Abe Fortas! Call your office ASAP!

March 14, 2018

 Abe Fortas! Call your office ASAP!

The Vietnam Wall, the big one in Washington, the one with 58,318 names on it, began in 1948 in Duval County, Texas. [Full disclosure – I once owned mineral rights there and I “fracked” my first well there in January, 1974 just before the Dolphins won a Super Bowl in Houston.]

At least that war, one of Lyndon Johnson’s 2 wars, ended. The other one, the War on Poverty, was doomed ab ovum. That war, whose casualty list would require a wall as long as Interstate 95, is still ongoing. It is the “Ground Hog Day” of battles, the Somme and Hurtgen Forest rolled into one, played over and over and over, again and again, and yet still again.

“Key Largo” a film noir gem, has a classic scene where Thomas Gomez, a B grade thug in thralldom to Edward G. Robinson, explains the voting process in detail. “People vote and we count them. We keep counting them until our guy wins.” Simple, isn’t it?

Lyndon Johnson went from being down by 20,000 votes on election night in 1948 to being up by 87 in a week. After he won the Democratic primary for Senate he won the general election in a landslide in November. 16 years later he became the third Democratic President in 48 years – 1916, 1940, 1964 – to promise not to send American boys to fight in foreign wars.

Abe Fortas, Johnson’s bag man and hondler, yes, that Abe Fortas, found the last 200 votes in Duval County. Surprisingly, and I say “surprisingly”, because there will be people from places other than Hudson County, New Jersey who will say that those 200 votes miraculously found and being in alphabetical order maybe wouldn’t pass the bag test. Bag test? Send a SASE.

Which brings us to Pennsylvania.

600 votes out of several hundred thousand cast is what is stopping the Republicans from keeping the House seat in question. 

Alas, Republicans lack both the wit, the stealth, the brass balls, the big brass balls, and the panache to grasp the nettle and enlist the spectre of Thomas Gomez and count and count and count. 

Of course, the cacophony of atonal howling from Banshees about voter suppression and intimidation and just plain meanness and unfairness is a gift that Republicans cannot master.

Speaking of contested elections, I feel it is my duty to point out to modern American Liberals, those who are universally afflicted with terminal “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”, that the Florida 2000 election was decided by the Democratic Senate in 1987 when they “borked” Robert Bork. I love eponyms.

An accepted urban legend is that the SCOTUS vote that made George W. Bush President was 5 to 4. Not true. The vote was 7 to 2. The vote to accept the case for review was 5 to 4. The kidney stone, the ragingly aching eye-tooth of political life, is that if Bork had been confirmed the vote would have been 5 to 4 not to accept the case.

Which means that Alpha Gump would have been POTUS, Thumper Gump would have been FLOTUS, and we would have been overrun by baby Gumpsters.

God is great and life is good and the Kyoto Accords are fading, fading in the rear- view mirror of History. All that without any visible “controlling legal authority”.

Are we sure Lee Atwater is still dead?

KEVIN SMITH

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET