Sanctimony, Inc. – Time was, leftists complained of rigged elections, the media paid attention to dirty tricks, and conservatives cared more about results than rhetoric

VDH:

Donald Trump, in characteristically muddled and haphazard fashion, said he thought the election might end up “rigged” (if he lost). Therefore, he would not endorse the November8 result if he found that fear confirmed — unless, of course, in Jacksonian fashion, he managed to win.

All hell broke loose, from both the Left and principled conservatives, that Trump’s allegations had somehow undermined the American electoral process itself.

Not likely.

Questioning the integrity of election votes was a national pastime in 1824 (“corrupt bargain”), 1876 (“compromise of 1877”), and again in 1960. Bitching over losing, of course, is not the same thing as armed insurrection in the fashion of 1860, when furor erupted over Lincoln’s election.

Any candidate, whether feeding conspiracies or out of genuine concern for electoral misconduct, can say whatever he or she wishes, without the deleterious national consequences that pundits decry. Bad sportsmanship and manners are not synonymous with constitutional subversion.

“Selected, not elected” was a Democratic talking point after the 2000 Bush victory. In a speech two years after that election, a now sanctimonious Hillary Clinton echoed those “selected” charges against the Bush presidency. But so what?

In 2004, the trope that Ohio was rigged and thus cost John Kerry the election was standard liberal boilerplate. An embittered Kerry was the sore loser that Trump will be if he comes up short. Kerry’s friend columnist Mike Barnicle was quoted years later of Kerry’s inability to accept legitimate defeat: “For a long period, after 2004, every time he even half fell asleep, all he saw was voting machines in the state of Ohio.”

Let us hope that Trump does not become as unhinged as Al Gore became — for years, the former vice president could not speak publicly without screaming in vein-bulging style, and seemed to be obsessed by George W. Bush in Carthago delenda est fashion.

Indeed, in the last week after the Trump blunderbuss declaration, an entire mini industry has emerged, chronicling prior examples of Democrats questioning election results or alleging past evidence of voting fraud.

It would, of course, have been wiser for Trump to worry out loud about localized corruption, rather than to suggest in conspiratorial fashion that a nationwide cabal was devoted to rigging the election. But then again, we have rarely seen anything like the recent disclosures of pathetic efforts at massaging the vote. Trump’s sin was one of magnitude, not of mischaracterizing the intent or culpability of his opponents: He is right that many wish to corrupt the voting, but hardly certain that in the key battlegrounds they are powerful enough to sway an entire state’s vote count.

Recently disgraced and resigned Democratic operatives, who were in the pay of the Democratic National Committee (and one of whom was a very frequent visitor to the Obama White House), boast on tape not only of disrupting Trump rallies by bought and staged violence but also of busing non-resident voters into Ohio to affect the vote count; they further brag that their dirty tricks are longstanding practice. When voting fraud is an act of pride rather than criminality, something has gone terribly wrong.

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