A Death Grip On an Alternative
Reality
Earlier today I read a column in today’s local rag written by a Ms. Jackie (rhymes with "Hackie”) Cushman who writes that “2020 isn’t over.” Intrigued by the title, I read it. Then I looked up the details on this Jackie Cushman person and it became clear. She is the daughter of Newt Gingrich and the second wife he married after divorcing his first wife who was struggling with cancer. Gingrich, according to his campaign manager said of his first wife, "She's not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of the President. And besides, she has cancer." (What a prince, huh?) While married to her mother, Gingrich was openly disporting with an aide, Callista Bisek (23 years his junior) who is now her stepmother and if you can believe it, US Ambassador to the Vatican!!! As the daughter of the 77-year old former Speaker, who actually made Rush Limbaugh an “honorary” member of the US House, she probably was dosed regularly with arch-conservative drivel from early days.
The entire gist
of the article is that there was something hinky about the recent election because
“Many Americans don’t think the election was conducted fairly.” Like the words “premium” and “curated” in ad-speak, she
declines to define her terms. To her, apparently “fairly” translates as, “Our
guy lost.”
Reading further reveals that since over
half of the voting populace didn’t vote for Trump, the election was unfair. This,
in spite of the fact that, in reality, this has been the most closely monitored
and reviewed election in our history. Bush/Gore revolved only around the state
of Florida, and one may remember the USSC stopped the sort of thing (hand
recount) which has occurred in Pennsylvania and Georgia and has, by the way, completely
validated the initial results. She also cites the Hayes/Tilden election of 1876
which was, in an eerie precursor, focused on questionable practices in Florida
(and Louisiana, South Carolina and Oregon).
What the writer
omits (because it simply fails to fit her narrative) is that in 1876 Tilden won
a fairly comfortable majority of the popular vote but that three Reconstruction
Southern states, chafing under the yoke of continued reconstruction efforts to
assure civil rights for former enslaved persons, muddied the waters with
internecine squabbles over who were the actual electors. Hayes needed all the
disputed electoral votes to win, and a Congressional committee, formed to settle
the matter, “caved” to the southerners by agreeing to end Reconstruction and
pull federal troops from the South, essentially abandoning it to the Klan and White
citizen’s councils. The
Grant era KKK act (the enforcement Act of 1871) would now lie dormant and uninforced against racist civil rights violators until the 1960s.
In return, the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes became POTUS, as
would five of the next six, with the exception of two termer/split term Grover
Cleveland, the lone Democrat until 1913. I will now digress to rant on another,
somewhat related, by Party, topic. I do this because, as a History Jedi, the force
is strong in me when truth vs fiction is concerned.
With the exception of James A. Garfield, a "reform" Republican who was assassinated 6 months into his term, the other Republicans especially Hayes, Arthur, Harrison and McKinley had some commonalities, among which were racist abandonment of Southern Blacks, with a blind eye to lynching and other atrocities, This was accompanied by a crass willingness to continually increase Civil War veteran’s pensions to buy the votes of the GAR (Grand Army of The Republic – a Northern veteran’s organization with a political point of view akin to today’s NRA). Five of six post-Civil War Presidents were ex-Union generals and made sure everyone knew it.
In fact, the last surviving
child of a Civil War veteran, Irene Triplett, died this past June (yes 2020!) still
receiving her monthly pension for being born, apparently, of $73.13 monthly. At
the time it was awarded that $73.13 was equivalent to over $1500 monthly!
The entire topic of the Civil War vet pension scam
would take more space that I plan to allot, so here’s a precis: The federal
pension system was a (the) hot topic in the American political
and economic systems in the decades after the war. President Grover Cleveland,
a Democrat, vetoed more than 200 bills related to pensions and
paid for it with his loss in the 1888 presidential election. However, his
successor Benjamin Harrison was equally quick to sign pension bills regardless
of the validity of the claim and Cleveland was able to defeat him in
their 1892 rematch citing pension corruption in the process.
The biggest single change to the pension
system came in 1890 (Republican Benjamin Harrison’s single term) with the
Dependent Pension Act. The Act also allowed widows to receive pensions if their
husbands were disabled for any reason at the time of their death,
not just due to injuries received in service. In 1901 a widow became eligible
for a pension even if she had remarried, so long as she was again a widow.
Children (adults) were added in 1907 at the same time that old age itself was
declared a “disability.” The solution to
all this new expense? Raise tariffs. In fact, the McKinley Tariff of 1890
pushed the tariff rate to 49% on some imported goods and earned the hostility of
non-veteran groups, particularly business organizations.
The reader must
remember here, this was a pension paid ,
not to 20 or 30 year retirees, or (rightly) to those disabled by service, but
simply for being in the military 90 days or more during the Civil War and later
extended under the same provisions to the Mexican war. This was, in today’s
dollars, about $800 a month for simply being alive! OK, ok, enough about the economics of Republican
election bribery in the late 19th century.
Comparing the election of 1868 to the recent 2020 one has gaping flaws of illogic through which one could drive a moving van. First, as the Lone Ranger radio announcer used to proclaim, “Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear” – 2016.
In
that Presidential election, the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, had a popular vote
majority. The Republican, Donald “now Lame Duck” Trump, won because of the
Electoral college, a Constitutional provision which he had frequently derided, pre-election,
in case he had the need to “blame” as he so often does, rather than accept
reality. In any case, Mrs. Clinton conceded
at 2:30 am on the morning after the election was called for Trump. No whining,
no calls of “foul” even though over 50% of the voting populace had declared
their preference for her. Trump won
because of the institution he had criticized throughout the campaign. Period
Now to the present:
In spite of significant Republican attempts at voter suppression, which included a tremendously blatant and direct amount of Presidential propaganda and effort, Joe Biden won
the Popular vote with a more than 6 million vote edge over Trump. He also has a
74 electoral vote edge as well, in what is, in my historical memory, the most
closely observed election in US history. The columnist makes reference to what
Trumpists “believe” about the election but with absolutely no factual statement
as to why. That’s because there simply is no factual data to support even the
most obscure allegation about the real validity of this election. Scrutiny and
even forced (and unjustified) hand recounts have shown no evidence whatsoever
of chicanery of any kind. So why do Trump’s supporters “think” (oxymoron alert)
there was something amiss. Can they not see Rudy “Noseferatu” Giuliani melting
down during multiple public diatribes and bloviations? Listen carefully. There is no “there,”
there, as Gertrude Stein famously said. Zip. Nada. Zilch.
So, back to the
question of “why do they believe him? One supposes it is for the same reason
they believed: “six new steel mills” (none), “Mexico will
pay for the wall” (no, they won’t), “China will pay the tariffs”
(no, we do, $850 per household per year), “I created Veterans Choice”(
no that was Barack Obama), “exploding dishwashers” (no, just no),
"Dems want to shut your churches down, permanently.” (???), “If we
stopped testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any.” (tell
that to the 265 million dead or yesterday’s 170,000 new cases), "There
has never been, ever before, an administration that’s been so open and transparent."
And on that unbelievably false statement I rest my case.
In fact, over most of four years, almost three fourths of the public statements proffered as factual by this Lame Duck have been either “mostly false” (20%) “completely false” (36%), or “outright bald faced lies” (16%). They believe him because he appeals to the darkest and foulest aspects of their psyches: Xenophobia, racism and intolerance, fanned in many cases by grotesquely abused, misused and misdirected “Evangelical Christianity” augmented, but rarely tempered, by those who believe that if it benefits business, no matter how immoral, it’s Good for America. '
We deserve, and just elected, much better.
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