
Forget Russia. Forget Ukraine. The Post Office is the New National Emergency!
How many times can the public be expected to fall for this? First we were supposed to get scared and panicked because President Trump was a secret Russian agent, doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin. Then we were supposed to freak out because Trump fired James Comey. Then we were supposed to fear for the future because Trump violated something called the Emoluments Clause. Then we were expected to fret because Trump was putting “kids in cages.” Then it was Ukraine.
Now?
Well, the Democrats are really running low on energy, because our latest Trump-created national crisis just doesn’t have the zing and zip of the previous ones. It’s one thing to get up in arms because Putin in secretly pulling the strings of the U.S. president. It’s quite another to generate much enthusiasm about the defunding of the U.S. Postal Service. When you have protesters and elected Democrats literally calling for the abolition of police, we’re supposed to think that USPS funds are the most important crisis facing the country?
The Post Office crisis does share one thing in common with all the rest of them: It comes to us with a healthy dose of Democrat hyperbole and outright lies.
First of all, to care even a whit about this manufactured controversy, you would have to believe that Americans can only vote by mail in the upcoming election. This just isn’t true. In-person voting will be in full swing, and anyone who wants to vote in that traditional way will be able to. In-person voting even has the blessing of The Great and Wonderful Dr. Anthony Fauci, so what’s the problem? If you really care about who is going to be the next president, get out there and vote and stop complaining.
Second, while Trump has made it easy for Democrats to turn this non-story into America’s latest “the sky is falling” hysteria, there’s no truth to the claim that the president and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy are destroying the Post Office in advance of the election. If the Democrats wanted their $25 million bailout that they stuffed into the latest stimulus bill, they should have been willing to cut some of the other pork out of the legislation. Even so, that money had nothing to do with preparing the Post Office for the election.
To put it plainly: The Post Office is plenty capable of processing mail-in ballots.
As the editors of National Review put it: “Given that the postal service delivers almost 3 billion pieces of mail a week, it is going to be able to handle any surge in mail-in voting, a proverbial drop in the bucket. What the postal service warned of last week is that some states have deadlines for mail-balloting that are too close to Election Day to allow a cushion for a reliable delivery, an admonition meant to ensure that mail-in voting works as intended.”
There are certain to be innumerable issues with widespread mail-in voting: Fraud, misplaced ballots, uncounted ballots, you name it. But none of that has anything to do with some secret plot by Trump and DeJoy to suppress the vote, it’s just the reality of the situation. Which is why holding a mostly-mail election is a terrible idea.
Democrats know this. They’re trying to sow the seeds now to blame Trump when this debacle unfolds as expected in November. We’re sure the media will assist them every step of the way.