From master commenter A.M. Golden, as excellent a personal account of Election Day as you are likely read, the Comment of the Day on “Last Election Related Post of the Day, I Promise”…
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Yesterday, I got up early and drove to my polling station, parked along the side of the road because I knew I wouldn’t find a space on the parking lot of the local Lions Club and got into a line that stretched to the end of said parking lot. The line began to extend onto the side of the road. It was 5:50 AM. It was a beautiful sight.
I was in the door at 6:24 AM. I had my ballot by 6:30 AM. I had filled it out by 6:35 AM. I stuck it in the scanner and got my sticker at 6:40 AM.
When I got home, I took my sticker, wrote “Garbage” on it and wore it proudly all day. I also posted on Facebook Abraham Lincoln’s famous statement from his first Inaugural Address (when the country was in far worse straits than it is now): “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
I kept up with the news all day long. The voting machines in Pennsylvania that didn’t work (that one of the most technologically-advanced countries in the world cannot run an election without these kinds of antics happening is absurd). The Voting Guides handed out in Rhode Island that were allegedly real ballots with the Republicans whited out. The bizarre happenings in Milwaukee where the ballots had to be recounted. The bomb threats in Georgia. Mr. Golden and our son went to vote later in the day and didn’t get stickers because they were out. In fact, the polling station ran out of ballots around 1:30 PM yesterday and had to get more.
It was also a challenging day for me. I decided I would fast and pray from 6 PM Monday night to 6 PM Tuesday night that the hand of violence would be stayed, that whoever would win would do so by a clear margin in both the Electoral College and the popular vote and that whoever did win would be willing to govern with integrity and listen to wise counsel. I didn’t even pray for a particular candidate to win. It remains to be seen whether all of my prayers will be answered with a “Yes”.
When I got up this morning and said my prayers and tossed laundry in the washing machine. As my oatmeal was boiling on the stove, I opened my phone and saw the news. I have to admit that I smiled and jumped in my seat a little.
I don’t like Mr. Trump personally. He’s a sloppy speaker and a blowhard. But the Democrats deserve this loss. Let me be clear: racism and sexism had nothing to do with it. Americans, including a great number of Independent voters, decided that a candidate with no particularly notable accomplishments for the past four years who would not articulate her policy positions, was installed as the candidate without a single vote by a citizen after helping gaslight the country that its President was fit as a fiddle and sharp as a tack (even when he wasn’t sharp as a tack back when he actually was fit as a fiddle) and whose campaign fixated on murdering unborn children in the womb and declaring its opposition to be Nazis wasn’t a good choice. It’s just that simple.
“I’m not Trump” is not good enough.
My Trump-deranged sister, along with her equally Trump-deranged friends are beside themselves. I don’t know why. I knew Trump would win when previously closed-mouths celebrities like Harrison Ford – who, 20-plus years ago in an interview, said he didn’t endorse candidates because he didn’t think people should vote based on what a celebrity said – opened their mouths and started endorsing VP Harris. The Democrats called in their allies in the entertainment industry when their allies in the news media weren’t cutting it. The “garbage” comment by President Biden didn’t help.
My sister refers to what’s coming as a horror. Really, sis? She posted that “Hate won last night”. Yeah, hatred of egg prices, maybe.
So, this morning, I posted words of Richard Nixon on his last day in office, “”Always remember that others may hate you but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.”
There’s a long road ahead. Mr. Golden went off to work this morning and I am praying for his safety because, even in perpetually-conservative Indiana, there are deranged people who can’t handle when their candidate loses. We can expect for the next four years exactly what we experienced the first time around: propaganda disguised as news, rumors and gossip reported as fact, hate relentlessly spewed at the President’s direction and attempts to undermine him at every step.
God help us all.
Ethics Alarms 
Thank you again for my COTD designation – typos and all.
Seeing the meltdown yesterday and finding that people were unfriending Trump voters, I decided to make a final post yesterday evening.
“I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.” –Thomas Jefferson
Imagine my irritation when I got my very first Facebook fact-check in the style of hiding my post and calling it False Information.
The reason why: There is no evidence that Thomas Jefferson said this quote about tyranny and liberty. “When the government fears the people, there is liberty.”
That was not the quote I posted. They fact-checked me, hid my post and labeled it false information for everyone to see over a quote I didn’t post.
These are the people the Democrats want to use to shut down so-called misinformation.
Morons.
AM: I’m sorry about the typos. Yesterday was a crunched day for me; I wanted to get your post up, and I did not proof it as carefully as I usually try to do, since your posts are generally clean. I’m in a bind today as well, but I’ll try to fix those typos. (You can always email me an edited version and I can easily use that too.
Facebook factchecked that quote, but when my FBFs declare as fact that Trump is “racist and homonphobic,” nada. Brilliant.
Don’t worry about it. I was busy, too, and didn’t take the care when composing it that I normally try to take.
Case in point?…John Adams.
AM Golden, I wonder if reposting the same quote and instead attributing it to “Our 3rd President” would make it past the censors.
Anyways, another outstanding COTD. We did not fast, but we simply prayed “Thy Will be done.” On Tuesday afternoon, a good friend of ours who came to Christ five years ago said to me in a moment of my worries, “God will accomplish His will. I have faith in that.” His words rather shamed me. I told him Wednesday morning that I had stayed up until 1:30 watching results…then asked “You?” His response?…”I was in bed at 8:30 last night…faith.”
Jack, you wrote Tuesday morning that everything you sensed led to a resounding win for President Trump, but I refused to risk believing it. You were right!!
I went to bed at 8:30 Tuesday night, too. I’d done all I could after all and, in the end, I felt also, “Thy will be done.”
Whether His will is for us to go through a time of healing or a time of suffering, we’ll find out.
I actually had a dream a couple of weeks ago of a map of the United States turning red. I woke up in the middle of it. I’m not sure that it was a prophetic dream but I began to wonder if we were headed for a big Trump win.
Or a Heinz ketchup factory explosion.
“Jack, you wrote Tuesday morning that everything you sensed led to a resounding win for President Trump, but I refused to risk believing it. You were right!!“
Exactly the same trepidation here, Joel; no qualms about being proven wrong, though.
PWS
Paul,
And it appears your “77 square miles of insanity” was (just barely) overcome by the “sea of reality”…even though Sen. Baldwin survived a strong challenge.
“Sen. Baldwin survived a strong challenge.”
Not without some despicable Lefty shenanigans; to wit:
Democrat(ic)Plant Defeats Hovde
PWS
Googling that quote gives also the first part “When the people fear government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.”
So, sure, Jefferson didn’t say it. But I would contend it is just the sort of thing he might have said. Looking down on us, he probably wishes he had said it.
Regarding your actual quote, I immediately thought of John Adams. Adams was so heartsick at the results of the 1800 election that he left Washington before Jefferson’s inauguration. But ten or so years later, he and Jefferson patched up their conflict, resumed their old friendship, and exchanged scores of letters before their deaths on the same day, July 4, 1826, America’s 50th birthday.
We’re coming up on our 250th birthday, and Trump will be in charge of the celebration.
Biggest birthday party ever, anyone??
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Oh, yes. Fantastic comment. More than worthy of COTD status.
1800 was a nasty campaign, for sure. Adams was bitter. I don’t blame him for being angry at some of the underhanded tricks that had been pulled. Bitterness is poison to the soul, though.
A few points:
First off… The Democratic leadership has been, I think, surprisingly good in their concessions. I can forgive Kamala the day it took to make her concession speech in that it seemed like an OK concession speech. Obama issued a similarly good statement. Maybe it’s because Trump’s lead was so solid that it blew all the wind out of their sails, or maybe they’ve been talking about how important conceding when you lose is that even they couldn’t possibly pull a Hillary/Abrams without developing a crippling case of self-awareness. I don’t care, I like that there isn’t as much bitching as usual from the people who matter. At least so far.
Which dovetails into my second point:
The absolute schadenfreude I’m experiencing seeing the litany of terminally online people freaking the fuck out. I’m sorry, I know there were people upset when Trump lost in 2020, but I don’t remember the days of primal therapy screaming. To an extent, these are legitimate feelings, and people are allowed to feel their feelings, but at some point I think that people need to take a step back and ask themselves why they’re so personally invested in politics, and what that migth be doing to their mental (or even physical) health.
I’d also like to take this moment for a mea culpa: I thought this election was going to be close, and I gave the edge to Harris. I knew she was a bad candidate, but I thought she was going to pull a Biden and hide out in a bunker until election day. I didn’t expect her to engage in the campaign death-spiral that was her opening her mouth in public, and even once she started doing that, I didn’t think the electorate would turn on her that quickly.
Finally…. The Democrats don’t have it in them, culturally, to self examine why they lost and do the soul-searching not to make these mistakes again. There were immediately people talking about how sexist and racist the voters were. I’d just like to point out, that Trump’s vote total was somewhere between flat and negative, the big change in this election was that the Democrats collected something like 15 million fewer votes. It the Democrats want to make the argument that 15 million Biden voters were so racist they couldn’t vote for a black woman… I don’t know what to say. Go hard. Attack your own support. See how that works out for you.