McCrory Conceded In North Carolina - Finally

For weeks, Republican ex-governor has been kicking and screaming about his defeat by his Democratic attorney general, Roy Cooper. The rending of garments was extreme, and the gnashing of teeth could be heard throughout the land. In the end, though, he finally rolled over -- sort of:

Despite continued questions that should be answered regarding the voting process, I personally believe that the majority of our citizens have spoken and we now should do everything we can to support the 75th governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper.

It is now accepted Republican orthodoxy that if you lose an election, you mutter darkly -- that is, when you're not screaming loudly -- about (nonexistent) voter fraud. If you're president-elect, you do it even when you win. Can the mutterers or the screamers produce even one of the millions of fraudsters? No, they cannot -- well, I know of one, a woman in Iowa who has been charged with voter fraud, and I've heard rumors of three others, which I can't substantiate right now -- and all of them are said to have voted illegally for Trump.

 Click here for an article in Esquire by the inimitable Charlie Pierce about "the newly insane state of North Carolina," entitled "This Is What All Elections Will Look Like Going Forward."

McCrory won election as governor in 2012, when the formerly sane state of North Carolina (actually, it was formerly a beacon for the New South) went solid Republican in the dark money tsunami that followed the passage of Citizens United (après moi, le déluge). That was when the cut-rate Variety Wholesalers billionaire king, Art Pope, was able to buy his very own state. As Charlie says:

This resulted in a flood of terrible legislation, including voter-suppression laws so obviously heinous that, recently, a federal court told the state to redraw its legislative districts and hold a special election no later than the fall of 2017. The basket of horribles also included the now-infamous "bathroom" law, which caused national LGBTQ organizations to make the state a pariah, and caused other people to look at the state and wonder what happened down there that made North Carolina into something closer to her sister to the South, which is the home office of American sedition.

In the recent election, the good people of N.C. decided they'd had enough; Cooper won as governor, and the state Supreme Court flipped back to being sane again. But of course the Republicans didn't make it easy. According to Charlie:

They muttered about voter fraud, because that's what Republican candidates do these days, even the ones that get elected president. But they also floated rumors that belonged in the party platforms of the Somozas or the Duvaliers.

Referring to the Somozas and the Duvaliers, Charlie's referencing the erstwhile royal families of the USA's sister banana republics Nicaragua and Haiti, and the public discussion in N.C. of the possibility of all kinds of machinations the Republicans could use to cheat the Democrats out of their win, including extending McCrory's tenure in office long enough for him to appoint enough new Supreme Court justices to overturn the result. Charlie says:

That these measures even occurred to someone, let alone that someone felt comfortable enough to burble them into the public prints, should give you some indication of how far gone the N.C. Republicans are. Also, it should give you some inkling of the Category-5 shitstorm that would've broken over the land had Donald Trump lost the electoral college but won the popular vote by, say, north of 2.5 million votes—just to pluck a number at random.

Predicting that this is how elections will be from now on, Charlie concludes:

It was a close-run thing, however. And it is a good measure for what the tactics facing Democrats are likely to be in every close election from the county zoning board to the White House, all of which are based on promulgating the notion that no Democratic victory is legitimate and that they are all tainted. Even McCrory's concession is larded with that.

These people play to win, always, everywhere.

They are changing the political landscape so that any Democratic election win is to be considered illegitimate.