My two greatest Americans are pictured above – Arnold Rothstein and Richard Nixon. Why? Because as a guy who occasionally takes the short odds on point spreads, I love the fact that one fixed a World Series and the other fixed a Presidential election.
Rothstein’s plan was very simple. Give some cash to a bunch of underpaid, hayseed farm boys playing for the Chicago White Sox. A dropped fly ball here, a wild throw there and the deal was done.
As for Nixon, he headed into the 1972 campaign knowing that if he could just get the centrist candidate, Ed Muskie out of the way, he could mop the floor running against a far-out, Lefty like George McGovern, which is exactly what he did. Muskie’s campaign collapsed before the New Hampshire primary when operatives from Nixon’s campaign sent a phony letter to the major New Hampshire newspaper alleging a meeting with Muskie where the Maine Senator compared French-Canucks to Blacks.
Who was one of the guys that planned and executed ‘dirty tricks’ for Nixon during the 1972 campaign? Roger Stone. And who was one of the Trump gang that was involved in the attempts to dig up dirt about Joe Biden in The Ukraine? Roger Stone.
And by the way, one of Stone’s closest associates is none other than Michal Caputo, who until he was sidelined with cancer as well as for accusing CDC scientists of ‘sedition,’ was an essential part of the team that downplayed the threat of Covid-19 right from the start.
The only mistake that Trump and his bunch made, however, in trying to fix the 2020 campaign, was that they couldn’t figure out a way to buy off the virus. The problem with a virus, any virus, is that it “exists only to reproduce. When it reproduces, its offspring spread to new cells and new hosts.” This definition was published back in 2017.
The point is that you can’t stop a virus from spreading by saying something about it that isn’t true. You can’t stop a virus from spreading by claiming that we’ve ‘turned the corner’ and the virus is going away. Yesterday, Trump held three super-spreader virus events in Pennsylvania, a state where the polls show that just about everyone who plans to vote has made up their mind. And he’s not winning in Pennsylvania.
In fact, Trump dipped back under 45% in today’s poll, Joe sits at 50.2%, and the dog-shit vote is 4.9%. In the three counties where Trump told his adoring, unmasked fans that voting for Joe would be as bad as voting for Stalin, or Hitler (Trump uses words like ‘communism’ and ‘fascism’ interchangeably, sometimes in the same sentence), more than 16,500 people happen to be currently hosting Covid-19.
Do we have a plan to prevent any of those 16,500 corona virus hosts from giving the virus an opportunity to find and attach itself to a new host? No. Do we have a plan to figure out where someone goes after a test shows that the virus is using their body as a host? No.
What we have is a President who mentions the pandemic as infrequently as possible because he knows for a fact that we will have a vaccine available in the ‘next several weeks.’ The fact that Anthony Fauci says the very earliest a vaccine will be distributed is 2021 – what the hell does he know? He’s just another one of those ‘idiots’ with an M.D. degree.
To Roger Stone’s credit, when he started working for Nixon and spread lies around that would help his boss win a Presidential campaign, at least his efforts were done in secret. Now the lies have become the open and official narrative of the Trump campaign.
Thank goodness the virus can’t vote. Because if it could, Trump would win in a landslide. Make no mistake about that.
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