But It Won't Be Over

If all goes well, we’ll awaken a week from today to the ghastly thought that we’ll be listening to that voice for the next four years.

I say if all goes well, because if the election is as close as the predictors say it will be — sooner or later, just by chance, they will be right — this thing could drag on for months, or it could result in instant rioting. I say that voice because no one who should be allowed to run free can stand the sound of either of the presidential candidates.

I sometimes think the outrage over January 6, 2021 is as much over non-lefties having the temerity to riot as the event itself. No one much fussed the previous year when the death of a street criminal in police custody led leftists to burn cities and throw a multi-state funeral that put King Tut’s to shame, and no one dared to criticize it, never mind bring it to an end.

So I say “if all goes well” because the best we can hope for is that the long national hangover can finally begin, with a minimum of other disruptions. As Nate Silver wrote last week, “Basically everyone loses 25 IQ points in the final 2 weeks of an election campaign, it's like showing up to a party where everyone is 6 drinks in.”

No one with working brain cells numbering in double digits or more can be for either of the two major party candidates. The good news is that one will lose; the bad news is that one will win. This election is about who is less awful. It’s a close choice, because both are terrible, and surely you have wondered how these two monkeys managed to get nominated. Almost every vote will be cast with a subtext of “just make this terrible campaign go away!” Which, sadly, is not on the ballot.

Let’s take a moment and consider our choices. The Democrats nominated this. (The video was put together by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s group, scarcely the locus of conservative philosophy, and you really should watch it. It’s the best argument I’ve seen during this entire campaign.) What took over the Republican party said this. One of those two will run the country until 2029. If you pray, divided government might be good to add to your intentions. It might not move the country forward, but it could slow its destruction.

I suspect that it has something to do with our standards not having eroded but their having largely disappeared. In this decade we have had a pandemic, and numerous opportunistic people who took advantage of it. I’m not just talking pharmaceutical companies, who made billions on useless and sometimes fatal “vaccines,” or politicians who said stupid things about them. We went along with them and are paying the price, and will.

I mean, too, other things, such as people accepting rioting and cities burning following the death of a guy arrested for passing counterfeit money while drugged to the gills, and the authorities doing absolutely nothing about those riots. The governor who led in doing nothing about it is one of the candidates for vice president. (Do you know how long and hard the Democrats had to look before they could find someone as bad as their presidential candidate to be her running mate?)

Is there anything that is too much for the country to swallow?

The notion of right and wrong can’t be totally dead in us. When Bugout Joe Biden surrendered to the Taliban a few months after he took office, the country pretty much let it be known that it had had its fill of him. The number of people who liked him fell below the level of those who can’t stand him. He never recovered. Harris says she can’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden did. She is lying — there are many things, all politically unpopular, that Biden didn’t do that she would do and will do, given the opportunity.

Normally, Biden’s unpopularity should have resulted in a wave of Republican victories in the Congressional elections of 2022. But it didn’t, and the reason is Donald J. Trump. Trump demanded vengeance on the country for not re-electing him. Make no mistake: he lost in 2020 and he knows he lost. (He is deadly serious in enforcing on the country Ed Koch’s old joke when people asked him to run again after he lost re-election as mayor of New York City. Declining to run again, Koch said, “The people voted me out. The people must be punished.”)

The Republicans lost in 2022 because Trump would endorse only those who kissed his . . . well, let’s say his ring. Only those who would demonstrate that their devotion to Trump exceeded any loyalty to the truth, by reciting the false oath that Trump had been the real victor in 2020, would get his support. Such low characters tend to have other shortcomings, too. They lost. Right, Doctor Oz?

Harris wants to transform the country into something not unlike Red China. (Seriously. Watch the video in the first link above.) As I wrote recently to a friend, during much of this campaign I’ve had the sense that neither party is all that interested in winning. And it makes some sense, if they figure that the the fan will become heavily soiled in the next four years, with the winner of next week’s election being blamed, and whoever follows will gain Rooseveltian powers because of the crisis. (Poor Kamala is not in on the joke — she is the joke.)

In Trump’s case, he’s limited to one more term, so he can happily spend the country into oblivion with the bill coming due January 20, 2029. Indeed, that’s exactly what he wants, to be remembered as the president before the bad times hit. The purpose of the United States, to Trump, is to serve as a monument to Trump.

Do we want a president who will establish concentration camps, refuse to leave after two terms, and attempt to stack the Supreme Court? Well, we had such a president. Upon his death he was replaced by Harry Truman. We’re still trying to recover from him.

So the question on the minds of sober people ought to be which candidate is more easily survivable. From which will it be more likely possible, four years hence, to recover? I have every confidence that Harris would be far worse in rendering the country unrecognizable. Trump, meanwhile, would leave us a country with no voice of conservative principles.

Which is the painful, prolonged disease and which is the terminal diagnosis?

That’s our choice. Or, you could just write in “NO!”

Historians a hundred years hence, presuming there are historians then and presuming there is a then then, will puzzle over the insanity of this election. We, living through it, have no good answers to offer.

A week from today we will be in a daze, if things go well, if we’re not cowering in our homes in fear of our lives. That’s if things go well. We may actually welcome the disorientation that will come this weekend when through government edict and for no demonstrable reason the clocks will be changed by an hour.

Also a week from today the campaign for the 2028 presidency will begin. Otherwise, the news channels would have to cover the actual news. They lack the skills and brains to do that, so they’ll continue to be 24-hour political soap opera channels, instead, staffed by dimwitted peroxide addicts in spike heels and flashing “News Alert” when the only thing new is the time.