Final words for straw-clutchers... just hang in there

"Reality has one advantage over fiction -- it does not have to be plausible." 
            -- Joe Carroll

== Clutching at straws for the Electoral Vote ==

Legitimately fearful, many thousands have bent their efforts to frantic petition drives, pleading with members of the Electoral College to cancel the calamity.  Last time, I offered a slew of different Electoral College Gambits… and the (very low) odds for each of ten scenarios.

Not one of which seems likely at all.

Among those that I left out? The Pence-Trump flip! GOP electors who can't stomach 'Ivan' Trump, the Siberian Candidate, but who are terrified of alt-right thugs, could vote Pence for prez and Trump for VP!  (A job well suited to him.) That kind of defector could both save the nation and plausibly shrug: "I voted for them!"  (And yes, that would pitch it into the House, onto Paul Ryan's lap, and the new president would still be a republican!)

Elsewhere, I've also pondered that DT isn't leaving things to chance.  Seeing that at least some GOP electors will defect (I predict not enough to matter, but perhaps enough to drop his total below 300) he might be seeking to bribe Clinton electors to do the same!  If you get such an offer, remember that this becomes a felony and could be a sting. Call your local FBI office.

Folks assume that the final moment will be December 19, when members of the Electoral College cast their votes. But frantic straw clutchers have until January, when the new House will certify each state’s electors’ ballots.  The House still has the power to refuse a state’s Electoral College delegation at that point. If they repudiated both Florida’s and Michigan’s delegations – for reasons of blatant (duh?) cheating -- the House might then seize the choice for themselves.  

That would, naturally, throw things before the High Court. In which case we would see what John Roberts and Samuel Alito are really made of.  Are they the dogmatic servants of rising feudal oligarchy that many now assume? Or adult citizens who have a limit to how much 1930s-Central-Europe style crap we have to take? This question will be asked not just in January, but many times, during a Trump Administration.

Okay, there are your straws! Folks who believe there is one chance in heck, for any of them -- (except DT's later removal by Ryan, say a year from now) -- aren’t readers of plausible science fiction. They believe in fantasy.

And yet…

== We start this adventure in great shape ==

Despite volcanic rhetoric, the U.S. is currently in pretty good shape, by most measures, despite having not had a functioning Congress for 20 out of the last 22 years. Indeed, one silver lining is how it leaves perfect the pure fact of the last 30 years.  That every metric of US national health does far better across the smap of democratic administrations than republican ones.

But it wasn't due to legislation. Which simply hasn't happened. Lately, we’ve mostly been administered in benign ways, though with almost zero innovation at the national level.

A locked and frozen federal government has fulfilled one Libertarian dream: wildly varied experiments at the state level – from marijuana legalization and investment in science, infrastructure and education… all the way to gerrymandering, voter suppression, bathroom bills and supply side ‘economics’ hothouses like Kansas. 

Outcomes in most (not all) so-called blue states have ranged from solid to excellent, while most (not all) red states, like Kansas, have seen their lot decay. It's valid experimental data, if we'll look at it.

Out of all the post-mortems from the election (I’ll resume my series of appraisals, shortly), one that I never see mentioned is this distinction between a U.S. federal government that was mostly in caretaker status, under Barack Obama, and the states, where legislation and experimentation have surged.

I have my own impudent hypotheses for why our red-state neighbors feel such wrath. One is that they know they have been very badly governed! But they have been talked into – somewhat naturally – blaming a distant federal government that has done next-to nothing new or different since 2001. (Except Obamacare – which now seems likely to be amended, with many name changes, rather than discarded; go figure.) 

In fact, Congress has cut funds from the IRS, SEC and other agencies that fight white collar crime, so many of those investigations have shifted to the office of the Attorney General of New York.

It’s said that “all politics is local.” We have red states whose outcomes from radical policy have been stunningly bad, but where citizens would rather not blame their accustomed political party. Not quite yet. Not while there’s a convenient scapegoat further upstairs, in the White House. 

(In a hopeful harbinger, the fed-up people of Kansas punished the GOP, this round, for running probably the worst state government in America. And the term “red state” applies to 33 out of 50, where the Republican governor and officials held sway over critical electoral infrastructure, like the voting machines.)

I guess we’ll see if the Confederacy can maintain this effective technique of delusion, as so many things go south, under Donald Trump.  Hope springs eternal… or at least for 2018.

== Straw don’t float for long ==

Long ago I said Donald Trump would “veer to the center” after winning the GOP nomination -- not one of my shining predictive successes. Nor, it seems, will there be any center-ward pivot once he takes office. His parade of extremist appointees lacks even a token nod toward the majority of Americans who voted against him. And thus, I find a silver lining – schadenfreude – in the discomfiture of Glenn Beck, Megyn Kelly, and the Worst Man In America – George F. Will – who issued polysyllabic, grandiose denunciations that “Donald Trump is no Republican.” Silly shill. He's no Yale-Bushite, paying lip service to right wing radicalism. He's the real deal.

(The mind boggles at the detestable treason of this monstrous excuse for an American.)

So, what turned a relatively non-ideological - though pathological - egotist into a frothing, alt-right fanatic?  Simple. The rallies. The roaring crowds rewarded and 'shaped' - by operant conditioning and addiction - a new Donald Trump who is not only amoral, sexist and deceitful, but now an extreme dogmatist, appointing men so extreme that Fox disowns them. It was the rallies, folks. And he seems intent on continuing them.

== Layers of reality ==

Jim Wright’s latest “Stonekettle Station” posting dives into the triumph of subjective reality – how for many Americans, “evidence” now consists of internet ravings and “proof” comes when those ravings are accompanied by a link and a jpeg.  He uses as a chief example the recent #Pizzagate tizzy. That notorious, made-up paranoia-drivel storm is believed by perhaps millions of gullibles for one simple reason.  Because otherwise they would have to face a hard truth. That nothing actually scandalous has ever been revealed about Hillary Clinton, even after 24 years of relentless “investigations” costing us all half a billion dollars, pursued avidly by professionals, congressional hearings, Foxzoids and internet lynch mobs.  After all of that, to be reduced to howling over a dumb-but-no-harm mistake in email procedure?  No, Hillary Clinton has to  have been running a child-porn and murder ring. Ah, that’s the ticket!

Oh but read some of the crap Wright wades through, having deliberately incited mania from ilks that frankly frighten me and that fortunately look at the long paragraphs here and wander away, seeking someplace more spasmodic to troll.

From The Washington Post; After allegedly trying to suppress voting, Trump applauds lower black turnout: This says so much worth pondering – about Trump, about his rallies, about their values… about patronization… and about how the Democratic coalition may need to rethink the loyalty of its parts.

Evonomics, one of the best sites online, ponders when the next president of America takes his oath of office in January, officers of Russian intelligence can savour a historic win. And that astonishing, appalling fact has divided, not united, the two parties that run the world’s great democracy. That should be enough to unsettle anyone.

Finally:  In the Atlantic, Eric Liu offers a suggestion for how folks depressed by the prospects of stunning levels of mal-governance can deal with the funk and malaise… start a club.  One with some positive goal.  Almost anything. Civic participation even at the lowest level can give people a sense of citizenship, involvement, even empowerment. 

---- Return to my earlier post-election postings: Part I and Part II