Foggy wrote: ↑Mon Aug 14, 2023 7:24 pm
The most amazing thing about the Georgia election is not that Trump tried to overturn the results. That was right in character for him.
The most amazing thing is not that there's so much evidence that Trump and his team were willing - even eager - to break the law. He was working with a team of criminals, because he got rid of anyone who wasn't willing to commit crimes for him.
To me the most amazing thing about this whole thing is that Georgia actually voted for Joe Biden, just like I did. He won by eleven thousand votes, and he really, actually, provably, certifiably won, by gum.
He won Georgia, a bastion of Republicanism in the Deep South.
And they counted the votes three times, and Joe Biden won every single time.
Those are all certainly amazing, but far from the most amazingest thing about this whole thing, which is this:
Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Republican Trump-voting Georgians involved in the election process, including vote counters, room managers, district supervisors, state attorneys, up to and including the secretary of state, the attorney general, and the governor, uniformly, bravely, honestly, and honorably followed the law in acknowledging that their candidate had lost the election.
MAGA world has devoted billions of dollars and untold amounts of personal pressure in an effort to ensure that such honest obedience to the law never happens again.
There's an Emily Dickinson poem that had me sobbing for 15 minutes the first time I read it, nearly 50 years ago, and it still elicits a sentimental reaction.
It's about the epitaph by Simonides for the Spartans at Thermopylae, not what is now known about the historical Sparta and the historical battle, but about an idealized Thermopylae that has inspired writers and poets for two and a half millenia.* The election officials in Georgia deserve it more than Sparta ever did.
"Go tell it" - What a Message -
To whom - is specified -
Not murmur - not endearment -
But simply - we - obeyed -
Obeyed - a Lure - a Longing?
Oh Nature - none of this -
To Law - said sweet Thermopylae
I give my dying Kiss -
_________
* @BretDevereaux has written _very_extensively about the real Sparta, on twitter, on his blog (see, e.g.,
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collectio ... ospective/], and recently in a "Foreign Policy" article,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/22/sp ... d-history/
See also Dr Roel Konijnendijk:
https://twitter.com/Roelkonijn/status/1 ... 0886956032 and
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ ... t/dl8ns8q/
As Devereaux recently summed up:
Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.
Also this, about Thermopylae:
https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/statu ... 0524873728
@BretDevereaux
With just 300 Spartan warriors!
And 900 or so perioikoi.
And 500 Mantineans.
And 500 Tegeans.
Over 1000 Arcadians.
400 Corinthians, 200 from Philus, 80 from Mycenae.
And 700 Thespians.
And 400 Thebans.
All the *Locrians they had.
And a thousand Phocians.
And an ??? helots.
Edit: corrected misspelling of a name.
Philly Boondoggle
Was it GG who called it, for HRC to be on Maddow when it came down? WINNER!
s titular Mama June in Fogbow's Favourite Show™ Mama June: From Not To Hot! Fogbow's Theme Song™ Edith Massey's "I Got The Evidence!" 
