"I Tried to Make Claims About Election Fraud So Preposterous Trump Fans Wouldn’t Believe Me," reports Jon Schwarz at The Intercept. "It Was Impossible." Specifically, he "confessed" to destroying Trump ballots, got a lot of angry responses on Twitter, and then made even more absurd assertions (destroying Trump ballots is in the Constitution, then in the Bible, then in Buddhist teachings, etc.) that induced even more angry responses, with no one apparently figuring out it was all a gag. I'll admit I could hardly catch my breath by the point where he says Twitter responses will automatically enroll their authors in a blockchain scam. I'd hoped he might reference the fictional nation of Freedonia or the fictional Duchy of Grand Fenwick, but then Trumpholes would probably just tell us that Duck Soup and The Mouse That Roared (released in 1933 and 1955, respectively) were actually instruction manuals created by the Elders of Zion.
In a peripherally-related note, a Bloomberg investigation unearthed around 200 prosecutions for voter fraud since November 2018, and, though I hate to sound like a broken record, that's not nearly enough to justify all the right-wing hysteria about "voter fraud." Note well, also, that prosecutions aren't convictions! For your reference, at least 155 million votes were cast in the 2020 elections and at least 115 million in 2018. I don't like to accuse everyone and everything of racism, but I feel it's pretty safe to say that "voter fraud" is code for "too many of Those People voted."
Amanda Marcotte reminds us not to put any stock in some Republicans' sudden willingness to get everyone to take the vaccine, and not just because most right-wing media types are still hawking vaccine "skepticism." (Even Mr. Hannity couched his plea to get vaccinated among stories about "vaccine overreach.") I'm glad to be reminded not just that right-wingers don't really care what Mob Boss Mitch says, but also that a lot of these right-wingers fancy themselves as "politically independent," even though they just so happen to independently eat up whatever right-wing slop makes them angriest.
In a related note, Republican politicos don't think the party's apparent desire to "have it both ways" on the vaccine will hurt them in the midterms. And that could be true -- if Democrats spend the next six months doing nothing and/or if some other catastrophe happens in the meantime. One thing that won't be true, though: their Janus face on the vaccine won't impress independent voters (you know, the ones whose votes are actually up for grabs every cycle!), because you don't impress them by trying to "have it both ways." I'd go so far as to say you do the opposite. Democrats could tell you all about that, were they so inclined.
Finally, an Alabama doctor writes at length about dealing with so many dying COVID patients who didn't get vaccinated when they had the chance. "I may walk into the room thinking, 'Okay, this is your fault, you did this to yourself,'" she writes. "When I leave the room, I just see a person that’s really suffering, and that is so regretful for the choice that they made." She has a lot more compassion than I would have, which I suppose is just one reason she's a doctor and I'm not. I'm grateful that we still have good doctors providing health care in America, and I suppose we will until right-wingers start sending them death threats and they decide it's not worth all the aggravation. Hey, that's how it's working with election officials.
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