First there was the absurd theatre of Mitch McConnell vs. Nancy Pelosi, two of the crustiest fossils on Capital Hill, negotiating over how many trillions of dollars the latest COVID relief package is going to be. Over the past four months in four different bills Congress has already spent 3 trillion dollars on Covid relief. This latest package will be between one and three trillion more, depending on which fossil prevails. Not one penny of these trillions of dollars was money that we actually...have. So, all of it was borrowed, a veritable geyser of red ink spewing forth from the Capital Dome. Thus we were treated to the preposterous assertion that Mitch McConnell’s one trillion dollar offer was miserly.
How much is a trillion dollars, you ask? See, here’s the thing. You and I can’t fathom such a sum. We hear the word trillion and we think... a large sum, but we can’t comprehend such a number. Here’s how much one trillion is...if you went back to the year of our savior’s birth and began spending one million dollars every single day for the past 2020 years...you would still have over 250 billion dollars left. The United States of America currently has 24 trillion dollars of debt...before the two fossils come to an agreement over how much more to pile on top. How many of our leaders are troubled by this Mount Everest of debt and the every increasing percentage of the federal budget required to service it? None. Zero. In fact, our elected officials are busy coming up with even more ways to spend money we don’t have. There are serious people making serious proposals for free college education for all, a wiping out of student debt, universal health care, government paid daycare, even slavery reparations is now in the mix. I watch it all in a befuddled daze.
Then there’s this...yesterday, President Trump’s Twitter Feed—the inflamed canker sore on the lip of the Country—belched forth yet another towering pile of nonsense onto the body politic:
“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”
Where in the world to begin? Politicians of every stripe have always complained about the fairness of elections, especially the ones they lose. It’s an American tradition. Remember 1960 when John Kennedy inched out Richard Nixon? That was only because Democratic Mayor, Richard Daley saw to it that 9,000 recently departed Chicagoans pulled the lever for Kennedy, giving him the electoral votes of the great state of Illinois!! So, complaining about election fraud is nothing new. What is new is complaining about election fraud in an election that hasn’t taken place yet, when the one doing the complaining is the sitting President who hopes to be on the ballot!! Aside from Trump’s incessant need to be the center of every conversation, this Tweet had one purpose and one purpose only...to delegitimization an election that he believes he’s going to lose. If he can sew enough doubt in the reliability of the count, he will always be able to say in his dotage, “I never lost an election, I was robbed.” To their credit, Republican leaders were quick and unanimous in their rejection of this foolishness. This country, through pestilence, peril and even civil war, has never postponed a Presidential election, and we are not about to start now just to assuage Donald Trump’s fragile ego.
DISCLAIMER: Since this is a political blog post, many of you will be furious with the opinions expressed here and feel the need to engage me in debate about this point or that. However, it should be noted that this post was written not to persuade any of you, but rather to get a great deal of frustration off my chest. If you find yourself itching to rip my opinions to shreds, I have a suggestion for you....start your own blog.
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