The Life in My Years

It’s taken 232 years but America is on the very brink of losing the boasting rights of being a true Democratic Republic. We may have been the first, back in 1788 when the Constitutional ratification was completed. Even with some built in flaws it was historic; a landmark in world history.

We’re in danger now of losing the high ground. The moral standing dribbling away with the hair dye that trickled down Drunkle Rudy Giuliani’s cheeks as he went on a bizarre, evidence free rant about rampant fraud in the presidential election.

What’s a “drunkle” you ask? A drunkle is the uncle who shows up uninvited to a family dinner. Arriving already tanked he sails straight to the rum punch to top off. Later, with the family seated for dinner in anticipation of food and fellowship, the drunkle raises a toast in honor of the hostess’s boobs and then wanders away from the table to throw up on the white couch.

Yesterday Drunkle Rudy vomited. Not on the white couch. That would’ve been preferable. No, Drunkle Rudy upchucked on the Constitution and every document, institution and tradition that’s made America stand out as the beacon of democracy.

For nearly 40 minutes Drunkle Rudy spun tales of Democratic Party deceit without any evidence. It was a parade of hearsay; a verbal storybook. There was the story about a food truck that showed up at the ballot counting center in Detroit with 50,000 to 100,000 mysterious ballots that were marked for Biden only, no down ballot votes marked. According to three people who Drunkle Rudy said are willing to testify, the ballots were run through the voting machines three times.
And then there’s the story of the 15,000 to 17,000 provisional ballots that represented double votes by Democrats in Pittsburgh. No evidence, just hearsay.

And then there was the creme de la creme in which Drunkle Rudy used legal precedent to prove that voting inspectors were not allowed to view vote counts in…in….who knows where.  He didn’t exactly say. My guess it was in the state of confusion. The precedent that Drunkle Rudy cited was the movie My Cousin Vinny, one of Drunkle Rudy’s “favorite law movies because he comes from Brooklyn.”

By the end of this spectacle Drunkle Rudy had hair dye streaming down the sides of his face, creating fodder for internet jokes worldwide, including the notion that Rudy is so full of shit that it’s leaking from his very pores. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic and frightening; so very humiliating before a world that is watching, laughing and gasping.

The entire script for this wild flight of fancy can be found online. Follow the link if you can stomach it. Just have a drink and your sense of humor handy. If you have even a hint of reason about you though, neither the drink nor your sense of humor will salve the wound of indignation.

If the purpose of their wild revelations was to preserve the integrity of the elections and our democratic institutions then why did this Giuliani circus not produce charges of Republican fraud along with their allegations of Democratic fraud? Certainly there must have been SOME skullduggery on the part of the Grand Old Party; one instance of a corpse voting for Trump or a person casting multiple votes. There isn’t much legitimacy in the claim of trying to protect the American institution of a free vote while being blatantly partisan.

Why has nobody claimed fraud in the reelection of Lindsey Graham who soundly defeated Democrat Jaime Harrison despite Harrison’s massive war chest of funding?
How is it that Mitch McConnell trounced challenger Amy McGrath when the polls showed an almost neck and neck race?
Could it have been voter fraud on the part of Republicans to swing those elections to the incumbents?
Indeed if the Democrats were so sophisticated and their corruption and fraud so rampant why did they not rig the Senate elections in South Carolina, Kentucky and Georgia (in Georgia the elections have resulted in runoffs)? It could be argued that reclaiming the Senate and having a majority in both houses would be more important than taking the presidency.
Why did none of the indignant citizens mentioned by Drunkle Rudy go to the FBI with their charges instead of being unearthed by the Trump legal team?
And where are the photos? With the advent of cell phones with cameras damn near any outrage you can think of from an anti-masker to a flag burner to a plumber’s butt crack at Home Depot is captured forever and granted eternity on the internet? Where are the photos of the food truck full of Biden ballots?
These dangling questions put the lie to Drunkle Rudy’s buffoonery.

Whatever their motives, Drunkle Rudy and Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis, the team of Trump ambulance chasers, have further tarnished the greatness of the American experiment. It’s a stain that Donald Trump began spilling over four years ago when he announced his candidacy. Drunkle Rudy’s dirty little trickle spilled onto the entire Republican Party given that the presser was held at GOP headquarters. It lent a sort of official party sanction to the whole hot mess.

And speaking of the Trump legal team, why is it populated by conspiracy theorizing hacks and not actual Constitutional or Election lawyers?  I think I have the answer to that question.  Any self respecting expert wants to retain his or her dignity and not face the prospect of, at best ridicule and at worst, disbarment.

There are volumes of eloquent writings and documents that celebrate America’s greatness as the beacon of Democracy; The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, The Federalist Papers, Common Sense, George Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The transcript of the Giuliani farce stains our tradition of eloquence and statesmanship.

As of this writing Donald Trump is meeting with Michigan State Legislators, ostensibly with the goal of somehow replacing Biden electors with Republican electors and in the process disenfranchising the voters of an entire state. There are reports that plans are in the works for similar meetings with the Republican Legislators of other states. It’s unprecedented. Unprecedented; a word that’s been frighteningly overworked during the course of the last four years.

Some pushback on the part of Republican Senators and members of Congress are trickling in but it’s been slow in coming and tepid when it arrives. Mitt Romney called Trump’s meeting with the Michigan lawmakers, “undemocratic.” That doesn’t cut it. What Romney should have said is, “What in the actual fuck do you think you’re doing you autocratic jerk?” It is long past the time for the GOP to rise en masse and tell Trump in no uncertain terms to put a halt to his temper tantrum, cease with his subversion of the American system and do his damn job. Since November 3rd, he’s been AWOL, sulking while the nation is foundering.

In a previous piece I expressed some sympathy for Trump, writing, “At 74 years old he’s probably never faced a situation like this before, where he couldn’t manage to buy, negotiate or bluster his way through the problem. For him this must be like being in a strange land with no map and no translator. It’s almost pitiable.”
On further review, that was a moment of misplaced mushiness. Trump and his allies and enablers have been on a scorched Earth mission to take down the Constitution, to subvert the vote and to reinstall another four years of this disgrace.

I’ve been torn over the notion of a Biden Administration letting the four years of Trumpian law breaking slide versus actively seeking investigations and prosecutions, with the latter seeming to be political retribution. I’ve changed my thinking. Trump and his gang need to feel the full fury of justice. If the sight of a deposed American President wearing an orange jumpsuit and the news of he and his family being sued into poverty is what it takes to right the ship then that is the course that must be followed.

The legitimacy of America’s role in advancing democracy throughout the world is on the brink. Our nation now has the opportunity to prove that when the system is strained to the margin of breaking, it somehow finds the strength to survive, to repair and to recover.