This election was, as Bill Maher observed, a slow motion coup d'etat. Events leading up to Election Day, were all calculated to narrow the numbers posted by the two candidates, one whose ambition and resume outstripped her acceptability by parsecs, and another, a serial failure, cheat and fraud, who had no business in that show except for his entertainment value, making those numbers come close enough together to make stealing the election a walk in the park.
Third party voters, despite bearing a major share of the media's blame for the result, were a lesser factor in getting the election close enough to steal. A much larger factor was a fatally flawed Democratic candidate, who could not charge her opponents with issues of selling out, and cheating to a goal (or "triangulation" as she quaintly terms it) when she herself was guilty of them, and seemingly had concluded that her best strategy was to lay low and shut up until the whole thing was over.
Then there is the corporate media to consider. Is there any surprise that the corporate media who made Donald Trump's candidacy with billions of dollars of free media exposure, and incessant beginning to end coverage of his disconnected from reality, stream of lack of consciousness, rally rants, are now trying to rationalize what cannot be made rational? This was clearly a factor, perhaps the largest, in closing the gap between the two candidates.
Those polling companies about which the pundits are pretending to be so puzzled are a part of the corporate media, since the corporate media is their principle client, and coming up with what the boss wants is what keeps one employed. It suggests another leg of election fraud where the narrowing of the result is required to make an election close enough to steal. We must ask were the polls in error, or were they cynically manipulated to lead the consumers of their results astray? The media, are not the consumers of polling results, despite their hiring of the polling organizations. They are the distributors of the results. The consumers of the results are the media's audience. Certainly, if polling, which is a primary crutch of big politics, is so much prone to error, why would it be useful at all?
Add in the sort of voter suppression techniques that Republicans practice at every turn and which have increased by a magnitude since the five-judge right wing majority on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act to enable them. It took them five election cycles to perfect the techniques of election fraud and set up the conditions to facilitate it. After the two initial successes in 2000 and 2004, Democrats figured out that they could overwhelm those attempts at election fraud with high voter turnout. Of course, it helped to have a candidate for whom it was worth turning out. Now, however, they have been able to coordinate efforts to set the conditions, which negate, and reduce, voter turnout.
Next consider the indispensable leg of election fraud, proprietary electronic vote counting. It is supposedly useful as a labor saving technology, freeing us from the need to hand count ballots. With a dearth of any credible security for it, we are counseled to accept its clear vulnerability to computer hacking, for the sake of its efficiency at providing a result. But if that is the case, why is it that such a speedy technology should take so long to count votes? In fact, returns were clearly being held back by both sides from their strongholds to determine how much they had to fraudulently add to win the state in question.
Another factor in closing the gap to get it close enough to steal was unquestionably the clear violation of the Hatch Act perpetrated by FBI Director James Comey, eleven days before Election Day.
A flood of money has hijacked our electoral system, that media will do anything to get their hands on, again mandated by the right wing Supreme Court. What was the first symptom? It was that the two candidates with the highest negative ratings were elevated to be the standard bearers of their respective parties.
Does it seem to be too elaborate and complicated an operation for such a conspiracy to exist? Ninety percent of our media are controlled by only six megacorporations with converging interests, overlapping boards of directors and close ties to political activity in the United States. Polling organizations need them as clients. Voting machine manufacturers and marketers are similarly controlled by corporate interests and closely guard the proprietary code that governs vote counting in their machines. Republicans have long practiced election fraud by reducing the voting population and manipulating the result of elections. With that in mind, does it still seem too complicated to be plausible?
There are those who are perfectly willing to accept the result of this election as perfectly legitimate. Others see through it, but prefer not to embark on the uphill slog to correcting these issues. I do not see any course to redemption that does not correct these issues, and I trust that I am not alone.
These sorts of "surprises", as that which slapped us in the face on Tuesday night, do not happen in a vacuum, independent of all the factors leading up to them, with experts whose lives are devoted to analysis of elections caught with their pants down and their eyebrows up. But they are dependent on after the fact explanation, or, more to the point, rationalization, whether to cover guilt or to save embarrassment and reputations. And anyone who believes that they do happen in a vacuum is delusional.
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