Remember when Chewbacca Shaman (challenge: get 5 minutes into one of his YouTube sermons without brain cells wilting) and other Stop-the-Steal Poobahs at the Maricopa County elections building in Phoenix started protesting, even on election night, pissed at Fox for calling Arizona early because there’s no fucking way, not Arizona, and egged on by officials like Congressman Paul Gosar (Cra-turned up to 11), who later on Jan. 6, after speaking to a seething mob of red hats and spittle, a warmup act for former guy, was at the House mic objecting to Arizona’s vote when shit and fan were introduced, cluster is fucked, people pissed themselves, some died, then Gosar and most other Republicans went back and voted to do what the invaders wanted. Remember that?
Chewbacca returns to Phoenix and is arrested toot sweet (Paul Gosar remains a U.S. Congressman) while a number of knuckle-draggin’ Republican peckerheads start demanding to see Maricopa County’s ballots because big city, people of color, and fraud, and even after two separate audits show the machines and counts are accurate, the Senate Republicans still subpoena the ballots, and if County officials don’t turn them over, which is what they said at first—go suck eggs, Senators—they could be arrested, no shit. But then a judge steps in (probably sitting really) and orders Maricopa County to turn over the ballots, and Arizona Republicans are all excited and high-fiving and everything before a bunch of huge-ass trucks pull up to the Senate Building with 73 friggin’ pallets stacked with over two million ballots, and the Senate is like, what the fuck? But their own goddamn subpoena says the ballots should be delivered to the Senate Judiciary Committee, so here goobers! Now they have all that paper but no way to count it, which is what they grumbled about doing all along for chrissakes, because the firm the AZ RepubliKKKans thought they hired to conduct the audit turned out to be connected to the orange shitstain in Mar-a-Lago and also in some kinda legal pool of stink—cue Claude Raines: “I’m shocked, shocked! Trump and crime?”
So Biden’s talking all Covid and relief coming for families, schools, and businesses, but Republicans have taken on the more Herculean tasks of uncancelling cartoon genitalia and racism, while exposing the election voodoo that stole the presidency, and right on cue State Senator Sonny Borelli from Kelli Ward’s old district (Yo, Sonny!) has sleuthed out a shitload of shredded ballots from dumpsters behind County headquarters, alerted by impeccably reliably crackpot sources, but election officials think Borelli, who is Senate Majority Whip BTW (!), may have rested a tad too long in the sun up there in Lake Havasu City, and they remind him that they do throw out trash, so he says they’re a bunch of “corrupt bastards” who outta be locked up, even though the board is 4-1 Republican, and he’s all mysterious and looking over his shoulder because he’s got the “dominoes” (from the dumpster, that is) that could start a chain reaction a la Sopranos:
“… I’ve been a pain in the ass in the Senate and wasn’t going to let this go. Trust me, there are people that will fold like a lawn chair if I disappear. They would rather this thing just die away…. They can bully me all they want but they know they can’t take me out … [unless] they whack me or I have a suicide."
He seems nice, having suicides and all and people folding like lawn chairs, sounding like Jack Webb on peyote. So there’s that, now get this: Kelli Ward and the Arizona GOP, which just went on this sue-happy binge to get Maricopa County’s ballots (which, really, will result in nothing other than making them look like even bigger dipshits), are themselves being sued for, you guessed it, not turning over the ballots from the Arizona Republican Party’s January 23 election, where Kelli Ward, who toted around former’s guy’s endorsement and his cardboard likeness, eked out a win as party Chair in a truly ugly spat.
Two Republican activists are suing the Arizona Republican Party and its chair Kelli Ward over her refusals to allow an audit of the results and procedures used for the state party's January elections.
The language of the lawsuit sounds awfully familiar, especially where they talk about an election with a “significant number of irregularities and general chaos”—parroting the claim Ward and nearly every other Republican made about the presidential election. The state GOP race was close because many R’s here would like to swap out Kelli Ward, whose leadership (must be a better word) has seen the AZ GOP maintain its grip on the legislature, leading of course to a shitload of voter suppression laws to prevent a 2020 do-over, but with Ward at the helm Republicans also lost two U.S. Senate seats (McCain and Flake were only a couple years ago), and Biden is the first Dem to take Arizona in 24 years. So there’s that—losing important races—and there’s also the unassailable fact that Kelli Ward is a conspiracy-hugging, clown-car driving, Looney Tunes screwball whose insane CT and election losses have pushed thousands of sorta normal thinking people out of the party (almost 10,000 Arizona GOPers beat it after the Jan. 6 insurrection, which Ward attended, natch).
A former legislator representing the Tim McVeigh slice of Arizona, a world of camouflage and Trump flags, Ward tried to unseat senators McCain and McSally in a couple GOP primaries, her Oath Keeper pals saying the old Maverick should be hung by the neck until dead (nice friends there, Kelli), but she never came close, and after McCain died in 2018 without being hung at all, with Kelli Ward saying his death was timed to hurt her primary campaign, and then she thinks maybe the Guv might appoint her to fill the vacancy and the McCain family goes, No friggin’ way does this vicious nitwit get that seat, so that’s why McSally (after Gov. Ducey’s first appointment, horrible person Jon Kyl, stepped down).
That’s what Arizona Republicans have been up to since Joe Biden won Arizona and Democrat Mark Kelly ousted Republican Senator Martha McSally—trying to overturn or cast doubt on the 2020 results, while passing laws so in the future mostly white people who have Tuesday off and a ride to the polls can vote. Soon you’ll have to live in Sun City or a tony enclave like Fountain Hills, whose State Senator, John Kavanaugh, just reminded his colleagues what unites them in their important work, saying, “Everybody shouldn’t be voting”—only “quality” citizens, like his neighbor former Sheriff Joe Arpaio. When they’re not doing that they’re suing one another, which is a fine thing to see.