US Elections 2020: shock and horror

This press conference had both me and Mrs. Arbel breathless.

Note that they are specifically saying “this is just an overview of what we have found”. It takes the guts of Rudy Giuliani (who got his spurs fighting the Cosa Nostra as a DA and then US Attorney) and of Sidney Powell to take on this…. I can only call it a ‘hostile takeover’ of the US electoral system.

I’ve wrangled data for a living half my life, not counting my years in graduate school. Political sympathies aside, I smelled a rat from the day after the election — there were too many ‘convenient’ statistical coincidences. But I assumed this was part incompetence, part local voter fraud, and part a system of mail-in ballots that simply begs to be abused. What was just revealed is something you’d expect as a plot bunny for a political thriller—but set in a fictional banana republic or emerging country somewhere. Not in the greatest democracy in the world.

I wrote earlier that this was no longer about Trump. After what I just witnessed, this goes up a hundredfold. Not just the long litany of vote manipulations (testified to by sworn affidavits or material evidence — herestheevidence.com), aided and abetted by complicit local and state officials — this was almost old hat in corrupt cities like the Chicago I once called home, just more of the same. But now things have taken a quantum leap. This is something else again.

I grieve for what is happening to the US, the birth place of my beloved wife, and the ‘shining city on a hill’ for so many around the world. My wife is a lifelong Democrat — from the days that said party at least still pretended to care about democracy, freedom of speech, and the welfare of the middle class. She never left the party — it left her and people like her to become the party of the Brahmandarins, of transnational oligarchic collectivists.

If what just happened is allowed to stand without drastic corrective action — regardless of which man will ultimately live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on January 21 — the US will no longer be a democracy. It will be the fiefdom of an oligarchy with sevenfold the sense of entitlement of yesteryear’s nobility, and none of its sense of noblesse oblige. Something will survive — with its name and its face, the way the institutions of the Roman Republic were maintained for show in the Roman Empire, even as they became sickening self-parodies.

If a Jew can quote Christian scripture (Mt. 7:3), I would tell everybody who has been screeching about ‘Russian collusion’ this: “Why beholdest thou the mote that [thou sayest] is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

Outside on the street, a loud party is going on, celebrating this or that, or maybe just unwinding after the second lockdown. Let them enjoy themselves—unaware as they are (except perhaps tomorrow via a highly incomplete and/or tendentious news report) of the enormity that took place ten hours by plane away.

But I cannot help being reminded of Izhar Ashdot’s Hebrew song about such a situation:

birkhovot Hiroshima sheli, ha-ason lo kara…
(On the streets of my Hiroshima, the disaster didn’t happen…)

UPDATE: Rasmussen poll before the press conference: “According to a Rasmussen poll conducted November 17-18, nearly half of likely voters, 47 percent, believe the election was stolen from Trump. If Joe Biden is ultimately certified as the winner, there will undoubtedly be a big fat asterisk on his presidency. […] 75 percent of Republicans believe it is very likely (61 percent) or somewhat likely (14 percent) that the election was stolen from Trump. But, according to the poll, while 69 percent of Democrats say it is not at all likely (61 percent) or not very likely (8 percent) that the election was stolen from Trump, 30 percent of Democrats believe it is very likely (20 percent) or somewhat likely (10 percent) that it was.” Matt Margolis adds at the link: “Let me repeat, nearly a third of Democrats believe it is likely that the election was stolen from President Trump. That’s a remarkable number. Huge, in fact.”

John Hinderaker, himself a veteran attorney, sounds a cautionary note about researchers doing their proper homework. This hold doubly true when the stakes are this high and the allegations this startling.

And Mollie Ziegler Hemingway: in an essay written before the press conference, says D[emocrats In Name Only] and the media are reaping the fruit Of 4 Years of anti-Trump conspiracy theories. I would go one step further: that the conspiracy theories were Galactic IMAX-level exercises in projection.

UPDATE 2: this won’t show up in a search on YouTube, but let’s not forget… straight from the [Trojan] Horse’s mouth: