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L E T T E R F R OM T HE E D I T OR
Farce! Rudy Leads Trump Push
to Undermine Democracy
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
Make no mistake. The
frantic and clumsy efforts
of Donald Trump
and his cultish acolytes
in denying the reality that Joe Biden
has won the presidency amount to
nothing less that an undermining of
American democracy, which — above
all else — relies on the faith of the
governed that they live under a fair
and just system.
Capitol Hill’s spineless Republicans
— maintaining their four-year “nothing
to see here” negligence — know
full well that the president has been
defeated, yet they blabber on about
how Trump is “100 percent within his
rights” to delay a transition urgently
in need of getting underway.
Even in normal times, an incoming
president must be brought up to speed
on sensitive national security issues
the details of which only the White
House inner circle is privy. Biden and
Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris
are being denied the daily briefi ngs
they ought to be receiving — as did
every one of their predecessors.
But these are not normal times.
The nation is being savaged by a
pandemic that Trump’s neglect allowed
to spiral out of control, threating
perhaps another 100,000 deaths
or so by Inauguration Day — on top
of a quarter of a million lives already
lost. Now that we have two promising
vaccine candidates, the enormous
job in front of us is distributing hundreds
of millions of doses safely but
also as quickly as possible. Keeping
the incoming administration out of
this loop is unconscionable — and, as
Biden warned, will result in unnecessary
additional deaths.
But let’s leave aside those Republicans
whose heads remain in the sand
and look to the real danger — those
who are actively working to undo legitimate
votes from among America’s
biggest turnout to date. To argue that
Trump or anyone else has the “right”
to mount court challenges misses
the point. The blizzard of suits fi led
by the Trump campaign and allied
groups have been uniformly meritless
and merely dilatory — as the
repeated dismissals by state and federal
judges have shown.
All the president’s men — and
women — have rushed into court
with vague charges lacking in real
evidence but instead backed by hearsay,
unfounded, often wild conspiracy
theories, and several embarrassingly
unvetted witnesses. Notably,
in recent days, reputable attorneys
from leading law fi rms have bailed on
these cases, and late last week Trump
decided to shift command of his legal
strategy to none other than the
hapless Rudy Giuliani, once dubbed
“America’s mayor,” but now a ranting
sycophant who for the past two years
trolled the world trying to dig up or
stage scandals — mostly about Hunter
Biden, an effort that got Trump impeached
— and is currently focused
on hosting overwrought press conferences
and trying the patience of judges
with bizarre courtroom antics.
Even Giuliani — though he often
seems crazy — must realize the lawsuits
and explosive charges are meritless
and have no chance of success.
The key word about them is “dilatory”
— and the fl ap this week over certifying
the vote in Detroit’s Wayne County
gave the game away. There, the
two Republicans on the four-member
Board of Canvassers initially refused
to certify the vote, noting small clerical
discrepancies — that occurred in
both the city of Detroit and neighboring,
mostly white suburbs. Tellingly,
one of the Republicans proposed certifying
the suburban vote, but not the
city vote.
Before the two Republicans relented
under a wave of outrage, Trump
tweeted the development was “a beautiful
thing.” But it was his campaign
legal adviser Jenna Ellis who said out
loud what she probably should have
kept to herself.
“If the state board follows suit, the
Republican state legislator sic will
select the electors. Huge win for @
realDonaldTrump,” she tweeted. In
other words, GOP state legislators
would, under that theory, ignore the
vote of Michiganders and assign their
16 electors to Trump rather than
Biden.
Trump folks talked about a similar
nullifi cation strategy for Pennsylvania’s
20 electoral votes.
Beyond that sort of nonsense, there
were other apparent efforts at strongarming
local offi cials — Republicans
— into throwing out legitimate votes
to overturn Biden wins, in Georgia,
Arizona, and Nevada.
South Carolina Senator Lindsey
Graham — a slippery character who
always manages to Velcro himself to
a useful alpha protector, whether the
late John McCain or now Trump (the
transfer of loyalty from the former to
the latter was particularly unseemly)
— managed to overcome his affection
for states’ rights and began phoning
offi cials in other states to inquire
about chances for his president to
upset the original assignment of their
electoral votes to Biden.
Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican
secretary of state already
under fi re from local GOP offi cials apparently
for not making sure Trump
won there, expressed shock to the
Washington Post that Graham appeared
to be suggesting he fi nd a way
to throw out legitimate Democratic
votes.
Graham— who told Fox News this
past weekend, “If Republicans don’t
challenge and change the US election
system, there will never be another
Republican president elected again
— voiced shock… shock at Raffensperger’s
characterization of their
conversation. But Gabriel Sterling, a
Raffensperger deputy, backed up his
boss’ account of the call, which he
also joined.
Graham also phoned Arizona’s Republican
governor, Doug Ducey, and
a GOP offi cial whose name he did not
recall in Nevada, which has a Democratic
governor.
The biggest abuse, however, came
from the big guy himself. Last week,
Christopher Krebs, the director of the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency within the Department
of Homeland Security, issued a statement
from a broad group of election
overseers declaring the November
vote “the most secure in American
history.”
On November 17, Krebs was fi red
by Donald Trump via Twitter.
The efforts of Trump, Giuliani, and
Graham are edging closer and closer
to an attempted coup. They best keep
in mind that even if inept and ultimately
unsuccessful, such an effort
could well amount to treason.
November 19 - November 25, 2 20 020 | GayCityNews.com
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