Yes, God, God. God don't never change.

Welcome to the Plodcast.

My name is Douglas Wilson.

This is episode 345 and it's good to have you good to have you with us.

Now I want to talk about dirty elections.

Whenever power is at stake,

whenever you have power centralized anywhere and there's a decision-making process by which that power is going to be dispensed to a successor or to the next generation or whatever.

We live in the kind of world where there has always been cheating.

There has always been, there have always been dirty deeds. So for example when JFK defeated Richard Nixon in

1960 there was some real funny business in Cook County, Illinois in Chicago.

And Nixon sort of took the high road where he didn't

and this is a high road that you will notice we are no longer on and we've not been on it at least

since the Bush-Gore battle with the hanging chads in Florida if you remember.

But Richard Nixon did the Noblesse Oblesge thing and said he would rather lose the election than have the country torn apart by a dispute

over the election. So he basically bowed out and of course was elected.

Was elected president years later in another run for the White House.

The thing I want to point out here is there is a way of thinking about elections that just makes them dirtier.

There's a way of treating elections and wanting to clean up the election process that just makes everything worse.

So let me illustrate this. You remember in 2016, in the election between Hillary and Trump.

One of the things that the Trump crowds would chant in his rallies was

locker up, and of course the import was that Hillary was a criminal.

Her affairs would not bear any kind of close examination

...