My Fellow Americans: We are studiously blind to this landslide: the number it took to defeat a vastly underestimated suppression (and repression) campaign lasting a generation and more. But thoroughly documented; and Palast has got the goods.
70 million votes for the incumbent? That leaves 230 million citizens who had been successfully propagandized, purged, impoverished, and after generations, too resigned, to vote. A small fraction of this number, added to the "polarized" blue side of a duopoly, made it a landslide.
It took the kind of extra measure that women and "minorities" (this refers to lack of voting rights, not skin color), and people who are both women and in a minority, along with the rest of us who have to work for a less-than-living wage, have to bring to work with them day after day, all their lives. Backwards, in high heels, in triplicate, despite wage-theft, and giving some white guy the credit for anything valued.
This landslide represents the real deal, after the "who knew?" shock and awe of the 2016 results, which destroyed the cherished "exit polls" (and dented the delusion that we elect these psychopaths) that had been so reliable once upon a time.
It is a measure of the extent to which the Fourth Estate has been, not just corrupted, not just subverted, but extirpated, by Fascism.
(Fascism is a fancy name for lawless totalitarian gang-rule.)
It represents the actual measure of just how pissed off normal, sane people can get after four years of crudely disguised, accelerating, totalitarianism, when even the life-long hopeless get out and jump through all the hoops it takes (in their neighborhoods) to cast a ballot. Enough of us to get enough votes counted to be an undeniable win.
It represents the actual level of social awareness and civic participation among other-than-white people, no longer "other-than" by any measure, but the bedrock of American citizenry.
"Too close to call" is revealed as the racist propaganda it is. It's just this generation's version of the "lazy and shiftless" mythology.
Finally, it reveals -- if indeed there is a transfer of power, a real question -- that there is actually a rudimentary form of crowd-sourced democracy in the USA.
We have not dodged the bullet. The rise of democracy has been violently put down wherever it has emerged, at least since the violently-widowed Mrs. Aquino was elected in the Philippines, and coined the term, "People Power." The "Arab Spring" was followed by the Arab Fall. Etc, etc, etc.
The task-list for the new president extends from global warming and environmental collapse, to the perpetual oil-wars and destabilization of democracies, to federal agencies and public infrastructure in smoldering ruins, to the reneged-on New Deal and the myriad civil protections fought-and-died-for by unions, the civil rights movement and so on; all the way down to child and adult day-care and pre-k-to-college public education; and a guaranteed, universal basic income. Not forgetting the separation of church and state!
Immigration needs its own paragraph here: not just knocking down the walls, and letting everybody in, giving them medical care, housing, education and opportunity, in their native languages: if we're not up to that level of human decency, we still must stop driving them out of their homelands! Millions of refugees are fleeing for their lives, driven by violent interference and economic exploitation that is sent directly from the USA.
But no "good" president can repair the damage of a long succession of bad ones.
Presidents are figureheads, like HRH The Queen. They exist to protect the oligarchy from the dire threat of democracy. When we see what is actually spent on thwarting the public will, and it's pretty glaringly obvious after "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission," we see the real power we are all born with. Since everything now depends on the Internet, it's getting harder to conceal the gross, long-standing imbalance of access.
We should be worried, now, about what the oligarchy will do now that the ROI on "elections" no longer inspires Investor Confidence.
