If Only I’d…

I remember when my Uncle Mick died. I wasn’t there, but I heard the story. It was Halloween.

One of the little neighbor boys went over to my Aunt Rose and Uncle Mick’s house to show them his Halloween costume. Mick bent over to see it a bit better and just went to the floor. The trick-or-treater’s mom was there and performed CPR and as a RN, she was good at it. The truth was that Mick was dead before he hit the floor. It was particularly painful for me because my cousins, Jimmy and John, were the ones we saw the most often and of course that made them closer than my other cousins. So our family adored Rose and Mick.

After he died, there were the questions that come up. What if I’d been trained in CPR? What if we’d gone for semi-annual check-ups? Why didn’t I see the signs earlier? You know, the “If Only I’d” questions. Those were put to rest because the professional health care worker was RIGHT THERE! and she didn’t see the signs, and no amount of CPR was going to bring him back. Mick’s doctor was surprised that he’d had this condition. Had he gone to more doctor’s appointments, it most likely wouldn’t have shown up on any of the usual tests. So all of this expertise basically shut down the questions and allowed my aunt and her boys to live without the regret of what could have been “If Only I’d…”

The election is over. Well, mostly over. There were irregularities in the process.

1. The voter turnout…the number of people actually voting was 30 million people more than last election. The biggest difference up until now was in 2004 when 17 million people more showed up to vote than the previous election. George W Bush was elected for his second term.
2. The percentage of voters that were eligible and voted was also unprecedented. The average turn-out is about 55% with the exceptions being 1952 with 61.6%, 1960 with 62.8%, 1964 with 61.4%, and 1968 with 60.7%. There was a whopping 68.97% this election!!!
3. There were record numbers of mail-in ballots. Because of the Corona Virus, some processes had to be modified. Not all states had mail in procedures that were consistent with the situation we found ourselves in due to the pandemic. Some required witnesses, some didn’t. Some ballots were mailed out by the state government, others had to be requested.
4. There were unprecedented returns to be counted and procedures in THAT part of the polling process that needed to be addressed.
5. The race was not called on the day of the election by the media. They didn’t have a clue. Most projections in the previous years were based on exit polls. Well if that many people are voting by mail, the projections will not be accurate.

Mr. Trump MUST challenge all the perceived and actual irregularities so there can be no “If only I’d…” questions about the legitimacy of the election. If he just acknowledged that the race was over and he had lost, there would be some conspiracy theorists that would debate the legality and the validity of the results. This way, the legal challenges that Mr. Trump is mounting will actually go to assuage those who doubt the outcome of the elections.

If you go back and read the Foundation Series by Asimov, you recall the Future Historians who make use of statistical tools to make the right calls and take the society in the correct direction. The fly in the ointment was the Mule who was the exception to the rule and messed up all the calculations. Donald Trump was our version of the Mule. According to all our society expects in an presidential candidate…most of that prescribed by the media (both social and news), Mr. Trump should not have even made it through the primaries. He said everything wrong. His actions were the opposite of what his pollsters and advisers would have proposed in order to gain the support of his target market. He tweeted so much that his campaign managers were running in circles trying to spin and put out the fires he started. His statements were obnoxious and offensive. His makeup artist was insane.

The machine had determined that after a POC president, the next should be female. Hillary was supposed to win. And yet… Things that should have incensed women didn’t deter them from voting for Mr. Trump. Things that should have outright shocked people of color didn’t dampen their enthusiasm for him. Things that should have distressed fairly intelligent people didn’t dissuade them from supporting him. His lies and his questionable character didn’t detour the Religious that supported him. That was precisely the opposite of what was supposed to happen. Mr. Trump should not have, under any circumstances, won the last election. But he did.

Yesterday, the machine triumphed once again. We have a cool, calm president, not a bombastic short-tempered narcissist. Granted, he’s old. But Mr. Trump was 70 years old when he won the presidency so he was old too. If he mounts an election for 2024, he’ll be 78…about the same age as Mr. Biden is now. We now have a president that has 50 years of political experience, not someone who was basically a businessman who’d had several questionable ventures and several bankruptcies. We have a president who is versed in the art of diplomacy and not into the “My button is bigger than your button” type exchanges. We even have a POC FEMALE as a vice president. But, are these good things? We have yet to see.

Now Consider: We already have a new normal due to the pandemic. We also have a new normal when it comes to interpersonal and intergroup relations. We don’t discuss anything, we just start throwing stuff. We seem to consider over-legislation and a corporate aristocracy to be the default. This may or may not change since we have a Democrat in the White house and Republicans running the House and the Senate…though only 2 votes separate the Republicans and the Democrats in the Senate. If the Republicans do to President Biden what they did to President Obama, it could be a rocky 4 years.

But at least it won’t be because of the “If Only I’d…” questions.

UPDATE: Yes, it would have been necessary for President Trump to challenge the elections and remove all doubt of fraud and impropriety. But when all 63 lawsuits were dismissed or thrown out, he should have stopped. But, much to my confusion as well as that of the rest of the country, he didn’t stop.

Instead of conceding, he incited a riot. He insisted he’d won in a landslide, but he’d lost by 7 million votes. You cannot manufacture 7 million votes. The fact that he lost the popular vote to Hillary and still won four years ago, he should have known he had less than 1/2 of his constituency supporting him. And yet, he had a great crowd of supporters in bizarre costumes and carrying weapons and confederate flags and instead of telling them not to do something violent, he ENCOURAGED them with references to civil war. What did he think he could have accomplished? He threatened the governor of Georgia to nullify 11,000+ votes so he could win Georgia’s electoral votes. The governor did not comply. 16 votes would not have changed the outcome of the election. He still would have lost. 232+16 is only 248. He needed 270 to win. This is not a landslide.

Then his supporters stormed the castle. You cannot brandish firearms and breach a federal building being guarded by armed police and not expect to be fired on. Some were carrying American Flags, some the “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, and some with confederate flags. The supporters of this rash act and the perception that all the insane rantings and accusations made by the president were true resulted in posts saying, “This was Antifa and BLM, Not us!” And yet, nary a black face in the crowd. Lots of weird white guys in costumes though…It looked like the studio audience in “Let’s Make a Deal.” So…who were those masked men? Certainly not the Lone Ranger and his buddies! We were lucky cooler heads prevailed or it would have been a blood bath. Did you know one of the protesters tazed himself to death? Had it been a BLM riot, there would have been dozens of deaths. There were 4. One was self inflicted, and one was a heart attack. BLM could have attacked the capitol building with cell phones and pool noodles and would have been mown down by automatic rifle fire. So these were Trump supporters who wanted to see him in office for another four years. Antifa groups do no support Trump.

Interrupting the counting of the ballots which ensures that a fascist dictator does NOT come to power would seem to be counter productive to an Antifa group’s ideology. If the plan was to frame Trump supporters, it was badly done. There were too many “True Trump Believers” in the crowd to indicate there were any Antifa sentiments. These believers would have trounced anyone they suspected of being members of BLM or Antifa.

13 days until the inauguration. I would suggest that the Secret Service assign many many more units to protect President-elect Biden from an Assassination attempt because you can bet your bottom dollar, there will be one. And there may be an attempt on Trump as well. Someone has let the crazies out of the box.