“2020: The Worst Year Ever,” reads the cover of Time magazine’s December 14 issue.

“There have been worse years in U.S. history,” admits author Stephanie Zacharek, but not, to her way of thinking, since World War Two.  Between a heavy hurricane and fire season, police violence and the accompanying protests, a circus of a presidential election, and a global pandemic, Zacharek opines, none but the oldest among us can remember a year nearly as bad.

Just how bad a given year was is, of course, a matter of opinion, but Zacharek’s opinion on 2020 strikes me as overwrought in a way that’s becoming increasingly typical of whiny American poor-us-ism.

Lately it seems everything has to be described in a superlative manner. Natural disaster. War. Police violence. Political craziness. You name it, we just can’t seem to accept that it’s part of a continuum. Everything absolutely, positively must be the mostest or the worstest of its kind, ever.

I don’t remember World War Two. I don’t even remember 1968. But that particular year lived on in our collective memory strongly enough, for long enough, that I remember (and sometimes still see) the shudders of those who lived through it.  Some high points:

In January, nearly 400 people died and thousands were injured in an earthquake in Sicily. North Korean forces seized the USS Pueblo. The Tet Offensive began in Vietnam.

In February, police killed three students at a civil rights protest in Orangeburg, South Carolina.

In March, American troops murdered somewhere between 350 and 500 unarmed civilians at My Lai in Vietnam.

On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots ensued.

In May, seven weeks of mass unrest began in France and at least 46 tornadoes struck At least 46 tornadoes struck ten US states in one night, killing dozens  and injuring thousands.

In June, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, California.

July saw the first recorded cases in the 1968 H3N2 flu epidemic, which killed somewhere between 1 million and 4 million worldwide and as many as 100,000 in the United States (no, not as many as COVID-19, but the population of the US was less than 2/3 what it is now). It also saw four days of rioting in Cleveland, Ohio after a four-hour gun battle between police and the Black Nationalists of New Libya left seven dead.

In August, more than 200 died in an earthquake in the Philippines, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, and police rioted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, abducting and injuring hundreds.

In October, soldiers opened fire on a protest in Mexico City, killing between 350 and 400, and 30 years of “The Troubles” kicked off after police in Derry, (Northern) Ireland,  truncheoned civil rights protesters.

Yes, 2020 has been a pretty crappy year, but let’s try to keep a little perspective here. There’s never been a year that some people didn’t think — at the time — was the worse year ever. And even if you can’t think of a single good thing about 2020 right now, I can point at least one out for you: It’s almost over.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Many (though not nearly all) of my friends on the Republican side of the bipartisan aisle are utterly convinced that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” to produce a fake victory for Joe Biden — that Donald Trump actually won, and had his victory stolen via a vast conspiracy to manufacture false votes and fraudulently switch real ones.

None of my friends on the Democratic side are buying it. Neither, it seems, are the courts. Nor am I.

So far, the evidence produced to substantiate the claims isn’t just unconvincing, it isn’t evidence. In substance, the argument is that 1) if voter preferences didn’t change between 2016 and 2020, and 2)  if the preferences of mail voters didn’t differ from the preferences of  in-person voters, a Biden victory was so statistically unlikely as to be suspicious.

But voter preferences DO change between elections, often in numbers sufficient to change outcomes from election to election in “battleground” or “swing” states.  That’s why that handful of states are called by those names. The margin between winner and loser in those states is always slim. Only a few minds need changing, or a few previously lazy voters motivated to turn out, to reverse the previous result.

As for mail versus in-person voter preferences, Donald Trump and the Republican Party spent the months leading up to the election telling their base that mail voting is suspect and in-person voting is better. The utterly predictable and completely non-suspicious result:  Mail voting went Democratic in a big way, while some Republicans who intended to vote in person decided at the last minute to catch a Seinfeld re-run instead of standing in line in the rain for two hours to participate in the real-life show about nothing.

All that said, yes, the presidential election was rigged. The next American presidential election that ISN’T rigged will be the first in living memory.

No, it wasn’t rigged to ensure a Biden win, or a Trump loss.

It was rigged to ensure victory for the status quo and for our de facto one-party system.

It was rigged by party committees, by state legislatures, and by the  Commission on Presidential debates.

It was rigged with committee rules, state ballot access laws, and debate requirements intentionally designed to keep both “major party” dissidents (e.g. Tulsi Gabbard) and third party and independent candidates as far off of voters’ radar as possible.

It wasn’t rigged to benefit a particular person. It was rigged to preserve a system: The post-World-War-Two, military-industrial complex-centered “consensus” system.

The rigging worked. If you don’t believe me, ask any progressive eyeing Joe Biden’s cabinet appointment announcements. He’s staffing his  administration with corporate lobbyists, party loyalists, and long-time ladder-climbing sycophants.

Exactly like Donald “Drain the Swamp!” Trump did. His election victory was anomalous given his rhetoric, but even if he had meant what he said, the system’s second line of defense  — some people call  it the “Deep State” — would likely have proven up to its job.

The election game is always rigged to produce business as usual.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“Congress,” The Hill reports, “is barreling toward a veto showdown with President Trump over the mammoth must-pass annual defense policy bill.” At issue: The annual National Defense Authorization Act, which as usual has little to do with actual defense.

Trump says he’ll veto the NDAA if it requires military bases named after Confederate generals to be re-named, as Congress desires.

He also says he’ll veto the bill if it doesn’t include his desired “reform” to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, giving government power to control social media platforms’ content moderation policies.

The main purpose of the annual NDAA is to feed hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate welfare into the maw of the military-industrial complex we’ve been ruled by since World War Two.

A secondary feature, often utilized by Congress, and occasionally by presidents using the threat of veto, is to use its supposed “must-pass” status as a shoehorn for forcing controversial items into law.

This year, we’ve got a two-fer on that secondary feature, and a game of chicken between President Trump and Congress.

In his four years in office, Trump has vetoed eight bills, fewer than any president since Warren G. Harding. Unless this NDAA fight goes south on him, he’s also set to become the first president since Lyndon Baines Johnson to finish his presidency without Congress overriding at least one veto.

Who’s going to blink? Who knows?

Congress’s heavy gun in the NDAA fight is the pretense, put on by politicians and parroted by media, that military spending bills are “must-pass” material.  But they aren’t.

Unlike “mandatory” spending such as Social Security, which occurs automatically absent congressional action to stop it, “defense” spending is “discretionary.”

Neither the Constitution nor any existing legislation requires the US government to spend one thin dime on the armed forces. In fact, the Constitution forbids Congress to fund the army for more than two years at a time (the idea being that standing armies are dangerous).

Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush all vetoed annual “defense” authorizations. The world didn’t end when they did it, and the world won’t end if Trump does it.

But it’s a silly fight, this one.

Congress, or the president, or both, should take a stand against spending many times as much taxpayer money on the military as could possibly be justified by any rational definition of “defense.” A fight over how much to cut from future NDAAs, and how quickly to cut it, would be a fight actually worth having.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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