Jill Stein has now raised over $4.5 million to pursue recounts of the vote in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, the three "battleground" states where the vote for president was closest. She says she doesn't necessarily expect the recounts to change the outcome, but there have been so many reported anomalies and oddities -- including counts totaling more than votes -- that for the sake of "Election Integrity" it is better to check again than to simply accept the outcome unquestioningly.
Seems simple and straightforward enough, doesn't it? Huh. The meltdown among the Trump apologists and normalizers is extraordinary. If they've done nothing wrong, they've got nothing to hide, right? Well...
As Lambert over at NC loved to say during the campaign, "This is a wonderfully clarifying election."
Indeed it is, for there has been a wonderful sorting of internet and media sites between Trump lovers and Others. NC, for one, is fully in the Trump camp as it has been since the campaign began. So too, Ian's Place, where the inappropriate Trump fluffing became something of a joke. The entire political class has pledged qualified fealty to the New Boss, and for all intents and purposes, so has almost all the Legacy and New Media.
As far as they're concerned, the (s)election is a done deal, and those malcontents and other losers can just get over it.
So here comes Jill Stein, who barely got 1.5-2.0% of the vote to say, "Hold on just a darned minute."
The reaction was and is fast and furious. So fast and so furious that it is all but certain that something is wrong with the counts, and not just in the "battleground" states, either.
Our elections have long been international jokes -- or perhaps nightmares depending on your point of view. The 2000 (s)election is still capable of raising the ire of millions of Americans and its results continue to affect the lives and survival of tens of millions around the world.
Now this? No. More and more Americans are saying "No," and some are taking action. They see a clear and present danger to the survival of the Republic -- which seems to have dawned on them rather late in the game, but oh well -- and their own survival as well.
They see through Mr. Trump's con. I've pondered that somewhat these last few months since I started paying more attention to the campaign. I've tried to understand why some people see through his con easily while others are seemingly transfixed by his persuasion and blandishments. How does that work exactly?
Well, it's obvious that some are in on the con and hope that by pledging loyalty early they'll get a reward. Tough luck, suckers when it comes to anyone else, they're gonna cash in on Trump's victory, come what may. The reward doesn't have to be money. For some it's just the shared glory of being on the winning side, no matter the struggle.
It's a game, in other words, not real life. Many of these game-players lack any empathy for their fellows; it's just not in their nature to give a good gott-damb over what happens to anyone else, and at least in part because of that, these non-empathetic players respond to Trump as one of their own. Well, sure, except that he and his ilk are more than happy to skewer their own supporters if there's power or profit to be obtained in doing so. Jeebus, do these people not know that?
Some apparently don't. It's "sad" but not sad to see it.
It's not true that we've never had a rich con man at the head of our government. In fact, there have been quite a few in the nation's history, though none that I can recall were as rude and crude a representative of his class as Mr. Trump. None I can recall lacked any social conscience at all. The closest historic example I can think of is Andrew Jackson, and at least from Ms. Ché's perspective as an Elder Cherokee Woman, he wasn't really as bad as he's been made out to be. Or rather, she says, there were reasons for his badness that have gone overlooked and need to be understood to understand why he did what he did, and why he turned the country in the direction he did -- better for some, much worse for others (such as her own people.) It's not helpful, she says, to think of it as a binary, good vs evil. It was far more complicated than that, and much of it had to do with the inner dynamics of Jackson's own family and how that affected his... mind.
[Note: Ms Ché has done a lot of study about Andrew Jackson. She's been to his plantation outside of Nashville, studied the place and the man carefully, read extensively about the times and the people who backed and fought Jackson, has looked into her own family history -- a history that includes both rebels and accommodationists -- and she's worked with other Cherokees who are attempting to comprehend what was going on in those days (1820s to 1840s) that led to Jackson's rise and the removal of the Indians from not just the Southeast but throughout the settler territory east of the Mississippi. I'm not a whole lot of help in that study. My own ancestral history has shown me that any success my ancestors had in this country depended initially on the removal of the Indians from Ohio and Iowa.
On the other hand, Cherokees, though subjected to some terrible conditions thanks to Jackson and those who served him, have not only survived, in many ways they've flourished, something that Ms Ché discovered was part of Jackson's argument for their removal from their lands in the Southeast. He justified it as a means to prevent their genocide. Jackson was no friend of the Indians, to be sure. But he was apparently not the ogre he's been made out to be, either. I won't defend him, but Ms Ché sometimes does, not to "normalize" what he did, but to expand the story to include more than most histories do.]
Trump apologists went ballistic when Jill announced her intention to raise enough money to pursue recounts of the vote in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and their anger only increased when she was able to raise her initial funding request almost overnight.
"A Clintooon plot!" they screamed. "Soros!! Soros!! Soros!!" "Hillary is masterminding this!!!!" Etc.
They say essentially the same things about the street demonstrations that broke out on the announcement of Trump's "victory." They claimed and claim that it is all a "Soros Plot to precipitate a Color Revolution!!!!!"
Nonsense.
Even the Water Protectors are considered to be a "Soros/Clintooon far left plot." It's crazy. CT and paranoia is rampant among Trump Protectors, Defenders, and Apologists.
But there you are, that's where we are in this unstable political situation.
Jill's act of defiance has given them the willies, because she's not Hillary, she doesn't support Hillary, and if anything, she has more contempt for Hillary and the Democratic higher ups than Trumpians do. She's more interested in replacing the corrupt and dangerous system of rule we have today than any Trumpian you'd care to name.
And she sees Trump and his minions as dangerous in office as another Clinton regime might could be. They're all warmongers, thieves, and mountebanks. All of them.
This is all taking place in the context of a furious effort to "normalize" Trump's increasingly erratic and nonsensical talk and behavior. To make light of it, in fact, as if he's only being himself, and himself is what the country voted for.
No they didn't.
The notion that "America elected Trump" is... false. Period. Hillary's popular vote lead is approaching 3 million and may surpass it once all the votes are counted assuming they will all be counted and counted accurately. If America had its say in this election, it was not to elect Trump. It was not to elect Hillary either. The actual "say" of voters this time around was "Neither one, please." A majority voted against Hillary, and against Trump.
Sigh. But that doesn't matter according to the way our presidents are (supposed to be) chosen. Of course those of us who are old enough recall how what's "supposed to be" doesn't matter either when a partisan Supreme Court sees an opening for its own lawless interference in the electoral process. Once that was done and accepted by the political class and its media handmaidens in 2000, the integrity of elections -- to the extent there had ever been any -- was forever compromised.
We the Rabble were shown in no uncertain terms that the (s)election outcome could and would be "adjusted" on behalf of TPTB's preferred candidate at will, and there was nothing the Rabble could do about it.
I think Jill is smart enough to realize that will be the case this time, too, no matter what the recounts show. I don't doubt she's aware that if the results were jiggered in those states on behalf of Trump -- which I tend to think happened -- the recounts are likely to be jiggered as well, "confirming" Trump's "victory" with the same jiggered set of numbers.
That is to say it will be if Trump is TPTB's preferred candidate, and that is not altogether certain at this point. Jill has raised an enormous amount of money for these recounts, more than she was able to raise for her campaign, and she's done it essentially overnight. She raised so much so fast that I can only imagine there are powerful interests who want this challenge to happen. As much as I'd like to think that millions of Little People contributed the remaining pennies in their piggy banks, I doubt that's the case. No, this looks much more like an effort by the High and Mighty to fuck Trump up.
Oh nasty. Well, yeah. That's how these people think. It's how they act. Trump and his followers would be doing it if the shoe were on the other foot, and they'd be rattling their sabres and threatening bloody mayhem the while.
Jill's approach is much.... calmer.
The question of Clintooooon!!!! backing is one of the more ludicrous accusations floating among the Normalizers, as if somehow that would invalidate the effort. Nonsense. Whether she has anything to do with it is not germane to the question of whether the count is accurate or not. Hello?
It's much like the accusation of Soros funding of the demonstrations against the elevation of Trump to the White House. Even if he were funding the demonstrations, so what? No one is being forced to march and carry signs, no one is coercing anyone else to be part of the protests. Those who are part of them are doing so for their own interests and purposes, not on behalf of someone else's agenda.
I'm reminded of the huge antiIraqWar protests back in the day. They were organized by the ANSWER coalition of largely old line Communist organzations. So? The participants for the most part weren't old line Communists and few were even aware of the organizations which formed the ANSWER coalition. It really didn't matter. The point was to physically express dissent from the coming invasion of Iraq.
Millions around the world did. They were unable to stop the invasion and its monstrous consequences.
That failure was educational. People have learned that massive demonstrations for or against pretty much anything can be and will be ignored if the demonstrators dissent from the neoLibCon consensus. Nevertheless, even if they are ignored, mass protest serves a useful purpose in making manifest the Rabble's disagreement with their Rulers, and in bringing together like minded individuals from broadly different political and social positions and perspectives. It's a cumulative thing.
The mass demonstration tactic must be combined with other, less easily ignored tactics to form an effective counter to the ruling consensus. It'll work on occasion. It'll fail too. But it's no good to say that because this or that effort was a failure that "nothing can be done."
What Jill is doing has the potential to undo the (s)election, though she doesn't expect it to. Regardless of the outcome of the recounts, her action throws a spanner in the works and makes the media's (new and legacy) efforts to normalize Trump's elevation to the presidency all that much harder. It isn't "normal" no matter what, nor is it acceptable to a significant portion of the electorate. It's a con....
So we'll see.
As always, we'll see.
And no, this is not about Hillary. Get over it.
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