In Deceptive World Of Politics . . . Are Biden, Hobbs Their Own Sorts Of Potemkin Villages?

By DEXTER DUGGAN

PHOENIX — When Joe Biden went to a carefully sanitized city of El Paso on January 8 under the pretense that he actually was looking into border problems caused by the invasion, critics said this was his Potemkin village visit — a reference to a deceptively arranged situation to make it look better.
Well, how about thinking of Biden as his own sort of ongoing Potemkin village?
Goofy, harmless Grandpa Joe actually manages to remember most of the words in singing “Happy Birthday” — while his administration imposes the most depraved, evil policies ever widely inflicted on the United States, and beyond.
Easily confused, sleepy, cognitively impaired bad Catholic Joe isn’t even sure how to exit the stage — while his administration pushes massive, tax-paid permissive abortion, sexual disorientation, officially sanctioned left-wing racism, social censorship, medical assault on patients and loss of their livelihoods, anti-religious bigotry, just to name a few of his Democratic Party’s outrages.
Sort of like the shifty shell game to conceal the bean, befuddled Biden stumbles his way through his lightly scheduled day even as his puppet masters more or less do the work of Satan, while friendly Catholic prelates can’t find it in themselves to call Biden to account for daily performing and encouraging deadly mortal sin as the nation’s way of life.
Would you worry if a puppy skipped over to sniff your pants leg? Until the puppy amazingly pulled out a pistol and demanded all your cash? With Biden, the threat may appear similarly unlikely, until you discover you and your family’s entire way of life and belief system are coming under threat of federal indoctrination and even imprisonment.
Ten years ago, whoever would have thought such a rapid, thorough national change in politics, religion, and society generally was even possible, much less right on the doorstep?
Yet as it shockingly arrives, the establishment’s U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and his GOP allies seemed all too ready to surrender, while they screamed out their opposition and insults against someone like Donald Trump daring to oppose degenerate Democratic leaders’ onslaught.
And if anyone still needed proof that conservative Republicans suffer a different standard of justice, they need only recall that last summer, not long before the midterm elections, Trump’s Florida residence was raided by the federal government at night, in the glare of flashing red lights and media hysteria, in a search for confidential documents from his presidency.
However, when documents that Biden wasn’t supposed to keep from the days of his vice presidency under Barack Obama began to be found only a few days before the 2022 midterms, this wasn’t reported at all until two months later, when voter outrage over the double standard for sleepy Joe would have been too late to affect the November elections anyway.
Nor was there the same political insistence that Biden strongly be held to account for this, and right away.
In his daily radio update for January 18, veteran right-tilting commentator Bill O’Reilly said he’s starting to feel a personal dislike for Biden that he never felt for any U.S. president he covered before. O’Reilly cited Biden posing as the savior of hapless blacks — although Biden didn’t compile such a civil-rights record during long decades of government work as a U.S. senator.
Meanwhile, conservatives waited hopefully to see how Republicans’ new although narrow majority in the U.S. House under Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) changed the shameful direction that had been set by previous Speaker and bad Catholic liberal Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.).

Lake Pursues Legal Challenge

Besides Biden, basement-dwelling Katie Hobbs was another Democrat who was slipped into office as the choice of the establishment, in this case as the officially declared new governor of Arizona after term-limited Republican Gov. Doug Ducey left office.
However, Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake continued to pursue her legal challenge to the November 8 election results after widespread suppression of Republican voters in populous Maricopa County.
The Arizona Sun Times posted on January 13 that the Arizona Court of Appeals scheduled conferencing on February 1 for Lake’s appeal after a Maricopa County Superior Court judge in late December dismissed the two counts that he agreed to hear of Lake’s total of ten counts.
The Sun Times said a Lake attorney “alleged that the ‘clear and convincing’ standard of evidence enforced by the [superior] court is ‘not the standard that the election-contest statute requires for misconduct’.”
It reported that the Lake campaign tweeted, “Do not underestimate @KariLake’s desire to get justice for the people of Arizona. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. She will see this through.”
In a separate Sun Times story, posted January 17, about a rumor that Lake is considering running for Kyrsten Sinema’s U.S. Senate seat in 2024, Lake’s gubernatorial campaign was quoted:
“Kari is hyper-focused on winning her court case as she is the duly elected governor and her election case proves that.
“Hundreds of thousands of invalid ballots were counted in Maricopa County alone,” the statement added, “more than 60 percent of Election Day voting centers were sabotaged, causing lines of four hours or more at some locations, the wrong ballot image was printed on Election Day ballots causing tabulators to jam and spit out ballots, 25K ballots were mysteriously added to the official vote count two days after the elections, and more than 100K ballots with rejected signatures were counted anyway.”
Some conservative media continued reporting on the November voting scandal here, including this article posted January 18 at The Federalist: “With 25,000 Mysterious Votes And Missing Documents, Maricopa’s 2022 Election Process Marked By Chaos And Uncertainty.”
However, some conservative-inclined writers thousands of miles from the Grand Canyon State seemed to be letting themselves get talked into minimizing this voter suppression.
Although Hobbs avoided commenting as much as possible during the 2022 campaign, she quickly started pushing the positions of her left-wing puppet masters after she was declared governor — including permissive abortion with tax dollars, a dangerously open border, and opposition to expanded educational choice that Ducey signed into law only last year.
In a separate Arizona Sun Times story posted January 17, GOP state Sen. T.J. Shope was reported as saying he and his GOP colleagues wouldn’t support Hobbs’ proposed state budget.
Shope was quoted: “My colleagues in the Senate GOP will not support this budget and its declaration of war on parents. We will not support taxpayer-funded scholarship programs for non-citizens. We will not support a repeal of the Border Strike Force at a time when the scourge of fentanyl plagues our people. We are united and we will hold the line for the Arizona we love.”
The Republican Party holds narrow majorities in both the state Senate and House.
The Sun Times also reported that Hobbs proposed taking $200,000 from a program for homeless pregnant mothers and giving “it to the Department of Health Services’ budget for ‘pregnancy services that are inclusive of all options and support personal choice’.”
In other words, the rabidly pro-abortion Hobbs wants to yank aid from homeless mothers and give it to abortionists.
The same news article said that Republican state Senate President Warren Peterson “said this budget would be dead on arrival and that it would be Republican legislators introducing a budget to help the state,” instead of trying to make Arizona into another California.
During his January 12 talk program on Phoenix-based KFYI (550 AM), conservative host James T. Harris said he thought Hobbs “should be legally, morally resisted at every turn.”
Harris was interviewing Phoenix elections attorney Tim LaSota, who said it was “totally unprecedented” for a governor to take dark money here to fund an inauguration, but Hobbs “hit up” donors with a request for $250,000 then wouldn’t reveal who they were.
By contrast, LaSota said, Hobbs’ immediate predecessor, Republican Ducey, limited individual donations to his inaugural to $25,000.
LaSota said he filed a public-records request for details on Hobbs’ pitch and wondered how much money might be left over for other purposes because, he said, how many $250,000 sums would be needed to pay for an Arizona inauguration?
The attorney was back on Harris’ program on January 18 with news that his public-records request at least persuaded Hobbs to release some information to Arizona political reporter Howard Fischer, who wrote that she raised nearly $1.5 million but spent only about $207,000 on the ceremony.
Now here’s a lesson on how the political game is played. And everyone wants to be in the winner’s circle.
Fischer wrote that Hobbs set up her inaugural fund under a section of the Internal Revenue Code that allows proceeds to be used for political purposes.
LaSota told Harris that Hobbs may plan to spend the large leftover to try to get more liberal Democrats elected to the state legislature in 2024 and take over the majority.
Both Fischer and Arizona Republic newspaper columnist Laurie Roberts noted the irony that the largest giver, Arizona Public Service ($250,000), donated significantly to Arizona Republicans in the recent election cycle, so perhaps this major utility company was seeking to get into Hobbs’ good graces now.
Roberts also noted that while Arizona Public Service had so much for these political donations, it also is seeking to boost its customers’ bills by around $38 a month.
She posted on January 18: “Just how badly does APS need more money from its customers if it can afford to fritter away $1 million to boost its political standing with the governor and not-governor of the state? And the hundreds of thousands more it spends on lobbying and other political activities, to remain in the good graces of the power set?”

Wild Voting

Finally, with election integrity a top concern of local Republicans, the annual meeting of Maricopa County GOP precinct committeemen was held January 14 at Phoenix’s Dream City Church.
The January 16 issue of the unofficial Maricopa County “Republican Briefs” blog said an attendee reported that the gathering “was rough. It was 12.5 hours in the building from start to finish. The meeting was 10 hours.”
The blog added: “Attendees report disruptions caused the meeting to run over at least an hour and a half, resulting in many PCs [precinct committeemen] leaving prior to the second ballot.”
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on January 18: “The debate over hand counting versus machine counting consumed the entire morning and seemed largely driven by some folks who just object to any machine doing any part of the process, which misses the mark if your concern is how to use the good of machines (speed and accuracy) while addressing their vulnerability (coding, insufficient auditing, etc.).
“They just didn’t want any machines in the name of election integrity,” Querard said. “The crazy part is how they ran the vote counting to decide that motion — when it was time to vote Yay or Nay, you just held up however many fingers representing however many votes (including proxies) you had. No one checked to see if the number was right, so anyone could hold up three or four fingers if they wanted.
“Then one person counted fingers and wrote numbers down before turning them in, but none of us voting had any idea if the number was accurate,” he said. “And this was all done because the same folks who didn’t trust machines somehow had complete trust in human beings. So it was all pretty wild.”