Kari Lake, the Armor of God, and the Filter of Vaseline

 

Kari Lake called on her supporters in Arizona to arm themselves ahead of an “intense” period leading up to the election. “We are going to put on the armor of God, and maybe strap on a Glock on the side of us just in case.” The crowd roared its approval.https://t.co/otBB7H2mkK

— Chris Cameron (@ChrisCameronNYT) April 17, 2024

Having spent something like a year and 3/4ths insisting she actually won the contest for AZ governor and only appeared to have lost due to voter fraud rather than conspicuous own goals like eschewing the support of "John McCain Republicans", has now decided to show a more moderate side by (checks notes) suggesting holy war and armed conflict: 

It is not the first time Ms. Lake has alluded to armed conflict with her and her supporters. Last year, she said: “If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the N.R.A.,” referring to the National Rifle Association. She added, “That’s not a threat — that’s a public service announcement.”

Her voice is just one in a rising chorus of violent, authoritarian or otherwise aggressive political rhetoric from Mr. Trump and his allies. The former president shared a video late last month featuring an image of President Biden, his Democratic rival, hogtied. He has also said that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and described his political opponents last year as “vermin” who needed to be “rooted out.”

I don't know about the John McCain Republicans, but this is a very familiar and tragic theme to Gabrielle Giffords Democrats. It is also a grave concern for AZ elections officials. And I think it is doubtful she will back off based on her previous history with such language and associations. Lake's true flaws are too big to airbrush away. She is a reckless demagogue. 

 

Kari Lake is Somehow Still Not Governor of Arizona

 

I joined @JustTheNews to talk about our incredible victory before the Arizona Supreme Court this week.

It's so nice to be able to talk about good news for once! pic.twitter.com/oXaXVoeRAg

— Kari Lake (@KariLake) March 25, 2023

I can't do another TWGB because two back to back is one thing, but three is a whole emergency situation that the blog has never actually drilled for, and in the meantime, Ms. Vaseline Lens experienced an incredible victory that she is explaining to entire hamfaced John Solomon and I wondered, "What, now?"

She's talking about a review of Maricopa County. Most of what she wanted was rejected, but ok. They are checking one area. She very likely still lost, but I see what she's trying. They are going to pretend that they have no earthly idea where the ballots in Maricopa country came from because they can't account for how each and every one got delivered. Therefore, they must have been sketchy. 

Is the standard of "they must have been sketchy" a standard that should overturn an election, though? You have no proof of sketchiness, after all. Who created the sketchy votes? How was any pattern of vote sketchiness organized? IOW, if you can't describe the method and means of the sketchy votes, you have to admit there were voters and they did vote, and if you can't verify all the votes, neither can you falsify them. If the voters are real, then the votes recorded have a certain validity. 

In other words, what the fuck, Kari, just admit you lost and move the fuck on!

Kari Lake and the Lawyers She Rode in On

 

You might have heard that Kari Lake lost her election, oh, about November of last year, but if you are Kari Lake, you are hearing as it if for the first time just now, when for the second time she has been told that her idea of "proof" that the election was rigged against her just simply wasn't. 

As just a minute's worth of throat-clearing on my part, what if things like machines that didn't work properly or the existence of mail-in ballots or whatever, weren't things that only negatively affected Republican voters, but were conditions that existed for all the voters and under those conditions, there was still just a higher Democratic voter turnout? See, I feel like most complaints from GOP pols and their various conspiracy theorist fluffers is basically Republicans claiming some kind of weird victimhood that they were robbed when no, sometimes candidates just lose for reasons. It's the old idea that only Democrats have agency, therefore, Republicans could not possibly claw their way to an electoral advantage by any sort of nefarious means, but Democrats totally do. 

Eh. 

But anyway, whether Kari Lake learns anything from this loss or not, her lawyers will possibly get a hard lesson, because they aren't just looking at sanctions, but possibly the loss of their law licenses. That is serious business, as in, they will be out of business.  What lawyers will learn from this is--don't perform meaningless signifying electoral challenges if you can't prove voter fraud existed. 

What does Kari Lake learn? Nothing, so long as people think it's just fine and dandy for politicians to lie their asses off about whether they won or lost an election to gin up their fanbase. After all, Trump is still doing it, no matter how many times he's been told he lost (and it's a lot--like, an unbelievable lot).  But I think she looks like a whole horse's ass the more she insists on it instead of moving on to anything else, and well, that's good. As an example for others. 

There is a Reason Kari Lake Lost

 

"There's not a darn reason we should've lost" -- Kari Lake comes close to admitting defeat pic.twitter.com/ek12xUjENy

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 24, 2023

But a recent news story tells us exactly what happened: she did it to herself.  

But according to the Republic, Lake’s loss boils down to the fact that she alienated vast swaths of her fellow Republicans, pointing to a recent analysis of the public voting records to identify the “disaffected voters” who support the majority of candidates from one political party but cast a vote for the opposing party in a specific race.

“The numbers show that while Lake claims she lost because of printer problems or other issues in Maricopa County,” wrote the Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl, “she could have won had she not turned off voters in the state’s most populous county who backed a host of other Republican candidates”:

Or long story short:

Kari Lake Lost Because Nearly 40,000 Maricopa County Voters Cast Ballots for Other GOP Candidates, But Not Her

Because maybe she needed the "John McCain Republicans" she was so hot to deride.  Maybe she made it too easy for Katie Hobbs to turn down a debate by acting exactly like the radical that Hobbs wanted to depict her as. And maybe focusing on the last election--2020--cost her 2022 because she wasn't focused on winning, but what to do if she lost. 

And bizarrely, she's still in denial-land. She's still trying to appeal her loss. Her Twitter feed and that of her "War Room" share random data points that don't prove any coordinated fraud, and she sits and bitches about her loss with people like Bannon who shouldn't be touched with a twenty-foot pole and supports Mike Lindell (!?) for RNC chair. Or Harmeet Dhillon. Depending on the day you ask. Anyone but whoever let her lose. But she ran a campaign that doubled down on stupid and is now setting herself up to look like an election denialist kook if she runs for anything else. 

And I say "Good". Better we all understand who we are dealing with so that Ruben Gallego kicks her narrow ass if she runs for Senate. And maybe she is just taking a very dishonest page from her hero, Donald Trump's, book regarding the profitability of crying "rigged". It's a pretty decent dollar--that fake indignation dollar. 

It would be lovely not to ever hear from this crank again. 

Flies in the Vaseline 2: She Lost

 

Kari Lake at Mar-a-Lago: “I believe we won by 400,000 to 500,000 votes.” pic.twitter.com/VpdpC1qJds

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) December 23, 2022

She got her day in court, and her argument was found to be unpersuasive.  

A state judge on Saturday rejected Kari Lake’s last-ditch effort to overturn her defeat in the Arizona governor’s race, dismissing for lack of evidence her last two claims of misconduct by Maricopa County election officials.

The order by Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson, after a two-day trial in Phoenix that ended Thursday, follows more than six weeks of claims by Ms. Lake, a Republican, that she was robbed of victory last month — assertions that echoed the false contention that was at the heart of her campaign: that an even larger theft had stolen the 2020 presidential election from Donald. J. Trump.

Her campaign has said it would appeal, and I would strongly suggest that they not do that, because it seems to me like sanctions would be a-comin' if they wanted to be that hard-headed. (It seems like the problem of trying to undermine faith in democracy is too serious a threat to call what they'd be doing actually "frivolous", but I can't imagine there's anything they have else to bring to the courtroom.)

But look where she has landed herself--if she just graciously thanked her campaign for all they did to support her in a relatively close gubernatorial contest and vow to continue to strive to participate in the civic life of Arizonans, maybe she would not look like the a smacked ass who ran around saying stuff like "They messed with the wrong bitch" and claiming she probably won it by a half million. 

It's a very unfiltered and unattractive look, right?  

I think it was very important for the process that she had been able to have her day in court and wildly not-prove her claims, and hope lessons are learned from this. I don't necessarily know that they will be the right lessons, but damnit, it feels like an educational opportunity.

UPDATED: Motion for sanctions against Kari Lake and her attorneys just dropped.  Lake should wake up--she may try to manipulate public opinion, but the courts are not the same.

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.