Dumping on voting systems sells pillows? Plus: Stirewalt takes on Trump, 'nincompoops.' And Merrick Garland finally gets his Senate hearings.

By Gary Abernathy

Dominion sues the MyPillow guy, and saying that makes me laugh

I’m sorry, but again, I can’t help but laugh out loud, and not just in the social media “lol” sense, when I read about people taking “the MyPillow” guy too seriously. Mike Lindell, who hawks pillows on TV and was a big supporter of Donald Trump and his election fraud claims, is being sued by Dominion Voting Systems.

As reported in USA Today, the key line from Dominion’s lawsuit alleges that Lindell “knowingly lied about Dominion to sell more pillows to people who continued tuning in to hear what they wanted to hear about the election.”

Got that? The way to sell pillows is to lie about a voting systems company. Who knew? Can you sell more mattresses by lying about state lottery systems? Is it because both subjects are so boring they put you to sleep?

Stirewalt makes clear his disdain for Trump and millions of ‘nincompoops’

Any remaining mystery as to the departure of Chris Stirewalt from Fox News was cleared up by Stirewalt himself in his first column for The Dispatch, a new online news site “informed by conservative principles” with a purposefully non-Trumpian point of view. The Dispatch was founded by Jonah Goldberg, formerly of National Review, and Steve Hayes, formerly of The Weekly Standard. The Atlantic did a piece on it in January.

Stirewalt was let go by Fox News in January, reportedly after substantial blowback for his part in the famously early election night call of Arizona for Joe Biden (a call that ended up being correct, narrowly). But another factor might have been Stirewalt’s apparent level of contempt not only for Donald Trump, but for Trump voters, a demographic important to Fox News.

In his new role as a contributing editor for The Dispatch, Stirewalt used his first column on Feb. 8 to state, “I don’t pretend to know everything that caused the nation to be such ripe pickings for a hustler like Trump.” But he goes on to venture a guess by assailing the United States’ education system, using various examples to prove his point, and making clear his contempt for voters who would elect Trump president. Here’s the key paragraph:

“Foolishness is nothing new in America. This is the country of P.T. Barnum, medicine shows and pet rocks, after all. But our current concentration of imbeciles has surpassed any kind of safe level. How we became a nation of so many dupes and fools is a matter at least as complicated as the causes of Trump’s presidency. What stands out… is that we are suffering the consequences from generations of Americans who are both undereducated and miseducated. This many millions of nincompoops didn’t show up overnight. They have been stumbling out of our nation’s failing schools for decades.”

Take that.

Merrick Garland finally gets a Senate hearing

Democrats have screamed for years now about how unfair it was that Republicans wouldn’t even hold hearings for Merrick Garland back in 2016 when then-President Obama nominated him for a seat on the U.S Supreme Court.

While Republicans made all sorts of excuses for not doing so, the bottom line was that the GOP had the votes in the Senate to block it. It’s that simple, and they should have just said so, because that’s how politics works.

Now, Garland is President Biden’s nominee for attorney general, and hearings are underway. The Washington Post reports, “Republicans, though, worry Garland might abandon some initiatives undertaken by the Trump administration that they favor — including beefed-up protection of religious liberties, or getting the department out of the business of forcing court-monitored reforms at local police departments — for more liberal policies. Acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson already has rescinded some Trump-era policies, and the Justice Department has changed course in some legal cases.”

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