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— No one is safe in Biden's America (@JustinOtherSte1) December 20, 2021

Kurt Schlichter indulges in just a teeny bit of Schadenfreude.

I love the smell of Joe Manchin in the morning … it smells like … victory.

If you survey the charred ruins of the progressives’ hopes and dreams, you will need to have a heart of stone not to burst into hysterical laughter at their pain. They were so close, so very close, and their heart’s desire was ripped from them by a senator from a sane state who had zero desire to commit ritual, political suicide to please the brother-curious likes of Ilhan Omar.

Cue the gif of a team of Joes carrying a coffin to that catchy EDM song. Savor. Taste their pain. Biden is broken, Schumer is humiliated, the “moderate” House Dems who Mistress Pelosi commanded to vote for this abortion are doomed in 2022, and somewhere, the Murder Turtle is smiling.

It’s absolutely perfect. And the best part is, while we patriots are full of Christmas cheer, this humiliating debacle is going to make this the Democrats’ worst Kwanzaa ever.

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Joy Pullman read Mollie Hemingway’s new boom Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections and found a number of appalling things you and I never had heard of, just for instance:

The DNC Controlled All Poll Watchers for 40 Years

I had to read this section of the book two or three times to absorb what it was saying. I couldn’t believe it could possibly be true. Yet it is: “Shockingly, the 2020 contest was the first presidential election since Reagan’s first successful run in 1980 in which the Republican National Committee could play any role whatsoever in Election Day operations.”

What? Next sentence: “For nearly 40 years, the Democratic National Committee had a massive systemic advantage over its Republican counterpart: the Republican National Committee had been prohibited by law from helping out with poll watcher efforts or nearly any litigation related to how voting is being conducted.”

This section in chapter 1 goes on to explain how such an insane thing could be real. Essentially, after Democrats accused Republicans of cheating in a New Jersey race in 1981, a judge banned the RNC from poll-watching and voting litigation everywhere in the country, then kept re-upping the order until 2018, when it finally expired three years after he died.

This handicapped Republicans for almost 40 years while Democrats were free to do things Republicans couldn’t, like give boosts to their voters all along the voting process and track them extensively, challenge ballots, document irregularities, and sue over election disputes. By 2020, then, Mollie writes:

Democrats had spent the last forty years perfecting their Election Day operations while everyone at the Republican National Committee walked on eggshells, knowing that if they so much as looked in the direction of a polling site, there could be another crackdown. As a result, there was no muscle memory about how to watch polls or communicate with a presidential campaign.

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John Hinderaker notes that all the gaslighting and censorship we see is not the typical behavior of people enjoying the conviction of innocence.

Democrats are making extraordinary efforts to suppress all discussion of whether Joe Biden actually won the 2020 presidential election. In fact, they go even farther: they want to suppress all discussion of the extent to which voter fraud occurred. That naturally makes me want to write about voter fraud, and who really won the election.

First, this question: why are the Democrats so hysterical in their insistence that fraud not be mentioned? One reason is obvious. Joe Biden will take office under a cloud, since close to half of all Americans doubt that he really won the election. The Democrats want to stamp out such doubts to preserve Biden’s authority as president.

But there is a second reason that may be more important. The Democrats want the lax voting procedures that prevailed in 2020 to continue in the future. They know that efforts will be made in many states to improve ballot integrity, and they want those efforts to fail. By rendering all discussion of voter fraud out of bounds, they hope to forestall reforms that would make it harder for them to cheat, or enable cheating, in the future.

So, did the Democrats steal the presidential election, or not? I don’t know the answer to that question. No one does. A number of statistical analyses have been done, which on their face suggest large irregularities. I wrote about one such analysis, by John Lott, here.

Beyond that, major questions remain unanswered. In several key swing states, there were midnight dumps of 100,000 or more votes, virtually all of which were for Joe Biden, something that can’t normally happen. Those dumps may have made the difference in the election. I have seen no attempt by any Democrat to explain or justify them. Maybe I’ve missed it, and maybe they somehow reflected actual ballots cast, but the burden of proof is on those who seek to justify such anomalies.

Even greater doubts about the election arise from the deliberately loose procedures that governed voting. Something like 69 million mail-in votes were cast, and until two months ago, everyone agreed that mail-in voting is highly susceptible to fraud. But the laxity in 2020 went far beyond the risks inherent in mail-in votes. I put it this way: I don’t know whether the Democrats stole the 2020 election, but I do know that they tried hard to steal it.

In 1983, Susan Rosenberg planted a bomb outside the US Senate chamber to assassinate Republican senators.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman @RepJerryNadler got Pres. Clinton to pardon Susan Rosenberg.

She’s now a board member of Black Lives Matter Network, Inc. pic.twitter.com/YchS2z5dFE

— Mike Yoder (@Yoder_Esqq) January 10, 2021

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Destruction, 1833-1836, New York Historical Society.

Even before Congress responded to the people’s protests by sitting up late to award the election to His Fraudulence, the democrats were already gnawing away at the foundations.

On Tuesday, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal notes:

Democrats eliminated a long-standing rule that allows the minority party to alter legislation on the floor before a vote. Speaker Pelosi and her caucus feared that continuing a practice known as a “motion to recommit” would allow the GOP to force Democrats to cast votes on controversial issues that may hurt them politically in the next election. This fear is even more acute for many moderate members given the rise of the party’s radical progressive wing.

Notably, Republicans never made a similar move when they held the majority. “This is a right that has been guaranteed to the minority for well over a century,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla. “With today’s changes, the majority is seeking to silence views they are afraid of.”

Next up, Democrats essentially scuttled a requirement that legislation which increases the deficit be offset with cuts elsewhere. With deficits soaring regardless of which party controls what, the mandate was clearly ineffective. Yet the symbolism here is obvious and will allow Democrats to offer budget-busting legislation on a wide array of dangerous progressive priorities without concern for the long-term fiscal ramifications.

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The paper of record reports:

WASHINGTON, D.C.—A congressional prayer at Capitol Building took over 24 hours to complete as Rep. Emanuel Cleaver concluded his prayer with amen, awomen, and amen variations of all 5,787 other genders.

“Amen, Awomen, Anonbinary, Agenderqueer, Atwo-spirit, Apolygender… this could take a while,” Rep. Cleaver said. “If anyone needs to go out and get some refreshments, feel free.”

“Adragonspirited, Abuildings, Atater-tots,” he continued, “Aagender, Agenderfluid, Adubstepkin, Agenderneutral, Atransmasculine, Atransfeminine, Awolfkind, Ademiboy, Astonebutch, Asquirrel, Amotoroil, Aqueenbae, Ababyyoda, Amermaidqueenking, Acaptainmarvel, Ahufflepuff.”

“Excuse me,” he said, taking a drink of water.

“Abenedryl, Aabacus, Atranspolyqueergreyacepokemon…”

After the prayer seemed to be finished, congresspeople tried to get up and leave, but Rep. Cleaver then said he was going to list all the gods he was praying to for clarification. “Yahweh, Allah, Joseph Smith, Brahma, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Thor, Odin, Isaac Asimov, Ra, Zeus, Loki, Isis, Xenu, the Force, the Lords of Kobol, Din, Nayru, Farore…” This went on for a while.

A new congressional rule will only allow Republicans to lead prayer for the sake of time, since they’ll pray to one God and conclude with “Amanlyman.”

Glenn Reynolds quotes a correspondent:

Thought experiment. There are five Democrat justices on the Supreme Court. There was a Democrat president who just ran for reelection. He supposedly lost, but virtually all Democrat voters believe that massive fraud in several Republican controlled states caused him to lose. Many Democrat attorneys general file a lawsuit in the US Supreme Court, essentially identical to the one that is pending now.

Does anyone believe for a second that those five Democrat justices wouldn’t do absolutely anything necessary to make sure the Democrat control of the presidency was maintained? Democrats care about power. Democrats do not care about process, or rules. Now we are being asked to be so meticulous about adhering to the rules, that we are to allow a laughably egregious fraud to succeed, and to permit our own throats to be cut by turning over the executive branch to the people who just committed the biggest political crime in history. I hope five US supreme court justices will show just a tiny bit of the creativity, to put it politely, which Democrat justices had when they, for example, found an imaginary abortion right in the US Constitution. We’ll see what happens.

and adds himself:

People always take for granted that the liberal justices will stick together, and rule for the Democrats. Even Democrats take that for granted.

Ayad Rahim thinks the democrats took no chances this time. They had it rigged.

In the last weeks of the presidential campaign, Donald Trump was drawing tens of thousands of enthusiastic supporters several times a day, and people across the land, and at sea, formed massive rallies and caravans of their own. Meanwhile, the Biden camp was barely limping along, with one or two funereal gatherings a week, before, at best, a few dozen people (sometimes, overwhelmingly outnumbered by Trump supporters); the campaign’s apparent strategy was to minimize the candidate’s exposure (and let the media do the work for them) — not only because the candidate was feeble and the campaign advocated lockdowns, but also because evidence began emerging of the Biden family’s dealings with foreign oligarchs and corrupt countries — most importantly, Communist China.

So, as election day approached, things were looking good for the president. Indeed, as the results came in on election night, the president was headed for re-election. He was ahead in the electoral college, and had big leads in the handful of remaining states he needed to win.

Then, suddenly, the counting stopped. Late at night, five decisive states announced at the same time that they stopped counting. Has the counting of votes ever stopped on election night in any election, let alone a presidential election? It’s as if, with a couple of minutes left to play in a basketball game, one team is way ahead and “running away with it,” and the other team is down and dejected, staring defeat in the face; and all of a sudden, the referees stop the game for the first time ever, and for no stated reason. Then they send the team that’s winning, home, blindfold them, and tie their hands; leave the trailing team on the court by itself, with control of the scoreboard and the keys; and ask them to send in the final score, whenever they want. If there were fans in the stands, they’d yell, “How much they payin’ you, ref?”

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James B. Meigs, in City Journal, describes the way Progressive generosity tends to penalize good conduct and playing by the rules. Relaxation of standards and selective release from conventional obligations of democrat constituencies that complain, he predicts, inevitably infuriates salt of the earth ordinary Americans who earned everything they have and who accept the world as it is without claiming victim status.

Last January, a small but telling exchange took place at an Elizabeth Warren campaign event in Grimes, Iowa. At the time, Warren was attracting support from the Democratic Party’s left flank, with her bulging portfolio of progressive proposals. “Warren Has a Plan for That” read her campaign T-shirts. The biggest buzz surrounded her $1.25 trillion plan to pay off student-loan debt for most Americans.

A man approached Warren with a question. “My daughter is getting out of school. I’ve saved all my money [so that] she doesn’t have any student loans. Am I going to get my money back?”

“Of course not,” Warren replied.

“So you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money, and those of us who did the right thing get screwed?”

A video of the exchange went viral. It summed up the frustration many feel over the way progressive policies so often benefit select groups, while subtly undermining others. Saving money to send your children to college used to be considered a hallmark of middle-class responsibility. By subsidizing people who run up large debts, Warren’s policy would penalize those who took that responsibility seriously. “You’re laughing at me,” the man said, when Warren seemed to wave off his concerns. “That’s exactly what you’re doing. We did the right thing and we get screwed.”

That father was expressing an emotion growing more common these days: he felt like a chump. Feeling like a chump doesn’t just mean being upset that your taxes are rising or annoyed that you’re missing out on some windfall. It’s more visceral than that. People feel like chumps when they believe that they’ve played a game by the rules, only to discover that the game is rigged. Not only are they losing, they realize, but their good sportsmanship is being exploited. The players flouting the rules are the ones who get the trophy. Like that Iowa dad, the chumps of modern America feel that the life choices they’re most proud of—working hard, taking care of their families, being good citizens—aren’t just undervalued, but scorned.

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