Sometimes you really do have to look at both sides of a question to understand it.
Since Election Day, we have been hearing how a large number of Republicans, most of them the ones I like to call Trumpanzees, believe that Democrats stole the election from their hero. I’ve heard numbers as high as 70 percent of Republicans, or about 30 percent of all voters, who think the results were manipulated.
If you’re going to read this, you need to understand that there is really no chance Joe Biden didn’t legitimately win the election. Even Bill Barr told the president there was no evidence of fraud or corruption of the extent that it would affect the results.
It is difficult to imagine anything happening in the next 31 days that would enable Trump to steal the election, but let’s say for the sake of argument it happens and 30 percent of voters become very happy. But then you have the 70 percent of voters who thought the election was fine now believing it was stolen.
William Butler Yeats said it best.
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Ain’t it the truth.
People who believe horrible things are filled with passionate intensity, and normal citizens are so involved with their own lives that they don’t have the time or energy for causes.
“Surely some revelation is at hand; surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out when a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert. A shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
“The darkness drops again; but now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Don’t kid yourself into thinking you have already met the rough beast. It’s not Donald Trump, no matter how much you think it is. Trump is essentially the same person he has been for 35 years, the clown prince of the rich. He’s the same narcissistic, sociopathic conman he always was, someone who was so damaged by his father that there was no chance he could ever be anything more.
The rough beast?
Nobody we know. Nobody we’ve ever heard of. Someone who pays public relations people big money to keep his name out of the media.
They’re not going to allow the chaos a reversed election would cause. Even with Biden in the White House, conservatives still hold enough levers of power that nothing too disturbing can happen.
Getting control of those levers may be the toughest thing we’ll ever have to do.