NOTHING SURPRISING

There is nothing surprising about the political aftermath from the US national election last November.  In clearing out old magazines I re-read a piece in the September 28 New Yorker.  “What Comes Next” by Jeffrey Toobin, a staff writer at the mag, has the sub-title: “How Trump’s forces could challenge the election results and turn the country into a battleground.” I believe he meant that “battleground” in a metaphorical sense of lawsuits and political conflict.  He never uses nor quotes the phrase “fight like hell”. He does not speculate on the security around the Capitol, nor even the eventuality that Trump’s troops would want to string up Pence as well as Pelosi.  He never once uses the word “militia”, nor mention Fox News, both omissions now seeming naïve and overly confident.   Toobin now seems wrongly optimistic that the deadline for state certification would end most of the conflict, that would have been December 8^th.  But mostly he was accurate and foreseeing as he described all the tactics, lies, chicanery, lawsuits (is that redundant in this case?) and bloviating that would be forthcoming if Trump didn’t win.  The stolen election meme goes back to 2016 when Trumpsters expected to lose and were heating up their complaints in advance of actual voting.

Toobin ends his piece quoting perhaps the most experienced and informed of the Republican legal minds who’ve mastered election litigation. He has long-time right-wing lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg (no relation to Ruth Bader) tell him: “The truth is that after decades of looking for illegal voting, there’s no proof of widespread fraud….Elections are not rigged.”

That should have sealed the deal in a world where information and reason matter. Ginsberg is deeply right-wing, a supporter of the Federalist Society which happily vetted all of President Trump’s judicial appointees.

Ginsberg worked some years as a reporter as a young man, then got his law degree. He may have come to realize that controlling lawsuits is a better route to power than merely informing the public and expecting results. His biggest single achievement was heading the legal fight that made George W. Bush President in 2000, even though W had many fewer popular votes.

In December, 2020, Ginsberg appeared on CNN where he was then a regular and said that the Electoral College vote on the 14th would close the case.

Ginsberg’s last noted public words were on CNN, January 6th: “The bottom line is that Trump’s efforts to void the electoral college will fail. Just as they have in the 60 court cases trying to overturn the vote of the people in an election he lost.”

Since that date Ginsberg has dropped from public view. One may wonder if it is a question of personal safety. Oppose Trumpland and death threats will follow. The death threats against Congress have doubled this year. It’s been openly suggested that’s why so many Repubs vote against his impeachment. Recall, this Ginsberg gets at least some credit for our most expensive war–Iraq 2–where we’ve spent over two trillion dollars. But haven’t we Yanks made Iraq just a wonderful place, like a suburb of Miami, even? Like Hialeah? Ooops, sorry–latest scene of another one of those bothersome mass shootings that clutter the news websites so often. I wait for the NRA or Republicans to believe that mass killings are some conspiracy by zero population growth groups, or sponsored by a group trying to curb climate change. Feed that conspiracy to Trump and he’ll happily blast it globally. Somebody check Putin’s secret Facebook pages and see if the meme has been born.

Nothing surprising in the gunning, either. The US has one of the world’s highest murder rates. There are more guns than humans…or robins…or pronghorn. More bullets than stars in the sky perhaps.

And our violent history says much of our culture and society. One of the finest American reporters in the last century was William Shirer. Reflecting on the social and cultural conflicts of the end of the 19th Century he wrote: “One was faced, then, in America from an early age with the intolerance and violence of our people, with the frenzy with which they could be whipped up by an irresponsible press, shoddy political leaders, hypocritical captains of industry and bigots in the pulpit.  The hysteria would die down for a time and then suddenly flare again.”                              —Twentieth Century Journey. published in 1976…45 years ago…Vietnam War still recent, Oklahoma City bombings and IRaq War not even conceivable, yet

Still, nothing surprising, sad to say.