"Oh, I awoke in anger So alone and terrified I put my fingers against the glass And bowed my head and cried."
- Bob Dylan, "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine," John Wesley Harding (1968)
(1.) Let's not forget that Trump lost ONLY BECAUSE Covid-19 put an emphasis on mail-in ballots, and consequently became a point of vigilance by the MSM as never before in our history. Trump is correct to call it fraud, but he does so for the wrong reason. Usually, we DON'T count all the votes. This time around Blacks, LatinX, College Kids, and "Injuns" were our best friends in ridding ourselves of Trump. It was amazing to me to watch the turn-around in Trump's lead in Pennsylvania go from 500,000 up to a deficit after they started tallying in all the urban votes from Pittsburg and Philadelphia. These are the votes typically chadded or tossed in numbers sufficient to guarantee a victory for Repugs. It was "voter fraud" because WE COUNTED ALL THE VOTES THIS TIME.
(2.) Despite the voter fraud Trump ill describes (corrected above), the grabber-in-chief almost won anyway. In five states --Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina -- the margin was 1.5% or under, and in Nevada it was close at 2.2%. Check it out for yourself . All of these states were easily reversible in a non-Corona year, when, normally, few would have been paying close attention to the value of mail-in votes.
Trump was largely upset at the final because he was led to expect such state reversals in 2020 and it didn't happen because of the scrutiny. That's what happened in Georgia. He was upset that votes weren't being tossed as usual. The voter fraud reasons he was espousing were actually some of the reasons used in the past to toss votes. That was the substance of his call -- lose some votes. The MSM is probably correct in calling it the most perfect election we've ever had, because it's the first one where they were watching intently for ballot throwaways. If only they'd been so vigilant in 2016, and saved the nation the horror of DJ's platter spins -- and the time wasted in dealing with the ticking clock of Climate Change (four years lost! arguably because not all the votes were counted in 2016, and nobody cared, even in the most sacrosanctimonious democracy in the world).
Now the question for the MSM is: Will they be as vigilant in the future? Yes, they are calling 2020 a model election, but we are already forgetting that primaries were anything but -- filled with just the kinds of vote dumping (see investigative journalist Greg Palast's "California Reamin'" chapter 23 for exactly how it works and was done) and, according to NBC News, there were continuing machine problems that may have helped Biden get the nod over Bernie. ABC even had Bernie projected as the winner of California's delegate-rich poll. So, the System may have got its sh*t together to oust Trump, but I wouldn't call it a fully functional electoral system just yet.
One of things Palast points out that I didn't process before was the fact each state's secretary determines how votes get counted. This turns out to be profoundly important. He cites the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race where the absurd condition existed where the secretary of state, Brian Kemp, kept his position while running for governor against Stacey Abrams. He was the final say in which votes counted in a race he was running in.
(3.) There are already bad omens smoking out of the MSM. Their disingenuous near-hagiographic framing of Biden's ascension, including the pretty, but bullshit Inauguration speech, written by Vinay Reddy (Indian American, not American Indian -- imagine what a speech that would have been!), wherein Biden performs the words "my whole soul" and it's embarrassing. What soul? Who's soul? Reddy's?
Not to mention, Reddy, inexplicably, seems to make reference to Langston Hughes's "A Dream Deferred," which is meet, coming from the parents of Indian immigrants, what with their horrific caste system back on the subcontinent, with Untouchables at the top and bottom of their system, and everyone else in between, but sounds lame, Mr. Reddy, uttered from the lips of your mouthpiece puppet, Joe Biden. He's a Dream Deferrer from way back.
And speaking of Dreamers, I've procured a copy of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson, which highlights Martin Luther King, Jr's visit to India in the 60s and its eye-opening revelation (to him) that the US, too, functions in a similar, unacknowledged caste system. Damn.
I reckon, ol' Corn Pop, all those pre-Voting Rights Act years ago, should have pushed lifebuoy Biden in the pool and gone out to the parking lot and slashed Biden's tires with that straight razor Biden claims CP brandished, and then pomaded Biden's windshield. What a bullshit artist we have now for president, right out of the box, with the press back to being lapdogs and stenographers. The new norm, same as the old norm. What's more, nobody, other than the IC in the background, did more to undermine Trump's presidency than the MSM.
At present, they are on a self-righteous victory lap mode, redirecting the narrative back to "mainstream" normality, which might be the death of us all. Chris Hayes alone has me on edge with that ad they keep flashing wherein he says, his voice rising to sudden falsetto, :... that we've been fighting for all our lives...." Jeesh. Seymour Hersh, in his memoir Reporter, observed, that there had been a class change within journalism, with fewer working class journalists than ever, and that today, more often than not, reporters come from privileged backgrounds -- same as the politicians they follow, sometimes even the same schools -- and that that influences the approach, reducing the likelihood of adversarial reporting. Hayes is a product of Ivy League Brown University and largely counts on other privileged subjects to pull his train through. Chooo-chooo.
(4.) As evil, or, at least, criminally narcissistic, as Trump was (is), we forget that he was not a politician. He didn't have a clue. That's why some people "liked" him at first. A privileged sh*t in crude rube's robes. Unlike a professional politician, Joe Biden, foe instance, he didn't realize that the definition of politician could be "professional compromiser." F*ck it, lie, if it gets you your way with voters. They have no real values. They are amoral weathervanes. They are often poll-driven, manipulators of ballots. Woody Allen, in Annie Hall, through Alvie Singer, described politicians as being one rung below child molesters. That's harsh, but just barely, if you consider that a molester's best feature is his grooming technique. Politicians groom and groom us. And we behave, in turn, like willing children.
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