Flies in the Vaseline (UPDATED)

 

It really does look like GOP AZ gubernatorial candidate and election denier Kari Lake is not going to pick up enough votes to win the contest. This shouldn't be an actual surprise since election-denying gubernatorial and secretary of state candidates have gone down this cycle all over. But this was the closest contest, in a state where there were actual Cyber Ninjas looking for bamboo ballots not that long ago, so this is the race where I do believe there will be some fuckery. 

Because I do not think Kari Lake will be ignored. Because even though rumor had it that the Trump election-deniers really wanted to start shit over a "close" PA race that never was close, the best shot they have for keeping the election fraud myth alive lies in AZ's supposed "slow" count. (Even though slow is careful. Dotting i's and crossing t's, as it were.) And because the "agents of intolerance" once decried by John McCain are very active in the election-denial movement. 

Kari Lake quite famously said she didn't want the votes of "John McCain Republicans" in more harsh terms. She might have wished she had been a bit more conciliatory, but hindsight is probably not more the strength of her faction of politics than foresight is. 

The people she does align with are the Jericho marchers. These are the sort of folks who, although white-bread Christians, see fit to blow a shofar horn as if they are genuinely acting out of a sense of having been chosen by God, even if this an appropriation of a tradition that is not their own. Their circumambulation suggests a threat, the reverse of people with faith in elections or democracy--to pull down the institution they surround. 

To get even weirder, Ali Alexander thinks he can "will" the election the way he wants via prayer, which, ok, but, you know. Trump lost. Among tons of others. So. His record is bad. 

For my part, I've tried to not talk about Kari Lake, despite her two-facedness regarding drag shows, and her obvious last-minute bid for sympathy by a "white powder incident" at her campaign headquarters which looks like a stunt--buy hey! not more complicated than Little Marco's!  And I almost felt a pang of sympathy for her eagerness to please when she vacuumed a rug for Donald Trump. It reminded me of Annette Bening's character in American Beauty.  She was going to sell this house today. 

I tried not to dismiss her and her odd robotic weird uncanny-valley nonsense as "Scary Flake"--it felt misogynistic. But if she wants to pretend that the election got stolen from her, if she loses by a margin not too dissimilar from the one Trump lost by two years ago, and in the company of Mark Finchem (a kook) and Blake Masters (who looks like he skins puppies because Yankee Candle doesn't come in that scent), well, it's just possible she's trying to be Trump's little darling today, but that won't do shit for her long-term chances at political relevance.

It would be better to go out with her dignity intact (such as it is) and take a run at the useless and badly implicated in 1/6 GOP AZ chair Kelli Ward, amirite? 

But that just like, my opinion. 

And I think it's pretty amusing the way Meghan McCain and Liz Cheney have already dunked on her via Twitter. For some Republican women, her act has already been a bridge too far. 

 

UPDATE: She's been to Mar-A-Lago, she's vowing to fight, she's got people wildly exaggerating about their "voter suppression" (when they still were able to vote!) and maybe her campaign has indicated that they just can't hold back those hardcore fans of hers to Maricopa Co.--fair warning! 

She is absolutely turning out how I thought she would.