CSotD: Entropy

We’re down to about two weeks before the election and, as Ann Telnaes (WashPost) puts it, Dear Leader is trotting out the raw meat (and viruses) for his supporters in a final push, amid reports that debate organizers are going to mute the opposing microphones Thursday during the two minutes each candidate gets to answer a question.

Assuming the third debate happens. Those nasty heel spurs might act up again.

Meanwhile, Trump is preparing his base for a poor performance and perhaps a fixed election, and it all seems a bit familiar.

Here’s an exchange with Chris Wallace from the final presidential debate, Oct 19, 2016:

So there you have it. Just hit “reload” and we’re back where we started, though you’ll note he did, after all, accept victory, though he continued to claim voter fraud and put together a commission which didn’t need to prove he had won — nobody disputed that the Electoral College count was in his favor.

He just needed to prove that he’d also won the popular vote, which, the commission discovered, he hadn’t.

But could it happen again?

Sure.

Maybe.

Doubtful.

Biden is currently up by 12. Four years ago, Clinton held a 9 point advantage in the polls, though that was three weeks out, not two.

 

It’s that last sentence you need to pay attention to: The final outcome of the popular vote was within the overall margin of error and, as for those subgroups, well, lesson learned.

Pollsters this time around are being a little less ebullient about predicting the final outcome, or, at least, they’re paying more attention to individual states, since it’s those results that actually matter.

And 538 has a bunch of color glossy graphical doohickeys with circles, and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one is, which looks suspiciously at first like they’re predicting every possible outcome in order to avoid failing to predict the one that actually happens.

But if you scroll around and dig down, you’ll find that they do eventually narrow things down and show how the states are likely to break and so forth and so on and things don’t look so good for Dear Leader.

So he’s not only declaring fraud ahead of time but warning his followers that he might have to leave the country to avoid being sent to the Point Barrow gulags or something. He wasn’t specific.

But it was enough to put fear into Mother Anderson down at Madam & Eve, who is already busy enough firing off her katty at the Mielie lady and the Hadedas.

Another irresistible target might push her over the edge.

 

Though others suggest he’d be more comfortable bunking in at a dacha with his pal Vlad, seen here in a Jack Ohman (WGWG) cartoon assisting the President in his election campaign.

Even Fox News was reluctant to bite on that lure, though their evening opinion folks are apparently flogging it to the masses.

Note, by the way, that Trump’s BFF has quarantined himself far more stringently than Dear Leader.

Where he probably doesn’t keep either used Kleenex or used pawns.

When Khruschev famously said “We will bury you,” he wasn’t threatening war or murder. He was simply repeating a stolid saying that has gotten Mother Russia through some hard times, which means “We will be still be here after you’re gone.”

So far, it’s worked.

 

Which brings us to Graeme MacKay (Hamilton Spectator)’s cartoon, comparing our previous attitude towards the commies with the great fall that seems to have gone after our pride, and he’s right not only about standing in line to vote but in the massive lineups for food among those who need it.

Bringing to mind the verse of “This Land is Your Land” that they don’t often teach the kiddies:

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

They also don’t teach the kids that Woody wrote that song as an antidote to the sappy “God Bless America,” and now here we are, once more divided between those who can see their people and those who just shut their eyes and pretend it’s all hunky-dory.

I note, by the way, that rightwingers have gone back to referring to “Communist China,” though I rarely hear anyone talk about “Nationalist China,” likely because most people have grown used to saying “China” and “Taiwan,” except when they’re trying to revive the Red Scare of the 1950s.

 

And speaking of those bygone days, Ohman gets a second mention for this commentary on Trump’s claim to have “saved your damn neighborhood,” and I think he’s right that Dear Leader has a 1950s view of the suburbs that is straight out of “Raisin in the Sun,” in which the white folks take up a collection to try to keep the Younger family from moving into, and desegregating, the neighborhood.

It was barely a dog whistle — it was a straight-out claim that affordable housing means crime, and, that by keeping the suburbs middleclass, Trump was doing just what he and his old man had done in their apartments: Rejected the riffraff and the overly melaninized.

However, as Ohman depicts it, the suburbs have changed and their view of riffraff has been updated considerably.

 

Leaving us with Pat Bagley (SLC Trib)‘s suggestion that wives may not tell their husbands everything.

One of the arguments against women’s suffrage was that it simply gave husbands a second ballot, and that’s not entirely invalid: My late father-in-law always helped his mother, his mother-in-law and his wife figure out how to vote.

But that was decades ago and, just as the suburbs are no longer lily-white bastions of Junior League and bridge clubs, even in the best of families, there’s often a gap between what he thinks he knows and what is.

Always has been, and not just in the voting booth.