“I’m too old for this shit.”
When I think of all the pop culture references I have made over the years, the thought that I would ever quote the “Lethal Weapon” movies would be almost ludicrous.
It not just Shane Black, the rootin’-tootin’est screenwriter ever.One of my favorite throwaway quotes come from another of his movies, “The Last Boy Scout.”
“Head or gut?”
But “Lethal Weapon?”
No way.
Until now.
Until I sat through an evening and long into the night watching election returns in the runoff races for two Senate seats here in Georgia.
I’m not sure this is the first time this ever happened, but two months after election day, two Senate seats were to be decided in runoff elections. Both were held by Republicans and the GOP needed to hang onto at least one of them to maintain their majority in the Senate.
We moved to Georgia in 2010 and the first thing that made me happy politically happened just two months ago when Joe Biden beat Trump in the presidential election. Both Senate races went to runoffs. The guy who had to have been seriously unhappy was Sen. David Perdue,
He ran more than 100,000 votes ahead of Trump in November, and beast Democrat Jon Ossoff by even more than that. But there was a third candidate in the race who got just enough votes to drop Perdue below 50 percent.
Still, Perdue’s 49.9 percent in November made him tough to beat in the runoff.
The other race was a little different. Democrat Raphael Warnock had finished first of a dozen or so candidates in November, but he still had only about a third of the vote. His best bet was that his opponent, appointed Senator Kelly Loeffler, was fairly unimpressive. In addition, Warnock could benefit from the massive efforts to get African-Americans to vote.
Turnout was heavy, and there were three different types of votes — early and in person, mail-in or absentee ballots and finally those who voted at the polls on election day.
The Democrats were both well ahead with about 40 percent of the vote in, with Ossoff leading Purdue and Warnock leading Loeffler by more than 200,000 votes each. But by midnight both had fallen behind, and at one point Ossoff fell more than 100,000 votes behind Perdue and Warnock trailed Loeffler by nearly as much.
Then they battled back, and I awakened briefly at around 2 a.m. to see that Warnock was leading Loeffler by about 35,000 votes with 98 percent of the vote counted. Ossoff had wiped out most of Perdue’s lead but still trailed by a few thousand votes.
I was sort of stunned that the race had bounced back and forth, and it looked like each party would win one seat.
Hey, it could have been worse.
But when I got out of bed around 8 a.m. and checked the Washington Post website, I saw that Warnock had been declared the winner in his race. No shock there, but I also saw that Ossoff had taken a 12,000-vote lead over Perdue. By 4:30 p.m., his lead was about twice that and CNN had declared Ossoff the winner.
For a lifelong Democrat, it couldn’t be better.
For an old guy who never seems to get enough sleep, there’s really only one thing to say.
“I’m too old for this shit.”