My "hockey mom" wife had the best analysis of the Trump-supporters march on the Capitol.  She observed that this is what happens when there are too many "no-calls" in a hockey game.  Players can skate through the bad calls, but it's one no-call after another that leads to the gloves dropping.  Games get out of hand when the players on the aggrieved team come to believe they have nothing to lose by retaliating because the rules aren't being enforced anyway.  They've reached the breaking point.

For the Trump-supporters, the last four years were a litany of "no-calls."  I can't even begin to think of them all.  We can start with Hillary's emails.

Then lying on FISA statements.

Congressmen lying under oath.

Information illegally leaked to select reporters.

A two-year harassment investigation, replete with over-the-top, brownshirt-style early-morning raids.

Those were then matched by an FBI gone AWOL.

That's followed by two attorney generals plus an FBI that make the Keystone Cops look effective.

Nevertheless, team Trump had better jobs and more income and a future so bright that they just straightened their helmets and shook off most of the no-calls.  Then came COVID and restrictions based on "for thee but not for me." 

Governors had gone wild.  They tossed aside the Constitution.  Long held rights were arbitrarily suspended without explanation.  The refs swallowed their whistles.  The violators were terrorized.

Then there's a summer of loving Antifa rioting and destruction.  Antifa's named a terrorist organization, but from law enforcement Americans get crickets.

You'd think they'd have dropped their gloves sooner.

But the Trump voters showed great restraint.  Abandoned by the teacher unions, they got up, and those who were allowed to do so left their homes and went to work and persevered.  They kept the shelves stocked and the country moving.  They were angry but civil — all the while watching buildings burn and being told such protests were "mostly peaceful."  My sense is that they planned on revolting at the ballot box.

Now let's add some insult to the injury.  The captain of the team of the other political party doesn't even step on to the ice.  Instead, he slumbers in the locker room while his team's chaos is unquestioned.

Captain Trump is told it's too dangerous to hold rallies with his team, but they take to the ice anyway.  The Trump rallies are packed, and everyone at each event knows that their day is coming.  Their patience will be rewarded at the ballot box.

What happened next?  Many of them went to bed on Election Night, happy in the thought that the nightmare was coming to a close, that at long last there would be a righting of the ship.  But they awakened to find that their victory had been stolen.

The same people who had told them to be patient for "15 days to slow the spread" and that riots were peaceful, and on and on, were now telling them that Trump had lost.  They were told that boarded up election offices weren't a problem.  That stopping the count and restarting it was standard operating procedure,  as was pulling boxes of ballots from below covered tables after chasing out reporters and observers.  And that not enough dead people had voted to make a difference.  Their affidavits were ignored.  Even the science had shown that the election results they were told to believe were simply too incredible to have actually happened.

Does anyone doubt that Vice President Pence wasn't, at least in part, swayed to look the other way by concerns that had the fraud been called out and investigated, the perpetrators would burn our cities?  Now the no-calls were justified as the right calls.

My wife's favorite hockey team is the Detroit Red Wings.  There's a soft spot for the legendary enforcers, like Gordie Howe and Bob Probert.  Just their presence on the ice kept the opponents honest.  They righted wrongs when the refs had swallowed the whistle one too many times.  The no-calls lit a fire in their souls.  It's done the same for a lot of Americans.

Image: Photo-MIX Company via Pixabay, Pixabay License.