Election Day 2022: Traitors on the Ballot

The party that brought you "America First" rarely puts America first. Will voters see through the lies?

Today is Election Day, Judgment Day, the Day of Reckoning. Today there will be a total eclipse of the moon, which won’t happen again until 2025. Today, voters in a number of House, Senate, and gubernatorial elections of grave consequence will collectively decide if our democracy lives or dies. Today, one in three Americans eligible to vote won’t bother.

In the days leading up to the election, the mainstream media has forecast a red wave—an appropriate analogy, as a red tide is toxic and causes harm to all living things in its wake. In the days leading up to the election, experts I trust have called bullshit on the “red wave” narrative, patiently explaining that 2022 is not your father’s midterms, that youth and early voting is up dramatically, that turnout will be enormous, which always favors the Democrats, that anger over Dobbs has not gone away. In the days leading up to the election, a chaos agent has used money from hostile foreign powers to appropriate Twitter, wreaking havoc on our most important social media network, and, in case there was any doubt whose side he was on, instructing the handful of idiots over whom he still has influence to vote Republican. Elon Musk pinned this tweet, meaning it’s the first thing you see on his profile page:

Elon Musk @elonmusk

To independent-minded voters: Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic.

Because who better to lecture us on shared power than “Apartheid Clyde,” a South African son of an emerald mine owner?

This couldn’t be simpler: If the GOP takes control of the House and the Senate, they will gut Social Security and Medicare by holding the country hostage during debt ceiling negotiations; they will end U.S. aid to Ukraine; they will roll out a nationwide abortion ban; they will make it even harder for people to vote—especially people of color—and gerrymander their way to permanent majority; they will stymie Biden’s appointments; they may install Donald Trump as Speaker of the House and Mike Flynn as president pro tempore of the Senate, and then impeach Biden and Harris both. That last bit sounds outlandish, sure, but so did John Eastman’s proposal to sabotage the Senate’s electoral vote count on January 6. Even so, one in three eligible voters, and maybe as many as two in five, will sit this one out.

As the sun rises on Election Day—and as the moon vanishes from the pre-dawn sky—I wanted to highlight four of the more egregious traitors running for the Senate under the banner of the fascist GOP. FiveThirtyEight has them either winning comfortably or running neck and neck:

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Mehmet Oz

Mehmet Oz is a Turkish citizen, which is fine, except that he’s also a bosom chum of that country’s gross dictator, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. It was during Erdoğan’s state visit to Washington, remember, that his thugs were allowed to beat up peaceful protestors, without repercussions, because he knew how to curry favor with Trump.

One of Erdoğan’s most vocal critics is an Islamic cleric named Fethullah Gülen, a 81-year-old dissident living in exile in the United States. Erdoğan can’t stand Gülen. There was an alleged scheme to discredit him in the press, covertly funded by the Turkish government, that came to light during the Mueller investigation. Mike Flynn was involved, and allegedly proposed a plan to kidnap the cleric.

Guess where Gülen lives? Pennsylvania—the same state in which Erdoğan’s buddy, the longtime New Jersey resident Oz, is now running for U.S. Senate.

And suddenly, the quack doctor’s quixotic campaign all makes sense!

Oz is also a serial killer of puppies, a pusher of quack remedies that don’t work, a Nazi car enthusiast, and a heartless bastard who during the pandemic proposed, with a straight face, that the government open up schools, because sacrificing three percent of our children to covid-19 death was a “trade-off” worth considering. I’m not certain he’d ever set foot in the Keystone State before launching his campaign, and he seems to lack any real constituency. Seriously, is there even one ardent Oz booster in all of PA? Even so, Mehmet Oz is polling even with John Fetterman, which explains why the Democrats sent the big guns to Pennsylvania over the weekend.

Yes, Fetterman suffered a stroke on the campaign trail. But he will recover. Oz will always be an avaricious, dog-murdering traitor.

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Ron Johnson

Speaking of candidates who exist to do the bidding of hostile foreign powers, Ron Johnson has a comfortable lead in Wisconsin. On the Fourth of July four years ago, the Senator was part of a Republican delegation to Moscow. As soon as he came back from Russia, he began spewing Kremlin talking points, growing louder as the midterms approached. This was so easy to spot that I wrote a piece about it in December, 2019:

Sleeper Cell: The Fourth of July Traitors

Here’s a key paragraph:

It may be a coincidence, of course, that two of the eight lawmakers who went to Moscow for some vague reason on the fucking Fourth of July are now mouthpieces for the Kremlin. But if you ask me, this delegation of the damned has all the look of a GOP/GRU sleeper cell. Consider: Eight Republican lawmakers—and, notably, not a single Democrat—journey halfway around the world to spend Independence Day with Putin’s coziest cronies. We don’t really know what happens once they get there, but we do know that the Russians are really fucking good at both psy-ops and kompromat. In Moscow, at least two of them are turned. The “Prostrate Eight” come home, everything is cool for nine months, and then, all of the sudden—boom. The switch is activated. The sleeper cell awakens. Its mission? To fulfill the prime directive: defend Trump at all costs. Ron Johnson subsequently goes completely off the rails. John Neely Kennedy does a 180. Both Senators are both regurgitating vile RU propaganda. They return from Russia with love—or, if not love, blind allegiance to Putin. It’s The Americans, but with actual Americans.

Since I wrote that, Johnson has gotten exponentially worse. His is as reliable a voice for Moscow as can be found on Capitol Hill. (What in the name of all that is holy was he up to on his little Russian adventure?) Oh, and he plans to cut Social Security and Medicare because, like most 2022 Republicans, he wants his constituents to die. Also, he chugs a beer like he’s in seventh grade and wants everyone to think he actually likes the taste.

Johnson is up almost four points in the state that pulls for Aaron Rodgers. His opponent, Mandela Barnes, the lieutenant governor, is half Johnson’s age, is a superb candidate who would do the Badger State proud, and has never spent Independence Day in Russia. Is Wisconsin—the state that gave us Kenosha and ugly cops that welcomed Kyle Rittenhouse—so racist that they’d rather re-elect an egregious puppet of Putin than vote for a well-qualified Black man?

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Marco Rubio

Another traitor running for re-election: Marco Rubio. This spineless motherfucker was on the Senate Intelligence Committee when Volume 5 was compiled, and took over as chair after Richard Burr was kicked out. He immediately tried to pull a Bill Barr and cockblock the findings. Look at this sniveling little puke putting lipstick on the pig of treason:

Marco Rubio @marcorubio

Final volume of Senate Intelligence bipartisan & thorough investigation into Russian 2016 efforts is now public intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/… We found no evidence of “collusion” But we did find troubling actions by the FBI, particularly their willingness to rely on “Steele Dossier”

I recall when Rubio shared a stage with the survivors of the Parkland massacre, looked those traumatized kids in the eye, took in their concerns…and then did fuck-all to stem the gun violence in this country. I also recall his challenger, Val Demings, pillorying him about this in their debate. And yet Liddle Marco is going to easily win re-election. Floridians seem to enjoy having the worst politicians in the country almost as much as they like taking in more money from the federal government than they pay out while simultaneously bashing socialism.

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J.D. Vance

If you were to go to the lab and build a Democratic candidate who would appeal to middle-of-the-road Republicans and Independents, you would emerge with Tim Ryan. He’s a white guy (the GOP loves white guys) and clearly a centrist, not some soy-boy treehugger MAGA can claim is “radical left.” He’s a man of his word, he has passion, he’s already represented his state well in Washington, and he’s not afraid of guns:

Tim Ryan @TimRyan

Not too bad for a Democrat 🎯

If that same lab were to construct the most mendacious, insincere MAGA candidate, scientists would lance a hemorrhoid from Trump’s ass, pump it full of OAN, give it a fastidiously groomed beard and shitty talking points, and name it J.D. Vance. It’s hard to find a more nakedly ambitious, full of shit individual running for office anywhere. All politicians embellish and prevaricate to serve their purposes, but this chode is next level. There’s not a shred of authenticity there, of genuine human emotion. He makes Elise Stefanik look like Mary Bailey.

Vance is a Trump creature through and through. He’s going to do all the worst Republican things, and he won’t even feel guilty about it. Jeffrey Dahmer struggled with his conscience more than this asshole. He’s up five points in the Buckeye State. What the fuck, Ohio? Get your shit together.

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It’s going to be a tempestuous coupla days. Keep calm. Turn off the TV. Put away your phone. Take a walk. Have a cocktail. Make lasagna. Binge "The Durrells of Corfu.” Come what may, I’ll see you on the other side.

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Photo credit: Gage Skidmore. J. D. Vance speaking with attendees at the 2021 Southwest Regional Conference hosted by Turning Point USA at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Arizona, April 2021.