting votes. I feel there was a very real opportunity for Trump and his Republican supporters to tear apart the voting institution in the name of getting what they wanted rather than following the will of the people.

    What is scarier, in many ways, is how many Americans do not see the possible destruction of rule of law and democracy which is inherent in Trump’s legal cases.

  5. Lars-Åke Frykholm says:

    Well, I see parallels between Trump and Ethos Effect

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *