Ted Cruz Can't Put Lipstick on This Pig - Rob Horowitz
Rob Horowitz, MINDSETTER™
Ted Cruz Can't Put Lipstick on This Pig - Rob Horowitz
The phone call, released in its entirety by the Georgia secretary of state because Trump was falsely characterizing it, brought home once again that what Cruz, Josh Hawley(R-M0) and the other Republican senators , apparently to be joined by more than 100 House Republicans, are engaged in is not some quest for “election integrity”; it's providing direct aid and comfort to what Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post has described as a “coup attempt”—helping the president in his futile, but still dangerous effort to overturn the will of the people as expressed on election day, certified by the states, and ratified by the official vote of the Electoral College.
Their actions assist Mr. Trump as he continues to strike at the heart of our democracy, resisting the peaceful transition of power. That what a sub-set of Republican Senators and a majority of House Republicans are planning is truly damaging--not just harmless political Kabuki theatre designed to stay on the right side of a vindictive president and appease his strong supporters-- is underscored by the fact that all ten living former secretaries of defense, including two that worked for Mr. Trump as well as Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, recently authored a joint opinion piece in the Washington Post urging that the election results be respected and reinforcing the importance of an orderly and peaceful transition of power. “Our elections have occurred. Recounts and audits have been conducted. Appropriate challenges have been addressed by the courts. Governors have certified the results. And the electoral college has voted. The time for questioning the results has passed; the time for the formal counting of the electoral college votes, as prescribed in the Constitution and statute, has arrived,” wrote the former defense secretaries.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTIn justifying his proposal for an unprecedented emergency 10-day audit of the election results. Ted Cruz said, “We went into this election with the country deeply divided, deeply polarized and we’ve seen in the last two months unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, and that’s produced a deep, deep distrust of our democratic process across the country. I think we in Congress have an obligation to do something about that. We have an obligation to protect the integrity of the democratic system.” What Cruz and the other enablers of President Trump conveniently ignore is that false allegations of voter fraud have been systematically advanced by the president and amplified by his allies in the media and Republican elected officials. That is what has caused the distrust among the sub-set of the electorate that strongly supports the president.
Courts, including ones with Trump appointees, have now rejected these claims nearly 60 times. This is because there is no evidence to back them up. And the outrageously false ones that have caused Trump friendly media outlets to do fact check corrections on air in an effort to avoid millions of dollars of libel awards, such as voting machines mysteriously changing Trump votes to Biden votes, are so obviously made up out of whole cloth that attorneys for the president have been reluctant to present them to a Court. As Mr. Cruz well knows, former Attorney General Bill Barr, a steadfast Trump ally, said that Trump’s own Justice Department had investigated the voter fraud allegations and concluded there was not widespread voter fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election.
As Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) pointed out, “The senators justify their intent by observing that there have been many allegations of fraud. But allegations of fraud by a losing campaign cannot justify overturning an election.” Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) put it more bluntly, calling Cruz's and the other Republicans challenging the election results argument that by challenging the election they are working to restore faith in the outcome, “nonsense.”
In an important recent article in the Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch made the apt point that Trump continually employs a disinformation technique “perfected “ by the Russians, dubbed a “fire hose of falsehood” This is an “information-warfare method, marked by high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fiction.” This has reached its apex during Trump’s months-long dangerous effort to calls the election rigged before it occurred and then continue to launch false charge after false charge after he was defeated in a desperate effort to cling to power.
If Senator Cruz and the Republican elected officials who are also backing this election challenge truly wanted to restore faith in our election system, they would have a constructive role to play by joining Mitt Romney, Pat Toomey, Liz Cheney, Brad Raffensperger, 10 former secretaries of defense and even Mitch McConnell in just telling the truth: that the 2020 presidential election was free and fair and that there is simply no evidence to back up the president’s outrageous and false claims. After all, elected Republicans—particularly conservative ones—are the people with the best chance of persuading skeptical Republican voters that the election results should be believed and accepted.
Instead, these elected officials—nearly all of whom know better—are willing to risk doing permanent harm to our democracy to score some cheap political points with the Trump base and/or avoid a primary challenge. No matter how much“lipstick” they try to "put on this pig,” it remains a disgraceful attempt to undermine our democracy.
