What the Fuck Was That?!

 

     "That's not the way it was supposed to end."

     That's what I said moments after Super Bowl XLII ended. Until the last 43 seconds of the game, the brilliant Patriots defense held the Giants to just 10 points. The Pats were 18-0 in the regular and playoff season and broke just about every record there was to break. The Giants were a mediocre 10-6 in the regular season. All auguries were of good fortune. 

     Then, somehow, Eli Manning found Plaxico Burress in the corner of the end zone.

     We learned pretty damned quickly that 18-1 doesn't count for shit of the 1 comes during the Super Bowl. It was like leading the pack during an entire marathon only to break your ankle within 100 yards of the finish line.

     My stepson was several miles away at his college boarding house and wound up breaking his right hand when he punched a wall. Back home, I just sat numbly looking at the Giants celebrate as the Patriots slunk off the gridiron. No, this wasn't the way it was supposed to end.

     In the previous six years of the Brady-Belichick dynasty, we'd already gotten spoiled. We thought winning was our birthright. Any other outcome was literally unthinkable. We deserved this!

     Super Bowl XLII was like a violation of the natural order of things. It was as if we were reading a book by a literary master only to have some clown hijack the book in the epilogue and rewrite an ending we'd be guaranteed to hate. No, we didn't just see that.

     Last night brought back the same exact feeling I had on February 3, 2008.

     The difference was that, in 2007, the Patriots really were invincible. Tom Brady threw for an NFL record 50 TD passes. Randy Moss shattered the NFL record for the most touchdown receptions. And people began forgetting the punter's name.

     Except Kamala Harris wasn't as infallible as the 2007 Tom Brady. She made some unforced errors, sure. For instance, her campaign rejected nearly $8,000,000 when the Congressional Black Caucus gave them a roadmap for Black voter outreach. Instead, her campaign relied on legacy media, online influencers and celebrities. And it can't be said her outreach in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania, that she lost by over 200,000 votes, was flawless, either.

     She looked and seemed flawless. We relied on that perception. We clung to it like grim death.

     Now, as usual, the pundits, when they do their grim duty autopsying this election, will come up with countless manifold reasons as to how and why she lost to the most prolific criminal in American history.

     White men hating her. Latino men hating her. Black men hating her. The glass ceiling. Flip-flopping on fracking, her soft stance on Israel. Blah blah blah.

     It's all of those things and none of them. 

     Here's what we do know-

     Granted, not all the states have finished counting their votes as of this writing. That includes California, the most populous state with 39.5 million people. But having said that, as of right now, 140,439,667 votes have been counted.

     Four years ago, 155,507.476 votes were counted for Trump and Biden.

     That's more than 15,000,000 fewer votes than four years ago. The US population has grown by millions in the last four years, which includes a lot of new voters. Plus, a record 78,000,000 people, about half the electorate, turned out to vote early within the last week. Early voting records were crushed in several states.

     What happened to 15,000,000 voters? The math doesn't add up.

     We'll likely never know what the exact reasons for Harris' catastrophic failure last night. Not only did she not win, she never once had the lead. All I know is the reasons for Harris' loss are ones no one is telling us.