Op-Ed: Biden's Win Wasn't A Victory; It Was A Reprieve
By Sam Youngman & Adam Parkhomenko
For Republicans, the masks have come all the way off.
And we’re not even talking about the selfish assholes who refused to put one on in the first place.
No, we’re talking about an entire political party that is in the process of trying to pull off a coup while looking the other way as 1,500 Americans die a day.
For years, these creeps claimed to be patriots who love America. Thanks to Donald Trump, we’re now seeing exactly what and who they are and exactly what they think of American voters.
On Tuesday, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy and Roy Blunt — all Republican leaders — refused to sign off on a document acknowledging that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be inaugurated on Jan. 20th.
Not long after that, the current president stood in the White House and called for GOP state legislators and judges to help him overthrow the election. That came after weeks of Trump calling state and local Republican officials and trying to strongarm them into throwing out votes.
Sen. Ted Cruz is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out almost all mail-in votes in Pennsylvania. That means a sitting United States senator is asking for 7 million legal votes to be cast aside because they didn’t produce the results he wanted.
Former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, who was recently pardoned by the outgoing president for lying to the FBI about his treasonous conversations with the Russians, called for the Constitution to be suspended and for Trump to implement martial law. If any Republican lawmaker condemned this, we didn’t hear about it.
In swing states, local officials are facing threats and armed goons outside their homes for doing nothing more and following the law and counting the votes, and Rudy Giuliani has been spreading COVID and anti-America lies — along with noxious gases and face diarrhea — all over the country.
If it weren’t for the law and a handful of outlier Republicans in a handful of jobs, we very well could be witnessing the end of American democracy. That they probably won’t succeed sure as hell wasn’t for lack of trying. And we damn well better remember it.
Our party officials and the mainstream media seem to be convinced that the Republican plotters will just tire themselves out. It’s not a real attempt, they seem to think, when the president’s lawyer is shitting out of his temples.
Well, we’ve laughed at Rudy too. But we never saw anything funny about what he and his crew are trying to pull. Because after four years of being told everything will be fine and then seeing that it is very well fucking not, Democratic voters and activists know to be alarmed. They know to keep their guards up. They know EXACTLY which voters the Republicans are targeting and they know their skin color. And they know that Trump will do as much as he’s allowed to get away with.
Hell, the only reason we’ve been able to sleep at all these last few weeks is because Democratic superlawyer and defender of democracy Marc Elias says it’s ok to.
But what about the next election? What would have happened with a different secretary of state in Georgia? Or a different Republican member of the Michigan Board of State Canvassers? What if the whole race had been decided by Pennsylvania? What if Marc Elias invents something like the Opti-grab from The Jerk in his spare time, accidentally messes up a bunch of people’s eyes, gets sued himself, goes broke and has to take Lou Dobbs up on his offer of half a billion dollars to switch teams?
That last one probably won’t happen, but we have to start living now like any of those other things can and will happen. We’re a party that wants healthcare for people. We’re a party that wants to save the planet from climate change. We’re a party that believes in justice and equality. And now we have to be the party that stands strong in defense of this democracy.
We’re not telling you anything you haven’t seen or heard with your own eyes and ears. And people like Elias have been defending democracy for quite some time now. But this has to move to the forefront of our mission as voters. We have to put it on the same level as the issues that motivate us the most. We have to become zealots in preserving our right to vote and to have that vote count.
That means that even when Trump takes his loser orange ass down to that gross South Florida orgy palace and STD incubator, the fight isn’t over. We might take some time to rest or recharge, but we have to come right back at it with the fervor of a drunken Giuliani at a family reunion.
The Georgia Senate runoffs are the perfect place for us to demonstrate this tireless devotion to democracy. We have to fight like Trump is on the ballot there. We have to fight like it’s the last free and fair election Georgia will ever have.
After that, we’ll take five, grab a smoothie and get back to work.
Better days are ahead. Joe and Kamala will take office. A vaccine will help us slowly return to our pre-pandemic lives.
But there are things we cannot and must not forget. The people who are right now trying to throw out our votes and end our democracy aren’t going anywhere. They have let more than 285,000 Americans die. They’ve sold us out to our enemies. They’ve betrayed everything we hold dear. And because of all that, they know they can’t win without cheating. So they’re trying to kill our democracy.
These last few weeks have been illuminating. We know what they want, we know how far they’re willing to get it and we know they’ll never stop.
We know that it’s up to us to stop them. And thanks to Joe and Kamala and more than 81 million patriots, we know we can.
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