Back in the year 1999, all the talk was about Y2K and how the new millennium would bring us to the end of the world. Of course, those fears were greatly exaggerated.  As it turned out, Y2K wasn’t the end of time, just the end of sanity. The U.S. was particularly hard hit. First, we elected George Bush, Jr. We thought he was the worst president in history. Then came our feel-good moment with Barack Obama, which drove a lot of people crazy enough to vote for a lunatic named Donald Trump who rose to power using the tactics of a fifth-grade schoolyard bully. Trump has since regressed to a toddler going through the “terrible twos.”

Trump promised to drain the swamp. He did, leaving us with nothing but pond scum. The worst of the worst, the dumbest of the dumb. To think this bunch of fools could fix a national election where Joe “I’m Confused” Biden wins by more than seven-million-votes is wishful thinking. If only we were that brilliant.

It wasn’t always this way. Joseph Kennedy rigged the 1960 election that got his son John F. Kennedy elected president. But even cagey old Joe couldn’t pull off a landslide the magnitude of Biden’s victory, and Kennedy had the power of the Mafia backing him up. Even with Kennedy’s money and mobster Sam Giancana’s muscle, the race was the closest of the century. JFK received only 113,000 votes more than Nixon out of 68 million ballots cast.

As powerful as he was, Joe Kennedy didn’t have the wherewithal to rig the vote in multiple states, as Trump claimed about the 2020 election. That’s a huge undertaking even for intelligent beings. All Kennedy needed were two swing states, Texas and Illinois.

Texas was no problem. Kennedy’s running mate, Lyndon B. Johnson, was a legendary vote rigger who began his political career by stuffing ballot boxes with the votes of dead people. The Kennedy-Johnson ticket easily won Texas in 1960.

Illinois was a little more difficult. In a scenario reminiscent of 2020, rumors of fraud circulated before the election, especially in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley’s political machine could be counted on to deliver Democratic victories by fair means and foul. With Nixon’s narrow margin of defeat in Illinois, outraged Republicans cried foul and demanded an investigation. Sound familiar?

A reporter named Earl Mazo with the New York Herald Tribune picked up the story and began investigating. He went to Chicago, obtained a list of voters in the suspicious precincts, and began matching names with addresses. Mazo found a cemetery where the names on the tombstones actually voted. He also found a vacant house that was completely gutted, yet somehow there were 56 votes cast for JFK from that house.

Kennedy ended up winning Chicago’s 28^th Ward by the smallest of margins, yet it was enough to put Illinois in his column. Nixon was devastated by the loss. But unlike the sore loser Donald Trump who gets blitzed by more than seven million votes, Nixon bit his tongue and accepted his razor-thin defeat. Nixon even went to Kennedy’s inauguration.

Based on Mazo’s reporting, the New York Herald Tribune planned a 12-part series on the election fraud. But at Richard Nixon’s request, the series was cancelled. “Our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis in the midst of the Cold War,” Nixon told Mazo.

Contrast Nixon’s sacrifice for the greater good with the juvenile behavior of Donald Trump who actually goes out of his way to create a constitutional crisis with bogus claims of fraud. Trump must have high regard for Democrats who somehow managed to rig elections in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, all swing states he won in 2016. He must secretly envy their wile and cunning.

We, on the other hand, seriously doubt that Democrats have the mental capacity for such an undertaking. Only the Russians are cagey enough for that.