Stacey Abrams lawsuit over legitimacy of elections fails to anger liberal journos

Journalists in general, and CNN in particular, have been relentlessly blasting the GOP and President Trump for a week over their accusations of misconduct or malfeasance in the Florida election count. Although courts have found that the law was in fact violated in Florida, and although a deadline was "accidentally" not met, costing Republican Rick Scott votes in the recount, the press has doggedly pursued the idea that Trump and the GOP are destroying America by raising the issue.

Not similarly, the same media is, and has been, pretty sanguine about the accusations in Georgia, where rather than missing or miscounted votes that are now known about and where courts have ruled the law was violated, there is only the repeated assertion by prominent Democrats and members of the press (including CNN contributors) that somehow GOP candidate and current Secretary of State Brian Kemp has stolen the election.

It reached a new pitch in Georgia on Friday, when the loser of the race Stacey Abrams blamed a failure of democracy, gave up without admitted defeat or conceding, and announced a lawsuit alleging that Kemp and co. tampered with the election.

Somehow, this doesn't translate into "dismantling" a very "pillar of democracy" for CNN's oh-so-recently troubled reporters and contributors.

On MSNBC on Saturday, Commentary's Noah Rothman discussed the burden of proof that rests on Abrams for her claim, stressing the importance of the charge.

“Frankly the evidence is not there” @NoahCRothman on Stacey Abrams claims that the Ga. election was illegitimate. #uppers pic.twitter.com/GdyGgxb687

— Up on MSNBC (@UPonMSNBC) November 17, 2018

Look at the reaction of those on the panel. The first thing the MSNBC host does is to call Trump's allegations of vote fraud as "specious." The absolute first thing he did was go back to Trump. Nothing for Abrams.

That is true of almost the entire media. CNN's Jake Tapper, on Thursday, did ask the question about Georgia's accusations against Republicans. How is that different, he asked his guests. A great question that, unfortunatley, Jen Psaki blew off with the unintentionally honest response that can best be summed up as "Because it's Democrats in that case."

Some commentators are painting Abrams objection as focusing on before-the-fact suppression, rather than after-the-fact manipulation or deception, and although the full details of the lawsuit are not yet known, her organization has dispatched people across the state to investigate claims of unfairly rejected ballots. As in, manipulation of the vote after the election. So claiming she is only talking about "suppression" is not factual.

Furthermore, that distinction is meant to imply a substantively different critique of the system, thereby immunizing the Abrams campaign from the same criticism of "undermining our institutions" that CNN and other journalists have invested the last 11 days in nailing to Trump and Rick Scott; itself a specious argument. In both the before and the after, the campaign, as well as prominent Democrats like Senator Chuck Schumer, Sen. Sherrod Brown, former DNC Chair Howard Dean and many more have alleged that this was willful voter suppression on the part of Kemp. Literally that the office of the Secretary of State was used to deliberately disenfranchise voters before the election and after.

Still, though, the mainstream media finds nothing "dismantling" of democracy in that. They do not demand the evidence.

For a week CNN has run chyrons with headlines like "Trump Falsely Claims Vote Fraud" and have spent hours insisting that republican guests offer evidence. Although ample evidence has been offered of the fact that votes have been miscounted, gone uncounted, that illegal votes have been accepted and legal votes missed deadlines, CNN and others have insisted that the claims of election fraud are "False." Not unproved, or that the errors can reasonably be attributed to malfeasance, but rather they have asserted categorically that the charges are "false."

Yet in Georgia, they not only don't say it's false, they offer no critique whatsover. There are no hostile interviews with Democrats from other states or the DNC committee chair or Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer where the anchors demand evidence. No chyrons labeling the lawsuit specious or her accusations unproved, much less false.

The Georgia accusations have utterly failed to excite the indignation on behalf of the republic from our interpid press.

Curious.