https://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2020/12/16/barrys-blog-358-a-mythologist-looks-at-the-2020-election-part-nineteen/

Mid-December

Some people take, some people get took, and they know they’re getting took, and there’s nothing they can do about it. – Shirley MacLaine, in The Apartment”

The Supreme Court rejected the Texas lawsuit. Supported by 17 Repub attorneys-general and over a hundred congresspersons, it was absurd and had no legal standing. But with all those reactionary justices, including three who had helped G. W. Bush steal the 2000 election from Al Gore, this was no forgone conclusion. But they actually did the right thing legally, and to many innocent liberals, it appears that they are now more respectful of the Constitution than the majority of Repub elected officials (or that, by “resigning”, Bill Barr has suddenly been infected by an ethics virus).

Bullshit. These same thugs in black gowns are planning to destroy abortion rights sometime next year. If they decided to put a legal seal on Trumpus’ fall from grace, we should assume that they were simply acknowledging that the useful idiot is no longer useful to their corporate masters – or that he will be more useful as a vengeful, fund-raising ex-president with his own TV network threatening to run again in 2024.

Republican Corruption: Trumpus is reportedly dangling Presidential pardons like Papal indulgences for people who haven’t even been accused of anything, even as he expects to execute thirteen federal prisoners this year. Meanwhile, he and the entire Repub leadership thrive on the creation and maintenance of anxiety. This is who they are and what they do – and how they raise money. So it appears that some of them will contest the election right up to the Georgia primary on January 5th (which will probably not be decided that day), and into the 6th, when some of them will probably stage a final challenge on the floor of the House of Representatives.

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Officials in another Georgia county (Camden) took voter suppression to a new low by ordering that voters would have exactly one day of early voting. In the long run, we should take note of how their policies have and will continue to infect the public’s confidence in the political process. Palast quotes James Kwak’s Washington Post article (yes, this broken clock can be right twice a day):

For years, it’s been clear that American democracy faces a real threat: voter suppression policies (generally implemented by Republican state legislatures or governors)…But today, Trump has shifted the frame: Many of his supporters believe the conspiracy theories he tweets and retweets, forcing Democrats and state election officials to declare that the electoral process is healthy and robust simply because it is not contaminated by widespread fraud.

For the next four years, it’s likely that debates about elections will focus on the nonissue of whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen. In the meantime, real voter suppression will continue, largely out of sight and out of mind…Now Trump has truly hijacked the conversation.

Democratic Corruption:

The Georgia Senate race is offering us yet another view of the rot at the core of the Democratic Party. Even as Abrams builds her well-deserved reputation as the leader of the fight against voter suppression and female people of color establish themselves as the activist base of the party, Reverend Raphael Warnock has responded to Kelly Loeffler’s anti-Semitism-baiting by rejecting his previous criticism of Israel:

I condemned BDS, its refusal to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. And I support President Obama’s memorandum of understanding [$3.8 billion in aid a year], it’s the largest such commitment made in history…Our aid and support to Israel is something I would advance as a member of the Senate. And there’s no question that Iran cannot get a nuclear weapon.

His statement had its intended effect, as he won the endorsement of a well-healed Israel lobby group. Yes, yes, I know – one does what one has to do to gain power, including trashing one’s principles for incremental gain, and the perfect is the enemy of the good, etc, yadda, yadda.

And Palestinian children will die because this “progressive” gave in to the warmongers.

Censorship: On December 9th, after the states had certified the election, YouTube announced that it was deleting any user videos that claim the election was fraudulent. Good idea, huh? But consider that the statement never claimed that any of the videos (loony as most of them undoubtedly are) endanger anyone’s health, incite violence or mislead voters (six weeks after the election). As Johnstone writes,

It’s simply deleting the videos because they are believed to be wrong. This is an important distinction, because it’s a marked deviation from the previous policy of content deletion used by YouTube and other new media platforms.

Taibbi agreed, insisting on a tech-supported double standard. Democrats and most of the MSM have pushed their own unprovable narratives about Trumpus’ collusion with Russia to steal the 2016 election for four years, while Trump supporters are now banned from doing essentially the same thing.

Intelligence agencies, think tanks, and mainstream news agencies have been preparing us for this concept for years as well. This dates back to the infamous 2016 Washington Post story hyping PropOrNot, a shadowy organization that identified a long list of homegrown American news sites like Consortium, TruthDig, Naked Capitalism, and Antiwar.Com as vehicles for “Russian propaganda.”…(Meanwhile) Unrestrained speculation about the illegitimacy of the 2016 election had a major impact on the public. Surveys showed 50 percent of Clinton voters by December of 2016 believed the Russians actually hacked vote tallies in states, something no official agency ever alleged even at the peak of the Russiagate madness.

Right-wing media distracts right-wingers and mainstream media distracts liberals. As I argued at length here, it wasn’t the Russians but the Republicans who hacked that election. But the combination of Russiagate and the marginalizing of legitimate progressive news served to keep the public from a much-needed discussion of the real reasons while Clinton lost, including her party’s abandonment of its working-class base.

In sum, it’s okay to stoke public paranoia, encourage voters to protest legal election results, spread conspiracy theories about stolen elections, refuse to endorse legal election tallies, and even to file lawsuits challenging the validity of presidential results, so long as all of this activity is sanctified by officials in the right party, or by intelligence vets, or by friendlies at CNN, NBC, the New York Times, etc…If, however, the theories are coming from Donald Trump…then it’s time for companies like YouTube to move in and wipe out 8000+ videos and nudge people to channels like CBS and NBC, as well as to the home page of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. This is a process YouTube calls “connecting people to authoritative information.”

With the press, we put up with gossip and errors and lies not because we think those things are socially beneficial, but because we don’t want an aristocratic political establishment having a monopoly on those abuses. By allowing some conspiracy theories but not others, that’s exactly the system we’re building…Acts like the YouTube ban…(will) almost certainly further radicalize this population…now you’re removing some of the last incentives to behave like citizens…This is a stupid, dangerous, wrong policy, guaranteed to make things worse.

Liberals don’t care about censorship, as long as it’s the right kind of censorship. Meanwhile, the big news is that three days after the Supreme Court refused to hear the Texas lawsuit, the Electoral College certified the election. The next day, McConnell congratulated Biden. And if the Dems don’t run the table in Georgia, Biden ought to return the favor, as he will have about as much power as a constitutional monarch, and McConnell will be the de facto President.