Texans voted for incompetence and Gov. Greg Abbott delivered — with a side order of death by freezing. Floridians voted for incompetence and Gov. Ron DeSantis delivered — with an even bigger side order of death- by-Covid. MAGAworld voted for incompetence and President Donald J. Trump delivered — with a bigger-still side orders of death- by-Covid, international side-eye, violent insurrection, an attempted coup, and the lowest democracy ranking since the country’s infancy (1800).
Abbott has a chance once more to deliver what his supporters voted for. As winter approached in November and with Texas Public Utility winterization rules not taking effect until Dec. 1, Abbott told Fox 7-Austin, “I can guarantee the lights will stay on.”
This morning, over 50,000 are without power. Abbott on Tuesday modified his promise:
“No one can guarantee that there won’t be a load shed event,” the governor said in response to a question about how he would measure the success of the electric grid. “But what we will work and strive to achieve and what we are prepared to achieve is that the power will stay on across the entire state.”
Abbott did not say, “I feel that we must maximize our efforts,” but that is what he meant. Load shed event” is a technical euphemism for rolling blackouts.
Tens of thousands of customers in Texas were without power Thursday morning as a major winter storm continued moving east across the United States, bringing snow, sleet and freezing rain to Midwestern and Southern states.
Nearly 53,000 power outages were reported in Texas early Thursday, along with about 15,000 in Arkansas, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks outages nationwide.
Alexandra Petri reminds readers that what’s past is past and cannot harm us. No need to look behind the curtain. The system worked:
We also learned that Trump wanted to seize voting machines. He actively pushed Attorney General William P. Barr to do that. Then he had Rudy Giuliani telephone the Department of Homeland Security to see about some seizing. Which Giuliani did! But later, when the plan evolved into issuing an executive order to authorize the military to do the seizing, Giuliani didn’t want to do it, and it did not happen. In other words: The system worked just as designed.
Yes, when we reached the coup stage of “ask Giuliani for his opinion about whether the military can seize voting machines,” Giuliani did exactly what he was supposed to do and spontaneously decided hedid not want to overturn the election. That is the robust protection the Founders built into the system! There was never any doubt Giuliani would for no clear reason determine he did want to support the rule of law and oppose having the military seize voting machines!
All the other people Trump leaned on ignored and disregarded him or pretended not to understand what he was tacitly asking. And it is fine, because those people are still in control of the elections — ah, what? They’re being hounded out? They fear for their safety, and the people who are trying to replace them have a much different attitude to election legitimacy?
Well, again, it’s probably fine. This was all in the past, where we keep everything about America that is bad.
You want incompetence, you get incompetence.
Petri reassures us all is well:
As long as we don’t read about the attempted coup or ask anyone questions about it when we invite them on the television, it’s nothing to worry our little heads over. It’s one of those bygones that we have to let be a bygone. Our system is foolproof, for the specified degree of fool that has tried, once, to overturn it so far!
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