When is “election denying” an affront to democracy — dare one say, an insurrection? ‘
Depends on what letter comes after your name when The Associated Press reports on you.
Should it be an R — shame, shame. The 14th Amendment has something to say about you, and it involves you not running for office ever again. That includes you, Mr. Trump. And you’ll be facing some federal charges on top of it, too.
Should it be a D? No problem. Keep up the good work.
The latest object lesson in this double standard — the only standard when it comes to whether questioning the legitimacy of elections is concerned, at least to the establishment media — came at an event Tuesday in Manassas, Virginia, which received relatively little media coverage.
The occasion was a campaign rally with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris celebrating the 51st anniversary of the overturned Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, according to C-SPAN.
What coverage the event did receive hinged around the presumptive Democratic ticket promising to restore national “reproductive rights” (read: unrestricted elective abortions) and to veto any national abortion ban, which is about as likely to cross the president’s desk in the foreseeable future as cyanide-flavored peanut butter has of catching on as the next big food and beverage fad. (Move over, Stanley cups.)
However, few media outlets took note of how our president kicked things off at the rally:
Election Denier Joe Biden: “Hello, Virginia! And the real governor, Terry McAuliffe!” pic.twitter.com/NFU7Uqu0ja
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 23, 2024
Yes: “Hello, Virginia! And the real governor, Terry McAuliffe!” Biden began, pointing out the not-Governor of Virginia, a former Democratic National Committee chair and Clinton bagman. (As well as a former governor of Virginia, albeit one whose term ended six years ago.)
McAuliffe lost by two points in 2021 to the really real governor, Republican Glenn Youngkin, in a state that’s tended blue over the last few cycles.
Not only that, there weren’t even potential shenanigans to talk about. McAuliffe shot himself in the foot repeatedly by aggressively siding with teachers’ unions over parental rights groups in a tense election-year battle over public school curricula that consumed the race in its closing weeks — then finished the job by declaring during the final debate that”I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Virginians, fortunately, thought otherwise, allowing Youngkin and his allies to score upset victories in the off-year election. No claims of Latvian collusion or Diebold machines gone haywire — just Terry McAuliffe, a well-studied prevaricator for almost the entirety of his political career, making the unforced error of actually saying what he thought for once.
Are Democrats election deniers?
This wasn’t news, of course, and not just because there wasn’t a Capitol incursion involved. In fact, had Capitol Police been able to keep rioters out of the building on Jan. 6, 2021, there would still be wringing of hands and clutching of pearls — and wringing of pearls and clutching of hands — over former President Donald Trump’s decision to challenge the results of the 2020 election.
Why? Well, we know that the same hand-wringing happened when Kari Lake refused to concede the Arizona gubernatorial election despite mysterious and systematic Election Day equipment malfunctions in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county, Given that Republicans tend to not trust vote-by-mail the same way Democrats do, and are more likely to vote on Election Day itself, the gummed-up machinations of Maricopa County’s electoral infrastructure may indeed have had a substantive impact on the outcome of that race.
But the media again acted as if Lake were a Threat to Democracy™ by pushing the point.
By contrast, Democrat Stacey Abrams, who did almost materially the same thing in Georgia in 2018 — albeit with less evidence that she had any chance at winning — received 1) no opprobrium from the folks at MSNBC or CNN and 2) a cameo on “Star Trek. Discovery.”
Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee’s RNC Research social media account posted — along with Uncle Joe’s foray into election denial on Tuesday — a 24-minute supercut of Democrats denying elections for the last quarter-century:
In fact, here is 24 straight minutes of Democrats denying election resultspic.twitter.com/gDnNqfruWD
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 23, 2024
Here we have 2000, where a few hundred votes in Florida decided the election. Conspiracies about hanging chads, the Supreme Court, then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and so-called “butterfly ballots” abounded.
Heck, for those of you have never seen Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” — and look, I was a liberal arts major/Democrat at the time, so I’ll blame my youth for giving the adipose Leni Reifenstahl of the Midwest a few of my dollars — he even implies at the start Fox News may have had a hand in it by calling Florida for Bush when the rest of the networks called it for Gore.
(This beauty isn’t included in the supercut — but if you can pirate the movie, it’s worth watching the first few minutes of Moore’s farrago of lies just to see him try and make that outlandish implication work.)
In 2004, the conspiracies were even more tenuous: Diebold electronic voting machines were allegedly responsible for variances in exit polling in Ohio that showed John Kerry ahead despite the fact he lost the state. Instead of looking at inbuilt biases and faults in polling practices — something that might have saved the Democrats a lot of heartache in the years ahead — they blamed the machines. Why? Because Diebold’s CEO was a Republican.
In 2008 and 2012, everything was totally legit at the top because the Democrats won, naturally. But then came 2016, when the perfidious Muscovites and/or James Comey swooped down and stole the election from the deserving Hillary Clinton, who — despite being about as likable as the aforementioned cyanide-flavored peanut butter — was supposed to walk away with four years at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Yes, well, the Steele dossier that the Russiagate hoax was based on turned out to be worse fiction than anything Nora Roberts has ever published, and Comey — quelle surprise — turned out to be a good soldier of #TheResistance who simply told America what it needed to know in his role as FBI director: More classified emails from Clinton had been found on a laptop shared by serial pervert Anthony Weiner and his wife, Hillary aide Huma Abedin. (I’m guessing they used it for, ahem, different purposes.)
Then came 2018 and the various misleading claims about Brian Kemp stealing the Georgia gubernatorial election from Stacey Abrams. But then, two years later, one was never ever ever to question the results of our secure and fair and fair and secure — and did I mention secure? — elections, ever, or they ought to be disqualified from even being considered as a carbon-based life-form, much less a candidate for public office.
Until Joe Biden did it, of course. Then, nobody in the media cared. “What’d he say about the ‘real governor, Terry McAuliffe?’ I certainly didn’t hear it. Reproductive freedom, yay!”
All I can say is this: Expect that 24-minute Democrat-denier supercut to grow, and exponentially, if things don’t go the way the White House wants this November.
