It would be almost impressive how limitless the GOP's capacity for the absurd is. If, that would be, their achieving their absurd goals didn't foretell the end of democracy.

Today's madness arrives via the Arizona "audit" (again,) where we learn one of the things the Florida GOP is spending money on is searching for 40,000 fraudulent ballots they believe were flown in from Southeast Asia. How are these crackerjack detectives to find the fake votes planted by the stealthy Asians? How else? The "auditors" are looking for (dun dun DUN) bamboo fibers in the paper.

I kid you not.

Here's Lt. Columbo John Brakey, on investigating the crime of election fraud in Arizona.

"There's accusations that there were 40,000 ballots flown in," said Brakey to Dennis Welch (an Arizona political reporter).

Welch asked, "To Arizona?"

Brakey answered, "To Arizona. And it was stuffed into the box. Okay? And it came from the southeast part of the world, Asia, okay? And what they're doing is to find out if there's bamboo in the paper." (The world's kind or orb-shaped, but okay)

Then he pointed to his right, saying, "That camera, right there, that they take a picture of the ballot? If you...they can really look at depth and find out, is it a hand-marked paper ballot? Because it's a 5K camera. You can see the folds in the ballot, because 92% of all the ballots here should have been folded because they came in through an envelope, okay?

Got that?

"And so, they're doing all sorts of testing to prove if it was or wasn't, and that's very important, because the only way you can persuade people on changing is having facts. And we're on a mission for facts," claims Brakey.

Is he, though? Is he on a mission for facts? If he's looking for facts, does he really think the key to high-tech election fraud is finding (1) the absence of folds, (2) bamboo fibers — because ASIA — and (3) using a camera everyone and their grandma has on their smartphone?

Furthermore, assuming Brakey's 92% figure is correct, and 92% of the 2.1 million votes cast in Maricopa County were cast in envelopes, that means (assuming one still believes in math) there are 160,800 votes that were NOT cast in envelopes. So, that means fully four times the number of ballots that he's looking for already have one of the two criteria this gobshite is using to determine if the ballot is from Southeast Asia.

He may be trying to pass himself as an impartial observer, but the fact that he is enabling this BS is evidence that he's a guy from whom you should want to stay as far away as possible.