George Rebane
[This was to be the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary censored on 6 January 2021.]
[Update. I was informed this afternoon that my “commentary got cut tonight by station management.” Management is now “establishing criteria for commentaries”, and there were elements in my piece with which the station took issue. I am saddened that the pall of leftwing censorship across the land has now reached our little corner of the Sierra foothills. Ratcheting autocracy on parade. gjr]
[16jan21 update. I am happy to report that The Union saw fit to publish this commentary in its 16jan21 hardcopy and online editions (here). Update continued below. gjr]
Today our country is again unhappy with how our national election was carried out. Here we are not talking about voters unhappy that their candidate did not win, which happens with about half the voters in every election. Instead, we concern ourselves with the very large number of voters on both sides of the contest who are dissatisfied with various parts of the voting process, and believe with all the cited and documented irregularities of the November election, that something serious is amiss with how we have come to elect our political leaders in the 21st century.
The recent election brouhaha started in 2000 with the narrow victory of George W Bush, a win that was hotly contested by his opponent Al Gore, who took the country through a lengthy and torturous process which involved counting tiny bits of hanging chad from holes in punched-card ballots. The 2004 election saw Democrats again voicing loud concerns over specifics such as voter registration, purging of dated voter lists, alleged voter suppression, long lines at polling places, and once more, voting machines with punch-card ballots. John Kerry was not happy with the election process that returned George W to the White House, but fortunately he did accept the results, and that settled the matter.
Republicans John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 gracefully took their losses to Barack Obama, and that provided eight years of electoral peace until Donald Trump’s electoral college victory overcame Hillary Clinton’s popular vote in 2016. The Democrats and Mrs Clinton would have none of it, and claimed that the election was illegitimate because Trump had colluded with the Russians whose alleged interference gave Trump the White House. The election was contested by the Democrats starting months before election day, and went on for Trump’s entire four-year term with investigations and impeachments that demonstrated misconduct by Obama’s DoJ and the FBI. In fact, to this day most American progressives still believe and deport themselves as if Donald Trump has been an illegitimate president.
So, we see that, beginning at the turn of the millennium, Democrats have in one form or another contested the voting processes that resulted in Republican presidencies. This means that at least half of the country has already had serious doubts about how our nation conducts its national elections. And then when 2020 rolled around, President Trump’s political enemies pulled out all the stops, including an obviously gratuitous party-line impeachment, to discredit the incumbent with new allegations supported by a one-sided media that touted ongoing investigations barren of any evidence to support the Democrats’ assault.
The election year arrival of the Covid pandemic, along with the fomented Black Lives Matter and Antifa movements, changed the entire political landscape of the world, and served only to add more fortuitous fuel to the fire that already raged around President Trump. Concurrently, we witnessed a number of key states suddenly and unconstitutionally change their election laws and voting processes leading up to November, which involved everything from adopting whole new categories of mail-in ballots, new voter and ballot validation rules, along with extraordinarily extended voting periods. All of these stratagems obviously favored one candidate over the other.
Team Trump launched a spate of lawsuits to counter these machinations, but to no avail. Their collected reams of evidence of election ‘irregularities’ have to date all been rejected by the courts on procedural grounds. No evidence has been adjudicated in open court, predominantly on the grounds that it would not have changed the election’s pro forma outcome. This response to the numerous legal complaints, all of which have been filed in vain, has today convinced the other half of our nation that our elections can be and may well have been rigged, and that our justice system is at least broken, and perhaps even corrupt.
So, the bottom line is that public confidence in America’s election process is at a dangerous all-time low, that divisive contesting of election results is now the new norm, and that if we don’t restore broad confidence in our elections, then it is very likely that we will have blood in the gutters as we dissolve into the Banana Republic del Norte.
It is for this reason, and not to deny Joe Biden the presidency, that the assembled body of evidence should be examined by, say, a trusted bipartisan commission that would then issue recommendations to remedy future elections. To reduce the inevitable heat from such a critical undertaking, the commission need not even adjudicate the verity of the evidence they examine.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[Addendum] To add weight to the above recommended way forward, we recall the 2005 report of the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform. This commission was co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former SecState James Baker. It is they, and not President Trump, who first sounded the warning stating that “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” (more here) And this conclusion was based on the type of mail-in ballots that had to be requested by bona fide voters whose identities were confirmed before the ballots were mailed to them. We can but imagine the enormously more numerous and complex forms of voter fraud that can be perpetrated when unrequested ballots are mailed to everyone whose name appears on grossly outdated voter lists containing people who are non-citizens, have moved, died, become mentally disabled, or even jailed in the interval.
When President Trump pointed this out, he was uniformly derided by all Democrats and their lapdog lamestream media. None of their so-called journalists bothered to research and/or inform today’s voters that this conclusion was reached 15 years ago by a bipartisan team of notables commissioned specifically to study avenues of election fraud and irregularities.
Today, pending election fraud lawsuits include one filed by the Election Integrity Project California against California’s AG Becerra, SecState Padilla, its governor Gavin Newsom, and includes 13 county Registrars of Voters (worth a read pdf here), which contends that –
"(EIPC) has been investigating serious problems with California's election process for 10 years. With over 700 affidavits signed under the penalty of perjury evidencing election code violations, obstruction of our volunteer observers, failure to verify vote-by-mail signatures, irregularities and fraud in the November 3, 2020 election, we have no choice but to bring this federal lawsuit in order to attempt to restore integrity to the election process."
Yesterday’s election in Georgia delivered the pall of an unchecked progressive political monopoly to descend on Washington. Its aftermath portends that our nation will retrace the terrible path of discord and dissolution blazed by California. The ascended Left has promised that Leviathan will soon receive a new spate of powers to exercise over us all – sapping the productive to succor their compliant. Each of us should now appropriately gird our loins according to the light we see illuminating our country’s future. In the descending gloom Victor Davis Hanson’s recent words may serve as a timely and revealing epitaph –
“What was strange was not so much the anarchist Left’s efforts in the present to wipe away the past to recalibrate our Animal Farm future. What was odder were both the absurdities of the complaints against American civilization, and the unwillingness or inability of Americans to rebut them and defend their own culture.” (emphasis mine)
Nevertheless, it remains my hope that we will not go quietly into that dark night which our disillusioned and disoriented brethren have prepared for America.
[16jan21 update] The comments following this commentary in The Union included a sad but pervasive example of liberal logic and thought. One Mr Richard Sciaroni totally missed the points made, summarily pronouncing that my recommendation of a bipartisan commission would be “unworkable”. Why? Because the states make and administer their own election laws and regulations. The suggested commission, like its 2005 Carter/Baker Commission predecessor, would not draft or impose federal election standards – even Congress could not do that without at least a SCOTUS ruling on its constitutionality. The new commission would simply examine the gathered evidence of the 2020 election irregularities, and draft a unified set of regulations designed to avoid the problems that half the country saw in that election. The several states could pick and choose which of these each would want to implement as suggested or modified.
Apparently this obvious approach was an intellectual bridge too far for Mr Sciaroni and his ilk. That deficit was compounded by his snark that, since the evidence was not admitted by the courts, there would be no need for such an examination and any subsequent recommendations – thereby missing by a mile the polarized condition of country abetted by tens of millions of Americans who continue to hold that we did not have a clean election, and the unexamined fraud/irregularities now denied will put an indelible blemish on future national elections.
rebanesruminations.com 
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