October 9, 2021

"I’ve always said that if you want to win an election, you have to win it on election night, okay?"

"But look, I don’t pretend to know the intricacies of how every state counted mail-in ballots and how they were certified. I don’t. But I do know that when you’re running for president, you have to have these legal challenges ready to go. Much as Bush did in 2000. The Trump folks wanted to exhaust every means. But at some point I think Joe Biden’s president."

Said Laura Ingraham, answering the question "Who do you think won the 2020 election?," in an interview in The Washington Post.

That was very well put. I don't watch her show — I don't watch any of the TV news analysis shows — but I can see why she belongs on TV. It's hard to nail down such an amorphous position in short punchy sentences.

From the comments over there: "Pathetic puff piece … the only honest thing she said is that half the country hates her guts. She’s a parasite." And: "Stop giving this lying garden utensil print. She is just another lickspittle for an ignorant, incompetent liar. She has no shame. Hope she and her kids don't get covid from some mask hole."

People have gotten so ugly. I've gotten so I just stand back, observe, and wonder. I do need to give that second commenter credit for the "don't." How did that get in there? A ray of hope.

65 comments:

gilbar said...

Serious Questions for democrats, and other Life Long Liberals

Who won the 2000 Presidential Election?
Was there Voter Fraud in Ohio in 2004?
Did Stacy Abrams win the Gubernatorial election in Georgia?
When did you reach your answers to these questions?

MadTownGuy said...

From the article comments:

"Hope she and her kids don't get covid from some mask hole."

I've seen this before. It's a way of expressing the underlying hope that they do, without actually saying it. Weasel words.

readering said...

We agree on The Godfather.

rehajm said...

I reject these calls for acceptance. There were disturbing unusual circumstances with massive mail in balloting, vote harvesting, strategically placed liberal judges and standing laches moot. To still deny there wasn't widespread fraud is intellectually dishonest.

You people calling for acceptance will be the ones whining the loudest when the side you don't like puts together the bigger, better fraud machine so I'm not falling for your word games now.

How about we work together to improve election integrity the way Florida did after 2000? I know, you don't want to engage with that idea, either...

Dear corrupt left, go F yourselves said...

Related? I wanted to point out commenter Chuck's deception and false quoting in a previous thread. (McAuliff thread) This is also known as - lying.
In a previous thread - commenter Chuck posted something about a man named Christopher Rufo, who is an independent jounolist.

Chuck Quote:
"Because remember kids; ""The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.'"*"

Note the sneaky quote marks.
Chuck uses quote marks around something Rufo never said. That's full-on democrat level fraud. remember kids - lying and fraud is all A-OK if done for The Party.

tim in vermont said...

I agree with her criticisms of Trump, that he lost the election before it happened. Democrats followed. Sun Tzu: "Win first, fight later," and sewed up the election by defeating safeguard after safeguard in the year prior. Trump sat on his hands and let it happen. Recounts just launder the 'votes' cast with these safeguards gone. Trump should have had Ann Coulter vetting his speeches and tweets for the lousy-grammar traps he was so prone to fall into.

Where we differ is that it's a binary choice and Biden is far worse, as we have seen over these past months. That being said, I would rather have somebody else run next time, Trump is just too old, and will vote against Trump in the primary, though I will vote for him in the general, if it comes to that.

Michael said...

The "don't" is clearly unmeant. It's just thrown in there so that what is meant can't be quoted. It's along the lines of "nice family you have there; hope nothing happens to them."

Darrell said...

The Dems stopped the counting when Trump was about to be declared the winner in multiple States. That sounds like winning on election night.

mezzrow said...

How did that get in there? A ray of hope.

That's just it. It's the hope that kills you, when you get right down to it. With an absence of trust (perhaps a vacuum is a better analogy) hope is an illusion and a distraction.

Better to distrust and cling to safety. The news may tell us to stampede in a certain direction, but for some that only confirms the location of the cliff.

Sean Gleeson said...

"Who won the 2020 election?" has one indisputably true answer. You don't have to like the answer (I sure don't), but there is no denying it.

The Constitution says that the President is elected by a college of electors. These electors are chosen by their home states "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct." In 2020, these electors chose Biden by a vote of 306 to 232.

Any objections to this outcome (e.g., allegations of vote fraud, corruption, or errors in ballot counting) are immaterial to the question "who won the election" -- unless you are asserting that the votes of the electors themselves were somehow miscounted, which I have not heard anyone allege.

Achilles said...

We spent 2016-2020 listening to Democrats complaining about Russia stealing the election and how dangerous voting machines were.

No Democrat has ever honestly defended the millions of votes that came in after election night for a week after they kicked republican observers out.

No Democrat has honestly addressed their obvious hypocrisy.

They are just shitty people.

Birches said...

Yeah I bet if you asked the commenter about that "don't" they'd admit they were being sarcastic...

Butkus51 said...

No way did joe get 25% more votes than Captain Zero. Growing up in Chicago......they bragged about stealing the election for Kennedy in 1960. So many jokes through the years. Oh, they were just joking? No they werent.

No way, no how.

Lets go Brandon

Chuck said...

Blogger gilbar said...
Serious Questions for democrats, and other Life Long Liberals

Who won the 2000 Presidential Election?
Was there Voter Fraud in Ohio in 2004?
Did Stacy Abrams win the Gubernatorial election in Georgia?
When did you reach your answers to these questions?


I’m neither a Democrat, nor a liberal. (You have your capitalization exactly reversed from what it should be; capitalized “D” Democrats, and lower-case “l” liberals.). But I suspect you aimed your comment at least in part at me.

President Bush won the 2000 election.
I saw no evidence of any significant voter fraud or voter suppression in Ohio in 2004.
Stacey Abrams lost her 2018 campaign for governor in Georgia.

Althouse I don’t see what is so admirable about Laura Ingraham’s weaselly answer to that question. I’m not going to do it, but I expect that if her WaPo interview answer was compared to segments of her prime time FNC program over the past 11 months, it would be embarrassing for her. When did she decide to accept the results of the election? With as little actual knowledge as she professes to have, what was her basis for doubting or disputing the results? And what does it really mean, to say that she thinks that elections need to be won on election night? I read that as demeaning of Biden’s election but that’s just me; Ingraham can, and should, explain herself.

It was an anodyne interview, Althouse. Laura Ingraham, who works in an office with a vaccine/testing mandate, won’t even say if she was vaccinated, based on some incomprehensible (and unexplained) medical privacy right. She spent a chapter of her book “Power to the People” talking about her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, but she won’t talk about a vaccination status that her employer requires her to disclose?

Iman said...

These commenters… it’s sad to think there are people out there with such shriveled souls.

Chuck said...

btw, Althouse; I think you need not worry about Laura Ingraham getting seriously ill from COVID, whether anyone wishes it upon her or not. Because I expect that like the vast majority of people with her education and income -- societal elites -- she has been fully vaccinated.

Of course, she could do a great deal of public good by making that fact clear and urging everyone in her audience -- an audience that includes a very large number of vaccine-resistors -- to get vaccinated as well. But Ingraham is choosing not to do that, to her eternal discredit.

Bilwick said...

I only started watching her show recently, and she seems incorrigibly pro-freedom. The horror--the horror!

Temujin said...

"Don't" was used sarcastically. There is no grace from the left. Which is why so many are so pissed that McConnell and other Repub Senators went along with Schumer's temporary funding of the Gummint. Schumer took the votes from Repubs, then went straight to the mic to tell the world he hoped the Repub's families don't get covid through any holes in their masks.

Ingraham is correct. This needed to be attacked hard, and strategically early on. It would still be important to show the country that some serious skullduggery went on. But it's too hard to get through the media, the politicized Judiciary at different levels, to get action on tearing open the election process in any one state, let alone 5-6 of them.

The corrections have to take place now, within state legislatures, all the while, holding the Federal Gummint under the Biden/Obama team at arm's length. If the Feds get control of the national elections, it's California for everybody.

john mosby said...

Fox News is in a weird position on the election. The night of, there was some kind of order from on high to go along with the other networks, and you could just see so many of the commentators restraining themselves, for instance on The Five. A lawsuit from Smartmatic didnt help. Things relaxed a bit since then, but still no one seems to be allowed to come right out an allege a steal, or even go in depth on the Arizona audit.

Fox people like Ingraham seem to be using masks/vax as a way to fight the power in lieu of the election allegations. It’s probably more libel-proof, as no injured party really wants to put disputed science in front of a jury. They seem to have learned that from the global warming suits.

JSM

Sebastian said...

"People have gotten so ugly."

"People"? You cite only lefties. "Gotten"? You mean, they used to be nice? When?

"I've gotten so I just stand back, observe, and wonder."

To your credit, you do more: you write, and you provide a forum. But just standing back won't cut it against the progressive onslaught: either the reasonable moderate Althouses of America make common cause with us deplorables to stop it, or the destruction and "ugliness" will continue.

rehajm said...

But look, I don’t pretend to know the intricacies of how every state counted mail-in ballots and how they were certified. I don’t.

But look, we should.

narciso said...

to speak the truth, in a time of deceit is revolutionary, I remember someone saying that

Clyde said...

The people who have gotten so ugly were ugly before, they just weren't so blatant about it. Times change.

Chuck said...

One other point about the Ingraham interview, Althouse. It is unsurprising, but still bothersome to me.

In the interview, Laura Ingraham stated that she no longer considers herself a Republican. That's non-news for the FNC prime time cast. Long a ago, Sean Hannity said that he was not a Republican, but some sort of registered conservative. (I think New York may have still had a functioning Conservative party; I don't know and I don't care.)

And then there is Tucker Carlson who as recently as this year was registered as a Democrat in DC. I don't much care about his voter registration, but what is eminently clear is that Carlson mostly loathes the current GOP Congressional leadership, and maintains that the current GOP is failed and useless nearly every chance he gets. Even if he were registered as a Republican, which he is not, he wouldn't be much of a Republican.

The point here is that the entire prime time Fox News channel lineup, nightly instructing Republicans all over the country what they ought to be thinking about, is entirely non-Republican.

Tina Trent said...

Well, that’ll screw the pooch on there ever being another election decided in Atlanta.

Dear corrupt left, go F yourselves said...

Tim in Vermont @ 7:07 - I agree completely. well said.

Trump is too old. I too wish Ann Coulter, and few others who come to mind, could have been allowed inside the Trump camp to help him. Instead Trump ignored the best most truth-worthy people, and carelessly let the insider swamp machine swallow him and push his buttons.

JAORE said...

"I do need to give that second commenter credit for the "don't." How did that get in there? A ray of hope."

Bless your heart.

Chuck said...

"Can Of Cheese for Hunter" at 8:58 am:

WTF?

Link to Rufo's Twitter page:
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1371541044592996352?lang=en

Full quote of that Tweet:
"The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory.' We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans."

Sorry for this off-topic diversion, Althouse. But this jackass called me a liar.

Ann Althouse said...

@Chuck

Could you please stop festooning your comments with "Althouse"? No one else does that! Just say what you have to say and stop calling on me over and over.

It's got this ludicrous "Well, good evening, Mrs. Cleaver" quality to it.

narciso said...

coulter and bannon were too impatient, to cite to example, he was egged on by michael woolf, who is a slimy nazgul, in his defense, much of the 'usual suspects' are after desantis as well, while lockdown and mask magnates are totally 'evidence free'

Dear corrupt left, go F yourselves said...

OK -Chuyck -You managed to cut off the context, and you did not link to that tweet. So I assumed you were lying, like you usually do.


Drago said...

Pro-marxist pro-CRT and #StrongDemocraticalDefender LLR Chuck returns once again to Full Eddie Haskell Mode.

Unexpectedly.

How long until Chuck shifts back to "drive a wedge between Althouse and her readers" Mode? (Yes, Chuck really did admit that explicitly before he was banned)

I'd give it about 4 hours.

Lets see what happens.....

narciso said...

so now we are paying 5 million dollars a day, not to build the wall, now garlands stasi are rainmakers for his family (20 possums voted for him) now al queda's released cleric quosi is vowing another 9/11, because of the surrender of bagram airbase, I could go on,

Drago said...

And might I add that Althouse is looking quite fetching this fine morning and Meade is a dapper looking peach of a guy as well!

--channeling pro-marxist pro-CRT LLR Chuck.

Big Mike said...

@Althouse, apparently Laura Ingraham, like you, has found it convenient to forget or ignore the sorry fact that Trump did have a legal team ready to go, but that his lawyers were doxxed, consequently they received death threats and resigned. In the end Donald Trump was left without competent legal support.

So tell me, retired law professor, do you think the American adversarial legal system can survive if death threats leave one side poorly represented or dven i represented?

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

She’s a lawyer and the good ones in your area of knowledge are outstanding communicators, and present thoughts well. This dovetails well with the Mollie Hemingway interview you posted. In the article on The Federalist site she quotes Trump saying that the Constitution clearly gives state legislatures the authority to change election laws and procedures and his biggest disappointment in the 2020 election is that state and Federal courts were unwilling or unable to enforce those laws. Remember how the Left bragged about how they discouraged lawyers* from working for Trump? What a plan! If select judges and administrators refuse to follow the laws who can make them?

*Very often the same lawyers and firms who gladly worked pro bono to represent terrorists in Gitmo.

mdg said...

The problem with these news people and pundits in general, is that there is so much money to be made, they will do whatever is necessary to stay relevant.

They will shift and move positions if there is a payday (Lincoln Project, anyone?).

I'm not saying she has done that, but she is right on the edge of the professional grifter class in DC and NY that has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years...on both sides of the aisle, mind you.

mdg said...

'Even if he were registered as a Republican, which he is not, he wouldn't be much of a Republican.'

A lot of us 'Republicans' are well and truly fed up with republican politicians in DC.

Reagan was correct...he didn't leave the democrat party, it left him.

Chuck said...

Blogger Ann Althouse said...
@Chuck

Could you please stop festooning your comments with "Althouse"? No one else does that! Just say what you have to say and stop calling on me over and over.

It's got this ludicrous "Well, good evening, Mrs. Cleaver" quality to it.

That was Meade’s comment to me after I posted a single-sentence comment which praised you for a blog post that I found thoughtful and agreeable. I go into it a bit with him; wondering what was wrong with my praising one of your posts. He reverted to the Eddie Haskell insult. Which now seems to have been bequeathed to you.

For the record; I have deliberately addressed comments to you insofar as they were aimed at the substance or subject of your main posts. It would be nicest for me, if your other commenters stuck to that, and didn’t devote your comments pages to personal attacks on me.

Dear corrupt left, go F yourselves said...

I know a legal team in Denver were ready to help Trump - and they were threatened not to.

Chuck said...


Blogger Can Of Cheese for Hunter said...
OK -Chuyck -You managed to cut off the context, and you did not link to that tweet. So I assumed you were lying, like you usually do.


In other words, you’re sorry for your recklessly false allegation that I lied about the quote. I didn’t.

Kthanxbye.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Chuck wrote the brave answers: “President Bush won the 2000 election.
I saw no evidence of any significant voter fraud or voter suppression in Ohio in 2004.
Stacey Abrams lost her 2018 campaign for governor in Georgia.”

My focus is not on the “who won” part but the “how was it handled part” of the post-election process. There is always someone who objects to the outcome and the DNC-Media sometimes indulges their fantasies and amplifies their claims (Stacey Abrams) or they mobilize a huge consortium to recount ballots (Algore) and spend SEVEN MONTHS analyzing results to find “the truth” when it seems to support their agenda. They were wrong about Bush and admitted it, although people like Terry McAullif kept up the fiction that Gore “was robbed” (see Clinton, Hillary 2016-2020 for further example of unacceptance of outcomes). So why is there a complete and total media blackout on analyzing what went right and wrong last year? Social DNC-Media blocks people who question the Party Line. Trump hatred trumps the law, tradition and ethics when we get down to why the last POTUS election is being treated differently than any other EVER. You Chuck with your situational ethics are part of the cabal trying to ruin this great Republic and try socialism one last time. You and your Eddie Haskell act are tiresome and disgusting. You should pay Drago for all his free advice.

Joe Smith said...

'It's got this ludicrous "Well, good evening, Mrs. Cleaver" quality to it.'

jim5301 said...

Chuck Why do you comment here? Even the "hostess" makes her distain for you quite clear, which just encourages more venom your way.

Ann Althouse said...

"He reverted to the Eddie Haskell insult. Which now seems to have been bequeathed to you."

Consider the alternative possibility!

Drago said...

Pro-marxist pro-CRT LLR Chuck: "It would be nicest for me....."

Banned commenter and often violent and racist poster LLR Chuck who was banned in part for declaring his intention to disrupt Althouseblog by "driving a wedge between Althouse and her readers", has thoughts on blog moderation policy.

Discuss.

Drago said...

"He reverted to the Eddie Haskell insult. Which now seems to have been bequeathed to you."

If there is any bequeathing of this non-insult-but-instead-accurate-characterization-of-a-psychotic-posters-missives (looking at you Chuck), which I believe I initially noted sometime back during LLR Chuck's strong and passionate support for Hillary and all democraticals in 2016, I will be doing it.

Gunner said...

If Twitter had been around or if the internet had been as omnipresent in 2000 as it is now, does anyone doubt that Bush's election lawyers would not have been stalked and doxxed like Trumps were?

Drago said...

jim5301: "Chuck Why do you comment here? Even the "hostess" makes her distain for you quite clear, which just encourages more venom your way."

It is a national trend for radical democraticals such as LLR Chuck to present themselves on social media as "lifelong true blue principled conservatives" while attacking only republicans and conservatives that dare to challenge left wing/democratucals and their policies.

LLR Chuck was utterly exposed as just that way back in 2015 by yours truly while others were reluctant to accept that...until the weight of evidence of that became a tidal wave of evidence when Chuck began directly parroting channeling Laurence Tribe, Lawfare blog, Adam Schiff, obama, Eric Swalwell, Ted Lieu, literally every elected democrat and dem policy, the entire MSNBC lineup, etc.

I would think Chuck's strong endorsement of AOC's new green deal, completely open borders and the openly marxist Warnock and Ossoff over Loeffler & Perdue in GA would settle the issue for all time.

Drago said...

Gunner: "If Twitter had been around or if the internet had been as omnipresent in 2000 as it is now, does anyone doubt that Bush's election lawyers would not have been stalked and doxxed like Trumps were?"

It would have been interesting to see a younger pro-marxist pro-CRT LLR Chuck as a younger guy pushing democratical policies.

Charlie said...

Speaking of people getting ugly, Ann, have you returned to the old practice of letting the comment section devolve into a brawl? Maybe it's easier to wear hip-boots when walking through the comments than to drain the swamp. I did admire and appreciate your efforts to clean the place up, for what its worth.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Of course Gunner! The difference is we can admit it. Ever here our self-identified “Republican lawyer” bring up John Eastman and defend him against the raging mob for advising Trump on the law? Hell no. Internal Secret Police are the worst kind of Stasi Establishment Republican.

Ann Althouse said...

I know the "don't" still implies the positive. It's like the threat in the form "Nice family you have there, shame if anything should happen to them." But it does add a little lightness to the otherwise leaden ugliness.

Greg The Class Traitor said...

"But look, I don’t pretend to know the intricacies of how every state counted mail-in ballots and how they were certified. I don’t"

Good. Then shut up about it.

Trump DID win on election night. So the Democrats put together enough fake ballots to steal the election from him.

See Fulton County, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philly, all controlled by Democrats, all stoping counting on election night while they still had ballots to count, all kicking out the poll watchers who would have slowed them down in their election stealing efforts.

Did the trump campaign screw up their response to Democrat vote stealing? yes, they did.

Do I lose the right to have my vote count, because someone else screwed up?

No, I don't.

No honest vote counter blocks poll watchers. the fact that teh Democrat "vote counters" did block poll watchers, and did it in the States that gave Biden the election, tells anyone who's willing to pay attention that the election was stolen.

Laura Ingraham is an idiot

JaimeRoberto said...

Nice business you got here. I hope nothing happens to it.

Same sort of thing.

Anonymous said...

The entirety of FNC is not interested in election fraud. That silence is deafening. If it was a clean election there should be no problem with a forensic audit, given the abnormal circumstances making sure thing were handled corectly seems like a better choice than acting like your job is on the line. Money explains a lot.

Lurker21 said...

I suspect that more people who actually showed up to vote on election day may have voted for Trump -- or at least enough to give him an electoral college victory -- because so many Democrats didn't want to go to their polling place and voted by mail instead, but I agree with her point here: proving which votes were fraudulent is virtually impossible, and overturning an election results weeks or months afterwards is impossible.

Ceciliahere said...

“Never let a crisis go to waste”…or something like that, is the strategy used by the democrats to take advantage of the system and warp it to benefit them. Covid was a blessing to the democrats in so many ways. They got to mail out paper ballots to everyone and anyone they wanted to. This was a way to ensure that illegitimate votes could be cast. In FL. If someone wants to vote by mail you must request a ballot and show proof that you are who you say you are (and still alive and a legal resident of the state) and that you are registered to vote in FL. FL. Does not mail ballots to everyone on the voting roles. This is what happened in 2020. There was not enough time to check the mail in votes to ensure that they were legit. Signatures need to be matched with the original request for a mail in ballot. Elections have been stolen in the past and will be stolen in the future. I remember my late father, a staunch democrat and union member, saying “vote early and vote often.”
Laura Ingraham is fearless in her POV. She’s a survivor in so many ways. Therefore, you won’t catch her at a toll booth like Sonny because she’s too smart. She’ll be outwitting the powerful and go on to be her own person and survive like Michael Corleone. I think that she believes (like the Corleone family did) that the U.S. govt is no better than the mafia. And that belief is even more true today considering all the unconstitutional and illegal shenanigans going on in D.C. The Biden presidency is a sham.

Bruce Hayden said...

“I suspect that more people who actually showed up to vote on election day may have voted for Trump -- or at least enough to give him an electoral college victory -- because so many Democrats didn't want to go to their polling place and voted by mail instead, but I agree with her point here: proving which votes were fraudulent is virtually impossible, and overturning an election results weeks or months afterwards is impossible”

By the time the votes are counted, it is probably too late. Ballots are separated from their validating information before they can be counted. We saw this in the AZ audit: many of the ballots didn’t get signature verification, or were write in ballots from illegitimate (or even dead or fake) voters. Pretty much anyone who spent much time in Maricopa county a year ago, know that Trump won, running away from Biden. It’s just almost impossible to prove now. Yes, there appear to have been upwards of a half million questionable ballots (better than an order of magnitude larger than Biden’s or Kelly’s win in the state). But it is essentially impossible to tie bogus ballot credentials to actual ballots at this point.

Readering said...

LI clerked on USSC, and was satisfied that 6 GOP appointed justices, including 3 Trump appointees, saw through the legal nonsense from the lawyers challenging the election results. Along with all the other court reviews in state and federal courts throughout the country. Along with Trump's own DOJ. Along with America's free press.

Bilwick said...

Only recently started waatching Ms. Ingraham, but seeen enough to know she's pro-freedom. So of course the statist Hive hate her.

Big Mike said...

We need to separate the issues. Was the election stolen? If it wasn’t, then why do Democrats act do damned guilty? Part 2, is there anything that can be done about it? No, not since the Electoral College voted on December 14. The procedures specified in the Constitution were properly followed, a President has been inaugurated.

And the consequence? We are being led — if that’s the right word — by the worst President since James Buchanan, displacing Jimmy Carter from this sorry status. Maybe the worst ever; we shall see. And I see no likelihood that replacing him with the VP via the 25th Amendment will result in any improvement whatsoever. Quite the reverse, probably, based on performance to date as VP.

What can we do? We can try to prevent vote fraud in the future, which seems to be what they are trying — against strong opposition — in Arizona. But the counter-argument is that the most of the proper procedures to prevent or mitigate voter fraud, notably signature matching, already in place, but not followed. Now what?

Iman said...

I picture Chuck as more the Larry Mondello type, with an ever-present apple in his pie hole.

charis said...

The ugly, casual contempt is unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. The other day I heard someone say unvaccinated people deserve to die. I was taken aback.

gpm said...

>>And might I add that Althouse is looking quite fetching this fine morning and Meade is a dapper looking peach of a guy as well!

OK, that one made me laugh. Kudos to Eddie Haskel.

--gpm