Charley P. (Pierce) lends voice to the demand for the repeal of the Electoral College. As the comedy act continues at Trump Tower, we are witness to the destruction of the United States of America. If this is a (fair & balanced) national tragedy, so be it.
[x Esquire]
I'm Leaning Toward Dumping The Electoral College, Too"
By Charley P. (Charles P. Pierce)
TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing
"This Is Not America"
By David Bowie
There's a genuinely bizarre—and genuinely dangerous—line of thought being promulgated by those people who are trying to push back against the empirical reality that, in January, we're going to be inaugurating a president who lost the national popular vote by somewhere north of 2.6 million votes. This isn't the quadrennial appeal to bury the Electoral College next to Alexander Hamilton in the graveyard of Trinity Church in lower Manhattan.
(I've argued both sides of that question in my life, but I'm leaning rather permanently toward dumping the EC. Twice in a decade-and-a-half it has screwed up the presidential election with appalling consequences. Since it was invented to keep incompetents and mountebanks out of the presidency, I'd say it's failed pretty badly at that job since 2000.)
No, this one is more insidious.
It is being argued in several places, especially on the electric Twitter machine, that Hillary Rodham Clinton's undeniable victory in the popular vote shouldn't really count because of the huge leads she piled up in, for example, California. Here's Byron York, just throwing it out there. Here, from The Hill, a once venerable Washington tip-sheet that is now a barge for clickbait, reporting that, at El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago's rallies, this theme is quite the crowd pleaser.
Hardaway and her sister Rochelle Richardson, who go by their stage names in public, went on to question Clinton's lead in the popular vote. "Trump won 2,623 counties against Hillary Clinton's 489," Diamond said. "I'm sorry media, I love y'all, but I don't believe Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. Unless you are counting the votes y'all said she was going to win."
And the good folks at Public Policy Polling have a poll in the field that's showing that this notion has some legs to it.
California contributes more to the national GDP than does any other state in the Union. If you want to see the results of the incredible over-cooking of the results from the Rust Belt, and the endless forelock-tugging in the elite political media towards same, look at a poll in which 43 percent of the winner's voters doesn't think California should count.
Why? My guess: "Brown people," which means millionz of illegalz, and Trump is right about that! All this talk about normalization tends to cloud a serious attempt to delegitimize even more of the institutions of democracy by ratfcking the results on which they depend. Somebody should knock this off. ###
[Charles P. "Charlie" Pierce is a sportswriter, political blogger, author, and game show panelist. Pierce is the lead political blogger for Esquire, a position he has held since September 2011. He has written for Grantland, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Sports Illustrated, The National Sports Daily, GQ, and Slate. Pierce makes appearances on radio as a regular contributor to a pair of NPR programs: "Only A Game" and "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" He graduated from Marquette University (BA, Journalism).]
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