
SAY WHAT? - The battle for democracy, woefully under-reported, lumbers on. The bad news is that the crazed orange guy is still out there, raving and lying. At a Saturday night "rally" in Georgia, he obsessively parroted "The Big Lie" yet again, telling a rabid crowd of cranks that Arizona's just-completed, $6-million, bamboo-fiber-seeking "full forensic audit" was "a big win for us" that revealed"huge findings!" and "a major criminal event" the commie Fake News is now villainously covering up, when in fact, here on unaccomodating Planet Earth, it found that - duh - Biden won, again, though by 300 more votes than was originally thought. "Truth is truth, numbers are numbers," conceded the GOP Senate head who approved the bonkers charade. Nope, insisted the crowd that gathered outside a hearing after release of the audit to frenziedly chant "De-certify!" and "USA!" Their lunatic calls echoed around the Internet, with conspiracy theorists trumpeting what's "gonna be the beginning of their end" and a Melania Trump (Official) site hawking Trump coins to honor "President Trump’s victory and success” - $7.95 to $4.95 or one free coin (plus $8.95 for shipping) in a “complementary plastic case” or multiple for "only 130$! (and) in a year the value will skyrocket and you'll be able to buy a house with only 25 coins!". Ok, maybe a really, really teeny one. Regardless, after the audit will definitely come "the storm, the rapture, salvation."
Appearances notwithstanding, notes Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson, the Jan. 6 riot and its ensuing "Stop the Steal" delirium "was not some crazy plot of some obscure dude in a shack in the mountains; this was a plan of the president of the United States." She details other horrors: a Trump lawyer's six-point plan to overturn the election and “kill the Biden presidency in the crib”; staff members of GOP A.G.s meeting for "war games" to consider strategies if Trump lost; MAGA wingnuts using the language of authoritarianism, from a Texas gubernatorial challenger saying the state "deserves a leader" like Brazil strongman Jair Bolsonaro to white nationalist Charlie Kirk echoing Nazi "replacement theory" by charging Democrats back "an invasion of the country" to bring in brown people who'll vote for them; and the bizarre, little noted news that next year's CPAC confab will be held in....Budapest, Hungary, where Viktor Orbán, Tucker Carlson's fave new fascist, is busy dismantling democracy. Given the current fundamental battle "to prove that democracy actually works," writes Richardson, "If this is not a hair-on-fire, screaming emergency, what is?"