By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Not bad work for a dead man.
One of the current news items on November 30 at the website of metropolitan Phoenix’s KTAR Radio (92.3 FM) was headlined, “Former AG Grant Woods endorses Democratic candidate Tipirneni.”
Considering that Woods died in 2021 and Hiral Tipirneni wasn’t a current congressional candidate, it was worth clicking on the headline to read more.
The story said this former Arizona Republican attorney general was backing Tipirneni in her congressional bid against incumbent conservative Republican Cong. Debbie Lesko.
And the date on the story was October 3, 2018.
It must have been one of those strange errors you hear about sometimes, when a technician presses the wrong button and incorrect things happen, like resurrecting a dead file.
Or how about bringing up a file of an event that hadn’t happened yet?
For instance: when Fox 10 Phoenix television station KSAZ aired a graphic during the news showing that Democrat Katie Hobbs had beaten Republican Kari Lake for governor — 12 days before the November 8, 2022, general election. Each of these candidates, the graphic showed, received more than one million votes, with Hobbs triumphant, 53 percent to 47 percent.
This was an actual incident of airing an erroneous graphic, and prematurely at that. KSAZ displayed it later the same day that Lake held an outdoor news conference in late October candidly criticizing media bias. Was this, some folks wondered, a warning shot at Lake about media power?
No, said KSAZ; it was just a pre-election testing effort from the Associated Press.
However, the old 2018 KTAR Radio story was very factual about what had been the late Grant Woods’ liberal style of Republican politics.
It was a useful reminder about Arizona’s “uniparty” corruption during current days when the establishment is determined to shove pro-abortion radical Hobbs and her Dem kindred into top Grand Canyon State jobs after a disastrous November 8 election — which effectively suppressed the in-person GOP vote at many of Maricopa County’s 223 voting centers.
As vote counting from the general election continued on November 11, incoming Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen, a Republican, told Phoenix talk host James T. Harris (KFYI, 550 AM) that the state-capitol establishment was “terrified” of Lake because she’s beholden to no one.
November was a restive time around the world, from Communist China to Iran to Brazil, where defiant people pushed back against aloof, callous establishments. Had that day arrived in Arizona, too? Determined demonstrations may be needed here as well to end manipulations by the privileged.
During public testimony on November 28 in downtown Phoenix, both voters and official poll workers told a hearing with the Maricopa County supervisors about their indefensible handling of the November 8 vote here. Nevertheless, the supervisors voted to certify the Maricopa results that day.
A bearded man who described himself as a former prosecutor defiantly said, “A curse upon all of you, you smug, smug people….Am I bothering you? Because this election bothered me, and you’re doing nothing about it. I don’t care about that stupid buzzer” — a reference to his time to speak having expired.
Another person, described as a poll worker, told the supervisors that all the poll workers were laughing at them. “You are the butt of our jokes.”
The late Grant Woods, who had been John McCain’s first chief of staff when the former Vietnam POW was a congressman in the 1980s, went on in his career to make no secret of his scorn for conservative Republicans — a trait, many believed, that was echoed by McCain’s preference for working with liberal Democrats.
In 2016 Woods had backed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president and, in 2020, Joe Biden. In 2018 Woods praised Democrat Kyrsten Sinema running for the U.S. Senate and attacked her GOP foe, Martha McSally.
Tipirneni was “smart, independent, articulate and understands the complexities of important issues. In other words, she is just what our country needs in Congress,” Woods said in 2018. However, the pro-abortion Tipirneni lost that congressional race to pro-life Republican Lesko.
Woods was the style of Republican who moved easily among the elite here who think it’s their job to override mere conservatives as often as they can.
This elite drew attention far beyond Arizona’s borders when they had strange things happen in the 2020 Maricopa County general election that supposedly gave a narrow presidential win to Biden. Having learned nothing, they grew more audacious in their efforts to control the 2022 midterms in Maricopa County, where the majority of Arizona’s entire population lives.
And don’t forget former Supervisor Steve Chucri, who resigned in 2021 because his fellow supervisors were embarrassed by a surreptitious recording of him criticizing them over the audit of the 2020 election.
The supervisors supposedly all agreed that the Arizona Senate shouldn’t have supported the audit.
However, a tape made in March 2021 revealed Chucri talking to some activists and criticizing fellow Supervisors Bill Gates and Jack Sellers because their own election victories had been narrow and they supposedly were scared of what an audit might reveal.
When the recording became known later that year, Chucri apologized to his colleagues and resigned while saying, “There was no cover-up, the election was not stolen. Biden won.”
(As it happened, well before any of this had occurred, I ran into Chucri a few times outside my church building’s doors.)
Since November 8, Gates, the chairman of the board of supervisors, had lectured Arizonans about the noble work being done for nearly two weeks of a long count of ballots.
Strangely, Republican Gates had spoken openly during a KTAR Radio interview only a few months earlier about the kind of Republican who didn’t deserve to win elections.
And here Gates was with his thumb on the scales in November, along with fellow “moderate” Republican and official county Recorder Stephen Richer, who just last year, in 2021, helped start a political action committee to oppose MAGA Republicans. It’s named Pro-Democracy Republicans of Arizona (prodemocracygop.com).
Criticizing “conspiracy theorists and demagoguery,” who should be opposed, its website says, “To that end, we are launching this PAC to support pro-democracy Arizona Republicans.”
You might think this looks pretty dirty, but, hey, it’s the way things have worked around here, with the assistance of what grew into the McCain Machine. The Gates-Richer crew may have thought they quietly could try their business as usual, but things were getting out of hand and, as Kari Lake was saying, they were a national laughingstock.
Lake’s own appearance and skills as a longtime news anchor gave her an edge in attracting attention. And the Gates-Richer team was starting to look as pathetic around the nation as bumbling Biden, who’d been endorsed for president in 2020 by the McCain Machine’s Cindy McCain and former Sen. Jeff Flake.
On November 30 Phoenix radio talk host James T. Harris began his program by saying he’d been listening to a District of Columbia station “and the conversation was about the corruption of Maricopa County,” and Democrat Hobbs, as the current secretary of state, being able to certify her own election to be governor.
Harris said that that radio station’s hosts and guests spoke of Maricopa’s corruption “with scorn.” Harris said people around the country are asking, “‘What the hell?’. . . The people of Maricopa County have no confidence about the election system.”
Back on August 5, KTAR Radio news posted an interview with Gates headlined, “GOP Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates: Party may need to lose to ‘find itself again’.”
Criticizing “election deniers,” Gates said the Republican Party “may need to lose in order to move away from candidates who deny election results,” KTAR posted, including an audio of the interview.
“I fear that if we continue to nominate people who deny the truth, then what may have to happen is that we lose elections,” Gates was quoted. “I don’t want Republicans to lose elections, but I also don’t want candidates who stated that they’re not going to accept the wishes and the will of the voters to be serving in office.
“Sometimes it does take going through a difficult situation like that for a party to find itself again and to again nominate people who are focused more on all of the constituents and not just a few on one far extreme or the other,” said Gates in August.
Endorsed By Trump
A KTAR host cited Gates’ words earlier about the results of the August 2 Arizona primary being a “catastrophe” for the Arizona GOP and for “our democracy” and “corrosive to our democracy.”
Expressing his dismay over the primary election, Gates said he didn’t know why his party went astray, and said he never thought the party would get to this point.
The top spots all had been won by Republican conservatives endorsed by Donald Trump.
It didn’t seem to occur to Gates that the majority of voters, not his own personal beliefs, should determine the outcome. Gates and Richer seemed to like to talk about “our democracy” as much as any liberal Democrat who doesn’t believe a word of it.
The December 1 hardcopy issue of The Wanderer reported that on November 19 the elections-integrity unit of the Arizona attorney general’s office wrote Maricopa County to ask for a detailed response regarding numerous failures and complaints over how the county handled Election Day (“Serious Vote Problems in Arizona — Raise Question of How Wide Were Similar Messes Elsewhere”).
The chief attorney of the county’s civil division, Tom Liddy, responded with what critics said was a brushoff. In his response of just over four pages, dated November 27, Liddy claimed that “every lawful voter was still able to cast his or her ballot” despite any problems.
The attorney general’s office reportedly was weighing how to respond.
On the other hand, conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who lives in the Phoenix area, said on his national radio program that there was “disenfranchisement all the way across the Valley” — which refers to the Phoenix metropolitan area.
Kirk said he thought the county supervisors “could be criminally liable.”
Although Arizona is the sixth-largest state by area, it has only 15 counties because most of its counties are very large but largely rural. The supervisors in two of them didn’t want to certify their own voting results in sympathy with what they saw as the difficulties of Maricopa County voters.
However, the two dissenting supervisors in Mohave County, in the northwestern part of the state, voted to certify “under duress” because they said they were threatened with arrest for committing a felony if they declined to sign.
The conservative “Just the News” website had as its lead story on November 30 a report about this, saying: “The office of Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, now the governor-elect, threatened the Mohave County Board of Supervisors with legal action and criminal referral unless they certified the 2022 vote in their county.”
In southeastern Arizona, the Cochise County Board of Supervisors deferred a decision to certify at least until December 1, when this hardcopy issue of The Wanderer went to press. Threats of lawsuits hung over the Cochise board, including by Democrat Hobbs, who hid from voters during much of the campaign but insisted they must crown her governor now.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress