Election Day 2024

Are we finished yet?

As I write this, the day before the election, the country is on edge.  Even the Wall Street Journal had an article about how some 60% of the country is suffering with anxiety and half the survey participants are angry. We are bombarded with TV and social media commercials.  My phone is being blown up by text messages (the new robocalls) as this candidate or that predicts that without my money, life as we know it, will cease to exist. The governors of Washington, Oregon and Nevada have put their national guards on standby for election day.

Our President (that would be Joe Biden in case you forgot) has told 49%-51% of the American public) that they are garbage.  We are told that fascism is on the march and led to believe that we haven’t seen this many Nazis since Germany invaded France in the spring of 1940 and that once again, this is the most important election in our lifetime.

Nevertheless, with all of the panic, rallies, fear mongering and millions of dollars spent to engage and enrage us, the polls have not changed substantially since June when the race was between Trump and Biden which kind of indicates that all of the agony that we have suffered in the last 4 months has been for naught.  Please make it stop!!!  And we hope that it will when Americans go to the polls on November 5^th .  But will it?

Nah!  Look Back.  The pitched battle for the direction of the country has been going on since at least 2016.  After a surprise win by Trump, we have had Hillary Clinton and the left asserting that Trump was an illegitimate President, and that they would form “the resistance” to stop him.  After all, how could such a creature defeat Hillary Clinton to prevent the ascendancy of the first female President of the United States?  The resistance created the Russian collusion hoax that sapped the energy of the Trump Administration for 2 and half years only to be followed by impeachment and a trial that never had any chance of success.

Shortly after, the 2020 presidential campaign began, this time with Biden eking out a narrow victory.  Then Trump alleged that the election was stolen from him.  We had the January 6^th “mostly peaceful protest” and endured yet another impeachment attempt as Trump was trying to clean out his desk in an attempt to say, “never again Donald.” And of course, there was the George Floyd “mostly peaceful protests” where cities burned, and police departments were defunded.  Also, by the way, let’s not forget the COVID pandemic which most rational people (which are becoming fewer and fewer) believed wasn’t not the fault of either the Republicans or the Democrats. However, it did take a year out of our political life until a vaccine was developed allowing the country to slowly open up in 2021.

Starting on “Day 1”, Biden reversed most of Trump’s polices on immigration which led to the surge of immigrants which overwhelmed the southern border and many cities in the interior. Then Biden abandoned Afghanistan resulting in the deaths of 13 U.S. servicemembers and the wounding of another 45, along with the deaths of more than 170 Afghan civilians in August 2021 so he could say that he had completely withdrawn troops before the 20-year anniversary of 9/11. On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.

Meanwhile shortly thereafter, Trump hinted at another run for the Presidency, so no one was surprised that on November 15, 2022, after an interminable mid-term election season, he announced that he was running for President again.  Jack Smith was appointed as Special Council three days later and criminal indictments followed in New York in March 2023, in Florida in June 2023, and in Georgia and Washington DC in August 2023.

Expectations that the criminal charges would take Trump out of the presidential race backfired as it merely increased and solidified his support.  The first voting took place in Iowa in January 2024 with the nominations wrapped up by Biden and Trump by March 12^th.  By summer. Biden’s mental decline was on full display during the presidential debate between Biden and Trump.  Democrats panicked as donors began to withdraw money, and Biden was forced out weeks later.  However, on the way out, he endorsed Kamala Harris, his vice-president, shutting off any other competition which would have had to suffer the claims of being racist, sexist, or both.  Then we were left with the campaigns that the main intellectual offerings were that Trump and his MAGA supporters were fascists and Nazis (and late breaking news, garbage) … while from the Trump campaign, Harris was vacuous, stupid and the worst ever….terrible.

So, do you really think that after November 5^th when all the votes are counted, and all the litigation is resolved that we will return to anything representing national calm and peace? Nah.  November 5^th will just be another day in the preservation/transformation of America.  If you think that our nation’s discontent will be over on November 5^th or whenever the election is called, I would disabuse you of that notion.  No, my political friends, no matter whoever wins, we, as a country, will continue to be as unhappy as we are now, and the campaign for President in 2028 will begin on November 6^th.  When the leader of one half of the country thinks that the other half is uneducated Nazi garbage and must be stopped at all costs while the other half thinks that half the country is populated by stupid elite snobs who exist merely to run their lives, I suggest that we got some issues.

Trump will continue to face old criminal allegations and new impeachments which will suck up his time, energy, and money so he can’t do anything, while Harris will continue to try to run the country through administrative agencies and executive orders hoping to transform America before the Supreme Court slaps her down.

Trump professes that once his policies are enacted, everyone will love it and love him because we are going to be winning again, while Harris says she is going to unite the country without any hint as to how she will incorporate the Nazi hoards that she believes are an existential threat to the country.  Meanwhile 79% of Americans think that the country is going on the wrong track and if Harris wins, I doubt that her only professed policy of change being that “she is not Joe Biden” will work to calm the American discontent.

We will find that the 2024 election has been a distraction from our problems which we had prior to the campaigns.  These problems will not be resolved as neither candidate will have a mandate to implement the consensus of the people going forward.  There is no consensus.  We will face the same problems which not only have not been resolved but have been allowed to fester while we have been otherwise distracted.

We still will be faced with the effects of inflation, immigration, runaway government spending, the effects of climate change policies, energy shortages, international gangs and crime, fentanyl poisoning the American populace,  transgender rights, DEI, housing, the dawn of the information age with related issues of AI, social media, misinformation while in the rest of the world, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East continue with the potential of the invasion of Taiwan on the horizon.

No, my friends, there will be no rest for the politically weary.