I missed nearly all of Thursday's Rudy-Sidney disaster, but the Bulwark's Tim Miller wrote up a scholarly summary of the literal meltdown immediately after:
"The press conference began with Giuliani presenting as a 'tumefied alcoholic from an Edvard Munch painting'" — journalist Peter Hamby's words — "replete with a black hair dye brook babbling down his cheek and wiping his brow with the vigor of a drag queen removing make-up between sets. His visage went from subtext to center-stage when the audio of the Trump livestream was interrupted by a pair of Beavis and Butthead-sounding tech managers saying: 'Can they hear us on the stream…. I guess not…. See fuckin’ Rudy’s hair dye dripping down his face?'"
Can the Traveling Trump Clown Show ever get any better? But things did turn serious when legal-team member Sidney Powell took to the microphone with all her technical expertise, intellectual heft and Clouseaulike sleuthing:
"[Software] can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President [oops] Biden. Which we might never have uncovered had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm that had been plugged into the system and that’s what caused them to have to shut down. That’s when they came in the backdoor with all the mail-in ballots, many of which they had actually fabricated. Some were on pristine paper with identically matching perfect circle dots,,,, Others were shoved in in batches."
All of this boobishness received a rave review from Trump himself, of course, and millions of his minions have since toddled along in agreement. What shocked, however, was Tucker Carlson's on-air reaction that night:
"What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history. Millions of votes stolen in a day. Democracy destroyed. The end of our centuries-old system of government…. [When I invited her on this program to detail her accusations, she became] "angry and told us to stop contacting her."
Does the once-much ballyhooed Tucker for President see an alternative path to the White House? — a path only 99 percent as crazy as Trump's?
It won't work. Trump's lickspittles are too clever for that. "How quickly we turn on our own," said Rush Limbaugh's producer, Bo Snerdley, in a tweet. "Where is the 'evidence' the election was fair?" You know, like where is the evidence that Bertrand Russell's sun-orbiting teapot doesn't exist?