Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something. – Wesley, The Princess Bride

Like a lot of folks, I had high hopes that this election would be done and gone by now.  Months, if not years, of constant bickering, complaining, and campaigning by unruly apes of all stripes have long since worn everyone’s patience paper thin.

The only way that could have happened was for one of the candidates to have walked away with a clear and decisive win last week.  As we all know, that didn’t happen.

So, in a replay of 2000, except this time it’s done four lines of uncut Columbian coke and four tabs of Berkeley-strength LSD, we are drawn into a quagmire of pronouncements, accusations, and shit-flinging.  One side wants us all to believe that the other side is a bunch of dirty, rotten scoundrels who can’t be trusted as far as we can throw them.  The other side wants to declare victory and go home to plot and have a nice nap, but please disregard the man behind the green curtain.

Problem is, they’re both right, or at least partly so.

Larry Correia has good write-ups of the ‘anomalies’ found in the way that votes are being counted in battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.  If you haven’t read them already, do yourself a favor and go on over there.  

I’m not much of an analyst anymore, but even without someone crunching the numbers, this all looks off to me, with off being the most polite way I can put it.  There’s a lot of smoke obscuring our view of what’s going on while the votes are counted.  I just wonder how much fire there is.

I’m not going to surprise anyone when I say that I didn’t support the Biden candidacy, and I have, to put it mildly, grave misgivings about a Biden presidency.  Leave out the possibility that he won’t make it through his term and is replaced by Kamala Harris and take him at his word that he’s fit for the office and will serve out at least one four-year term. 

Joe Biden has been a wart on the ass of American politics since I was in diapers.  My political coming of age happened while he was running for president the first time, all while openly attacking a black Supreme Court nominee and black young men in general.

So, now the country will have to withstand weeks, if not months, of political and judicial knife fights.   Fledgling peace deals in the Middle East will, at best, stay in an uncertain stasis, while China and Iran will exploit our inattention to our detriment.  That’s nothing to say about how the government will be basically paralyzed as we head into another economic downturn brought about by the latest reaction to Covid-19.

In short, we don’t need this right now, if ever.

That’s the short term.  The current crisis will end in January, when we will open up a whole new batch of post-Christmas crises.  The long term will make this look like a polite Victorian afternoon tea.

If Biden wins, there will be, at least, the perception that the election was gained through a grand exercise in ballot-box stuffing, undead hordes with voter registration cards, and the connivance of at least a few federal agencies.

If Trump threads the needle and ekes out a win, or at least a tie that throws the whole thing to the House of Representatives, then the last four years will have been nothing but the opening act for a three-ring circus of rioting, gridlock, and demagoguery that will last until at least 2024.

So, we are going to either see vote tallies that are soiled by opacity and a general feeling of sleaze on the part of a large number of Americans, or we are going to see an election decided in the most legalistic way imaginable.  

Either way, our faith in semi-clean elections and orderly transitions of power from one president to another are going to be shaken for a generation.  

No matter what, half of the American electorate is going to be mad as hell, and they aren’t going to take it anymore. They will believe that the election was stolen from them, and one side will be right. 

People don’t want to understand the nuances of voter registration and voting laws in Sheboygan or Punxsutawney.  They want a clear, unambiguous, up or down vote that they can point to and, even if they lost, say that the rules were fair and were applied fairly.  Shenanigans at the polls or arcane legal and political maneuvers don’t do that.

God forbid that something should happen, or almost happen, to either Biden or Trump.  That would be enough to get their most fervent supporters into the streets for a good old fashioned insurrection.

So, we’ll see.  The last time things were this muddled, President Hayes sold out to the southern states to gain the presidency.  I wonder what Biden or Trump are willing to bargain with to win this time.