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It's almost over

It must feel like the world is falling in for the Republicans.  I suppose this is why Mitch the Turtle is so anxious to get Amy Coney Barrett through the Senate Monday.  With her on the Supreme Court Bench, they will be able to challenge the election results as the absentee ballots roll in.  

However, at this point it looks like the election will be called shortly after the last polls close on the West Coast, as Biden is pulling ahead in all the battleground states, leaving Superspreader Donny scurrying around the country to drum up last-minute support as he visits as many as three states in one day. Of course, Sleepy Joe can't get too relaxed.  You can never take a vote for granted in the final stretch.

Muted Donny had a hard time at the last debate.  Unable to talk over Biden or the moderator, he tried to resort to playing Mr. Nice Guy by complimenting Kristen Welker at one point.  This after disparaging her on twitter in the run-up to the debate.  Releasing the 60 Minutes interview on facebook, in which he walked out on Leslie Stahl for pressing him too much with thorny questions, isn't doing him any good either.  He comes across as a whiny little brat, but then he always does.  

It's like Problem Child writ large.  However, Conservatives love this potty-mouthed brat.  I shook my head at all the glowing posts from my Northwest Florida high school friends on facebook as Trump flew into Pensacola for one of his superspreader rallies.  Fortunately, most of them were smart enough not to attend.

One struggles to understand this love for the Donald.  It's not like anything he does benefits them, especially these rallies, which have resulted in upticks of coronavirus cases in the states he's visited.  The US hit a staggering high of 85,000 new cases the other day and all Donald had to say is that the numbers are "fake, fake, fake," blaming the surge on too much testing, and telling his supporters that "we are rounding the corner beautifully" at a rally in the Villages, a sprawling retirement village in Florida.

Any reasonable person would see Trump for the cheap huckster that he is, but it seems many people enjoy the "wow factor" of his rallies.  The guy definitely knows how to stir up an audience, usually by feeding into their ugly biases, the way Baron Sacha Cohen is doing once again as Borat. But, how many of these poor deluded souls are there?  They obviously represent far more than a sliver of the population, as Trump consistently polls between 42 and 45 per cent in approval ratings.  How far removed from society do you have to be to believe this nonsense?

No amount of rallies is going to save the Donald this time around, even if pollster Robert Cahaly believes "shy" Trump voters will propel His Orangeness to a second term.  The demographics are not shaping up the same way they did last time for Trump.  Senior citizens have abandoned him in droves.  He's lost the suburban white women vote.  Even non-college educated white men are questioning his leadership.  All across the board, his numbers have shrunk, and in some cases flipped.  He simply has no path to victory this time around, short of challenging the election results all the way to the Supreme Court, but this only if enough states are close enough to call the results into question.

His campaign team hoped at one point that he might flip New Hampshire and Maine and Nevada, but that seems highly unlikely now.  He is sliding further and further behind in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the states that won him the 2016 election.  He's having a hard time overcoming the Scranton boy with deep Catholic roots, who has cut deeply into his base in all these states.  Making matters worse, Trump trails in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona, four states that should have been comfortably in his column if he had been any bit like the president he perpetually claims himself to be.

It's pretty hard to say you are the best president America has even known, as the pandemic sweeps across the country, tens of millions remain unemployed and the economy teeters on the edge of collapse.  Yet, he does, calling all these woeful domestic stories fake news.  He thinks if he repeats his mantra often enough and loud enough people will believe him and turn to him at the last moment.  So what if more than half of the American electorate will have voted by election day.  A record 51 million votes have been cast so far and we still are 9 days out of E-Day.  Not even Obama enjoyed this much of an early surge in voting in 2008.

People aren't so much voting for Biden as against Trump.  Few expect Joe to be the transformational president that many believed Obama would be.  They just what a return to normalcy.  A president that doesn't have to have his mouth washed out with soap everyday, who leaves fires burning behind him everywhere he goes, who refuses to recognize that our nation is in great peril from the divisions he has sown in this country.  Not since antebellum time have we seen such a reckless and clueless president than this, but the worst you could say for James Buchanan was that he was horribly ineffectual.  Trump is actually fomenting a renewed civil war at his rallies, urging a call to arms if he is not re-elected.

Through it all, Mitch girds the Republican Party for what will most likely be Democratic rule for the next four years.  He will have his firewall in the Supreme Court.  It will be pretty hard to get any legislation to stick with 6 conservative judges on the bench, four of whom they can count on to overturn any Democratic legislation or executive order.  It probably won't even get that far, as he has littered the federal appellate courts across the country with conservative judges as well, ready to strike down any new liberal law once a case is brought before them.  He figures that after four years of inaction, Americans will be clamoring for a Republican president again, just not Donald Trump.

This is why Amy Coney Barrett is so important to him.  He will do whatever it takes to get her through the Senate.  There are no more John McCains to stand up to him unless some shy conservative senator decides at the last moment he has had enough of this charade.  So far, only two Republicans have firmly spoken out against filling the vacant seat on the Supreme Court, and most likely they will abstain.  Mitch still believes he has 51 yes votes, and that he won't need the Vice-President to cast the deciding vote.

So, most likely it will be a Pyrrhic victory for Joe Biden and the Democrats on November 3.  We will be locked in a contentious battle for the next four years over every effort to deal with the pandemic, the economy, climate change, as the Republicans will buck any kind of stimulus package, claiming once again that what the country needs is more austerity after running up the single largest annual budget deficit in American history - $3.1 trillion!  This administration has added a staggering $7 trillion dollars to the national debt in four years.  There will be no way to overcome this massive revenue shortfall in four years, and Mitch knows this.  He and his conservative cronies will blame the Democrats for our ailing economy, not the huckster who was forced out of office.

Well, you can only begin to undue the mess by getting rid of the principal culprit, and that begins with Donald Trump.  Hopefully, Americans will wise up a little and not be so easily taken by phony businessmen who believe only they can bring about economic prosperity.  But, the problem goes far deeper than just this one guy, to all those who enabled him to pull off this great con.  That begins in places like Northwest Florida, represented by Matt Gaetz in the House.  We have to flush all these turds out of Washington.  Only then can we begin to have a level of decency the vast majority claim to want.  Mostly, I just want to end this ugly reality show we have been forced to endure these past four years!


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