Something’s brewing, and it ain’t good
It seems more and more people are acting and talking crazy. It’s pretty dangerous stuff.
Example: Before a vote last week by the Uniontown Area School Board to require student mask-wearing, to help stop the spread of a variant of the COVID-19 virus, a parent told the board, “This whole pandemic is nothing but a complete scare tactic from the powers above to create a tyrannical government.”
Another declared, “Why can’t we as Americans push back? There is no reason to be scared to death. There is every reason to push back, to not be a pawn in this game.”
Meanwhile, in Harrisburg, the Republican-controlled state Senate Intergovernmental Affairs and Operations Committee voted to launch an investigation of the state’s 2020 presidential election, in which Democrat Joe Biden beat Republican Donald Trump by 80,000 votes.
Committee chairman Cris Dush, in an apparent attempt to strike a moderate tone, said, “We are not responding to proven allegations” of voter fraud.
The investigation, Dush continued, was for the purpose of determining whether the allegations – which, we all know, originated with Trump – were true or not.
If “factual,” then the General Assembly was responsible for correcting matters, with an eye on preventing “that from happening in future elections.”
To accomplish its goal, the committee voted 7-4 (a straight party line vote) to subpoena voter records, not just here and there, but from every corner of the state.
The committee demanded the secretary of state’s office hand over the names and addresses of every Pennsylvania voter, all of which is public anyway.
It further demanded birth dates and the last four digits of everyone’s Social Security number be turned over. This, of course, is not public information, but private, as it should be for very good reasons.
To add to the injury, Dush said he was interviewing private “consultants” who presumably would take possession of this wealth of information. We taxpayers will pay the consultant bill.
The Jefferson County lawmaker, it needs to be noted, was one of several Republican members of the state legislature to visit Phoenix, Ariz., in June, to get a firsthand look at the widely discredited, months-long “forensic” election audit going on there.
Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin and Georgia have been similarly active in pursuit of election fraud, even though these matters were reviewed by dozens of federal and state courts across the country months ago.
The courts’ conclusions boil down to this: the 2020 election was free of any taint of fraud, either by voters themselves or the people, mostly at the grassroots, who run our elections.
The blabber we’re hearing more and more of from the likes of Dush and the Uniontown gentleman worried about “tyrannical government” is enough to call into question the future of the United States, as we’ve known and loved it.
A podcaster by the name of Matt Welsh recently told Tucker Carlson of Fox News, about Joe Biden, “We had to elect this rotting bag of oatmeal to get a real tyrant.”
He went on to say: “Maybe, in the end, this is a good thing. … It’s time for choosing for Americans…. Americans are going to comply and lie down to this, or we are finally going to stand up and say, ‘You know what, this is not gonna happen.'”
There’s a whole cohort of conservatives who appreciate the dangerous spot we are in, the result of a caustic brew of falsehoods, fabrications, and a feckless disregard of democratic norms.
One of these is Ohio congressman Anthony Gonzalez, who announced on Thursday that he is stepping down after only two House terms, citing family matters but also scoring “the toxic dynamics inside” the Republican Party.
Gonzalez voted to impeach President Trump in January, one of 10 Republicans in the House to take the politically hazardous step of defending this republican form of government against Donald Trump and the anti-democracy passions and opinions he engenders among millions of Americans.
What should have been easy for Gonzalez was hard, and not just career-wise. His vote prompted threats to his family’s safety.
As for his party, Gonzalez, a former Ohio State and NFL football player, told interviewers, “We’ve learned the wrong lessons, but beyond that, and more importantly, (Trumpism) has been horribly irresponsible and destructive for the country.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.