And They Said It Couldn’t Be Done
In a rousing victory for America’s political cartoonists, stand-up comedians and late night talk show hosts, Donald Trump has been returned to the White House which means the people who need a president doing and saying outrageous and moronic things are pretty much set for the next four years.
The rest of you are screwed.
And just in case you’re not depressed enough already: a CNN column pointed out that this next Trump Administration will probably be way more radical than the last one because Trump cut ties with any halfway-sane Republican who tried to talk sense to him and held on to a group of parasitic, brown-nosing ass kissers who applaud anything he says or does no matter how moronic.
As Bette Davis says in this scene from All About Eve, fasten your seat belts, it’s going to get bumpy:
BTW: I tried to find a shorter clip where Bette just delivers the seat belt line, but I’m glad I didn’t because the following scene between Bette, George Sanders and Marilyn Monroe is priceless and should remind us that before Hollywood had access to CGI or thought it was entertaining to blow up buildings, wreck cars or have insane clowns stab 27 people to death, the best movies had razor-sharp dialogue because movie-goers were going to spend two hours watching people talk.
Somehow Casablanca is fabulously entertaining even though it didn’t have even one car wreck.
So even if you’re down in the dumps – and if you’re the kind of person who reads my stuff regularly, you probably are – it’s good to remember there are still people in the world who do good things like write movies, plays and books or create music and art that entertains us and makes us think and the world is not totally filled with mouth-breathing morons.
They’re just in the majority.
And speaking of good people worth appreciating…
Every election thousands of people volunteer their time to make those elections possible and since 2020 and Donald Trump’s claims that he was being cheated and a bunch of imbeciles believing him, poll workers have been threatened and attacked and yet they showed up again last Tuesday and I thought they deserved some recognition for being there.
If you want to read more about this, here’s a link:
As pretty much everyone who has taken a serious look at it tells us, voter fraud is almost non-existent and there are already laws against it, so why do the Republicans keep yammering about it?
Because claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election were used to justify restrictive voting bills in numerous states.
For instance:
According to the following article, in many cases Republicans wanted to give themselves the power to overrule non-partisan election officials after voting has been conducted, so in other more direct words: “If we don’t like the results you come up with, we’re going to change them.”
Also according to the following article:
Republicans (and Donald Trump is on the list) admitted the more people vote, the worse it is for them because in 1869 the 15th Amendment gave Black men the right to vote and just 51 short years later the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote (so there’s another thing women should be pissed off about and the list was pretty long already) and Republicans would prefer that voting be restricted to White gun-owning males and Overly-White women with beehive hairdos.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/21/politics/voting-rights-senate-republicans-trump-biden/index.html
And to solidify the point about more voters being bad for Republicans:
In 2020 Joe Biden got 81,283,501 votes and Donald Trump got 74,223,975 votes.
In 2024 (according to the latest numbers from the Associated Press) Kamala Harris got 69,074,145 votes and Donald Trump 73,407,735 votes.
So Trump’s vote totals stayed pretty much the same and Kamala and Joe’s totals varied by about 12.2 million and some of that’s on Kamala Harris and the Democrats for not being able to articulate a clear difference between her and incumbent president with lousy approval ratings. Lots of people didn’t vote this time and that’s how Trump got elected.
Anyway…
Republicans trying to keep the wrong people from voting inspired the cartoon you just looked at and led to the next one.
According to a Pew Research Center report, over 60% of Americans support abolishing the Electoral College and according to the National Archives there have been more than 700 Constitutional proposals to change it (more than any other subject) and according to me it’s an archaic remnant of our Founding Fathers’ racism which every once in a while totally fucks up a presidential election and if you’re wondering why we still have the Electoral College I’m glad to pretend you asked.
Think about it:
Why is the popular vote used to determine the winner of every other public office, but when it comes to the Big One suddenly we need a layer of bureaucracy between the ballot box and the Oval Office?
Just in case you didn’t pay attention in school (and this will be a rudimentary explanation because I wasn’t paying attention in school) in the Electoral College system, we’re actually voting for a slate of electors who “pledge” to vote for the candidate we wanted to vote for ourselves.
Then the electors get together in mid-December, Rube Goldberg sacrifices a chicken, they sing “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” and turn the results over to Congress to be certified on January 6th.
Jesus.
By comparison, throwing a witch in the water to see if she floats seems reasonable and efficient.
And in many cases the electors aren’t required to vote the way the people in their state voted and in 2016 seven “faithless” electors – including five Democrats – refused to cast their votes for Hillary Clinton because someone pushed her into the Potomac and she came up doing the backstroke.
(OK, that joke is totally dependent on you knowing one of the Medieval tests for a witch was throwing her into water and if she floated she was a witch and if she drowned she was innocent, so kind of like voting in many presidential elections: you’re fucked either way. Clearly, this test for witches is ridiculous and these days is only used in certain parts of Florida.)
And BTW: just who are these electors?
According to the following article from PBS, they’re often people who play prominent roles in state government or longstanding party members and there is no centralized list of electors so most of us don’t know who they are.
What could possibly go wrong?
Now here’s a look at what could possibly go wrong.
The Shocking History of the Electrical College
The Founding Fathers didn’t like using the popular vote to select a president because they were afraid voters wouldn’t make an informed choice and that a direct voting system would allow a demagogue to rise to power and thank God for the Electoral College because that’s never ever happened.
(My tongue was so far in my cheek on that last paragraph I think I dislocated it.)
So to avoid uninformed votes and demagogues they dreamed up a convoluted system and the Southern states argued that slaves should be counted to increase their states’ population which would give them more power and representation in Congress, but the slaves still couldn’t vote.
So they decided to compromise and count each slave as 3/5s of a person.
(Which seems like a ridiculous proposition, but let’s face it, if they were counting Donald Trump as a person they overshot by at least 2/5s so being a fraction of a human being is totally possible.)
The Civil War ended that 3/5s garbage, but generally speaking Southern states have done all they can to suppress the Black vote and making the Electoral College winner-take-all means the White majority can overwhelm Black voters and make how they vote irrelevant.
Which means we all just participated in a screwed-up system based on racism.
We still have the Electoral College because the White majorities in Southern states want to drown out the Black vote which is at least part of why Republicans are so freaked out about immigrants; let enough people of the wrong color into the United States and White people won’t be the majority any more.
And if that ever happens, just wait and see how many current Electoral College defenders suddenly decide it’s an archaic system that needs to be abolished immediately.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/04/nx-s1-5173568/electoral-college-explained
Racism and Sexism
People have learned not to express their racist and sexist feelings out loud because these days those feelings can get you sued and/or fired, but they still exist and I wonder how many Trump votes or Kamala non-votes were inspired by people not wanting to vote for a female with the wrong skin tone.
Just in case you’re wondering and I was…
According to the internet, 58 countries have or had female leaders so we’re still not quite as advanced as the Philippines, Bangladesh, Haiti, Mali, Jamaica, Slovenia, Senegal, Barbados, Slovakia, Togo, Mexico or a long list of countries our next president refers to as shitholes.
Pay attention to January 6th
I’m not a big fan of predictions because, turns out, predicting the future is hard, but if unhappy Democrats don’t riot on January 6th I’ll take it as I sign I voted for the right people.
Nevertheless…
Congratulations to the Republicans who voted for Donald Trump; you’ve gone from the Party of Law and Order to putting a Convicted Felon in the White House.
And they said it couldn’t be done.
I love you, Lee.
Quotable! I am glad that political cartoonists, etc. will now have plenty of material... we will need a bit of humor to get us through what promises to be four years that may change not just our country but many others as well. Oh, don't get me started... it may be a roller coaster and I'm stocking up on barf bags.