A brand new president of the U.S.A.???
By Robert LaFrance
NOTE: Trump lied. He lost by 7 million votes.
I woke up Wednesday morning, Nov. 4, expecting to hear that the United States of America had turfed out Donald Trump and had replaced him with a rather bland (but relatively honest) chap named Joe Biden, but, for the first time in my life, I was wrong.
Well, maybe not the first time, but there haven’t been many.
It was several hours earlier that Donald Trump had declared himself the new president, though at least eight important states hadn’t been decided yet. “Sounds like Trump all right,” I said to myself, since no one else was paying any attention to me.
Here’s a prediction: Over the next few years Trump, if it turns out he was re-elected, will do everything undemocratic and anti-democratic he can to make himself a dictator. Nobody better argue with him either, or they will find themselves digging ditches in Montana.
I am writing these cheerless words on Saturday, Nov. 7th, and the election still hasn’t been decided. At 3:00 am on Nov. 4, seven hours or fewer after the polls closed, Trump, since he was leading at that moment, declared himself the winner and order vote-counting to stop. I didn’t think at the time that it worked like that, but Trump did.
It didn’t work of course. For some reason the Democrats were of the opinion that everyone who cast a vote should have that vote counted. A bit silly, but there you go, and now, today on Nov. 7, Joe Biden has the lead and looks to be the next president unless Trump’s army of lawyers finds a giant loophole somewhere.
1:30 pm Saturday: A news bulletin came to me on Google that the US television networks had all declared Joe Biden the winner of the Presidential race. We only need to await Donald Trump’s gracious and gentlemanly concession speech. The possibility of that’s happening is about in the same range as my being hired as Brad Pitt’s stunt man. No, Trump will try every sleazy trick his lawyers can come up with.
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Enough of that for now, let’s go to a different Hallowe’en.
A few days before Hallowe’en took place, I went to the grocery store, the Dollar Store, the hardware store and (by all means) the liquor store to buy treats for all the little tykes who would be trick-or-treating on October 31. I didn’t go to Cannabis NB because I had run out of money.
My wife and I put a little table out of the porch and on that table we put two big silver bowls. Inside the bowls, all Covid-scrubbed, were approximately 67 bags of chips and a variety of healthy snacks like chocolate bars and other sugar-laden treats. I think we also slipped in a couple of unhealthy ones, like small juice boxes. (I’m not sure what ‘small juice’ is). Then we put cheerful signs around the bowls. “Happy Hallowe’en” and “Help Yourself”.
After all that, we sat down on the porch and waited for the deluge of social distancing kids who would be crowding around and snaffling up the goodies. And we waited, and waited. Finally, about 5:30 pm, a little girl from down the road, halfway between here and Bon Accord, came by with her grandmother, or maybe it was her mother, and took a small bag of chips and a small chocolate bar. We did have a sign that read “Help Yourself”, but this little girl was being very polite.
Too polite as it turned out. After the girl left we had a grand total of zero. We even tried to persuade the dog Minnie to stop killing squirrels and have some Doritos (‘dirty toes’ my son calls them) but she looked at us as if they and we were made of melting candle wax. No sale there.
So there we were, with a plethora of Hallowe’en treats and a dearth of customers. What could we do? Answer: We started eating chips, bars etc. and broke out the scotch. By midnight, as far as I know, Hallowe’en 2020 was a huge success.
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A few comments on our world:
The pronunciation of the planet Uranus has always baffled me, and most other people, except perhaps rocket scientists, and maybe even them too. Is it “your anus” or is it “urine-us”? I would like to hear from my many thousands of readers. If you are wondering why I think this is important, the answer is that I don’t have the faintest idea. I don’t think there’s a winner or a loser here.
Not to belabour the U.S. election as an event, it probably needs said that the election of the next president is among the least important decisions to be made on November 3 and in the days that followed.
“Election day results were a major rejection of the war on drugs” was one headline I saw on an online news channel. After quite a struggle in the early years, the advocates of drug legalization have finally been successful in several states, like 15-plus.
Oregon decriminalized (not legalized) ALL drugs, including magic mushrooms and in every state where a ballot measure asked Americans to reconsider the drug war, voters sided with reformers. In Arizona, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota, voters legalized marijuana for recreational purposes. In Mississippi and South Dakota voters legalized medical marijuana.
Just think of the billions of dollars taxpayers in the U.S. and Canada have spent chasing grass growers while white-collar and political criminals sat back and laughed. Oh, it is to giggle.
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One final comment in this column that will hit the streets, as it were, on Remembrance Day week: thanks to all the men and women who have died while wearing Canadian uniforms. If you watch TV or movies at all, you might be under the impression that the U.S. had won World War II single-handed, but Canada’s contribution (that began in September 1939 and not Dec. 7, 1941) was HUGE. Thank you. -end-
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