RNC Chair Ronna “Please Forget I’m a Romney” McDaniel either doesn’t understand the Pennsylvania voting rules she denounced or else she lied about them. Host Martha MacCallum let the disinformation, designed to sow distrust in the process, go uncorrected.
In a discussion about the still too-close-to-call Republican primary race for the U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania between Dr. Mehmet Oz and David McCormick, McDaniel blamed the state’s Democratic Governor, Tom Wolf, for allowing too many votes to be counted because he vetoed a Republican “election integrity bill.”
MACCALLUM: But -- so the former president is suggesting that another Republican who is supported by people who used to work in his administration is searching for votes or doing something that is -- that is untoward?
MCDANIEL: Well, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled this year, and the RNC very much supports, that ballots should not be counted without a date. I think that's the law in Pennsylvania. I think that should be followed.
And we certainly do not think that ballots without dates should be counted, because how do you know when they came in? I think that's common sense and that is definitely where the RNC and the GOP is.
FACT CHECK: “Please Forget I’m Mitt Romney’s Niece” McDaniel either couldn’t be bothered to learn about the law she smeared, or she’s too stupid to understand it, or she lied. Politico explains: “The ballots at issue were submitted by the return-by deadline; voters just neglected to write a date on them. Under federal law, that omission is “immaterial” as to whether the ballots should count, according to Friday’s court ruling.”
Yet MacCallum, whom Fox claims embodies the “ultimate journalistic integrity and professionalism,” either played dumb and pretended not to know McDaniel had just promoted a dangerous falsehood about the very election integrity she professed to stand for or else MacCallum couldn’t be bothered to learn about the legal voting process she had just asked about.
But wait, there’s more. MacCallum once again claimed to know nothing about the substance of one of her own questions, this time about Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s declaration of war on the GOP after he lost his primary last week.
MACCALLUM: All right. I just want to put this on the screen. Madison Cawthorn, obviously, has gotten a lot of attention in this race. He lost his bid to retain his House seat. The president kind of supported him, the former president, last minute in that race.
But here's what he just said, Madison Cawthorn: “The time for genteel politics as usual has come to an end. It's time for the rise of the new right. It's time for Dark MAGA to truly take command. We have an enemy to defeat, but we will never be able to defeat them until we defeat the cowardly and weak members of our own party. Their days are numbered. We are coming.”
What you think of that? And what is -- what is Dark MAGA?
MCDANIEL: I don't know what "Dark MAGA" is.
MACCALLUM: It sounds scary.
MCDANIEL: It sounds like the Star Wars thing, like the dark side of the force. I don't know. I don't know what that is.
As it happens, I wrote a post for Crooks and Liars just a few days ago about Cawthorn’s post and I do know what Dark MAGA is. To quote from my post, “Dark MAGA is a real part of the extremist right which, believe it or not, thinks Trump and Trumpism has been too kind and gentle.” It’s a movement that wants Trump to return but this time giving less leeway to his enemies and with more right-wing violence against them. A simple Google search would have clued in MacCallum.
For a woman who dropped her own middle name to seem more MAGA and a “news” host on the network that is all but indistinguishable from MAGA propaganda, it’s hard to know whether it’s worse that they don’t know about this extremist faction bubbling in their own world or if they do know and are pretending otherwise.
You can watch the interview below, from the May 22, 2022 Fox News Sunday.