11/6/20: I woke up very early
this morning to news that the State of Georgia had gone blue, at least for
now.
Joe Biden had a 3,500-vote lead. The president’s
chances of being reelected were slipping away. I peeked out the curtain. I
figured Antifa mobs would be rampaging thru the normally quiet streets of the
Village of Glendale, Ohio.
 |
Looking good for Mr. Biden. |
____________________
By October 12, Pennsylvania had already received
1,794,448 mail-in ballot requests from Democrats.
____________________
No one was stirring. But it was obvious that a
beautiful fall day in southern Ohio was taking shape.
As the hours passed, it was increasingly clear that the
President of the United States was losing the last marbles he possessed. He tweet-ranted
and tweet-raved. He stalked to the podium in the White House press room and insisted
that the election was being stolen from his deserving grasp, because state election
officials insisted on counting all the votes they had received. In Pennsylvania,
what had been a large Trump lead, built on votes from those who showed up in
person, began to disappear as several million mail-in ballots were tallied.
“Stop counting!” Trump shrieked.
In Arizona and Nevada, however, where Trump trailed,
Republicans insisted that only communists would try to stop the counting before
every vote was tallied! For good measure, Trump and his pals howled about a plot
they said was afoot when one news network “called” Arizona for Biden with votes
still left to record.
I admit, that as I watched the Arizona numbers
come in all day, and Biden’s lead was cut in half, I wasn’t sure he could hold
the state. I could see where Trump might win. So, we needed to count the votes.
Nevada, too, might slip from Biden’s grasp.
So. Count the votes. If Fox, or any other
network made a wrong call: count the votes. Nothing about this was hard to
grasp. Yet, President Trump refused to grasp it, much less face the grim facts.
Meanwhile, as hundreds of thousands of mail-in
ballots were counted, Trump’s once impressive lead in Pennsylvania vanished.
Biden moved ahead. This had nothing to do with “fraud” and everything to do
with the fact Democratic leaders had urged supporters to get ballots in
early, by mail.
Money in the electoral bank, so to speak.
Indeed, if you had tried your best to be
informed, you would have known this was coming. On October 12, it was
reported that Pennsylvania had received 2.6 million mail-in ballot requests. That figure included 1,794,448
Democrats but only 693,670 Republicans, the rest independents.
It was clear then, that Republicans might have a
lead when in-person votes were counted. It would have to be huge.
1,794,448
– 693,670
??? Potential Democratic gain
in mail-in voting
This math problem was much too hard for the president,
or Lou Dobbs, or Sean Hannity, or all of them together, to figure out.
So, as the president’s lead shrank and then
disappeared, he and they squealed like punctured pigs.
Fraud was rampant in Pennsylvania, they
bellowed.
Actually, it was math.
Even Pennsylvania’s Republican senator, Pat
Toomey, chastised the president for making wild, unsubstantiated claims of
voting fraud.
By Friday night, additional counting showed
Biden with a lead in Georgia that had grown to more than 4,000. In Nevada,
Biden’s lead had also grown. In Arizona it continued to trickle away. The
biggest prize, Pennsylvania, was getting away from Mr. Trump. Biden’s lead passed
20,000. Even in counties where the same-day vote had given Trump 2-1 leads,
mail-in ballots were running in favor of Mr. Biden.
Once it became clear that Biden was going to end
the day with a small lead in Georgia, Trump supporters who had been shouting
that it was past time to stop the count, suddenly started shouting anew. “Let
the counting go forward!” they cried. Several
thousand ballots from U.S. military men and women overseas were still
coming in. Trump could still carry the Peach State.
Count every vote!
*
“I’d put
the heads on pikes, right.”
IN OTHER NEWS, Trump supporters hatched various plans to turn
the electoral tide in favor of their favorite president. Two followers of “Q”
showed up outside a Philadelphia vote-counting facility. Their Humvee turned
out to be loaded with weaponry, including an AR-15, plenty of ammunition, and
allegedly boxes of fake ballots that they thought they could get turned in.
Fortunately, the two men were arrested before they could fix the tally in
Trump’s favor.
(Or open fire.)
If that plan sounded stupid, recently-indicted former Trump campaign
adviser Steve Bannon floated a plan for how Trump could enforce iron discipline
in the federal government, supposing he won a second term. Fire Dr. Fauci, fire
F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray, he said. “I’d like to go back to the old
times of Tudor England,” Bannon explained during an epically unbalanced podcast.
“I’d put the heads on pikes, right. I’d put them at the two corners of the
White House, as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the
program, or you’re gone.”
His sidekick chipped in with a lovely story about two Philadelphia
Tories, who were hanged for consorting with the British during the American
Revolution. “This,” he said, “was what we used to do with traitors.” So, you
could argue that the stakes in this election were high, at least for those of
us who didn’t want to get our heads stuck on pikes outside the White House.
