By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – U.S. Sen. Mike Braun, R-Indiana, took a step through the looking glass the other day.

You know, to the place where up is down, the night is day and fact is fiction.

The first-term Indiana senator went full-tilt boogie on the twisted argument that somehow many, many votes for Donald Trump in 2020 were either manufactured, mislaid or misread. And that, somehow, this was all the media’s fault.

In an op-ed piece for The Washington Examiner that struggled to meet the demands of both logic and grammar, Braun cited stray anecdotes from around the country and, from these cherry-picked pseudo-facts, tried to make a case that the integrity of the entire election was in question.

And, again, that somehow this was the fault of journalists.

Rather than, say, the responsibility of elected officials entrusted with making government work.

There were several things troubling about Braun’s outburst.

The first was its selectivity. He pointed to supposed lapses in the system – on the strength of evidence about as substantial as a summer morning mist – that affected the presidential vote count but didn’t call into question any of the other races on the ballot.

If there were significant irregularities, wouldn’t they have affected other races, too?

Shouldn’t we also be looking at the congressional and state campaigns Republicans won?

That is, if we’re really concerned that the system had been breached and that outcomes shouldn’t be trusted?

But, then, it’s asking a lot of a man who ran for office on promises of being President Trump’s flunky – promises Mike Braun has kept – to think clearly about the needs of the nation rather than the task of keeping his master happy.

The uneven application of Braun’s analysis – and I realize I’m straining the definition of the word “analysis” beyond its limits – isn’t the most bothersome aspect about the senator’s op-ed.

That honor goes to the piece’s sheer, unadulterated, undiluted looniness.

One of Braun’s arguments is that a supposed whistle-blower in Nevada filed an affidavit saying workers disregarded signature verifications. Again, if this were true, it would disqualify all the votes on that ballot, not just the ones cast in the presidential race.

But that’s not the biggest problem with this bit of reasoning. Affidavits aren’t particularly compelling evidence. They haven’t been subjected to close or cross-examination. In many cases, they aren’t even subject to penalties of perjury.

In other words, there’s no risk or cost associated with lying or making things up in many affidavits.

There are affidavits out there that say UFOs exist. There are affidavits that say Elvis is alive and living happily in Sioux City, Iowa. For all I know, there may be affidavits floating around that assert that Donald Trump’s wall along our southern border has been completely built and Mexico paid for it.

Much of the reason journalists haven’t dropped everything else to examine the president’s claims of voter fraud is that even the president’s advocates aren’t taking those claims seriously.

However much Trump may fulminate on Twitter – and Braun in loopy op-eds – the president’s lawyers sing from a different hymnal when they get in court.

In court, of course, standards of evidence apply, and people get slapped hard if they do not tell the truth. There, the president’s people don’t make claims that widespread fraud occurred. Instead, they argue that certain legally cast votes should be disregarded because the president doesn’t like the outcome of the contest.

The courts, understandably, haven’t been kind to this real attempt to rig an election.

When judges haven’t just tossed Trump’s cases out after a summary hearing, they have laughed at them.

Even U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr – a man who has vied with Braun and U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina for the title of most slavish Trump lapdog – has acknowledged that voter fraud wasn’t a problem in this election.

But that didn’t deter Mike Braun.

That’s because Braun will buy anything the president sells.

For that reason, the senator from Indiana should be careful.

Trump, we know, will have cash-flow problems when he leaves office because he has more than $400 million in debts about to come due.

President Trump may have a bridge to sell someone as gullible as Mike Braun.

That bridge connects Brooklyn with Manhattan.

Doubtless, the good senator from Indiana will see it as a great deal.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

The City-County Observer posted this article without bias, opinion, or editing.