What Surprise?

There was no October Surprise. This should have been obvious. The big surprise was that there was no surprise. Given that a corrupt and cognitively impaired Joe Biden could be elected, it followed that John Fetterman would win his congressional race. The template had already been put in place. Katie Hobbs refused to debate Kari Lake in Arizona and virtually disappeared from the scene. The only reason for such anomalous behavior could only have been that she was already assured of a strong performance in advance, obviating the need to risk facing the public.

It should have been obvious that a pandemic or a war or some sort of major event was no longer required for the Democrats to turn a red wave into a disappointing trickle. There should have been no doubt that the Democrats were quietly preparing to tamper with electoral outcomes by other means, that voting machines would go on the blink, that polling stations would run out of paper, that alleged illegal electioneering and discarded ballots would figure in the results, that Google manipulations would exert an effect on the outcome of the mid-terms via “ephemeral experience” and “opinion matching,” and so on. Such tactics and subterfuges should have been evident from the get-go, but Republicans’ over-confidence and lack of attention to detail cost them what might otherwise have ended less catastrophically.

According to Stephen Kruiser, American voters are idiots; half the country is brain dead, which may be true, but that is far from the whole story. The Republican Party is not known as “the stupid party” for nothing: overconfidence is a killer. Yet it must be said that it is not clear what might have been done to prevent an electoral travesty since the electoral process has been “weaponized” by a controlling administration and a compliant media apparatus. Two-thousand Donkeys, so to speak, are not a trifling phenomenon. At the same time, a state of acute preparedness and intelligent planning by Republican strategists may have to some degree mitigated the consequences we are now facing.

The Democrats did not spring a sudden attack, a resonating “surprise”; they sent in their agents under the radar, quietly seeding the ground for the expected crop, a long-term operation. This should have been expected. As for the Elephant, it was never in the room.

One thinks of that famous quote from Otto von Bismarck: “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.” One might expand the aphorism to include during and after an election as well.