America, the Beautiful…er Appalling

Commentary

The aftermath of the election is showing America’s true character. Led by the President and his enablers, and supported by almost half the population, this is a litigious, mendacious, deceitful, hypocritical nation.

Earlier this morning, as the results started trickling in showing Joe Biden taking slim leads in Georgia and Pennsylvania while maintaining similarly slim leads in Arizona and Nevada, combined with the expectation that the majority of the remaining votes to be counted in those states appear to favor Biden, I was asked by two people, “Are you feeling better now? Are you feeling good?”

My answer – “I should be, but I’m not.” And, the why I’m not is pretty easy to explain:

• Donald Trump delivered a speech from the White House last night that CNN headlined this way: “Trump delivers the most dishonest speech of his presidency.” The speech was so awful that all but two of the major networks cut their coverage in mid-speech. (Ironically, besides Fox, CNN was the other network that covered the entire speech.) A speech so appalling even the Trump-supporting, Murdoch-owned New York Post headlined its coverage with this: “Downcast Trump makes baseless election fraud claims in White House address.” (Perhaps the only good news coming out of this debacle is the apparent abandonment of Trump by the Post…as evidenced by this other story: “Panic-stricken Trump Jr. calls for ‘total war’ in clueless tweet.”)
• Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Governor, Nikki Haley all came forward supporting Trump’s baseless election fraud claims.
• Former Trump acting Director of National Intellegence, Richard Grenell, who had no intelligence experience upon taking the job (I’m not sure if he has any intelligence, but that’s another story) and who lasted in the job a whole three months, was dispatched to Nevada to disrupt the election count with unsubstantiated claims of election fraud. When pursued and questioned by MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff to provide any evidence of the claims, Grenell literally ran away from the correspondent. (As an aside, and after only three months in the job, Trump gave Grenell his Cabinet chair upon his resignation, something unusual for an acting Cabinet member. Trump made the gesture, apparently, because of Grenell’s status as the first openly gay U.S. Cabinet official. It has not been confirmed if Trump really gave the chair away after Pastor Ralph Drollinger, who runs a Bible Study attended by several members of the Trump administration‘s cabinet and who has implied that homosexuality could be one of the causes of the coronavirus epidemic in the U.S., warned him that he’d better get rid of it lest another Trump official sits in the chair and contracts the “Gay Virus.”)
• Trump lawyers, including Rudolph Giuliani,* have been disrupting the count in all the states in which Trump is behind (but none of the states in which he is ahead) with many frivolous law suits – how about the one in which the poll observers had to be moved closer to the counters; or the one in which the Trump lawyer who claimed Trump observers were not allowed into the counting room, admitted, when queried by the Judge, that actually, there were Trump people in the room.)

*(By the way, one of the Trump sons, I don’t remember if it was clueless [thanks, NY Post] Don Jr. or sleazy Eric, wanted to find a “James Baker-type” to lead the post-election legal battle. Baker, a former secretary of state, consummate DC insider and leader of the 2000 Bush v. Gore dispute, when told of the “fils” Trump search, was reported to have said, “I know Jim Baker. In fact, I am Jim Baker. And Rudy is no Jim Baker!”)

I could go on…but you get the gist.

So, am I feeling better? Certainly better. But good? Not a chance.

Yes, it appears the Joe Biden is set to become the 46th President of the United States. And Kamala Harris, is poised to be the first woman and first person of color to be the next Vice President.

But, who knows what the next few days and weeks will bring?

Who knows what havoc Trump and his minions will continue to wreak on the country in as he engages in a virtual blood fight to maintain his power?

Who knows what a lame-duck Trump, with two+ months until Biden’s inauguration, will do to damage the country even further than he already has?

And, until we get the results of the two Senate run-offs in Georgia in early January, who knows how Biden can possibly work to heal the country with a McConnell-led, GOP majority Senate that contains members like the aforementioned Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and others blocking every initiative?

Sorry…I am feeling better. But the country remains deeply, and possibly irreparably divided. Feeling better is as far as I can go at this point. Feeling good, I fear, is a bridge too far.