On the Couch

The FBI has been scouring the land to find and arrest the insurrectionists who invaded the United States Capitol building on January 6. As news media report the apprehending of each miscreant, I find reading the brief backgrounds of each one instructive. The most salient feature I have noticed is that many of the would-be shtarkers live with their mothers. (And many of whom brought their mothers along to the riot.) 

Calling Dr. Freud!

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In interviews, several of the idiots claimed to be acting like the citizens in Ukraine or Belarus who flocked to the streets to protest fraudulent elections. But their heads were so screwed on backwards that they couldn’t even get the analogy correct.

Consider: Those Eastern European protesters were opponents of the government, who saw the ins using their political power—control of the right to be on the ballot, control over the handling of the voting, control of the counting of the votes cast, etc.—to steal the election.* The opposition had no way to subvert the election—they had no power to do so, even if they wanted to.

Now consider the situation in the US: The party in power was claiming that the election was stolen by those who had no power to do so. But the outs don’t control how ballots may be cast (in person, by mail, etc.), or where drop boxes will be placed for the collection of ballots not cast on election day or mailed,** or how and when ballots are counted, or what forms of ID are necessary to cast one’s ballot, or the reporting of the results, etc. That is all under the control of the ruling party. In other words, only the ins have the means and power to steal an election. 

Thankfully, election officials—both Republican and Democratic—did not bow to pressure to undermine the legitimacy of the election. Indeed, some of the state officials who came under the most pressure to act fraudulently—those in Arizona and Georgia—were Republicans. When Trump called the Republican Georgia election official and asked him to find 11,780 votes, that was a prime example of how an in party attempts to steal an election. He wanted an in-power official to commit fraud. No out-of-power person could even attempt such an act.

The ins steal elections, because, unfortunately, they can.

So “Stop the Steal” as a slogan was a correct one. Except it was aimed at the wrong party.

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* As proof of what an in party can do, here is what happened in Tanzania this past October:

https://apnews.com/article/tanzania-elections-kenya-voting-fraud-and-irregularities-presidential-elections-e4df247054dd2ce39412ec660357f80e

**  In Texas, the Republican governor decreed that only one drop box would be placed in each county. Harris County, which contains the city of Houston, has 4.7 million people!