The Friday Letter / No. 522 / Dec. 30, 2022
Updated at 9:58 a.m. Saturday with correction in first paragraph
In 2016 Trump carried five states crucial to his win: Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. He lost each of them in 2020. Not one has enacted meaningful election fraud reform in the meantime. For now, let's take a closer look at Arizona.
In the 2022 midterms, Arizona Republicans flipped two congressional seats and now control the state's delegation, 6-3. That's an important factor in the GOP's upcoming control of the U.S. House.
Nothing changed in the state legislature. Republicans continue to control the House, 31-29, and the Senate, 16-14. Let's peel the skin from this onion.
Arizona's gubernatorial election will affect the 2024 presidential election in ways, I suspect, that only Kari Lake understands. She campaigned on the promise to call the legislature into session “on day 1” to fix Arizona's corrupt voting practices once and for all. After she lost to Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who refused to recuse herself as the state's chief election official from counting the votes, Lake sued in state court. Big surprise coming: She lost.
Prediction: From his basement or a nursing home, Joe Biden will take Arizona's 11 electoral votes in 2024. Here is why:
In Maricopa County, Arizona's largest with 60 percent of the state's voters, 53.7 percent of registered voters are Republican, 46.3 Democrat. There are 850,415 registered Republicans, 734,684 Democrats.
Yet Hobbs “carried” Maricopa by 51.2 to 48,8, with 790,352 reported votes to Lake's 742,713. That translates to 107.5 percent of Democrats voting for Hobbs and only 88.5 percent of Republicans voting for Lake. Does that pass the smell test?
Maricopa's results in the U.S. Senate race were similar. Incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly beat challenger Blake Masters, 52-48. He got 809,572 votes to Masters' 710,491. This means that Kelly got 110.2 percent of the Democrat vote, but Masters got only 83.5 percent of the Republican votes. Does this make sense?
Have you seen this analysis anywhere but here?
Maricopa County is a political cesspool. Lake claimed that ballot chain of custody was not maintained, and that voting machine malfunctions caused ballots to be misread or unread. Some of the machines didn't have ink. The judge dismissed these claims outright. Not figured into his decision, apparently, is that paper ballots would have prevented these problems.
The day before the election on Nov. 7, the Trafalgar Group poll, considered the most accurate in the 2020 election, and the Democrat-affiliated Data for Progress, both had Lake leading Hobbs by 4 points, 51-47.
Voters could have brought Arizona's election corruption to an abrupt halt. They chose not to. So long as they allow the corrupt Maricopa County Democrat machine to determine Arizona election outcomes, don't expect any surprises in 2024. Biden wins. Pray that I am wrong.
America's man on horseback
Tulsi Gabbard sat in for Tucker Carlson Tuesday night and subjected Congressman-elect George Santos to a blistering attack on his character for lies he told during his campaign. His repeated apologies went nowhere with her. It was a verbal draw and quartering.
We wonder if, given the choice, Santos might have preferred a couple of days on the rack to this withering pummeling. Some would call him a stand-up guy for agreeing to the interview. She didn't care.
Gabbard, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, war veteran, and 4-term former Member of Congress from Hawaii, was until recently a Democrat. Santos is a Republican, but that is not what this is about.
New York's District 3 voters will determine Mr. Santos' fate. Let's look closer at Tulsi Gabbard.
It might surprise folks who get their news from the New York Times and MSNBC that Tulsi still occupies the national stage. They haven't heard from her since the 2019 Democrat presidential debates, as she only appears on the Fox News Channel. They might be confused, given her liberal voting record from the most liberal state in the Union, to learn that she left the Democrat Party in November.
The Democrat Party, she explained in her public exit interview, “is under the complete control of a cabal of war mongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoking anti-white racism, who actively work to undermine our god-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution and who are hostile to people of faith and spirituality, who demonize the police, protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, who believe in open borders, who weaponize the national security state to go after their political opponents, and above all are dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.”
Gabbard is no right-wing zealot. The conservative Heritage Action for America gave her a lifetime voting favorability rating of 10, just three points higher than the House Democrat average.
She endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. But she recognizes the absurdity of boys playing on girls' sports teams, and she fiercely opposes our open borders.
She opposes severe abortion restrictions, particularly in other countries where women who miscarried – called a spontaneous abortion – have been imprisoned. She agrees with Hillary Clinton's once-held position that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. Yet she supported the SCOTUS overturning of Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision as the correct interpretation of states' rights under the 10th Amendment.
As a Honolulu city councilwoman, she introduced a Trumpian populist measure to ease parking restrictions on food truck operators.
Tulsi Gabbard is a constitutional conservative. She opposes our endless wars that have no national interest. She opposes the reckless spending. She understands that our open borders and China, not Russia, pose the biggest threats. If those who self-identify as conservatives had any brains they would conclude that it's not necessary to agree on every issue to work in a common cause, the saving of America. That's not the same as capitulating to the mob as McConnell and company have done.
And while she no longer fits as a Democrat, it's hard to picture her as a Republican – not as the GOP stands today. We can't imagine her in the party of Mitch McConnell and the 17 other Republican Senators who betrayed us by agreeing to the Democrats' bankrupting, inflation-fueling $1.7 trillion spending bill. Defying all logic, these Uniparty Republicans prevent the House from restoring any sanity to spending over the next year.
If Republicans ever needed a populist in the Trump mold, it is now. Millions of working-class Americans of every race and ethnicity are ready for this, eager to fumigate the party and chase out the swamp creatures. As people like Tulsi, like Ron DeSantis, like Greg Abbott, like Kari Lake and Blake Masters and Adam Laxault and Herschel Walker, Lee Zeldin and Sarah Sanders meet these awesome leadership responsibilities, the likes of Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitt Romney might start to feel uncomfortable and begin to look around for greener pastures in the party they love to snuggle up with, the Democrats.
The 18 who betrayed us
Make no mistake about this, as Nixon liked to say, the 18 U.S. Senators who kneecapped both the House and the country at-large must be removed from the Republican Party and banned from calling themselves conservatives.
Led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, these Uniparty Republicans in Santa Claus suits handed Democrats a Christmas gift by voting for the $1.7 trillion spending bill that will prevent House Republicans from exercising financial responsibility for the next year. They could have – should have – supported only a continuing resolution to fund the government into next month, when Republicans will control spending legislation in the House.
This responsibility has no answer. The 18, every one of them, must be shown the door at their next election. We start with those who face the voters in 2024:
Only one, Mitt Romney of Utah, and that's the problem. The others are safe until 2026 or 2028. Given little opportunity for pickoffs, conservatives need to work now to unseat Romney with a conservative primary challenger.
The other Republicans who betrayed their voters and the nation:
Roy Blunt, Mo., (thankfully retiring)
John Boozman, Ark.
Shelley Moore Capito, W. Va.
Susan Collins, Maine
John Cornyn, Tex.
Tom Cotton, Ark.
Lindsey Graham, S.C.
Jim Inhofe, Okla.
Mitch McConnell, Ken.
Jerry Moran, Kans.
Lisa Murkowski, Alaska
Robert Portman, Ohio (thankfully retiring)
Mike Rounds, S.D.
Richard Shelby, Ala. (thankfully retiring)
John Thune, S.D.
Roger Wicker, Miss.
Todd Young, Ind.
These constitutional turncoats must be confronted at every public appearance and must know they will be sacked the next time they are summoned before the voters. Pretenders like Tom Cotton must never again be allowed to display the conservative, constitutional banner.
A lack of misunderstanding
As my video partner and producer Brendon Day, mimicking Bush 43, once accidentally quipped on one of our Youtube videos, it's a lack of misunderstanding.
Tucker Carlson interviewed Texas Gov. Greg Abbott this week. He asked why Abbott waited so long to deploy Texas Army National Guard troops to the southern border and why he hasn't sent more. Owing to our limited research capabilities, we don't have precise numbers on this, so let's just present the gist of the thing.
Fox News hasn't posted the video clip yet. It's worth a look once it does. Here is where a combination of misunderstanding and poor communication lead to muddled reporting. Tucker wanted to know why Abbott didn't send more troops. Abbott tried to explain that many – he did not say how many – of the state's 18,000 Guardsmen are deployed overseas and unavailable for domestic duty. He also tried to explain that you can't just send warm bodies to deployment zones. They need the training for the specific mission. At the border, that requires the state NG's 606th Military Police Battalion, not supply clerks and public relations flaks. Abbott didn't communicate this well.
The MPs are trained in civil disturbance operations and mass migration response. And Abbott missed the chance to correct Tucker when Tucker suggested that Abbott shouldn't be sending troops to Afghanistan. Tucker is a smart guy, but he should have known that National Guard and Reserve troops are deployed overseas by the Pentagon, not by state governors.
“What we have here is failure to communicate,” said the Captain to the inmates in Cool Hand Luke.
. . .
Our nomination for the 2022 poster child of the term limit movement goes to Sen. Ben Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, who has sullied the halls of Congress for more than 35 years. Hate speech – as defined by him – is not protected by the First Amendment, and the federal government should adopt European rules for controlling what we Americans may say.
Recommended reading
“The Coming Split”
Dan Gelernter at American Greatness
There is no hope for the Republican Party in its present form, Gelernter argues. Seething over McConnell's absurd statement that supporting the war in Ukraine is the nation's top priority, Gelernter lays down the gauntlet: “There are not enough unprintable words in the dictionary to say everything that statements like McConnell’s conjure up in my mind. But here are a few he might understand: “I’m fed up. And I’m out.”
Today's quote
“Our elections are a Third World sham, and millions of foreigners with no right to be here live in the country without fear of removal. Their numbers are rapidly growing under the explicit protection of an administration whose party, in between giving lectures on the rule of law, brags about replacing and disenfranchising the country’s natives.” – Matthew Boose in "Who Radicalized the Right?"
The next Friday Letter will post on January 13.