Month: July 2020

Dear President Trump, 

Fuck you.

Insisting that schools open in the middle of a pandemic that is your fault is outrageous. Are you insane?  Your lack of leadership has caused the death of over 135,000 people already. You and your goddamn Republican enablers have become angles of death, and a curse on the American people. Your insistence that schools reopen is just the latest of the outrages inflicted on us. Claiming that children are not generally susceptible to the virus is shocking, but what do you care? How many children are you and your fellow bootlicking Republicans willing to see die? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? You are willing to sit on your sorry ass while 135,000 people died. Are you willing to let 135,000 of our children to die also? How much death does it take for you to open up your eyes and realize that you are in charge? God help us.

There has never been such a lack of presidential leadership in the history of this country. You refused to implement a national policy to fight this plague. You have shirked your duty to protect America from this pandemic. You have failed to lead while the United States as led the world in infections and death from this pandemic. You said that you claim no responsibility for the virus spreading throughout our country. We know that. Your administration has pressured the states to virtually ignore the crisis confronting our nation. You and the goddamn Republican governors who kiss your ass like the craven shits they are have caused the worst public health crisis in history. 

You have made the Republican party a death cult. It’s all about you, isn’t it? The virus is just a hoax, isn’t it? While you play golf and get tested three times a day, ordinary Americans are dying because of your malfeasance. Your Republican governors have fallen into a predictable pattern of denying reality until the dead bodies pile up until even they can no longer ignore the pain and suffering and outrage of their constituents. It is inevitable that Governors in Texas, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida will sooner or later be forced to shut down their states in the face of the deaths of thousands of citizens unfortunate enough to live in their states. How many will die first?

But no. There is no responsibility to be laid at your door, right? It doesn’t bother you a bit that 135,000 Americans have died, does it? It’s all about your reelection, isn’t it? Well, we are not stupid. Those of us who can afford to not send our children and grandchildren back to school are not going to do so just so you can continue to pretend that the virus does not exist. You don’t care for our children but we do. You won’t even wear a goddamn mask.

Mr. President, you and your fellow Republicans are responsible for this plague. An election is coming and you and your fellow Republicans are going to pay for yours and their malfeasance.  It looks like you and your party are going to be flushed down the toilet like unwanted shit. I hope so. I hope I live long enough to vote against you.

Very Truly Yours,
Jeff Carter

The Washington Post has a schadenfreude-tastic article this morning where GOP strategists are concerned that Dear Leader’s baseless attacks against Mail-In Voting might leave the GOP baseless.

The GOP fears that enough dumbass MAGAhats will skip voting this year because their president is attacking the only safe way to vote during a pandemic. Republican candidates are getting blowback from their constituents whenever they advise on how to vote for them by mail. That’s fewer votes for Cory Gardner, Kelly Loeffler, David Perdue, Joni Ernst, Susan Collins, Thom Tills, John Cornyn, Lindsey Graham, and Mitch McConnell. Suits the hell out of me.

Trump has made over 60 completely fabricated claims warning about the “fraudulent” nature of voting by mail. As usual, Donald Trump is wrong, and the evidence is negative.

The right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation came out with their most damning evidence about voter fraud in America. Their document Truth about Voter Fraud can be found on the White House’s website. In large-font all-caps against a scary red background, you the reader are first alerted with their summary of “1071 PROVEN INSTANCES OF VOTER FRAUD”. Since 1988… That averages out to what… about 67 per election? So?

Out of this list of 1071 voter fraud cases spanning over three decades, a whopping 70 of them relate to absentee voting. These charges include eye-popping crimes such as the 1988 crime of Mr. Ernest Newton, former state senator of Connecticut, who agreed to pay a civil penalty of $1,000 for assisting in filling out someone else’s absentee ballot.

In the 2016 election, there was precisely ONE case of mail-in voter fraud. The case was in Iowa, where Terri Lynn Rote pleaded guilty for voting for Donald Trump twice.

In contrast, 18,610 votes were not counted in Florida in 2000 due to dimpled or hanging chads. Katherine Harris’s “Scrub List” erred in kicking off about 26,000 eligible voters that were neither felons nor dead. The United States Commission on Civil Rights found that African-Americans made up 11% of Florida 2000 voters and 53% of the uncounted votes. Again, these numbers are for one election in one state. The comparison is not even close.

There are a lot of issues of ballot access in the United States. Voting by mail is a solution, not a problem. The evidence shows overwhelmingly and unambiguously that voting by mail is a great way to vote. Voter fraud is vanishingly small and insignificant in our election system. The embarrassingly low number of cases that The Heritage Foundation uncovered in their 3-decade nationwide search is proof positive. But Trump supporters are immune to evidence by definition. Dear Leader told them it was a problem, so now they think it’s a problem. Surely, politics are in play (gasp!), but according to a recent NYT/Siena College survey, 88% of Biden supporters support expanding vote-by-mail in a pandemic, and 72% MAGAhats oppose it.

New Jersey’s Primary this year was mostly by mail. Five states–Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, and Utah, are completely vote-by-mail. Utah voted for Trump in 2016. Arizona, which went for Trump last time, is about 80% vote-by-mail. Even before Before COVID changed everything, twenty-one states allowed voting by mail to anybody who wanted it. Access has only increased since voting by mail became the obvious public-health-conscious solution to preserving our democracy in a pandemic. Evidence shows that both Democrats and Republicans are elected by mailed-in ballots.

So a funny story about Trump supporters refusing to vote has extremely dire consequences. Trump is amplifying his message of two possible outcomes. Either Trump wins the election, or the election is fraudulent. And if recent surveys of vote-by-mail opposition approximate MAGAhats’ adoption of Trump’s worldview of the 2020 election, we will have a large bloc of people baselessly believing that the election was stolen from Dear Leader.

Absolutely nothing in Trump’s history gives any confidence that he will accept the results of an election where he is the biggest loser on the biggest stage on the planet. He still doesn’t accept the 2016 election that he lost by nearly 3,000,000 votes but still got the office.

Trump knows there is nothing wrong with mail-in ballots. He is attacking elections because he does not want an election. As was true for the past 3 and a half years, Trump fancies himself a dictator, and the dictator is attempting to pre-emptively nullify the election. He is actively, relentlessly, daily, attacking the very fabric of democracy. Nothing less than the peaceful transfer of power hangs in the balance. Trump is unambiguously clear on his position.