We're coming for you, Mr. Trump!

 

I voted today.

It took over an hour. People were lined up for a block and a half from the County Board of Elections Office- on the Wednesday before Election Day.

Doubtless, COVID played a role, although I'm not sure exactly how voting early like I did today is any safer than voting at one's precinct on Election Day would be. Since the County Board of Elections is actually closer to my apartment than my polling place, I personally make a habit of voting early, though. But the percentage of the electorate that's voting early doesn't really register until you see the lines.

I'm told that it's been this way every weekday for a while. And when I left after voting, the line was just as long as it had been when I showed up.

It's easy to believe FiveThirtyEight's prediction that 154 million Americans will vote in this election. Along with a substantially larger lead than Hillary Clinton had four years ago in the polls, a turnout this massive further convinces me that, PTSD from 2016 aside, Joe Biden is going to win this thing, probably convincingly. I am optimistic that Donald Trump will be thoroughly repudiated by the nation.

It's the only chance the Republican Party has, it seems to me. Barring a throughgoing de-Trumpification, the Party of White, Mostly Non-College Educated, Men doesn't seem to me to have much of a future, and Charlie Sykes is right: the only way that's going to happen is if the voters "burn it all down."

I did my part. I voted a straight Democratic ticket. I don't think I ever did that even back when I was a Democrat, in the Seventies and Eighties.

There was some regret in voting against Sen. Joni Ernst, for whom I once had such high hopes. One-time Congressman David Young is a relatively inoffensive sort, at least personally. But from top to bottom, the party which has so completely abandoned its values and convictions and become a cult of personality for a childish, massively ignorant, and generally incompetent narcissist needs to pay the price. Tough love, I guess I might say, for what was once my party. Even more, a necessary thing for America. We need to have an effective opposition party once the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress, and it will not be possible for the Republican Party to be taken seriously until it gets Trump out of its system.

Which might be easier said than done. I'm not sure that a defeated Trump wouldn't attempt a comeback in 2024. Or if not Orange Man personally, one of his toadies. Maybe even Junior. But the real problem is that the cruelty, the authoritarianism, the racism, the boorishness, and the general stupidity has been mainstreamed now. It's going to be tough to put back in the bottle.

I see that the Monmouth University poll has Biden up five points in Georgia. Not to count my Never Trump chickens, but something tells me that a landslide may be brewing. America may be about to decisively purge itself of the alien parasite that's been dictating its public policy at the Federal level for the past four years.

I think, to coin a phrase, that we're about to Make America America Again.