By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, April 01, 2021
Once again, the liars of the world have descended
upon Georgia, which, in its infancy as a purplish state, has become a cynosure
for fabulists of all stripes. This is the third time in as many years that
Georgia has been wantonly maligned. Who among us would bet against there being
a fourth before the end of next year?
The tradition started in earnest in 2018, when Stacey
Abrams became nationally famous for refusing to accept the results of a fair election that
she lost by 50,000 votes. Abrams still insists that she was cheated, is
supported in this holding by many in the press, and has so effectively spread
her distortions that, three years later, they are still echoed habitually by
figures such as Elizabeth Warren.
Abrams’s complaints in 2018 were numerous, hysterical,
and utterly meritless. She complained that her opponent was running for office
while he was secretary of state — which he was, but which he’d done twice
before without incident, which Democrats themselves had done happily in the
past, and which was ultimately irrelevant given that the secretary of state’s
office does not count or reject votes. She complained that Kemp had enforced an
entirely mainstream law that strikes from the rolls anyone who hasn’t voted for
three years and who, having been asked by the secretary of state’s office
whether he or she is still a Georgia resident, has ignored the question for two
consecutive federal elections. And she complained that Georgia had reduced the
number of polling places — which was true, but which was the product not of
Kemp’s being secretary of state, but of consolidation by rural counties and the
rules set by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. Together, Abrams cast
these complaints as the return of “Jim Crow” — a charge so historically
illiterate and irresponsible that, in a sensible political culture, it would
have disqualified her from public life in perpetuity. If the Georgia Tourist
Board were looking for a Chief Mendacity Officer, Abrams would be a shoo-in.
Somehow, things managed to get even worse in 2020, when,
having lost Georgia narrowly but fairly, President Donald Trump engaged in a
campaign of fabrication of such staggering scale, malevolence, and obduracy as
to almost defy belief. Trump claimed that he’d “won very substantially in
Georgia.” He had not. He claimed that, in Fulton County, 300,000 votes had been
mysteriously added to the rolls and 200,000 votes had been confirmed by “forged
signatures.” This wasn’t true. He claimed that a “minimum” of 5,000 “dead
people voted.” They didn’t. He claimed that “thousands and thousands” of
ballots were improperly shredded. They were not. As he continued to work
himself into a lather, Trump took aim at his own U.S. attorney in Atlanta,
called for the Republicans who run the state’s executive branch to “resign,”
and, eventually, retweeted Lin Wood’s preposterous suggestion that now-governor
Kemp and his successor in the secretary of state’s office, Brad Raffensperger,
should go “to jail.” Trump’s attacks on Georgia were the most significant part
of what was the single worst incident of sore-loserism in American history — an
incident that culminated in the president of the United States encouraging his
own vice president to stage a coup. By the time Trump was finished, millions upon
millions of Americans had been misled.
A few months later, it is happening again.
Last week, Governor Kemp signed a fairly innocuous election-reform bill, and, within days, all
hell broke loose. As I write, corporations across the country are lining up to
condemn the bill; the press is engaged in its customary fact-free delirium; and
President Biden is suggesting that the measure is not just like Jim
Crow, but worse. There is no more of consequence underneath
this frenzy than there was beneath the previous two — and there is certainly
nothing to justify the bill’s comparison to one of the darkest stains on
American history, a political regime under which an entire class of people was
not only excluded from whole swaths of our society, but habitually beaten and
killed, based on its skin color. President Biden is lying about the bill. Cable news is lying
about it. Politicians in other states are lying about it — often hypocritically. Nothing sums up the absurdity of the
situation better than the fact that the CEO of Delta initially praised the
final law, but then, having seen the lies take hold in the public’s
imagination, felt obliged to condemn it.
All told, one cannot help but feel sorry for Secretary of
State Raffensperger and his chief operating officer, Gabriel Sterling, who have
now been required twice within the last six months to face down an
angry, tempestuous mob while armed with nothing more potent than the
uninspiring truth. Bemused by his demotion from resistance hero to public
enemy, Sterling explained this week that the new “claim of voter suppression
has the same level of truth as the claims of voter fraud in the last election.”
That is to say: none.
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