(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

MILWAUKEE—It turns out that, for all the sturm und drang of the past four days, the most important political story written last week was this one, in The New York Times, by Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti, about Republicans' ongoing efforts to game the certification process in advance of the 2024 election. These shenanigans are based on the Big Lie that the 2020 balloting was rigged. Which, of course, it was not.

But unlike the chaotic and improvised challenge four years ago, the new drive includes a systematic search for any vulnerability in the nation’s patchwork election system.Mr. Trump’s allies have followed a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses. The latter strategy involves an ambitious — and legally dubious — attempt to reimagine decades of settled law dictating how results are officially certified in the weeks before the transfer of power.

As you might expect, this whole scheme is cooked up by the big brains at the Heritage Foundation and as such, it is equal parts magical thinking and pure ratfcking.

At the heart of the strategy is a drive to convince voters that the election is about to be stolen, even without evidence. Democrats use mail voting, drop boxes and voter registration drives to swing elections, they have argued. And Mr. Trump’s indictments and criminal conviction are a Biden administration gambit to interfere with the election, they claim. “As things stand right now, there’s zero chance of a free and fair election,” Mike Howell, a project director at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said at an event this week. “I’m formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election.

This is the campaign worth following for the next three months. It will be waged in courthouses and in city council chambers, and in town meetings all across the country. And it’s fooling exactly nobody.

Even if the cases fail, Mr. Trump’s allies are building excuses to dispute the results, while trying to empower thousands of local election officials to disrupt the process. Already, election board members in several states have moved to block certification of primary election tallies, including in a major swing county in Nevada last week. “The fundamental principle of the system — the rule of law, the finality of the results, the ability to challenge an election but then accept the results if the challenges fail — is being stood on its head,” said Ben Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election lawyer who broke with his party over Mr. Trump.

For decades, Ginsburg was the dark lord of ballot chicanery for the GOP. (His work on the Great Florida Heist of '00 is the stuff of legend.) If these tactics turn even his iron stomach for such shenanigans, they must be rancid indeed. Of course, you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to suss out the usual suspects.

But this year, the R.N.C. has worked to align Trump allies behind a more coherent strategy. Its new leaders — Michael Whatley and his co-chair, Lara Trump, who is Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law — have vowed to turn the party more fully toward preventing what they call “cheating."They have installed a new “senior counsel for election integrity” at the Republican Party headquarters: Christina Bobb, a lawyer indicted in Arizona on charges related to Mr. Trump’s attempt to dispute his defeat there. She has pleaded not guilty.

Well, that certainly sounds on the up and up. The “senior counsel for election integrity” is currently under indictment for election-related crimes. Perfect.

Voting against certification was practically unheard-of in presidential elections until late in 2020, when Trump allies sought to block certification in Wayne County, Michigan—and until Jan. 6, 2021, when thousands of protesters sought to block Congress from certifying the election results. Since then, members of state and local boards have voted against certification more than 20 times across eight states, according to a list compiled by Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that tracks antidemocratic trends in the United States. In most cases, the board members were outvoted or, when they weren’t, courts or officials forced them to certify the vote. (In one case, in Arizona, two board members who voted against certification have been criminally charged, pleading not guilty.) This system ain’t right in its HAID.

As to The Speech Thursday night, it was cow-stunningly long, but made up for it by being weird. Here is the opening passage, in which El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago described in freakish detail his encounter with eternity last weekend:

Bullets were continuing to fly as very brave Secret Service agents rushed to the stage. They really did, they rushed to the stage. These are great people at great risk, I will tell you, and pounced on top of me so that I would be protected. There was blood pouring everywhere, and yet, in a certain way, I felt very safe because I had God on my side. I felt that.

The available video evidence does not show any such similarity to Missionary Ridge. He went on to commend the crowd at the rally for not panicking...

But that isn’t the reason that they didn’t move. The reason is that they knew I was in very serious trouble, they saw me go down, they saw the blood, and thought actually must dead, that I was dead. They knew it was a shot to the head. They saw the blood. There’s interesting statistic. The ears are the bloodiest part. If something happens with the ears, they bleed more than any other part of the body. For whatever reason, the doctors told me that. I said, “Why is there so much blood?” He said, “It’s the ears. They pop bleed more.” So we learned something.

Something known to every cornerman at every ringside since the dawn of time. But at least this part of the speech was original and plus ça strange. The rest of it wandered around until it fell into Lake Michigan. All that was left was an endless litany of the bullshit he’s been peddling for a decade now. Immigrants are stealing "107 percent" of our jobs. (That sounds bad.) Immigrants are killing "hundreds of thousands of people." (That sounds worse.)

"I can stop a war with one phone call."

And kissing the dead fireman's helmet. That was...a choice.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Get A Workin' Man" (Billie and DeDe Pierce): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1924, are the Republicans nominating Calvin Coolidge. Oh, boy. His vice-presidential nominee was Charles Dawes, who was far more interesting than Coolidge. (So was a spittoon.) HIs father was the indomitable Rufus Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin Infantry, part of the Iron Brigade, who helped save the first day at Gettysburg. (Rufus also was a one-term congressman, turfed out because he opposed the execrable Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.) Anyway, Charles Dawes was an accomplished musician and composer. One of his pieces, Melody in A Major, was so popular that, in 1951, the same year that Dawes died, a lyricist named Carl Sigman added words to it and it became "It's All In The Game," a hit for Tommy Edwards and eventually covered by dozens of artists. Here's my favorite, from Van Morrison's Into The Music LP. History is so cool.

I shouldn't leave Milwaukee without citing Texas Governor Greg Abbott as the most odious twerp to take the stage. His five minutes of rage against migrants were the most conspicuous assertions of secession at a major party political convention since William Waightstill Avery tore the Democratic convention apart in 1860. There was no such rebellion in the hall this week, though. The crowd ate up Abbott's poison and asked for whipped cream on top.

Among the many victims was twelve-year-old Jocelyn from Houston, Texas. Raped and murdered by two illegal immigrants. She’s one of thousands whose lives have been destroyed by Joe Biden’s open border policies. To make matters even worse, Biden is even fighting tooth and nail to stop Texas and other Republican states from securing own borders. I deployed thousands of National Guard soldiers to build hundreds of miles of razor wire barriers. Give it up for our National Guard. They built those barriers to stop illegal crossings. When Joe Biden ordered to cut that razor wire, I ordered the National Guard to triple the razor wire on the border. When Biden took 50 acres of Texas border property to illegally process up to 5,000 illegal immigrants a day, I directed the Texas National Guard to take back our land and wire it shut... When Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refused to even come to Texas and to see the border crisis that they created, I took the border to them. I began busing illegal immigrants to Washington DC. And we have continued busing migrants to sanctuary cities across the entire country. And those buses will continue to roll until we finally secure our border.

And the son of a bitch is proud of it. Jesus, these really are the mole people.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found. From Popular Mechanics:

Archaeologists recently found the lost ruins of a ceremonial temple—covered in sand and 4,000 to 5,000 years old—in northwestern Peru. The excavation team first discovered the walls, and subsequently unearthed a mix of features indicating that the structure was once a temple. And then came the skeletal remains of three adults tucked between walls...The oldest portion of the site features not only the up-to-5,000-year-old walls, but also various architectural features that help define the site as a ceremonial temple. “We have what would have been a central staircase from which one would ascend to a kind of stage in the central part,” Muro Ynoñán said, noting that the stage could have hosted ritual performances in front of an audience.

I have a feeling that the "ritual performances" may have been a tad grisly. No business like show business, I guess. Greg Abbott would have sprung for a luxury suite, I'm thinking.

Hey, AP, is it good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

A team of Brazilian scientists has discovered a fossilized skeleton of what they believe is one of the world’s oldest dinosaurs after heavy rains in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul accelerated the natural process of erosion. The researcher believes the dinosaur lived during the Triassic period, when all continents were part of a single land mass called Pangaea. Dinosaurs are thought to have first evolved at that time. The apex predator discovered in Rio Grande do Sul belongs to the group known as Herrerasauridae — a family of dinosaurs that used to wander across lands that now make up present-day Brazil and Argentina, according to a fact sheet about the discovery shared with The Associated Press.

These dudes didn't survive as a species long enough for the asteroid to get them. But one of them was discovered because of flooding that is representative of how similar we are to the asteroid in our impact on the planet. They lived then to surprise us. and make us happy now.

I'll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Posting will be light next week as I will be moving, which inevitably blows goats. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake line. Wear the damn mask. Take the damn shots, especially the boosters, and especially the most recent boosters. Watch out for the damn bird flu. And spare a moment for the all the good people suffering in the unprecedented heat, and also those people in south Florida and east Texas, which are now lagoons only Martha-Ann Alito could love, and the people in similar peril in the upper Midwest, and in Mexico, and for the people of Iowa and across the Plains states who have been living under the gun of all the tornadoes, especially the folks in Texas, who are staring down the barrel again this weekend. And for the people of Baltimore, and for the people of Israel and of Gaza, the people of Ukraine, of Lewiston, Maine, and for the victims of monkeypox in the Republic of the Congo, and of civil war in the DRC, and of the earthquake zones in Taiwan, Iraq, Turkey, Morocco, and Colombia, and in the flood zone in Libya, and the flood zones all across the Ohio Valley, and on the Horn of Africa, and in Tanzania and Kenya, and in the English midlands, and in Virginia, and in Texas and Louisiana, and in California, and the flood zones of Indonesia, and in the storm-battered south of Georgia, and in Kenya, and in the flood areas in Dubai (!) and in Pakistan, and Brazil, and in the flood zones in Russia and Kazakhstan, and in the flood zones in Iran, where loose crocodiles are becoming a problem, and in the flood zones on Oahu, and in the fire zones in Oregon, and western Canada, and Australia, and in north Texas, and in Lahaina, where they’re still trying to recover their lives, and under the volcano in Iceland, and for the gun-traumatized folks in Austin and at UNLV, and in Philadelphia, and in Perry, Iowa, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting.

Catch Up If You Dare: The Shebeen Goes To Milwaukee For The RNC

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. 

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