Shrieking Todd Blanche Is Not Meddling In Alaska Election! You Are Meddling In Alaska Election!

Schmuck.

Resting Blanche Face

Our fondest wish for Todd Blanche after he no longer occupies the attorney general’s office — whether because Donald Trump fires him, or a new president takes power, or he’s frog-marched out in handcuffs, defenestrated out his office window, or dragged out by his stupid fucking hair — is that he spend the rest of his miserable life being shunned by society until he is driven so mad by loneliness that he retreats to a cave high in the Rockies to live out his days wracked with regret and self-loathing so enormous that he can do little but curl up in a ball and rock back and forth, muttering gibberish and praying for a bear to wander by and eat him. (Also obviously disbarred.)

In short, Christ, what an asshole.

Blanche made the rounds of a couple of Sunday morning chit-chat shows this weekend, where he was interviewed by Margaret Brennan on CBS and Dana Bash on CNN about the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against the state of Alaska over its ballot for the midterm election. He was by turns petulant, whiny, smug, condescending, smarmy, defensive, abrasive, and childish. Personally, we were in favor of both Bash and Brennan cutting his mic and telling him to come back when he could behave like a goddamn adult and stop performing for the bloated Nazi gasbag watching him from the White House and grading him like he’s auditioning for the Yale School of Drama.

Yeah, we were that irritated after watching Blanche’s performance. If we want to watch a pile of hair bloviate at the top of its lungs on Sunday morning, there are plenty of evangelical churches in our area. Or we can watch the NFL pregame shows. So many options!

For instance, here Blanche is losing his shit at Dana Bash for reasonably wondering if all this election denial might lead to another January 6 if Trump doesn’t get the results he wants next week:

“Oh stop it! You gotta stop it with that! You’re not even being a real person! Come on, man. … You’re saying, Mr. Attorney General, because the president of the United States is concerned that there is an absolute fraud happening in Alaska, is he going to do something crazy? That is not a real question.”

Yeah, can you imagine Donald Trump throwing a fit over an election he falsely claims is fraudulent and doing something crazy over it? This president? Who just wants to make sure all of America’s elections are free and fair, so long as he wins all of them? Todd Blanche is offended that you would even entertain such a thought in your pretty little head, Dana Bash!

Apparently Todd Blanche has been orbiting Alpha Centauri for the last decade without a helmet.

Then there was the moment Blanche told Bash she was embarrassing her employer by asking him obvious questions like What in the fuck are you doing? (We’re paraphrasing.)

The Alaska lawsuit turns on the fact that there are two people named Dan Sullivan on the ballot for the Senate seat. One is Dan S. Sullivan, the incumbent Republican senator. The other is a retired schoolteacher named Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr. The DOJ contends that the latter is only there as a ratfucking exercise by Democrats, who recruited him to run. (He denies this.) The DOJ argues that this confusion will cause voters to mark their ballots for the wrong Dan Sullivan, thus denying the incumbent his rightful victory.

It is important to remember that this whole situation has already been adjudicated by the Alaska state government. State officials have agreed to put the word “incumbent” next to Senator Sullivan’s name, along with noting that he is a registered Republican. Like so:

This seems like an obvious and solid solution to us, and we have so low an opinion of the intelligence of Republican voters that it is probably floating around in the Quantum Realm somewhere.

You know who has an even lesser opinion of Republican voters? The president. Donald Trump claimed at a rally the other day that voters don’t know what the word “incumbent” means, which is as close a thing to proof as we’ll get that Donald Trump himself only just learned what the word “incumbent” means and therefore assumes no one else knows this previously obscure bit of lexicology. (A lot of people don’t know it has a “B” in it.)

Anyway, the Alaska State Supreme Court blessed this solution four months ago. The states run their own elections. That should be the end of it.

Now the DOJ is demanding that Alaska come up with a solution that will segregate any ballots cast for Daniel J. Sullivan so that it can investigate later whether voters who marked his name meant to mark the incumbent’s name. Since that will be any ballot marked with the former’s name, the net effect is that the Trump administration is announcing ahead of time that the only election result it will accept is if the incumbent senator wins. Otherwise, it will scream and carry on and hold its breath until it turns blue.

In other words, as law professor Steve Vladeck put it, DOJ is “assuming there will be mischief rather than responding to actual evidence thereof.”And this is even before we get to the practicalities of how Alaska would go around questioning every voter who marked Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. on the ballot, since it’s not as if voters sign their names to their ballots before turning them in. Bash actually asked Blanche this at one point and he sputtered and blustered and never answered the question. Because he can’t.

Vladeck and other legal and elections experts are describing the lawsuit Blanche spent Sunday polluting the airwaves to defend as “frivolous”, “abusive”, “sanctionable”, shot through with “blazing incompetence”, and more like “press releases masquerading as lawsuits.”

That last one is probably the key descriptor. There is really no legal action to take, because there has not been any sort of violation committed. This is all just bad faith noise meant to sow confusion ahead of elections where polls indicate Republicans are going to lose a lot of races they might have been expected to win if the current presidential administration didn’t suck harder than a Dyson factory.

Blanche more or less admitted all this when Dana Bash asked him what crime the lawsuit was trying to address and he had to admit that it isn’t:

We get it, the administration’s entire electoral strategy is being overseen by the pre-cogs in Minority Report.

What’s fun about watching both of Sunday’s interviews is that you can practically see Dana Bash and Margaret Brennan trying very, very, VERY hard to not scream in frustration as this walking dingleberry mansplains the election to them. They know why he’s lying, the audience knows why he’s lying, your freaking cat knows why he’s lying. And yet.

Blanche also spent a lot of time claiming the president did not order him to file this lawsuit, which HA HA HA HA HA, sure thing, bubba.

Watch both interviews below if you have a hardy stomach and no gag reflex:

And yes, this is your OPEN THREAD.

[Steve Vladeck / Rick Hasen]

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