The house Roosevelt built has been rotting. Increasing the rot is pretense. The pretense that we are the ones who are to blame for this past election and nothing else, no one else. Mr. Do Whatever to Steal an Election and his Enablers (NOT A GREAT BAND NAME) won: and don’t you dare question that. (I dare. I dare.) We must be noble: quietly concede, roll over, play politically dead and, most of all, whip ourselves over and over again.
    So many bad BS excuses from our own side as to why we sucked, starting with framings that make it seem like Kamala, who was all over the country, even in red places, didn’t do enough. Given some of these framings by our own pundits and pols you would think all Kamala did was stay home, smoke funny cigarettes and watched Captain Kangaroo reruns. Oh, and obviously the other side ran such a perfect campaign.
    Cough, cough.
    Kamala campaigning with Liz Cheney, what a mistake! (Really?)
    Didn’t go to the right places. (She went damn near everywhere, the energy was amazing!)
    Culture war! (Only THEY get to do culture wars apparently, and far more than we ever do.)
    Trans in bathrooms? Damn, that’s one of the weaker critiques. Maybe we should have just agreed with all of their plentiful culture war issues. Maybe we should have defended the uneaten cats in Springfield too?
    Of course Bernie had to join in on the whipping suggestions. He who helped with the campaign. He who was so good at it he won every primary he was ever in. “But he was cheated! Cheated!”
    Gee, where have we heard THAT before?
    ”Democrats have lost their way?” What, NOW you say that? You know we’ve heard your previous more positive comments BEFORE the election, right? You’re like the patient’s doctor who stands over his patient’s corpse and says, “Well, what the doctor REALLY should have told her is…”
    And one must ask, all these hindsight observations, where were they BEFORE the election? As ever, these kinds of hindsight self flagellations come out of a very appropriately named portal.
    Dare I ask what Mr. Do Whatever to Steal the 2020 Election and his Enablers may have done to steal the election this time, or at least contribute to the loss? I know, I know, “Don’t you dare even suggest that!!!”    I dare to ask if Mr. Do Whatever to Steal the 2020 Election and his Enablers so to steal the election this time, or at least contribute to the loss? I know, I know, “Don’t you dare even suggest that!!!”
    Oh, I dare, I dare.
    I don’t trust them. Do you?
    I know we wanna be the good guys. Not endlessly claim elections were stolen. Not rip apart voting machines. Not constantly claim we were cheated. Not keep trying to block the count. Not demand votes be found for us, not refusing concede. Not attempt to get an otherwise obedient VP murdered, or claim any such violence was Antifa, BLM, then switch to patriots being kissed by police…
    I don’t want anything like that from our side, obviously. If the other side had a history of being even remotely fair about elections I might be both submissive and noble too.
    But you see history more than suggests otherwise, and not just about Trump. From making deals behind Johnson’s back with the South Vietnamese (How well did that work out for pro-Nam war warriors?), to making deals to hold the hostages in Iran, to doing anything to stop counting the vote and pack the Court, to Trump’s many attempts to steal the election while encouraging insurrection, trying to force election officials to cheat, to “find” votes, force fake delegates into the EC and more… and the Republican Party’s many efforts to eliminate politically incorrect voting groups.
    Considering all this, and so much more, maybe it’s time we stop being so damn noble and at least demand investigations? They don’t need to be loud and accusatory. They do need to be by neutral organizations/companies, far, far better than Repubs hired in 2020.
    Hey, maybe EVERY presidential election should be investigated by non-partisan organizations, and those results double checked.
    Don’t get me wrong, I understand the results on the surface level: redder states turned redder due to turn out. Bluer states not as blue because supposed lower turn out. (How sure are we of that? How many didn’t get to vote, were turned away, provisionals weren’t counted, were purged off the rolls, no “Russia, Russia, Russia…?) Purple states turned redder.
    To repeat: ON THE SURFACE LEVEL, but we need to dive deeper. From election boards allowed to negate voter’s selections of delegates, to voter challenges, voter intimidation and voter purges, too few machines and broken machines going to Trump politically incorrect polls, to honest poll workers being harassed out of their jobs then replaced by MAGA stooges, and the fact they previously tore apart voting machines perhaps learning how to screw with them… all of this the short list of the nasty games they played, none of this passing the sniff test.
    Oh, after all this time NOW it’s all on the up and up?
    Can’t you smell the rot?
    But the pols and pundits so desperately want all of us to be noble and not even QUIETLY question or to investigate. And at the same time we should self flagellate. Oh, our candidate, our party, WE must have been SO bad. Oh horrible, horrible us. Let’s slap that whip even more and harder than monks did during the black death!
    Something smells rotten in 2024.
    Noble rot.

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    “Inspection” is a column that has been written by Ken Carman for over 50 years. Inspection is dedicated to looking at odd angles, under all the rocks and into the unseen cracks and crevasses that constitute the issues and philosophical constructs of our day: places few think, or even dare, to venture.
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Ken Carman and Cartenual Productions.
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