To save the country, tell the truth
As far as I can tell, the number of Republicans against democracy serving in the Pennsylvania General Assembly remains the same as a year ago.
You will recall that a month prior to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, 64 House and Senate Republicans wrote their infamous letter requesting that the state’s congressional delegation turn aside the will of the people and not certify Joe Biden’s election to the presidency.
These RADs and CADs (conservatives against democracy) continue to imperil the country by their silent, and sometimes not so silent, acquiescence to the crazed notion that Biden lost and Donald Trump won in 2020.
The failure of local state Reps. Ryan Warner, Matthew Dowling, and Bud Cook, along with state Sen. Patrick Stefano, to withdraw their endorsement of the Dec. 6 letter amounts, at this point, to the attempted willful destruction of the thing that makes America great.
The free and fair election of our highest leaders is the crown jewel of American democracy. From it flows everything else, including arguably the rights enumerated in the Constitution and free capital and free labor, the very things that have made America a beacon for all the world, going back to 1776.
It is impossible to love America and hate democracy. To undermine the basic tenant of democracy is the equivalent of striking a match to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
On the first anniversary of the Capitol insurrection, a statement, either jointly or separately, that Biden is the legitimately elected president of the United States would have a wonderfully cleansing effect.
Otherwise, we will continue down the fraught path toward the 2022 and 2024 elections. The way things are going neither side will likely be satisfied that the vote count reflects the popular will.
Under those circumstances, the consequences will be dire.
Politics does indeed makes strange bedfellows. And I’d like to think that Misters Warner, Dowling, Cook, and Stefano would react in horror once they knew they were sharing space with a gallery of stranger than strange characters.
Characters like Douglas Frank, a former math and science teacher in Ohio.
According to the Washington Post, Frank says he has “discovered secret algorithms used to rig the 2020 election.”
“A six-degree polynomial,” he claims, inserted into an algorithm was responsible for the dirty deed..
In meetings with election officials across the country, Frank has argued, the Post reports, that voting machines connected to the internet took votes away from Donald Trump and gave them to Joe Biden.
Following one such meeting, Ohio’s secretary of state, Republican Frank LaRose, posted a Facebook video in which he stated that not a single voting machine in his state has ever been connected to the internet.
Besides, LaRose said, “… a six-degree polynomial (has) nothing to do with how elections are run. But it sounds impressive.”
LaRose added that Frank’s false-alarm algorithm is especially beguiling to folks already disposed to believe the 2020 vote was fixed. It’s how conspiracy theories gain a foothold, he told the Post.
Frank has begun calling for trials and prison terms or executions for state officials who further the 2020 election cover-up.
Out and about as well has been a retired Army colonel by the name of Paul Waldron, who’s been promoting the notion that the presidential vote was manipulated by laser-like “remote connections” to voting machines.
Waldron briefed Republican members of Congress before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. There is also evidence that he spoke to officials at the White House.
Another Army veteran, retired Gen. Thomas J. McInerney, claims that the CIA, operating out of Germany, helped rig the election. For good measure, McInerney throws in a bunch of co-conspirators, including, according to Atlantic magazine, an Italian satellite, the Pakistani intelligence service, and former FBI chief James Comey who, in the general’s fevered imagination, sold U.S. cyber-weapons to China.
The time is long past that our quartet of local lawmakers repair to the land of the sane, before it’s too late for both them and us.
Maybe it’s already too late. As the social critic George Parker said recently, “A party can’t be half-democratic and half-authoritarian. The insurrection and the lie that instigated it are not tools that Republicans can put away when it suits them.”
“Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.