Dear America,
I happen to have been watching C-span a couple of days ago when Senator John Cornyn of Texas was speaking before The Senate. He always presents himself as a voice of civility and fair-mindedness, but on this occasion he said that the impeachment of Donald Trump that is impending is an attempt to nullify Trump's election by 63 million people, as if the popular vote was a popular mandate of some kind. It's the same line that I heard Representative Jim Jordan, the Republican junk-yard dog, use during the public sessions of the House Intelligence Committee's impeachment hearings. It's a coup attempt according to Cornyn and Jordan. I wonder where they heard that...not really. We've all heard our liar-in-chief make that claim. Of course they never mention that Hillary Clinton got almost 66 million votes: the most of any candidate during the 2016 presidential election. And in the bargain, they never mention that about 73 million voters in total, including third-party candidates, voted against Trump. If there was a popular mandate in 2016 it was that anyone but Trump should be president. It was Alexander Hamilton's paternalistically inspired electoral college that elected Trump, not the people of the United States.
And there's another, related canard popular among Republicans relative to 2016. Trump has claimed many times that he won the electoral college in a landslide. But the fact is that he won with fewer electoral votes than any president since Jimmy Carter except one, and that one exception was George W. Bush. Bush also became president after being beaten in the popular election by his main opponent, so Trump joins Bush among the ranks of the five presidents who ascended to the presidency without a popular mandate and of the presidents since Carter that won the Electoral college with less than 60% of the electoral votes available: dubious distinctions all. Yet, despite the dubiety of Trump's claims and their endorsement by Jordan and Cornyn, Republicans go on blithely repeating Trump's lies in the name of partisanship, all of which raises the question, whom do they serve, and what will the American electorate do about it this November.
Some time ago...when I was still in my sixties as I recall...I was standing in line at a store and an elderly man dropped a twenty dollar bill as he was paying for his purchases. I stepped forward, picked it up and gave it back to him. He looked at me and thanked me and said, "may you live to be 200." Like an idiot I said, "God forbid," reiterating something my mother had once said to me about a long-life wish she had received. We were both outside the store and gone before I realized that what I said wasn't what I meant. It was just something my mother, then in her mid-eighties and afflicted with anhedonia, regret and anger at life had meant. What I meant was that I didn't want to live to be a 200 year old. I would love to be even a sixty year old for 200 years, but I didn't want to be a decrepit 200 year old sitting in a chair waiting to die as my mother was doing at that time. But what I said wasn't that. What I did was reject a felicitation from another person offered out of grace and gratitude.
The point isn't that I was rude and ungrateful when I should have been thankful that someone thought well of me and thanked him in return, although I have, and always will, wish that I could find that man and correct my reprehensible response to his well-wishes. (If you're out there and you read this, please accept my whole-hearted apology and believe that my regret is deeply sincere.) The point is that I let something fall out of my mouth without thinking about it because I had heard it before. I'd like to believe that that is what Cornyn did, though I can't believe that Jordan didn't contemplate his contortions of fact. And I would like to think that we all will go to the poles this year only after thinking about the things we say to others, that they have said to us, and most importantly that we say to ourselves. I believe that if we all do that, we will get a better result than we did in the 2016 election. We will elect someone who cares more about people than about things, and I don't care what party he is in so long as his mind is his own and he, hopefully like we voters, thinks for himself before he acts.
Your friend,
Mike
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