I’m feeling kind of left out of the picture here. And I’m suffused with shame. After all, I present myself as getting all the facts. Indeed, I’ve written a book about it, How I Learned The Facts of Life.
So I found it unsettling that, until I read Gail Collins’ column today (“Pick The Worst Of Trump’s Worst: A plethora of awful alternatives”), I didn’t know about someone Rudy Giuliani produced who claimed he was a witness to voter fraud.
Like many of the witnesses Trump’s team was mobilizing, Daryl Brooks seemed to have a vague mission in election oversight — he said he “wanted to go to the polls to watch.” There were definitely a lot of Republicans who, like Brooks, felt they hadn’t been allowed to get close enough to the action and suspected something was being hidden.
But experts searching high and low failed to find any evidence of the kind of serious, widespread irregularities that might call the results into question. Instead, the public got … [Rudy] Giuliani. Who held his press conference at a place called Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia. This seemed to give Trump the pleasant impression the event was in the swank Four Seasons Hotel, instead of a humble gardening service store near a crematory and a sex shop.
Rudy emphasized that Brooks was just the first of what were going to be “many, many witnesses” of election fraud. Inquiring minds wanted to know why, in that case, he chose to lead off with a guy who served jail time for exposing himself to two girls, owed a great deal of money in overdue child support payments and, if known at all in his home state, New Jersey, it is as one of those guys who keeps running for offices he’s never going to win in a million years.
If you get yourself re-settled after the shock of reading the short but punchy C.V. of Daryl Brooks, you can read Collins and then look at what readers’ choices for the Worst Of The Worst are. Lots of write-ins.