Tag Archives: Big Lie

Political perversion at its worst

The political perversion that is underway within what passes for the Republican Party cannot be illustrated more plainly than what well might happen to one of the party’s stalwarts in an upcoming GOP primary election.

Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming stands front and center among Republicans in her opposition to the lawlessness demonstrated by Donald J. Trump — particularly during the final weeks of his administration as POTUS.

Because of her fealty to the Constitution and the oath she took to protect and defend it, Cheney is facing the wrath of the Trumpkins who populate her party in Wyoming. She is running for re-election this year and has drawn stiff opposition within her party; Trump has endorsed one of Cheney’s rivals. Why? Because she believes in the rule of law and believes that Trump has violated that tenet by his re-telling of The Big Lie about why he lost the 2020 presidential election.

Cheney is as stalwart a conservative Republican as anyone in the House of Representatives. None of that matters to the Trumpkins who have censured her and effectively declared her to be persona non grata within the Wyoming GOP.

That’s because she refuses to profess her loyalty to Donald Trump.

This is a shameful perversion of principle and of the oath all members of Congress take when they enter the People’s House.

I am not going to predict that Cheney will lose her primary fight when the balloting occurs in Wyoming. I’ve seen the various polls and will admit that it doesn’t look good for her future.

I also must stipulate once more that she is not my favorite Republican serving in Congress. She is too conservative for my taste, which illustrates why these attacks on her anger me so much.

I guess, therefore, the political perversion is complete when a member of Congress with whom I have fundamental philosophical disagreements can win my support on the basis of her rage at a president who embodies all that is wrong with today’s Republican Party.

Go figure.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

How do they stand behind The Big Lie?

How in the name of all that is holy and sacred, all that is just and truthful, all that is rational and reasonable does anyone continue to subscribe to The Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen?

That is my takeaway after watching Day Five of the 1/6 House select committee’s hearing on the insurrection instigated by the 45th POTUS.

Indeed, Donald Trump keeps insisting the election is being victimized to this day by electoral thieves. You know what? He’s telling the truth!Ā Because it is Donald Trump who is committing the attempted theft!

Just as he blasted the media for putting forth “fake news” while at the same instant questioning whether Barack Obama was qualified to run for and serve as president, Trump is doing the same verbal shuffle with The Big Lie.

The televised hearing today highlighted the testimony of three former Department of Justice officials — including Jeffrey Rosen, the former acting AG at the end of the Trump administration — who told House committee members of Trump’s efforts to subvert the Constitution. These men worked for Trump!

I will admit readily that these hearings have riveted me. They have me transfixed by the testimony. They have demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt in my own mind of the existential threat Donald Trump poses to our democratic process.

But as committee vice chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., pointed out succinctly in her closing remarks, there remain those who will refuse to accept what the rest of the world knows is the truth about Donald Trump.

That he is a dangerous, evil man.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Strange world, indeed

We have entered a strange time in our nation’s history when two sides of a great — and widening — divide cannot seem to make themselves heard by the other side.

I am going to refrain from the “both sides do it” argument; I will aim my fire at those on the far right of that divide, the Donald Trump cultists who — despite mountains of evidence to the contrary — continue to live in the fantasy created by The Big Lie.

That the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from their guy and that the theft lies at the heart of all that is wrong with the government. They refuse to cede an inch of that turf to reality, to the truth, to the facts that are spread before them.

Donald Trump brought in a fellow named Christopher Krebs to tighten the integrity of the 2020 election. Krebs did his job. He did it so well that when he declared that the most recent presidential election was the “most secure in the history of the nation,” Trump fired him. He didn’t want to hear the truth from his own guy!

And so … a needless, pointless and feckless battle rages on. There is no way in the world, or so it seems, to persuade the Trump Cultist Corps that their guy lost a free, fair and legal election to Joseph Biden Jr. They hang their message on The Big Lie that Trump keeps telling. Indeed, the Texas Republican Party just concluded its weekend meeting in Houston with a resolution that declares President Biden to be “illegitimately elected.”

Where in the world do we go from here?

I hate to think there is no way out of this blind alley. So, I won’t think it. I will retain my eternal optimism that eventually self-restorative sanity will take its resume in our national discussion. The alternative, as we have seen, is unacceptable.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Texas GOP: gone bonkers

It’s as official as I can determine it: the Texas Republican Party has spun off its axis, it is out of its collective mind, it has been taken over by the Donald J. Trump cultists, the believers in The Big Lie.

The state GOP has concluded its convention in Houston and has declared that President Biden is not “legitimately” elected to the nation’s highest office. The 2020 election, the state GOP said in its resolution, is too “rife” with fraud.

Now comes the question: Does the Republican Party have proof of that preposterous allegation?

The answer: No! It does not!

Hey, the state GOP don’t need no stinkin’ proof! It just swallows the swill served up by the former Snake Oil Salesman in Chief, who has defamed the nation’s electoral system since the moment he lost the 2020 election.

Fed up and fired up: Texas Republicans meet in a climate of mistrust, conspiracy and victimhood | The Texas Tribune

The convention had plenty of lowlights. Such as when conventioneers booed U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, as staunch and devoted a Republican as anyone in the convention hall. His claim to infamy? He sought to work with Democrats in crafting a bill that seeks to curb gun violence. You can’t do that, senator … say the diehard cultists who now dominate the Texas Republican Party.

I’ll be brutally honest. I never thought I would see this day in the evolution of the Texas political system. I moved to Texas when it was still dominated nominally by conservative Democrats. Then the “red tide” began to swell in the mid- to late 1980s. Mainstream Republicans began winning public office.

A Republican governor, George W. Bush, scored a lot of points across the spectrum through his ability to work with Democrats who still controlled the Legislature in the mid-1990s.

Those days are gone. I hope not forever. We have now a state GOP dominated by know-nothings, fruitcakes and nut jobs … which more or less mirrors the Republican National Committee.

The believe in The Big Lie. They purposely spread its falsehoods. Therefore, the Texas Republican Party is populated by liars.

Shame on them, and shame on those who put the liars in charge.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Now it’s Trump vs. Pence

A weird political back story is being pushed to the forefront on the eve of the Georgia Republican Party primary election.

Donald J. Trump endorsed former U.S. Sen. David Perdue’s effort to win the party’s gubernatorial nomination. Former Vice President Mike Pence endorsed Gov. Brian Kemp’s bid for re-election.

The smart money at this moment says that Kemp is going to roll to an easy victory over Perdue. Which means that Pence is going to trample Trump in the fight for whose candidate gets Republican voters’ nod.

Trump vs. Pence, therefore, is going to end in a technical knockout — for the former VP … and possible rival to Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

This is really rich, man.

Trump got angry with Kemp because the governor wouldn’t buckle under Trump’s pressure to “find” enough votes to turn the state’s electoral result from Joe Biden’s column to Trump’s. So now the ex-POTUS is backing Perdue … sort of. You see, he now has washed his hands of Perdue’s bid because the ex-senator is trailing so badly that Trump doesn’t want to be associated with the losing candidate.

All Gov. Kemp did in the wake of the 2020 election was follow the law. He refused to pressure the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensberger, to do Trump’s bidding. Trump doesn’t believe in the rule of law; he believes instead in the “rule of keeping himself in power.”

If my voice mattered in Georgia — which, of course, it doesn’t — I would be pulling for Mike Pence’s guy over the dipsh** Donald Trump has endorsed.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Step aside, Texas GOP

Texas Republicans have taken their share of hits from critics over the quality of the candidates they nominate for public office.

I am going to pronounce at this moment that the Texas GOP has been eclipsed in the loony bin category of political nut jobs by their colleagues in Pennsylvania, where a true-blue 2020 election denier has been nominated to run for governor of that great state.

Doug Mastriano is now the GOP nominee Pennsylvania governor. He served in the state senate. His foe this fall will be Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democrat who ran unopposed in his state’s primary.

Far-right election denier Mastriano wins GOP race for governor in Pennsylvania (msn.com)

Mastriano, to be brutally candid, is a seriously dangerous man to run one of the nation’s most populous and important states.

He believes President Biden and Democrats stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump. He would get to appoint the next secretary of state in Pennsylvania and would be likely to find a fellow denier to lead that state’s election in 2024.

He tried to get fake Trump electors seated for the certification of the 2020 results in Pennsylvania; Biden won the state’s electoral votes, but Mastriano sought to overturn those results.

Oh … my.

I now will declare my own preference for Pennsylvania governor. Josh Shapiro must win to preserve the rule of law and to save the democratic process in one of the states where it all began in the United States of America.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

We are sinking ever lower

Have we really devolved into a society that applauds a candidate who says a medical official hired to guide the nation out of a killer pandemic should be stood in front of a firing squad and executed?

Never mind. I know the answer.Ā It is yes. It sickens me to my core.

John Benett is chair of the Oklahoma Republican Party. He told a cheering crowd that Dr. Anthony Fauci should be shot by a firing squad. The worst part? The crowd cheered and clapped at the congressional candidate’s hideous message!

The Huffington Post reported:

ā€œWeā€™re fighting communist Democrats, establishment RINOs!ā€ Bennett ranted in a video that Right Wing Watch shared online Tuesday and has now gone viral.

ā€œWeā€™re fighting against a system that stole the election in 2020 and nobody had been held accountable,ā€ he continued, parroting former President Donald Trumpā€™s baseless election fraud claims. ā€œWeā€™re in a war with bureaucrats that have forced vaccine mandates on us, mask mandates on us.ā€

Oh my goodness.

“In a war”? Is this clown serious? Yeah. He is.

Republicans Cheer As Congressional Candidate Demands Fauciā€™s Execution By Firing Squad (msn.com)

There is not a single thing I can say that is going to sink into the thick skulls of those who buy into that bullsh**.Ā  I am left only to condemn in the strongest terms possible the kind of hateful demagoguery that has become the norm within what used to be known as a great political party.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Big Lie channels Fake News

The most maddening aspect of the Big Lie into which Donald Trump keeps breathing life is how the irony matches the Fake News mantra that the future POTUS made so popular on his way to winning the presidential election in 2016.

Think about this for a moment.

Trump kept hammering the media for promoting “fake news” even as he was uttering nonsense related to President Obama’s place of birth and questioning whether the 44th president was eligible to run for and then serve in the nation’s highest office.

The Trumpkin Corps gobbled it up and swallowed it, not grasping the insane irony of their man’s pronouncements condemning the media for doing their job.

Then the former Liar in Chief lost the 2020 election. He didn’t concede. He has never congratulated President Biden for his victory. Never offered to help him or support him in any fashion. He said the election was “rigged” and “stolen” from him.

The irony is that The Donald has engaged in the most blatant act of electoral theft in U.S. history. He incited the 1/6 insurrection. He didn’t lift a finger to end it as the rioters were beating police officers and sh***ing on the Capitol floor. He has allowed his minions to try to install fake electors to overturn the results that showed Biden winning a clear Electoral College victory. Oh, and he bullied state election officials in Georgia to “find” enough votes to let him win that state’s presidential election.

A “stolen” election? Is this clown serious?

Of course not!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Give it a rest, Donald … oh, wait!

Part of me wishes Donald J. Trump would stop yammering about an electoral theft that didn’t occur. Then it dawns on me: Why not keep up the charade, given that more Americans are tuning that nonsense out of their minds?

Gerald Baker, former editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal, is the latest conservative to say that The Donald needs to stop yapping about the “voter fraud” that didn’t occur during the 2020 presidential election.

Wall Street Journal Editor Has Had It With Republicans Who Back Donald Trump’s Big Lie (msn.com)

InĀ an opinion pieceĀ published Monday, Baker wrote that many prominent Republicans and major donors donā€™t actually believe Trumpā€™s election lies and would love for him to ā€œgo quietly away.ā€

ā€œIt is a desire expressed as fervently in private as it is assiduously and dexterously avoided in public,ā€ said Baker, who served as the WSJā€™s editor-in-chief until 2018.

Well, geez. Keep talking about it, Donald. Yeah, it’s old “fake news.” Yeah, it never happened. Sure, Trump has yet to produce a shred of evidence to back up his specious claims of electoral theft.

It’s getting real old, Donald.

So, keep fomenting The Big Lie … loser!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Election wasn’t ‘stolen’

David Perdue began a debate in Georgia by declaring that the 2020 presidential race was “rigged” and “stolen” from the idiot who lost the contest.

Oh, then he said his own race for re-election to the U.S. Senate was stolen, too.

Sigh …

Perdue once served in the Senate until Jon Ossoff defeated him. He now says “the evidence is compelling” that he and Donald Trump were victims of “theft” from “widespread voter fraud” in Georgia.

No. He wasn’t. Neither was Trump.

The “compelling” evidence? We still have seen nothing.

The Big Lie needs to be squashed.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com