COVID Diaries Pt. 15

After a contentious election where 45 and his supporters simultaneously tried to stop voting in states they were winning and keep voting in places they were losing, Joe Biden was finally declared President Elect over the weekend.

Places everywhere erupted in celebration.  Not just in the US, but around the entire world.  It was a pretty amazing thing to see.  For a moment, we were all able to take a breath, and the anxiety of four years evaporated.

That doesn’t mean it’s all over.  Far from it.  There are still runoff elections in Georgia to determine the Senate which is huge.  And let’s speak about Georgia.  It was a reliably red state that barely flipped blue during this election.   This is due to Stacy Abrams who got out the vote in that state like no one has ever seen.  She was amazing, and delivering Georgia was unexpected and very welcome.

In addition, we have our first female Vice President Elect in Kamala Harris.  She broke that glass ceiling for all females, white and black.   It was a pretty momentous thing.  Black females got out and voted in record numbers, and I cannot thank them enough.

Even with that good news, we have to remember that 70 million people still voted for the Orange Lawn & Garden enthusiast (more on that later.) After four years of constant lies and deplorable behavior and policies, 70 million people still said, “That’s our guy.”   That’s incredibly troubling for me.  Those people might not be fascist, racist, homophobic, or xenophobes, but their vote basically said they were okay with a guy that was.  That sucks for America, and sucks for my opinion of fellow Americans.

That said, I still have a very high opinion of our election workers and getting the counts correct.  My wife, as well as close friends all volunteered as election officials during a pandemic, and I couldn’t be prouder of people stepping up to make sure this was a fair election, and everyone could vote.

Now due to the pandemic, a lot of people voted early or voted by mail.  Because of this, early results favored 45, but that’s only because they hadn’t counted the mail-in votes.  45 had told his supporters not to vote by mail, so the mail ballots were overwhelmingly in Biden’s favor, and as the counts went on, President Elect Joe Biden overtook Trump in enough states to win the electoral college.  He’ll also have won by more than five million in the popular vote.

Because it looked like counting votes in Pennsylvania would allow Biden to overtake 45, he wanted them to stop counting there.  The campaign sent Rudy Guiliani to Philadelphia to have a news conference to denounce the counting of votes.  The “I could not make this up in a 100 years” moment came when instead of booking the Four Seasons hotel to have this press conference, they booked Four Seasons Landscaping.   Instead of admitting their mistake and going elsewhere, they pretended they meant to do it the entire time and actually held the press conference there.  Right in between a sex toy shop and a crematorium.   Seriously.  That happened.

And some Republicans still can’t understand why I think this administration is unqualified.  It baffles intelligent minds.

As of this moment, 45 still insists he won, and that Democrats stole the election.  There will be lawsuits, posturing, and shit disputing this election until we drag him kicking and screaming out of the White House.

Today, via Tweet, 45 fired the Secretary of Defense.  I’m sure he’ll continue whacking anyone that he thinks has slighted him.  Also, they haven’t released funds for Biden to use for his transition, so he’s impeding that.  I’m sure we’re in for a couple months of that manbaby’s temper tantrums.  Hopefully he doesn’t do too much damage to our Democracy before then.

Today we also had really promising news on a vaccine trial from Pfizer.  Trials look extremely good and they could actually have up to 50 million doses ready before the end of the year.  This is awesome, and hopefully things keep trending the right way there.

The funny thing is, the current VP has claimed that it’s all because of Operation Warp Speed, the initiative by the current administration to fast track a vaccine.  Pfizer came out and said that they never took any government money and were never a part of that initiative.  So, just another lie by the current administration.  We’re pretty used to it by now.  Either way, it’s good that things are moving forward.  It needs to because numbers right now are pretty dire.

In the last week we’ve seen record numbers of cases, hitting well above 100,000 positives a day.  It’s a pretty grim milestone, and going into the winter, it’s going to get worse.  Funny how it’s not a hoax that magically went away after election day, as so many truly stupid people were thinking.

Anyway, we still have until January 20^th for 45 to spread his crazy, all in the middle of this pandemic, so let’s see where it takes us.

But…

For the first time in a long time, I feel hopeful, happy, and can truly breathe. I’m going to savor it.