Strange Days

 

 

Jeffrey St. Clair >>

 

+ I have no feel for how this strange election will turn out. I sense that most people want both leading candidates to lose and lose badly, but they think and fear Trump will win. Of course, that may be their fatalism taking over, and who could blame them? The polls seem unnaturally close–to the extent you can poll cellphones. People keep telling me you can’t, but they sure as hell seem to have no trouble bombarding me with their non-stop texting. And I’m hit with a dozen more every time I text “STOP” back. So I’ve stopped looking at texts, and if you send one, don’t expect a reply until after the election is settled sometime in January.

 

CNN has Harris up in Michigan and Wisconsin, but tied in Pennsylvania, which is slightly surprising and may represent some vengeful machinations by Josh Shapiro for passing him over as Veep, even though the Governor of Pennsylvania is somewhere to the right of the ADL on Palestine. Not that Harris is any less hostile toward the starving, orphaned and maimed of Gaza. Harris’s campaign has offered voters little more than a droning insistence that she’s not Trump, which is much less obvious than it may appear, at least in terms of policy. In fact, she’s had to recruit the likes of Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban to testify to the distinction, narrow as it may be, which is unlikely to prove helpful in the long run, even among the white suburban women voters of Philadelphia, who she seems to have sacrificed what remains of the Democratic base to attract. She sent Obama to repair the damage, though he seems to have squandered whatever mojo he once possessed.

 

Apparently, she’s up comfortably in that lone Nebraska district around Lincoln. If Harris holds Pennsylvania, she could still win, even if she loses Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. But if that’s how it plays out apparently Mike Johnson now has some scheme to muck things up in the House. Then there’s Virginia, where Harris should be leading by 5 or 6 points given that Trump’s people want to slash the federal workforce by 2/3s, but she’s only ahead 1 or 2 points and that was before the Supreme Court’s whacko ruling this week (Bush v. Gore, redux) allowing the state to purge its voter rolls even of legally registered voters, which should be an ominous sign for Harris.

 

I tend to think Harris wins a plurality, but not a majority, of the popular vote 49-47 and loses again in the electoral college, even though I hope it turns out the reverse, if only because it might ignite MAGA into laying waste to the EC, despite the fact that anti-democratic relic of the slave-owning era works entirely to their advantage. I flipped my way through the 200 dreary pages of the Oregon Voters pamphlet and only found two races that captured my attention: both for Soil and Water Conservation District Commissioners and one of those was running unopposed. 

 

Cockburn used to say, vote for whoever makes you happy, knowing that the vote-counting machines will probably record it for someone you despise. So I filled out my ballot, though not very joyfully, and drove to the drop-off site in our little mill town, where the ballot box was being “monitored” by four MAGA people, adorned in their red hats, who, undeterred by the drenching rain, recorded my arrival on their cellphones and asked to see my ID, a request I replied to with a customary Mexican gesture, as I told them I’d left my papers back in Juarez. Hasta la vista, muchachos.

 

+ They must be apprehensive about how I was casting my vote for Soil and Water Conservation District #2 Commissioner.