Strange Times

If you burn down Minneapolis, Democratic Congressfolk will excuse your behavior as protected by the First Amendment and CNN talking heads will describe the event as "a mostly-peaceful demonstration".  Police will herd you as well as they can in the desired direction, but you can expect to go home tonight if you don't go to jail.  If you assault the Capitol and do little more than break glass and upend furniture, Congressfolk from both sides of the aisle will berate you and call you an insurrectionist, and the police will pepper-spray you and shoot you dead.

And why are the people assaulting the Capitol?  Well, they're protesting what they see as an entirely illegitimate election.

"But," you say, "there's no proof that the election was illegitimate!" and, in fact, there seems to be no 'proof' (in the accepted sense of that word) of improprieties.  There is, however, a column of smoke smelling distinctly like 'election fraud', and where there's smoke, there's fire.

This is what's causing that awful smell:  Joe Biden ran almost no campaign — the result of Covid-19 restrictions, obviously — and was lashed to the mast of his ship-of-state with Kamala Harris who was so unpopular among Democrats that she terminated her Presidential campaign early for lack of funds.  When Trump held a campaign rally, 25,000 supporters showed up;  When Biden held a rally, he was lucky to see 400 attendees — including the camera crew.  Despite this, he managed to garner more votes than Hillary Clinton did in a hard-fought campaign four years ago, and more votes than a wildly-popular Barack Obama did eight years ago.  Let's not even touch on the mysterious appearance late election night of several thousands of ballots all, by some accounts, for Biden, and many of which contained no votes for down-ballot races.  If you can't smell that, you may be positive for Covid-19.

There's an old adage in medicine:  "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."  Once a mail-in ballot is separated from its enclosing envelope, the ability to identify any ballot as either legitimate or illegitimate is gone irretrievably and forever, so, yes, there's no evidence this election was stolen.

That doesn't mean it wasn't stolen.

74 million American voters no longer believe voting is a good way to express the will of the people.  That's a problem.  Democrats don't care because they 'won'.  That's a much bigger problem.  It means there will be no change to the way elections are run from here on out.  If you're a Republican, you can resign yourself to never winning another federal election.  Your best hope is that the Democrats who now hold both Congress and the White House will screw things up so badly over the next few years that there will be no way to pull off another magical midnight ballot-dump in 2022 or 2024.

Don't hold your breath.