These days, it seems that only the most deplorable of the deplorables are all-in for the windmill-tilting audit—er, “Fraudit”—of presidential votes in Phoenix and surrounding Maricopa County, Arizona. No less a personality than The Messiah, Lord Donald Trump, The Most Merciful, has championed it. Trump actually believes the audit could be enough to prove that he really did have a second term stolen from him by the radical socialist Democrat mob.
Well, it seems that even some of the Trump diehards’ preferred media outlets are having the scales fall off their eyes, per Raw Story.
Take The Washington Times, aka “The Moonie Times,” for instance. This was a rag that openly promoted the canard that the Jan. 6 insurrection was an antifa false flag. But on Saturday, the paper ran an article that was somewhat unflattering, to say the least, about the Fraudit. The headline set the tone: “'Hoping something sticks': Arizona election audit promises more intrigue than answers.”
That headline alone would have probably been enough to trigger a 280-character tirade from Trump back in the days B. I. (before the insurrection). But the body would also be enough to make MAGA heads explode.
The ongoing audit of the 2020 election in Arizona has the state’s Republican leaders at each other’s throats and their disputes over the process are raising doubts about the outcome of the high-tech recount.
The pro-Trump faction that is championing the effort says all they want is the truth about an election in which President Biden was declared the winner by a less than 1% margin and GOP challenges over irregularities were rejected by the courts.
Republican officials in Maricopa County, which is Arizona’s largest county and the target of the audit, say the auditors have made impossible demands. Some analysts suspect the audit is less about getting answers and more about injecting new uncertainty.
Ouch.
The Times also quotes Matt Bernhard of nonpartisan voting tech firm VotingWorks, who likens the audit to a dog trying to chase a fire truck.
Another example flagged by Raw Story—Breitbart. You would think this story would be catnip for that crew, given its slavish loyalty to Trump (one of its nicknames is “Trumpbart”). But lately, Breitbart has taken to simply picking up AP copy. One Breitbart piece actually noted that a “little-known firm” is overseeing the proceedings.
Raw Story also notes that Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer wrote a scathing op-ed about the Fraudit for National Review. Richer is one of several elected Republican county officials to have slammed the Fraudit for the windmill-tilting sham that it is, and was no less unsparing here.
(E)ven though an IRS audit might annoy you and cause you some stress, you’d eventually realize that you have nothing to fear as long as the audit is done fairly and properly.
But you’d likely feel differently if the IRS outsourced the audit to someone who:
- Had no applicable professional credentials
- Had never previously run a tax audit
- Believed that Hugo Chavez had nefariously controlled your tax-auditing software
- Had publicly stated prior to examining your taxes that you’d certainly committed tax fraud
Granted, National Review has been somewhat more critical of Trump than other right-leaning outlets. But it says a lot that the magazine that bills itself as THE voice of intellectually minded conservatism in this country prints something like this.
Any fair-minded American, regardless of political shade, should be outraged at what is happening in Arizona. Looks like a significant element of the right is coming to the same conclusion.