My Monday column begins like so:
When reality began to disprove Republican ideas, instead of coming up with better ideas, conservatives created their own television news network to broadcast their "side" of reality, as if reality has "sides." When the neoconservative faction of the Republican Party wanted to invade, occupy and rebuild Iraq as a free market, oil-rich utopia, they fabricated evidence as a pretext for war. When they needed to ascertain information about terrorism, they engaged in the immoral, illegal act of torture. When voter demographics shifted and minorities and immigrants began to overwhelmingly favor the Democratic Party, Republicans disenfranchised those voters with nefarious plots like voter ID laws, voter purges, fewer voting machines at targeted precinct polling places and shortened early voting calendars. When the first African American presidential candidate was poised to win his party's nomination, the Republicans set about a campaign of disinformation and conspiracy theories in order to discredit him as an anti-white, Muslim terrorist, communist and, contradictorily, a Nazi fascist.
See a pattern? Whenever it's faced with a serious challenge to its seemingly dwindling power, the modern Republican Party cheats.
Such is the case with the Republican Party's newest plan to steal presidential elections.
Instead of improving their ground game or appealing to broader demographics to reinforce their dying and marginalized brand, Republican legislatures in at least four swing states are, with the support of Reince Priebus and the RNC, attempting to rewrite the rules for how each state's electoral votes are distributed to the presidential candidates. [continue reading here]