Arizona Audit results leaked before release tomorrow- Reveals nothing changed in results

[Torie]

https://www.abc15.com/news/region-phoenix-metro/central-phoenix/first-look-at-draft-of-election-audit-report-ahead-of-friday-release

Basically it confirms nothing changed, lmao. I could go on a rant about this drivel all day....

Oh well, why not?

I’m a partisan Republican and I will never stop being one. But even I have my limits.

Stop wasting money on this drivel and actually focus your money and energy on 2022 and 2024. Stop. It.

And stop blindly listening to Trump and Lindell’s election stolen drivel as if it was the gospel’s word. Trump is now asking for an audit in Texas, a state he won by 5- for what purpose or measure? How does this man’s perfectly apparent mental breakdown help us win? Just pass election integrity laws that minimize activities such as ballot harvesting, as so many red states have, rather than focusing on “audits” that achieve absolutely nothing but a waste of money and a ton of embarrassment. Stop being obsessed with a personality cult and fight for conservative values, you imbeciles.

If Trump runs in 2024, and confirms my worst fears and runs an “election stolen 2020” style campaign I will either make sure he isn’t the GOP nominee (difficult) or leave the presidential ballot blank (even as I write down all down-ballot races for Republicans elsewhere) or write in DeSantis or Ronald Reagan. Or William F. Buckley. Or Clarence Thomas or Anton Scalia. But I've had enough of this balderdash.

They won't stop. Trump will come out with some new bs line about how the audit were all a bunch of RINOs or some other crap, bully the brain dead and spineless into uttering it and demand conformity around that line otherwise "he won't be your friend anymore" and he will get you primaried.

Trump, the circus clowns and all the rest will be pushing this line about the stolen election until Trump dies and they will be fundraising off it and trying to preserve as much clout as possible. The only question is how much damage does the Republican Party sustain before the vast bulk of its members wake up and realize they are being used by a bunch of criminals and this gets pushed to the fringe sidelines where it should have been all along.

I have said before, I am not fond of the neoconservatism embraced by Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger but I adore the fact that they both have a pare of brass balls the size of cannon balls and should be celebrated because of that fact alone (and reelected as well). However, they will not be the ones to wrest control of the party from Trump. Were any populist or nationalist to come along, go hard against the media, multinationals and the Democrats aggressively and also stand up to and oppose Trump, Trump would be yesterday's news almost instantly.

This is the peril for the populists and nationalists, because at the end of the day Republicans want power and the risk becomes if some populist or nationalist doesn't step up and show some balls, eventually the party could just default to the old guard neocon types in a scenario that I warned about simply because it is tired of losing. I have warned about this scenario in posts responding to BG-NY and it emphasizes why they need to get beyond Trump especially. It also illustrates why Trump is harmful to his own movement's long term success and longevity, because all of the big Trumpists are a combination of craven opportunists and cucks and they are all cowards and no one will ever take them seriously as leaders.

DeSantis has plummeted on my list of potential Presidents and Hawley practically doesn't even exist anymore in my eyes because I look at him and I see Ted Cruz 2.0.

I really can't follow your post, or at least discern what it is you are looking for in a more perfect world. The best I could infer from your text is that you seem to much prefer "populists and nationalists" over "neocons," whatever that might mean in real life applications on the ground these days.

[Torie]

That is quite an essay, NCY - well thought out and crafted, and I am flattered that you took the time to compose it for me. And I think you are probably right to boot, as much as I loathe the content of much of your perspicacity personally. What the polity needs to bring the Pubs back from the abyss, and detoxify it of Trump, is someone even more ruthless than Trump, albeit less self destructive, more thoughtful, and most important of all, far less of an amoral bordering on sociopathic narcissist. But what that further means is that higher SES types that are moderate on economic policy will not and cannot go back to the GOP, and the Dem party will also begin to have more acute intra-party tensions.

The two party system works far less well when there are more cohorts out there that are very distinct from each other, and cannot very easily paper over their differences within one party. The collapse of reasonable newscasts and newscasters in favor of outrageous shills has also caused that source of glue for the polity to melt away in the pandering demagogic heat.  Who can one trust these days about much of anything?

[Torie]

Yes indeed. You have an internationalist information economy that rewards education and the ability to think about abstract concepts, at the same time that education becomes more expensive at about 3 times the rate of inflation, that hollows out the lower middle class, and a tax code that is much more friendly to the high paid upper middle class and the rentier class. So it is hardly surprising that we are where we are. And it all saddens me.

But other things give me joy and hope. I see it in particular in NYC. Interracial couples and young people of all backgrounds interacting "naturally" with each other, and both seeing and interacting with persons of color and varying backgrounds who are obviously quite well educated and doing well economically.

Quite the opposite of upstate NY, where you have the gentry, now most typically people who brought their money with them to retire or recreate, and then the serfs, with a thin veneer of middle class types who provide services to the gentry or require some level of education to make the system function at all. I am overstating things of course, but not as much as I would like.