The Witness Chronicles, 10/14/24

Are you ready for President Vance? I’m not.

Photo by Abdul Ahad Sheikh on Unsplash

President Vance? And Other Tales of Terror

My daily reality check

With three weeks to go and early voting already underway, my guess is that virtually all voters have their minds made up. Anything I or anyone else writes is unlikely to change those minds. After all, every day brings us another cornucopia of outrage, lies, nonsensical rambling, and speeches bursting with incomprehensible rage.

And more and more stories of angry white men with guns harassing FEMA workers or trying to get into Trump rallies. Meanwhile, I think about Trump’s health and the consequences if he were to die in office. It’s a likely possibility given his terrible eating habits, overweight paunchy ‘beautiful body’, and his total lack of interest in doing anything about any of it.

This week Kamala Harris released a report on her health and it is very good, but the report was really about calling out the Trump campaign’s steadfast refusal to tell us anything substantive about his physical health, his mental acuity, and things like his weight. There is increasing evidence that the campaign is generally trying to keep him away from any situation that could reveal any of these possible conditions.

Oh yeah, and he is old. Now, because of those men with guns, he can’t even play golf. So, yes, a President Vance is a distinct possibility, despite JD Vance being the least experienced politician to get anywhere near the role in recent years.

It’s scary season, and I’m not referring to Halloween. There are real life horror movies playing out in real time all around us. Weather, raving maniacs, and the specter of a President Vance.

Who will win? I have no idea. Neither has anyone else, despite the constant parsing of numbers that are meaningless by ‘journalists’ who make their living writing the same article over and over again about some new poll. At this point I wonder why we bother paying any attention at all.

The Republican Party has been releasing their own polls and when these get averaged into other polling, Trump of course gets a bump. All we can take away from those claims is that the books are being cooked in any way they can be.

I’m constantly thinking about how Orwellian the Republican playbook has become. I doubt many voters have read 1984, Orwell’s horror novel of life under an authoritarian government where everyone is watched and language is twisted by leaders for their own purposes.

That government says Truth is Lies and Lies are Truth. Sound familiar?

It sure sounds like the blueprint for what we are watching right now.

At this point I think most of us just want this to over, for the sane candidates to win and life to get back to whatever normal is now. But there’s no sign that will happen as Trump openly says he will not accept defeat. We really need a Kamala Harris landslide but there’s no sign that’s coming.

I’m a little resigned to something like a civil war between ideologies. I just hope the country isn’t too exhausted to stop this unending stream of divisiveness and hate.

If I sound a little pessimistic right now, it’s because it appears there are many people who are refusing to deal with reality and simply want to join the herd mentality that Trump represents. If there is anything about this election that is even more disturbing than his openly fascist rants, it's the willingness of many to just do what their friends are doing while being willfully ignorant.

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