Putin’s Puppet Delivers For His Boss, Undermining The Integrity of American Elections

In 1974, Republican leadership notified President Richard Nixon that he had lost his party’s support after the release of the Watergate tapes, and he faced certain impeachment in the House and Senate:

On Aug. 7, 1974, U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., U.S. House Minority Leader John Rhodes, R-Ariz., and U.S. Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, R-Pa., made it clear to the embattled Nixon that he faced all-but-certain impeachment, conviction and removal from office in connection with the Watergate scandal.

In his 1988 autobiography, Goldwater wrote that after hearing their grim assessment, Nixon “knew beyond any doubt that one way or another his presidency was finished.”

“None of us doubted the outcome. He would resign,” Goldwater wrote.

Rhodes, who served in the U.S. House from 1953 to 1983, also recounted the meeting in his 1995 memoir “I Was There,” and noted, “I got the very strong impression that he had already decided to resign when he talked to us.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden is likely to be projected the winner today of the 2020 presidential election by the media. Biden will address the nation this evening.

The current Republican leadership in Congress needs to make that walk from Capitol Hill to the White House to notify President Donald Trump that, for the good of the country and the integrity of our election system, this election is over. Trump’s false claims of election fraud and “illegal” ballots, without evidence, must cease and desist.

Are there no patriots among Republicans in Congress today?

The man behind the curtain at the propaganda machine formerly known as the Republican Party, Rupert Murdoch, reportedly has notified the president he has lost, according to iNews in Britain. How Rupert Murdoch turned against Donald Trump:

Earlier this week Mr. Murdoch spoke to Mr. Trump and told him that he had lost, and that Mr. Biden was going to emerge as the clear winner, i has learned. Mr. Trump did not accept that.

Privately, Mr. Murdoch – formerly a friend and supporter of the President – is dismayed by Mr Trump’s inappropriate conduct since the polls closed. 

On Wednesday this week, the day after the vote, Mr. Murdoch … put a call into the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, i understands, urging him to ask other senior Republicans to refuse to endorse Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories and baseless claims of fraud.

Maybe he should give this directive to his Fox News propagandists who continue to actively promote these groundless conspiracy theories.

Mr. McConnell, who has remained loyal throughout every previous Trumpian firestorm, had already come to the same conclusion. On Thursday morning he went against his President, insisting that the democratic process must continue: “Claiming you’ve won the election is different from finishing the counting.”

[S]uch phone calls from Mr. Murdoch and his team may help to explain why the President has struggled to find many prominent Republicans to publicly endorse his wild claims – alongside the lack of any evidence of fraud, of course.

Twice this week, on election night, and again on Thursday, Putin’s puppet has done what Vladimir Putin could only have dreamt of in his wildest dreams: Trump attacked the integrity of America’s electoral system and undermined democracy. In veiled language he incited division and violence in response to his losing this election.

Putin is smiling at the success of his handiwork.

What happened last night was a national disgrace, and a frightening display of a president mentally and emotionally unhinged and detached from reality. Not even Richard Nixon has so debased the office of the presidency.

Republican leadership must do an intervention to prevent any further damage to the reputation of the United States and its national security. Trump is making us look like a third-rate banana republic.

The New York Times reports, In Torrent of Falsehoods, Trump Claims Election Is Being Stolen:

Even for President Trump, it was an imagined version of reality, one in which he was not losing but the victim of a wide-ranging conspiracy stretching across the country in multiple cities, counties and states, involving untold numbers of people all somehow collaborating to steal the election in ways he could not actually explain.

Never mind that Mr. Trump presented not a shred of evidence during his first public appearance since late on election night or that few senior Republican officeholders endorsed his false claims of far-reaching fraud. A presidency born in a lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace appeared on the edge of ending in a lie about his own faltering bid for re-election.

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” Mr. Trump said Thursday night in an unusually subdued, 17-minute televised statement from the lectern in the White House briefing room, complaining that Democrats, the news media, pollsters, big technology companies and nonpartisan election workers had all corruptly sought to deny him a second term.

“This is a case where they’re trying to steal an election,” he said. “They’re trying to rig an election, and we can’t let that happen.”

He convinced few people who were not already in his corner. Most of the television networks cut away from the statement on the grounds that what Mr. Trump was saying was not true. On CNN, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a Republican often put in the position of defending Mr. Trump over the years, appeared exasperated as he denounced the president’s loose talk of election thievery as “dangerous” and “shocking” and declared that “counting absentee ballots and counting mail-in ballots is not fraud”.

“There is no defense for the President’s comments tonight undermining our Democratic process,” Gov. Larry Hogan, Republican of Maryland and a critic of the president, wrote on Twitter. “America is counting the votes, and we must respect the results as we always have before. No election or person is more important than our Democracy.”

Former Gov. Chris Christie, Republican of New Jersey and a longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s, likewise disputed the president. “I talk tonight now not as a former governor but as a former U.S. attorney — there’s just no basis to make that argument tonight,” he said on ABC News. “There just isn’t.”

[W]ith vote counts in key states turning grimmer even as he spoke, Mr. Trump was poised to end this term in office the way he began his presidential campaign in 2015 — defended most vocally by family members and a few loyalists while Republican leaders held him at arm’s length rather than embrace outlandish claims.

Pennsylvania’s Republican senator disputed Trump’s false claims, unsupported by any evidence, of voter fraud in his state. ‘This is getting insane’: Republicans push back against Trump’s false election claims:

Shortly before Trump made baseless claims at a news conference about massive voter fraud in Pennsylvania, Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said in a statement that once the state’s final election count is “reached and certified, all parties involved must accept the outcome of the election regardless of whether they won or lost.”

Toomey on Friday called for patience as the votes are counted, despite Trump’s having tweeting earlier Thursday that officials should “stop the count!” Speaking about the mail-in vote count, Trump also told reporters, “There has been a lot of shenanigans, and we can’t stand for that in our country.”

“It’s going to take the time that it takes,” he told the TODAY show. “I saw the president’s speech last night and it was hard to watch. The president’s charges of large-scale fraud, there’s no evidence here.”

The harshest pushback came from retiring Rep. Will Hurd of Texas:

“A sitting president undermining our political process & questioning the legality of the voices of countless Americans without evidence is not only dangerous & wrong, it undermines the very foundation this nation was built upon,” he said in a tweet. “Every American should have his or her vote counted.”

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) who at times has been a harsh Trump critic, also offered a strong rebuke:

“We want every vote counted, yes every legal vote (of course). But, if you have legit concerns about fraud present EVIDENCE and take it to court. STOP Spreading debunked misinformation,” he wrote. “This is getting insane.”

Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, a vocal Trump critic who was the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, tweeted Friday that the president has the right to ask for recounts and investigations of any alleged irregularities, but is “wrong to say the election was rigged, corrupt and stolen.”

Romney said Trump’s doing so “damages the cause of freedom here and around the world, weakens the institutions that lie at the foundation of the Republic, and recklessly inflames destructive and dangerous passions.”

“Counting every vote is at the heart of democracy. That process is often long and, for those running, frustrating. The votes will be counted,” Romney wrote then.

Former Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., called Trump’s remarks “simply reprehensible.”

But then there were also these assholes supporting Trump undermining American democracy and the legitimacy of our election system:

As a few Republicans distanced themselves from Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations of fraud in Tuesday’s election, Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz enthusiastically backed him in back-to-back appearances on Fox News.

“I’ll tell you the president is angry and I’m angry and the voters ought to be angry,” Ted Cruz told the network’s host Sean Hannity, whose evening show is a favorite of Trump.

Cruz alleged falsely that Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general had ordered vote-counting in the state’s largest city of Philadelphia “until Joe Biden wins.”

“We need to get in there now,” Cruz said of voting centers.

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Asked by Hannity if the Pennsylvania legislature could refuse to recognize the results and instead give the state’s electoral votes to Trump, Sen. Lindsey Graham replied, “I think everything should be on the table.”

“Philadelphia elections are crooked as a snake. Why are they shutting people out? Because they don’t want people to see what they’re doing,” said Graham.

The man who broke American politics, Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, followed this pair of assholes on Hannity. Newt Gingrich: Bill Barr Should Arrest Poll Workers:

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich seemingly demanded on Thursday night that Attorney General Bill Barr use federal agents to arrest election workers in Pennsylvania and that election results in the state should be tossed.

“My hope is that President Trump will lead the millions of Americans who understand exactly what’s going on,” Gingrich fumed. “The Philadelphia machine is corrupt. The Atlanta machine is corrupt. The machine in Detroit is corrupt. And they are trying to steal the presidency. And we should not allow them to do that.”

“First of all, under federal law, we should lock up the people who are breaking the law,” he continued. “You stop somebody from being an observer, you just broke federal law. Do you hide and put up papers so nobody can see what you’re doing? You just broke federal law. You bring in ballots that aren’t real? You just broke federal law.”

After calling for poll workers to be locked up over the right’s latest conspiracy theories about the election, the former speaker wondered aloud if Republicans are “supposed to surrender,” adding that the specter of Trump losing is “a genuine deep crisis of our survival.”

Gingrich’s baseless conspiracy theories are unsupported by any evidence and are without merit. He has been out of his mind for many years, and no one should listen to this truly evil man.

For his part, Trump’s Propaganda Minister Sean Hannity argued on Fox News that there should be a “do over” election in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania’s Republican legislative leadership rejected Republican fantasies about ignoring the will of the voters and having the Republican legislature impose a slate of Republican electors. Pennsylvania lawmakers have no role to play in deciding the presidential election:

We have said it many times and we will happily say it again: The Pennsylvania General Assembly does not have and will not have a hand in choosing the state’s presidential electors or in deciding the outcome of the presidential election.

To insinuate otherwise is to inappropriately set fear into the Pennsylvania electorate with an imaginary scenario not provided for anywhere in law — or in fact.

Pennsylvania law plainly says that the state’s electors are chosen only by the popular vote of the commonwealth’s voters.

The provision relating to the choosing of presidential electors by the popular vote was enacted in 1937.

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The General Assembly has a sworn duty to follow the Constitution and the Election Code, which does not involve the legislature in the process of choosing electors. There have been zero discussions occurring within the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and Senate about changing this provision.

So, to set the record — once again — without question: The only and exclusive way that presidential electors can be chosen in Pennsylvania is by the popular vote. The legislature has no hand in this process whatsoever.

That’s a big “fuck you” to Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and Newt Gingrich from the great state of Pennsylvania … and that goes double for you, Hannity!