In six years, you could not have fixed the problem?
I have a friend who is a kind of fixer in the Israeli Knesset. You’d never know his name, and you’ve never seen his picture. But he is the guy who can grab a guy’s elbow and convince him to vote “the right way” on an upcoming piece of legislation. He is known and respected by all of the political parties, and in the past, he has worked with Knesset members from the far right to the center-left.
This week, he played a role in getting a new “mevaker ha’medina,” State Comptroller, elected. The fellow used to be Bibi Netanyahu’s lawyer. The vote was contentious and required several rounds. In the end, the Likud demanded that each member of the coalition take a picture of his ballot prior to submitting it. And with that, Bibi’s guy got elected. If you want to win, you sometimes have to know how to play hardball.
The Republicans love to be the country’s patsies. While the Democrats run roughshod over tradition and even rules and laws, the Republicans go for proper procedure. How on Earth did we have a 2020 election whose outcome was not known for days? How were Republican poll watchers shut out of a polling station after hours, and trying desperately to look inside? Why did the FBI seize 2020 election material in Georgia? How did tens of thousands of “Biden only” ballots appear in Michigan in the days after the official election ended? And while the Supreme Court has given the Republicans power to put an end to ridiculous pro-Democratic districts, the Republicans still can’t be bothered to pass a law that would guarantee that each voter is a citizen and who they claim to be. The SAVE America Act failed in the Senate again last week.
California went to the polls, and the two Republicans who appear to be in the two slots are at risk of finding themselves in third place. Steve Hilton may be in first place for the governor’s race as I write these words, but days’ worth of ballots are still uncounted. Will Hilton fall down the standings until he is conveniently out of the running? Republicans did nothing over six years via the courts or laws to fix the problem. One solution: all results not public within 12 hours after the polls close should be declared invalid. The Republicans are professional losers. Not Donald Trump and his team of Alpha Studs. MAGA has as much to do with the Republican Party as beauty has to do with the beast. Donald Trump knows how to win, but some issues require laws to be passed or enough human mass to create change. Spencer Pratt has run an amazing campaign, and he has touched a nerve with LA residents who are sick of their expensive third-world city. They want a beautiful, safe, and affordable town, and Pratt is the only one who understands that—and also knows how to make political ads like no other. But the RINO branch of the Republican Party enjoys losing, thrives in not challenging the Democrats on all of their cheating. “You won’t have final results until Friday? Hey, take the weekend and give us the results on Monday of the following week. By then, the top two mayoral and gubernatorial candidates should be Democrats. Have a good one.”
We see it in sports when some players simply quit on their teams. Sure, they’re still out there, but you can tell that they are only waiting for the final whistle, the last out, or the like, so that they can go home to enjoy their stratospheric wealth. We’ve seen quarterbacks and power forwards give up. Obviously, they are rare, and most professional athletes are like Donald Trump—they like to win and only win. But there are people in life who are happy with being in seventh place. They don’t mind as those around them cheat and advance themselves at their expense. Republicans have known for years—especially after 2020—where the major holes in election security exist: identification, mail-in ballots, ballots after election day, and intentionally slow counting. And they, as a party, have done nothing to fix things. For every Scott Pressler fighting for votes and for every Supreme Court decision that favors Republican House chances, we have dozens of representatives and senators who don’t care about their voters or guaranteeing a fair vote. Four House Republicans just sided with Democrats to attempt to limit Donald Trump in war-making against Iran. Who needs a “loyal opposition” when you don’t even have a loyal bench?
There are people who love having responsibility, and there are those who run from it. How often have you seen on X some grandstanding representative write, “I today will introduce a bill for….” When one is in the opposition and out of real power, he can introduce any and every bill that comes to mind. Bernie Sanders wishes for the government to take 50 percent of all public AI companies. Yeah, that one’s really going to fly. Taking responsibility means accepting consequences. Donald Trump went to war with Iran. The performance of American forces has been outstanding. Let’s, for just one minute, imagine that things went south. Planes shot down, ships sunk. Pilots held captive. Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth would have taken responsibility with U.S. Central Commander Brad Cooper for their failed campaign. Only if one is willing to take responsibility for failures can one take credit for successes. The Republicans would rather lose and then yell all day long about how many homeless there are in LA, the Newsom train to nowhere, the high price of California gas, etc. Who wants to fix the system, win elections, and then have to do something? Not our traditional Republican clowns.
I see Republicans who say that California needs to get its act together or try to count votes quickly, like Texas and Florida. They miss the whole point of the exercise: the voting in California is intentionally defective to leave open the opportunity to change outcomes. The extraordinary event of 2024 was that Donald Trump won all of the swing states, and his numbers were so big that not even the Democrats could whip up enough extra ballots to get Vice President Cackles over the finish line. The Democrats are looking at the California numbers and figuring out if they can invent enough new ballots to get one or both Republicans out of the running. The Republicans are Boy Scouts of old, while the Democrats are Hell’s Angels. The Republicans are like the guy who counts to three in a duel, while the Democrats are the ones who spin around at one and a half and shoot the other guy in the back.
It’s pathetic to see the Managed Decline Wing of the Republican Party think that it has some opening. Mike Pence has resurfaced and babbles on about people being tired of Trump and wanting to go back to the old ways of losing in a gentlemanly manner. They missed the memo. Americans want all of the illegal aliens out of the country yesterday and every corrupt Democrat and billionaire in jail for the next 20 years. People don’t want less of Trump but wish that the president would be more Rambo and less nice. The Pences and Paul Ryans of the party don’t realize that they are as popular as toenail fungus. Didn’t they see that all of the president’s people won their primaries? They’ll learn the hard way. We may be disappointed, but we’re not so down to go back to their successful losing.
Democrats cheat, and Republicans act shocked. Over and over again.