Via Mediaite, have a look below at the very special present that was left under the GOP’s tree on Christmas morning.

I bet Dominion’s defamation lawyers are pretty excited about it too.

Seems to me that we’ll get a (relatively) good result from Georgia regardless of whether Republican voters take Wood’s advice or ignore it. Click the image in the tweet for the full reveal:

https://twitter.com/LLinWood/status/1342650137382969344

Wood would have you believe that some sort of “algorithm” inside Dominion’s machines is subtracting Republican votes and adding Democratic ones. How can he and Sidney Powell prove that? Simple: All Republicans need to do is mass-boycott the Senate election on January 5, tricking the algorithm into producing impossible “negative” vote totals for Republicans in heavily Democratic areas. E.g., if the fabled algorithm is designed to automatically switch 100 votes from red to blue and only 50 Republicans turn out to vote, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue will each get -50 negative votes in that precinct — the smoking gun that vote-stealing is going on.

That’s the logic driving the man in whom MAGA has placed all of its hopes on overturning the election.

The woman in whom they’ve placed their hopes isn’t having a great week either. First Sidney Powell was barred from meeting with Trump, now the credibility of another of her key witnesses is in serious doubt:

Powell told courts that the witness is an expert who could show that overseas corporations helped shift votes to President-elect Joe Biden. The witness’s identity must be concealed from the public, Powell has said, to protect her “reputation, professional career and personal safety.”

The Washington Post identified the witness by determining that portions of her affidavit match, sometimes verbatim, a blog post that the pro-Trump podcaster Terpsichore Maras-Lindeman published in November 2019. In an interview, Maras-Lindeman confirmed that she wrote the affidavit and said she viewed it as her contribution to a fight against the theft of the election…

In a recent civil fraud case, attorneys for the state of North Dakota said that Maras-Lindeman falsely claimed to be a medical doctor and to have both a PhD and an MBA. They said she used multiple aliases and social security numbers and created exaggerated online résumés as part of what they called “a persistent effort . . . to deceive others.”

Wood has been encouraging Georgia Republicans not to vote in the Senate runoffs for more than a month but until now I thought he meant that to be a simple act of protest. I.e. “until we have reason to trust that the votes in this state are being counted accurately we should decline to participate in elections.” That’s logical enough — certainly more so than Trump’s “the election was rigged but go vote in the runoffs anyway” pitch — but that’s no longer the rationale here. Essentially Wood is treating the runoffs as an experiment on the state’s voting machines. All he needs in order to produce the evidence that’s going to propel Trump to a second term is for Republican voters to stay home.

That must be verrrrrry tempting for “stop the steal” true believers in Georgia. If the Loeffler and Perdue races end up being as tight as the presidential election was, Wood’s message really does have potential to tip those elections to the Democrats. Which, as I say, means we should get a result on election night that’s encouraging in one way or another regardless of the outcome. If Loeffler and Perdue win, it’ll mean Wood and Powell have less influence among MAGA fans than people think and that their theory of vote-switching by Dominion machines is bogus. If Loeffler and Perdue lose, it’ll mean that the segment of the base that’s embraced all-out crankishness is now sizable enough to decide elections, in which case the GOP can’t be trusted to govern responsibly and the Senate’s probably better off in Schumer’s hands for the time being.

On the other hand, conspiracy theories are necessarily unfalsifiable and therefore any new development can simply be folded into the theory. If Loeffler and Perdue win, Wood will presumably say that GOP turnout was so enormous that even the “algorithm” couldn’t subtract enough votes to blow it for them. If they win by two points each then they must have really won by six or seven. Whereas if Loeffler and Perdue lose, that’ll be treated as further “proof” following the presidential election of how corrupt Georgia’s election system is. Certainly that’ll be Trump’s spin on the result, although it’ll be trickier for Wood since he’s *trying* to engineer a GOP defeat here. If Loeffler and Perdue each lose by, say, two points without any evidence of “negative vote totals” anywhere, how does Wood spin that? Does he celebrate the fact that some Georgia Republicans stayed home, as he asked them to do? Or does he cite Loeffler’s and Perdue’s defeats as further evidence that the machines are rigged or whatever?

To put that a different way, what would Wood regard as a “legitimate” outcome in Georgia? For Trump and most MAGA fans, Loeffler and Perdue winning would be legitimate and them losing would be illegitimate. For Wood, who’s called for the two to be arrested, it’s much more complicated.

Here’s GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a rare House Republican who’s willing to criticize Trump, palpably mortified by what his party’s become. He was tweeting his disgust at Trump and his “stop the steal” enablers last night but he felt obliged to make his position known on national TV this morning too.

Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger says he expects that when Congress meets to affirm Electoral College votes "it is going to disappoint the people that believe this election was stolen — that think this is an opportunity to change it" #CNNSOTU https://t.co/pvLeZHf6UJ pic.twitter.com/dYrQ4JZPmk

— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) December 27, 2020