A Tall Tale From The Chicken House.
All the chickens had gathered in the Hen House. "We've done a very
dumb thing," squawked Henny Penny. "We should never have fallen for
that sly old Foxy Loxy, and all his lies." "We voted that mean, lying
old Fox out of office," clucked Rhoda Island-Red, "All we need to do
is to tell him to leave". "We've told him!" cried Chicken Little, as
she kept an eye on the sky. "He just sits there, licking his lips and
inviting me in for dinner".
"Maybe if we just compromise and go to dinner, Foxy Loxy will finally
go away", mused Henny Penny, "We'll simply ignore the past and go
forward as if everything is hunky dunky."
And so they did. And as the days passed there seemed to be fewer and
fewer chickens in the Hen House. And Foxy Loxy seemed to be putting
on an aweful lot of weight.
The moral of this little tale is that if it looks like Donald Trump,
and if it tweets like Donald Trump, and if it sneers and grins like
Donald Trump and if it lies like Donald Trump, then we should avoid
ever electing him to any office. And if we do? Then the sky really
is falling in.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/18/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Trump's Not Conceding! No One Should Care!!
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
17 November 20
The era of Trump irrelevancy has dawned, and too many people are slow to
see
the light. No matter what Trump has the nerve to do now, none of it is
likely to matter much, since the man has so little real nerve. The
presidential election is effectively over, and now we're going through the
formalities. So get Trump out of your head! He had no business being there
in the first place.
Two important provisos: (1) Keep an eye on what he and his family steal
between now and January. The Biden administration should be prepared to try
to recover the millions (or billions) of ill-gotten Trump gains from public
pockets. (2) And keep an eye on his destructive appointments and policies.
For now, he can do whatever any president could do, but all of it (or most)
can be easily reversed soon after January 20. The Biden administration has
to have the will and the courage to make the undoing quick and thorough.
And there's the greater problem: What level of grit do the Biden people
have? How clear is their vision? Actually, what IS their vision? Is there
any vision? "The soul of America" is not a vision. It's not even a real
thing. It's feel-good, pious language garbage that takes no one anywhere.
The "soul of America" is not a governing principle, it's a deceitful
conceit
designed to mislead any observer into imposing any random meaning on
value-free rhetoric. But that's where we are, waiting to see what the next
president and his team will do to define their idea of America's soul.
They're off to a bad start.
More than a week after Biden's winning vote-count reached an irreversible
(almost surely) level, Biden still hasn't assumed a presidential demeanor.
He IS the President-elect in every known reality. But he's still acting
more
like the presidential-wannabe. What are the Biden people thinking, spending
time and energy trying to rebut Trump's various election-fraud claims?
Those
claims are a house of cards that have begun collapsing from their own
insubstantiality. A presidential team would simply ignore them. When
reporters ask about them, just ask back: What gives them any credibility?
Get Trump out of your head!
The vote fraud scam is just another Trump distraction that draws focus away
from the continuing criminality of the Trump administration and its effort
to destroy as much of effective government as it can in the time it has
left
(see provisos above).
The Biden people need a counter-narrative, but they don't even seem to be
thinking in those terms, even though they have an excellent, reality-based
counter-narrative staring them in their faces.
That would be voting. That would be the absence of voter fraud.
Right now the Biden transition team is mostly a figment of media
imagination
rather than an actual, organized, public entity. Transition news is
scattershot, usually of unevaluated importance, with no central focus. No
incoming president should want two months of political blur, dominated by
his opponent, to precede his taking office. No doubt the Biden people know
that perfectly well, but they're still in the fuzzy wuzzy stage of
development, and the longer it lasts the harder it will be to cure.
Voting is obviously the thing of the moment, and the Biden people haven't
taken advantage of that. Right now (late, but still not too late), the
Biden
people should be pushing back with their own narrative centered on having
won the national vote by any rational assessment. The Trump administration
reports that this "election was the most secure in American history." There
should be a daily Biden election report that covers the latest positive
developments, that discusses state issues, and that undermines Trump's
claims, albeit obliquely, by citing facts without reference to Trump
himself.
The effect of this Biden effort (should they undertake it) would be like a
long-running seminar on a core element of a healthy American democracy (an
aspect of its soul, if you will). There seems to be widespread popular
ignorance about how our election system works. The Biden Voting Seminar,
sustained at least through Congressional certification in January, would be
a civics lesson carried into public consciousness by the Trojan Horse of
phony controversy. A daily affirmation of specific instances where the
system worked might actually have some impact over a two-month span. The
credibility of this seminar would rest on its willingness to examine any
and
every slightly credible claim of irregularity, and even discussing the ones
that turned out to be real even though the number of votes at stake was
immaterial to the election outcome. By January, this seminar might well
persuade most Americans that the integrity of our voting system is real. It
might even cut into the impact that twenty years of dishonest Republican
claims of voter fraud have had despite their lack of evidence. (Real voter
fraud has taken the form of such Republican scams as voter caging, extreme
gerrymandering, and voter suppression over the past 20 years).
The moral basis of a serious voting seminar - reinforcing voting integrity
-
is essentially unassailable, as long as the approach is factual, low key,
honest, comprehensive, reality-based, and sustained. And the beauty part of
this approach is that it requires no mention of Trump or any of his
distractions, except perhaps on occasion, obliquely, to underline their
meaninglessness. Structurally, in terms of the election, everything Trump
is
up to is irrelevant and best expressed by ignoring it. This should be
happening now, it should have been happening at least since November 7, and
it should continue till the process is complete.
Voting issues reach deep into other areas of serious concern. Voting issues
are, among other things, issues of race, issues of economic inequality, and
especially issues of truth in media. Biden could, if he would, lay out a
new
paradigm for both government and media honesty/accuracy/clarity. These are
Big Picture issues. There's little sign of Big Picture thinking among
Bidenites, despite their many decent qualities. The assumption seems to be
that America's soul only needs to be restored, which is a mirror image of
Trump thinking. Insofar as there is an American soul, it's steeped in white
supremacy and begs for transformation, not restoration.
The reality that the Biden team is not making transformative efforts is a
horrible harbinger of future shortcomings. A conscientious continuing
voting
seminar is relatively easy. How will the Biden folks manage with the hard
stuff?
