In Arizona, They're Trying to Make 2+2 Equal Another President

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

04 June 21

This is a planning session for whatever might come next. There is a straight line from the seizure of the U.S. Capitol to the fairgrounds arena.

et’s check in on the ongoing extended farce playing out at the Arizona state fairgrounds as a coalition of angry shut-ins and crooked human abacuses continue to try to find a way to make 2+2 equal another president. Now, this is interesting. Apparently, they’re selling tours to out-of-town MAGAs grown bored with asking their aldermen about the baby-eating ritual before last year’s pancake breakfast. From the AP (via WHYY):

Three Pennsylvania lawmakers will be in Arizona Wednesday to check out the state Senate GOP’s partisan audit of the 2020 election. They’re the latest Republicans to make a pilgrimage to Phoenix, Ground Zero in the “stop the steal” movement’s push to find support for the far-fetched conspiracy theories suggesting the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

Political pilgrimages are nothing new to Arizona…But now, the draw is the Arizona State Fairgrounds, site of a former basketball arena where a Trump supporter who has promoted election conspiracies is overseeing a hand recount of 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County. The latest visitors are Pennsylvania Sens. Doug Mastriano and Cris Dush, and Rep. Rob Kauffman. They’ll meet with Arizona legislators at the Capitol before touring the site and getting a briefing from the auditors, according to a terse statement from the audit team Tuesday. None responded to interview requests on Tuesday.

This, of course, is more proof that the campaign to demolish public confidence in our elections is a national effort. I guarantee you this drop-by from the three clowns from Pennsylvania is not an exercise in thrill-seeking. The livestream from inside the arena makes CSPAN’s congressional programming look like Blazing Saddles. This is a gathering of the likeminded and, very obviously, a planning session for whatever might come next. There is a straight line from the seizure of the U.S. Capitol to the fairgrounds arena. To take only one example, according to WHYY in Philadelphia, Doug Mastriano, one of the Pennsylvania ratfcking tourists visiting Phoenix, spent $3,000 of his campaign money to charter buses for folks to go to Washington for the January 6 insurrection.

Mastriano (R-Franklin), rumored to be a future GOP gubernatorial candidate, has faced calls to resign for attending the rally. A review of the state senator’s campaign finance records shows that his committee paid $3,354 to Wolf’s Bus Lines in three installments for “bus reservations” about six days before Trump’s “Save America” rally. The same week the payments were made, Mastriano posted an event on Facebook offering bus rides to D.C. on Jan. 6 — charging attendees $25 dollars for an adult and $10 for children.

Other people have stopped by as well. Professional election observers, they were. They walked boldly right into the wind tunnel of crazy. From the Washington Post:

In one instance, a software update caused so many errors that the company handling the recount abandoned the update and went back to the old software. In other instances, prohibited items including cellphones and pens with black or blue ink were allowed onto the counting floor.

And in an incident last week, audit spokesman and former state Republican Party chairman Randy Pullen told an observer that the pink T-shirt he was required to wear while watching the proceedings made him “look like a transgender.”

Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, is now posting the security infractions on her official website. She’s also now running for governor. I wish her all the luck in the world, and she’s going to need every speck of it. If she finishes ahead on election night, they’ll be recounting ballots until half-past the Mars landing.