by Roger Kimball
In my last column, I noted the many “red flags” that have popped up regarding the 2020 presidential election.
I won’t repeat that litany, except to say the appearance of impropriety is at least suggestive and, if you are the worrying sort, potentially damning.
It’s partly a matter of what I think of as the Goldfinger principle, after the avid gold smelter and nuclear weapons amateur Auric Goldfinger.
Goldfinger was a sensitive man. He didn’t like it when people began looking into to his business ventures with too much curiosity, largely, no doubt, because many were ostentatiously illegal and, in some cases, evidence of grandiose homicidal insanity.
Nevertheless, his response to the repeated unscheduled appearance of James Bond in his life prompted him to make the eminently rational observation that “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”
Coincidences and Oddities
It might have been mere coincidence that Joe Biden ran behind Hillary Clinton everywhere except a handful of critical cities in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia.
That is odd, to be sure, especially when one notes that around midnight on Nov. 3, Donald Trump was running substantially ahead in those states. Then the voting stopped. Everyone yawned and dozed off. When they woke up, what do you know, Joe Biden had the lead everywhere!
Odd. Possible, certainly, but also odd.
It was also odd that the turnout was so large: pushing 90 percent in Milwaukee, for instance, much higher than it was for Hillary, and substantially higher than it was even for Barack Obama.
It was odd, too, that all of what have been described as computer “glitches” benefitted Democrats. They seem to have come to light by accident and, once uncovered, in some cases shifted county elections from the blue column to the red column.
Makes you think, as does the ratio of votes for Biden in those late-arriving ballot dumps.
There are so many occasions for thought in this election. There was the apparent violation of Benford’s Law, for example, a statistical tool widely used to uncover fraud, as well as the tranches of votes that were filled out, every one of them, for Joe Biden, not to mention the tens thousands of ballots that were filled out for Biden-Harris but for no one down ballot, as if someone were hurrying to stuff—I mean cast—his ballot.
None of this is dispositive, of course.
Nevertheless, I feel sure that it would have made old Auric Goldfinger ornery.
Changing the Subject
It certainly has made the Democratic media complex eager to change the subject. “Joe Biden won. He’s President elect. Time to leave the election behind us and celebrate.” That’s the mantra, isn’t it?
Biden himself has been banging on with calls for “unity.” Doubtless the poor fellow does not remember the four years we’ve just been through. Donald Trump won the 2016 election. Do you remember all the “unity” that greeted him?
What a disgusting display it was, and many Republicans have treated the appeal with some portion of the contempt it deserves. As Matt Schlapp, Chairman of the American Conservative Union, put it, “For Democrats calling for unity you may want to actually stop counting illegal votes in NV first.”
The reliably repulsive Adam Gopnik just took to the pages of The New Yorker to lecture anyone who actually reads his writing that “democracy depends on good losers.” (He actually wrote that.)
I doubt I am the only one to notice a sinister note behind the saccharine appeals to our better angels. Consider, for example, Kamala Harris’s Tweet from Nov. 12:
“Hope.
“Unity.
“Decency.
“Truth.“These are the ideals that will guide a @JoeBiden-Harris administration.”
Sure they are.
As some alert commentator noted, Harris seems to have been consulting the Left’s new how-to manual, George Orwell’s “1984”:
“Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely…
“HOPE
“UNITY
“DECENCY
“EMPATHY
“TRUTH
“EXPERTS
“SCIENCE”Again, makes one think. As does the behavior of Joe Biden’s supporters. Just Saturday, when thousands upon thousands of President Trump’s supporters rallied in Washington, D.C., to show their support, the rally was peaceful.
But come nighttime, when the crowd began to disperse, Antifa and BLM moved in to attack various elderly Trump supporters, or single mothers with their children. Turning Point’s Charlie Kirk got to the nub of the issue when he asked: “How can Joe Biden keep preaching ‘unity’ and ‘healing’ while his supporters viciously beat Americans in the streets of our capital?”
How indeed?
Appearance of Impropriety
There are many people, and I confess I am of their number, who believe with Newt Gingrich that this election was essentially “a left-wing power grab, financed by people like George Soros, deeply laid in at the local level, and, frankly, … a corrupt, stolen election.”
Well, where, you ask, is the evidence? That is a good question. A dramatic answer to that might be forthcoming, and I will come to that momentarily.
But in the meantime, consider the optics, the “appearance of impropriety” that is so ostentatiously abundant in the case of this election.
Everyone knows that “It is common practice in the business and legal communities to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.”
Corrupt liberals “dog this election”.
Yeah. The Obama Administration was going to be the most honest ever. The most transparent ever. In the end, they set the bar high for future regimes to meet if they want to be more corrupt than Obama was. Then Pelosi becomes Speaker and pledges to put ethics first, only to ignore corruption and trampling the Constitution. Immigration fraud, campaign finance fraud, classified information leaks, abuse of power… as long as the Democrats were doing it, there was no such thing as ethics.
Absolutely amazing that the people who saw crime and guilt everywhere they pointed (and it was always pointing away from THEM), THEN attempted to develop the proof can’t see all the clear signs of fraud and corruption they themselves have posted.
From USA Today, November 17, 2020 – Trump ousts Homeland Security cyber chief Chris Krebs, who called election secure
Maybe Pence should take a look at Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment.
@Greg: Anyone that regards that election as secure should be fired… or committed to an asylum.
Sidney Powell:
I think Donald Trump is batshit crazy, and there’s a lot of agreement among psychiatrists and psychologists on that point. Losing the election has pushed him right over the edge. He simply can’t handle losing or rejection like a normal, mentally stable person. He’s striking out at all of his perceived enemies and methodically ridding himself of everyone who doesn’t tell him what he wants to hear. Opportunistic people willing to reinforce his delusional thinking are being drawn to him as if by a magnet. This isn’t just unseemly; in the case of a president, it’s seriously dangerous.
If Powell has this “deluge of evidence” of “massive voter fraud” she’d better start rolling it out, and the same goes for Rudy.
@Greg: Its exactly where you refuse to look.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/bidens_great_leap_forward_a_split_second_in_wisconsin.html#.X6-u0jX5S3g.twitter
Every voting district in Wisconsin is sent their absentee ballots by the county clerk to open and count no one stop clearing house so most of those ballots were already counted and reported along with in the in person count reporting.
Thats why the over night ballot stuff was so suspicious.
@Greg: You have nothing useful to add to the discussion other than your usual parroting of Leftwing disinformation.
Piss off.
@Greg:
There’s actually ZERO agreement or evidence of that.
The “my enemy is crazy and I’ll make sure the news outlets repeat that ad nauseum” is sure sign of weak and worthless argument.
The election has not been called, and Trump has lost nothing.
Remember that, Zhang.
@kitt, #6:
I looked. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be seeing. Some guy was watching the map of Wisconsin while the count was underway. New information came in; it was added to the cumulative totals, and the projected outcome and probability shifted as a result.
The shift on the map display most likely corresponded to a point in time when new data was added by whoever was maintaining the map. There’s no direct real-time correspondence with the progress of the counting process. For all we know, some late-night map tender had just come back from their lunch break and entered a backlog of reported results all at once.
@Greg:
“For all we know…”
Ah yes. The standard Leftwing tactic of “plausible deniability”.
Bullfeathers, indeed.
@Nathan Blue, #10:
It’s the writer of the article on American Thinker who’s making unfounded assumptions about what a late night shift on the Wisconsin map signified, not me. “For all we know” is an observation that “he doesn’t know diddly squat” about why the map changed when it did. He was watching a map display change, not any real-time event in the official counting or reporting processes.
This is the kind of stuff that judges are likely rolling their eyes over after reading the court filings.
@Nathan Blue:
It is clear that B/S Artist Comrade Greggie has never worked elections. Never been an election clerk or presiding judge, never been a poll watcher, never sat on the Counting Committee. He is just a B/S artist that, with ever post, shows he is nothing but a propagandist who gets his comments from his handlers, probably the Chinese since the Democrat I know are smarter than Comrade Greggie and don’t make the stupid comments he does.
And then he has the cajones to say that Sidney Powell is a liar when he believes people like Brennan, Comey, Clapper and Andrew Weismann. The lever of hypocrisy there is monumental.
Like you never took a class in logic…
@Nathan Blue: Amazing in that 1 dump the vote changes so drastically from trump ahead 51 % to boom only 15 % for the entire after lunch ballot stuff er data entry
Brown county the Republican district 8 congress rep got 10K more votes than the Prez but the Prez still won the county by 10K votes. very strange indeed.
When the Presidency is taken away from Joe Biden his voters will be rolling over in their graves.
@Greg:
Oh, that’s right. One of your basic arguments is that you are SUPER logical.
You’re not. You’re a parrot of your handlers who tell you what to write. You know little about the counting of election results and can’t even seem to read a simple flow chart. But it seems you made straight “A”s in Marxism 101.
That’s because you’re an idiot. A useful idiot, but an idiot just the same.
@Greg: Where is the logic here?
Wayne County Board Breaks Deadlock, Votes Unanimously To Certify Election Results While Demanding Audit.
@Greg:
Again, “nothing to see here” isn’t a compelling argument. Hillary paid money to make up false allegations against Trump, even after being exonerated fools and state-run media still lie about Russian collusion. The least you Marxist apes could do is let free American citizens investigate the RAMPANT examples of election issues that obviously sculpted an election. There is no reality were 78 million people voted for the worst presidential candidate in history, baring a totalitarian take-over by a corrupt globalist political party bent on cheating.
149K votes came in in Wayne Country Michigan, all but 6K for Biden.
This is a sham election and shall not be recognized as valid.
@Nathan Blue, #17:
No one has produced a shred of credible evidence to support claims that there was a significant level of voter fraud anywhere, nor is there real evidence that any votes were changed by human or machine tabulation.
Trump was building his election fraud narrative months before the election. He’ll likely take it with him when he leaves the White House in January. No doubt there will be plenty of people who will help him maintain his delusion, but the rest of the world will necessarily move on. There are too many serious problems to be dealt with.
Trump’s refusal to allow any normal transition activities is inexcusable. This should have been going on even in the presence of some legitimate dispute about the election outcome. Trump is behaving as if the well-being of the nation only matters if he remains in office. That isn’t true in his case, or in the case of any president. All presidents are temporary. The importance of the presidency is not. Peaceful transition of power and the continuity of informed leadership are more important than any changing of the guards.
On January 20, 2021, Donald Trump will cease to be President. That’s the reality, even if some people refuse to accept it. Some people refuse to accept that Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. This doesn’t change the fact that it happened, or that telescopic photographs taken today reveal discarded mission equipment and footpaths made in the dust that still remain many decades later.