By Rich Lowry
Friday, December 04, 2020
There is no evidence that Lin Wood and Sidney Powell are
secretly working for the Democratic National Committee, but no one has
definitively disproved it, either.
That’s the kind of conspiratorial reasoning that the
Wood-Powell duo, with their deep commitment to wild and unfalsifiable charges,
might apply to themselves.
The two Trump-allied lawyers have made themselves into
wrecking balls against the Republican Party of Georgia, whose top elected
officials, they allege, are involved in the most dastardly and far-reaching
conspiracy in American history.
This might be only a bizarre footnote to the 2020
election, if their charges weren’t being amplified by the president of the
United States and didn’t come at a time when the Georgia GOP needs all of its
voters to turn out in the two January runoff elections that will determine
control of the Senate.
According to Wood-Powell, Dominion voting machines were
used to rob President Donald Trump of his rightful landslide in Georgia, with
Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both
Republicans, in on the fix, aided and abetted by foreign enemies of the United
States.
The rot runs so deep that, per the duo, Republicans
should boycott the runoffs. Or, as Wood put it at their bonkers joint rally on
Wednesday in Georgia, the governor should resign and go to jail.
If this turmoil contributes to a Republican debacle, it
would be the dumbest and most unnecessary loss since Steve Bannon decided in
the 2017 Alabama Senate special election that it’d be a brilliant idea to run
Roy Moore, the one Republican noxious and scandal-plagued enough to lose to a
Democrat.
Ideally, the Georgia races would be about President-elect
Joe Biden and stopping his agenda. Instead, Trump and his fraud claims have
become a wedge issue, making it harder for Senators David Perdue and Kelly
Loeffler to bridge the gap between Trump’s base and suburban voters.
Trump is clearly of two minds. He can’t admit that he
lost Georgia and will endorse any lunatic theory to explain away his defeat. At
the same time, he knows his political legacy is caught up in the outcome of the
Senate races.
So, he attacks the top Republicans in the state at the
same time he promotes Perdue and Loeffler.
Nothing will ever be enough to satisfy him and his allies
about the Georgia vote. The other day, Trump pounded Kemp for not matching
absentee ballots with their envelopes and checking their signatures. But the
signatures were checked twice already.
In Georgia, first, the signature on an absentee ballot
request is checked against the voter registration card. Then, when the ballot
is sent in, the signature on the envelope is checked against both the ballot
request and the voter registration card.
When Wood and Powell were asked at their Wednesday rally
about the hand recount that should have put to bed the Dominion theory, Powell
denied there was a full hand recount and said, regardless, Georgia’s election
system is built to skew recounts, too.
One can only conclude that if Georgia allowed Wood and
Powell to choose a team of forensic scientists to inspect ballots in a
hermetically sealed examination room guarded by Navy SEALs, they’d still come
up with a reason why the count had been subverted if it showed Biden ahead.
Perhaps Republican voters will ignore all of this come
January. But there’s a reason parties seek unity before important elections. At
best, Wood-Powell are distracting from the GOP message in the races and, at
worst, convincing persuadable Georgians that it is the Republican Party that
needs to be checked, not Joe Biden.
Certainly, the Wood-Powell logic supports sitting this
one out. There’s no reason to bother voting if Georgia is controlled by
politicians on the take who use technology to predetermine the outcome of
elections.
Who needs actual agents of the DNC if this is what the
most fervent allies of Donald Trump are saying?
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