Exploding Houses

Here is incoming U.S. congressman Burgess Owens explaining his decision to join the Republican challenge to the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory:

Owens told The Salt Lake Tribune that he believes President Donald Trump actually won the November election, stating, “There’s no question in my mind that I think he won.”

“There is no question in my mind that I think X” — if that means anything at all, it means “I am certain that I believe this.” In other words, “I firmly recognize the identity of the thought in my own head.”

And Owens insists, like all GOP cult members before him, that he is not alone in being certain that he believes something stupid:

“I think it’s the right thing to do,” Owens said of Republican attempts to oppose the electoral vote. “Seventy-plus percent of conservatives say that this [election] is not fair. We the people should have this opportunity to have this conversation versus [just] people with black robes.”

Translation: “Seventy-plus percent of Republican voters depended so fervently on Trump’s election victory to sustain their own fragile egos, and to give their spiritless lives some kind of meaning, that they, like their cult idol, simply cannot accept the possibility that Trump lost. And with so many people so unhinged by their adulation of a reality television celebrity-moron, the actual result of the electoral college voting process just has to be rejected, so that those on the losing side of this election do not have to suffer the pain of coming to terms with that loss (as losing voters always had to do before), because such a fate is just unacceptable, even if the entire judiciary — including the conservative-controlled Supreme Court — having been presented by the cult’s lawyers with exactly zero evidence to support the cult’s fantasy world, has universally rejected all their frivolous and/or tyrannical lawsuits.”

Innocent men have been wrongly convicted of murders and served decades in prison based on far more persuasive circumstantial evidence than anything Trump’s cult is offering as grounds for radically rejecting the constitutional procedures and judgments of the entire United States electoral system and federal judiciary.

These kooks continue to rationalize overturning an election result on the grounds of having the supposed right to “have this conversation,” to “hear from alternative electoral college voters,” and other such poppycock. On this reasoning, no election can ever be certified, as long as people on the losing side wish to continue “conversing” about fraud that they cannot prove, making extreme claims they cannot substantiate, using mathematical calculations that defy common sense, conjuring imaginary electoral college voters in place of the actual ones appointed by the states, and just generally behaving like petulant punks.

I feel about today’s Republican Party — including most of its voting base — more or less the same way I feel when I hear news stories about houses that blow up due to drug operations gone awry. “I hope none of the innocent people next door got killed in the explosion. Otherwise, no loss.”