Liberals deny elections all the time. Please have the dignity to at least admit that.

We have the video, you know!

Kari Lake’s putative loss in the Arizona gubernatorial race last night brought with it a rash of news reports like this one, from the New York Times (emphases added):

Ms. [Katie] Hobbs, a Democrat, narrowly defeated Kari Lake, a right-wing former newscaster who was talked about as a future leader in a Trump-dominated Republican Party, in a bitter and closely watched race that became a final test of whether candidates molded in Mr. Trump’s image could win in battlegrounds. Ms. Lake, one of the most prominent purveyors of Mr. Trump’s lies about his 2020 election, followed several other election-denying candidates in defeat.

And this, from the Cable News Network:

Democrat Katie Hobbs will win Arizona’s governor’s race, CNN projects, defeating one of the most prominent defenders of former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. 

Calling the 2020 election rigged, Republican Kari Lake had repeatedly said she would not have certified Joe Biden’s win in Arizona in 2020. Hobbs, as Arizona’s secretary of state, had rejected GOP lies about the election. 

I mean, this is just embarrassing. I mean that sincerely: It’s embarrassing. Not just because the word “lie” itself is so childlike and juvenile in this context, like something a whiny kindergartener would say, but because the double standard itself is just mortifyingly self-evident. Liberals “deny elections” all the time. This is just a fact! You simply cannot ignore this. It is impossible to deny at this point. To cite just a few prominent examples:

• Stacey Abrams. After she lost the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race, Abrams denied those election results for years. She repeatedly falsely claimed the election was rigged or fraudulent or whatever and that she was the true winner. She did an awkward, clumsy pivot during the 2022 race and tried to deny that she ever denied the election; this claim was so egregious and demonstrably untrue that the Washington Post fact-checker debunked it. (Needless to say, the New York Times does not refer to Stacey Abrams as as “election denier” who spread “lies” about that election, even those she is and she did; in fact, earlier this month the Times wrote a retrospective on her failed campaigns in which it intimated she was a “strategist” and a “visionary.” No mention of her repeated election-denial falsehoods.)

• Hillary Clinton. Clinton has never really accepted the legitimacy of her 2016 loss. She has falsely called that election “stolen,” she has said Trump was an “illegitimate president” and the 2016 election “wasn’t on the level;” even as late as 2020 she was still spreading conspiracy theories that the election “wasn’t on the level,” that “something [wasn’t] right with it,” that we “still [didn’t] know what happened,” and that “history” would “discover” these unknown, unnamed malfeasances with the election.

• Democrats in general have repeatedly falsely denied election results and/or spread conspiracy theories about elections. John Kerry reportedly believed the 2004 election was stolen and didn’t slap down rumors that he did believe that; his wife spread a conspiracy theory about the voting machines getting hacked that year. The late Rep. John Lewis claimed Trump was not a “legitimate” president because “the Russians” sabotaged the election in some way. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has claimed Abrams lost in 2018 because of a conspiracy theory in which some votes “didn’t get counted.” Biden’s erstwhile press secretary claimed the 2016 election itself was “stolen.” As late as 2016, Joe Biden was still falsely claiming that Al Gore won the election. Oh hell, Biden was claiming the 2022 midterms could be illegitimate before the midterms occurred.

I mean, look: This is just the way it is. If you lose an election you publicly cast doubt on the results and suggest they might not be legitimate. Republicans do it; so do Democrats. It’s not wrong to admit this if it’s true. And it is true. We have the receipts! We have lots of video footage and written reports to easily substantiate this.

None of this is great and we’d all be better off if it wasn’t happening. One way to stop this kind of conspiracy theorizing, of course, is to stop pretending that only one side does it. If your mass media criticize the evidence-free claims of election malfeasance from one major political party while ignoring or suppressing or waving away the same claims from the other major political party, it absolutely makes it look like you’re trying to cover something up. I have little expectations, of course, that the media will correct any of this moving forward; we should likewise have little expectations that election denial, in all its bipartisan glory, is really going away anytime soon.