By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — “Suckers!”
That might have been the contemptuous salute from the ruling U.S. establishment toward the too-compliant people it governs as 2022 passed into the history books.
Independent and conservative voters across the nation were sneered at and connived against, from Washington, D.C., where Sen. Mitch McConnell’s Republican minority shrugged them off during the lame-duck session, to Arizona, where a rigged voting system struggled to avoid being exposed to the public.
After literally decades of conservative activists working their hearts out to attain a Republican majority, GOP Minority Leader McConnell (R., Ky.) demonstrated that when much of his Senate team unites with Democrats to squelch conservatives, the upper chamber still is about two-thirds in the pocket of left-wingers — far from a conservative majority.
Hardly had the November 8 midterm Election Day passed than 12 Senate Republicans needlessly joined Democrats to pass the far-left, misnamed “Respect for Marriage Act” that made it easier to exert legal pressure against moral traditionalists. Cognitively impaired Democrat radical Joe Biden gleefully signed the measure.
A Breitbart story posted November 16 said that approving the bill “is yet another instance of Senate Republicans providing the votes needed to pass overreaching Democrat legislation, which includes broad-sweeping bills concerning gun control and infrastructure.”
Conservative U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) issued a statement that because of McConnell’s insistent lockstep for sky-high spending, the Democrats would be able to continue their ruinous policies even after the House came under majority GOP control in January.
Political figures who actually might reverse this debilitating course were reviled and condemned as MAGA extremists, like GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake in Arizona, who kept fighting against suppression of conservative voters. Lake’s choice to go to trial provided a revealing look at how her politically corrupt home county of Maricopa runs elections.
Thanks to McConnell’s strategy, money for Democrat sick priorities, fantasies and pork waste would keep gushing out of taxpayers’ pockets in order to continue undermining this nation through the lame-duck session’s “omnibus” bill of nearly $1.7 trillion.
Conservative U.S. Sen. John Kennedy (R., La.) said McConnell worked with Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) — both left-wing extremists — to put together the bill.
The Federalist conservative website quoted its editor-in-chief, Mollie Hemingway, on December 22: “What is unbelievable to tens of millions of Americans is that Republicans, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, are working so hard to get this passed. It is deeply immoral and frustrating to Americans that this is what’s happening in our country.”
And that was just one spending measure during the session.
All that McConnell would have had to do was wait just a few weeks, when the new Republican-majority U.S. House would take power as January began, and GOP members in the lower chamber could have helped craft a reduced spending package. But McConnell wouldn’t wait.
The U.S. couldn’t defend its own border but allocated tens of billions of dollars to defend distant ones, like Ukraine’s, which McConnell proudly declared to be a GOP priority.
Conservative “Turning Point USA” co-founder Charlie Kirk lamented how it hurt to feel the disdain from GOP leaders after conservatives had rallied to support them.
Was it finally time to cut loose from an establishment GOP that had no interest in winning conservative goals and to seek different ways?
Multibillionaire Elon Musk seemed to be growing friendlier to conservatives. He already was widely known and seemed to want to make a difference, such as by reforming censorious Twitter after he bought it. Would Musk be the kind of new partner conservatives should work with after showing McConnell the exit door?
Inflation pummeled American families due to politicians’ unconstrained spending, but Congress laughed and lied that it was passing “inflation reduction” measures that actually threw more fuel on the fire.
A Fox News story posted December 21 quoted conservative GOP U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin, expressing apprehension that Congress had increased what it regarded as its baseline spending level by about 36 percent, an additional $1.6 trillion, from $4.4 trillion to $6 trillion.
Elsewhere the nation was staggering under the burden of left-wing Democrat priorities including Green Energy nonsense that placed new burdens on power systems trying to keep Americans warm and with their lights on, and also ever-expanding pressure to spend on the demands of unending illegal immigrants who decided it was time for the U.S. to take care of them.
Mark Dannels, the Republican border-country sheriff of Cochise County, Ariz., told the Russell & Hunter radio talk program in Phoenix (KFYI, 550 AM) that if you ask either illegal immigrants themselves or the Border Patrol why they’re flooding here, the answer they’ll give is Joe Biden encouraging them.
Dannels said that if a person could question the unauthorized entrants about why they’re making asylum claims, most times the reasons wouldn’t hold up for two minutes.
Meanwhile, cameras in the courtroom allowed viewers literally around the world to watch Maricopa County’s corrupt election procedures being exposed during a truncated two-day trial that still managed to reveal everything from incompetence to apparent perjury as Kari Lake challenged her supposed narrow gubernatorial loss to left-wing radical Democrat Katie Hobbs.
Conservative commentator Emerald Robinson’s “The Absolute Truth” program interviewed Patrick Byrne, an American election-integrity defender currently in Dublin, Ireland, who watched the trial and pronounced Maricopa procedures to be appalling.
Robinson said it showed “total disregard for the chain of custody” of ballots. Byrne replied that Maricopa showed “there is no integrity. . . . They don’t even count the ballots where the law says they have to count the ballots. . . . They have no idea if people are inserting (unauthorized) ballots or not.
“So many things have come out,” Byrne added, with ballots being printed on the wrong size of paper so that tabulating machines would reject them. “It’s clear these government officials have no interest in running fair elections… . And they’re running dirty elections.”
Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson threw out eight of Lake’s ten counts, including dismissing the issue of signature verification, before the trial ran December 21-22. Even though Thompson had until the following week to announce his decision, he rushed it out on Christmas Eve to say that Lake’s legal team hadn’t made its case about the remaining two counts, malfunctioning printers and chain of custody.
As this article was written overnight on December 28-29, Lake had appealed the ruling and said she would take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.
The “UncoverDC” investigative website posted a powerful analysis on December 28 titled, “The Kari Lake Decision Is a Travesty: Here’s One Reason Why.” Actually it was a lot of reasons that are worth a look as reporter Tracy Beanz carefully examined testimony in the court transcripts.
In addition to officials who seem clueless about the voting process, this included testimony by the MAGA-hating County Recorder, Stephen Richer, denying that he ran a political action committee that opposed Lake — who was widely known as a MAGA candidate (pp. 46-47).
Beanz proceeded to show information about Richer’s “pro-democracy” PAC and its donors.
In his concluding argument, rough-talking Maricopa County civil-division lawyer Tom Liddy ranted that Lake and Arizona Republican Party Chairman Kelli Ward had urged voters to go to the polls on Election Day instead of voting early — as if in-person voting were some kind of crime instead of a constitutional right.
The corrupt Maricopa County establishment was determined to shove the radical Democrat Hobbs into the governorship. Everyone knew what might happen when the establishment is denied something that it really wants. Presumably Judge Thompson knew.
Among instances of muscle-flexing: More than a decade ago Maricopa County’s chief prosecutor, conservative County Attorney Andrew Thomas, and two of his deputies lost their law licenses because they displeased the establishment.
Thomas, who had an Ivy League background and also was an established author, had combated illegal immigration, which drew the ire of the powerful open-borders contingent.
One of those two deputies, Lisa Aubuchon, told The Wanderer on December 26, “That’s how Arizona politics work. They will bury you if you don’t play by their rules.”
The other deputy, Rachel Alexander, went on to become a conservative activist, writer and columnist for Townhall. She posted on December 26 that the judge simply wasn’t correct when he claimed that he couldn’t set aside the election of Hobbs.
At least tens of thousands of Republican voters likely were suppressed in Maricopa County on November 8 because of widely observed chaos at the polls, but Thompson minimized that.
Alexander wrote, “Thompson said in his opinion that it was unprecedented in history to set aside an election like that, but he was mincing words. It’s happened many times. In 2013, in Pembroke, N.C., a new election was ordered for town council after it came out that at least two candidates helped bring people to the town’s early voting location who were ineligible to vote.
“In 2018, in Sharpsburg, N.C., a judge merely cited ‘an irregularity’ as enough to order a new election. There, only 20-25 voters were alleged to have been disenfranchised,” Alexander continued. “In 2019, a judge ordered a new election for a Georgia House seat based on merely finding that four voters were ineligible.
“Also that year, in North Carolina, Democrats were all too happy to praise a judge ordering a new election where a contractor was accused of illegally collecting hundreds of ballots for the winning Republican candidate. He wasn’t even convicted yet, merely accused,” she wrote. “In 2020, after hundreds of mail-in ballots were discovered in a mailbox in Paterson, N.J., a judge ordered a new election in the city council race that was affected.
“Last year, in Surry County, N.C., a judge ordered a new election in the commissioners’ race over the mere action of a poll worker informing voters that one of the candidates was deceased. The courts in these cases did not set high bars for proof, unlike Thompson,” Alexander wrote.
Lake tweeted Alexander’s observations then deleted them when Hobbs and Maricopa County squawked.
Alexander told The Wanderer on December 27 that their complaint was a “total red herring argument” because “I shined a light on their wrongdoing.”
At least Thompson rejected a subsequent request by vindictive Hobbs and Maricopa County to impose a sanction of nearly $700,000 on Lake because, they said, Lake’s claims were groundless and lacked good faith.
Among conservative commentators impressed by the cameras’ revelations in the Maricopa County courtroom were radio talk host Carl Jackson and Substack.com writer Mary Claire Kendall.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress