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August 17, 2020

The Democrats' fake narrative about the United States Postal Service

By Andrea Widburg

Practically overnight, a new leftist narrative emerged: Donald Trump is trying to destroy the United States Postal Service (USPS) to ensure that, in a time of Wuhan virus shutdowns, Americans will be denied their right to receive ballots by mail or send them back the same way.  This is a non-story, based on old news and hysteria.  Nevertheless, the Democrats, both in and out of the media, have ginned it up so much that Nancy Pelosi has insisted that representatives return to Washington to save the USPS.

It's no secret that the USPS has been bleeding money for years.  Part of it has been longstanding mismanagement issues.  Even Obama noticed:

The real hit, though, has been technology.  When the Founders wrote, in Art. I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the Constitution, that Congress would have the power to create a postal service, no one could ever have imagined the internet.  While the phone and fax machine put large dents in the volume of mail flowing through the post office, it's been email and other forms of electronic communication that have reduced the USPS to trafficking almost entirely in advertisements and packages.

By 2011, the San Francisco Chronicle was writing about the fact that the postal service was removing mailboxes from the streets because there wasn't enough mail to fill them:

Chalk up another casualty of the digital revolution: the blue corner mailbox.

Because of steeply declining use, the U.S. Postal Service has removed more than 60 percent of the blue boxes, once as common on the American streetscape as lampposts and ice cream trucks.

"Nothing says you're on an American street more than the blue mailbox," said Nancy Pope, postal historian at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. "It's part of a neighborhood identity, it's reassurance, it represents our ability to communicate with one another. When you take this away, something is lost."

In 1985, nearly 400,000 blue mailboxes graced American streets. Now only 160,000 remain, and more are vanishing every day. San Francisco has removed more than 800 in the past few years, dropping the total to 1,700. Dozens, if not hundreds, more are likely to meet the same sad fate, according to the post office.

The chief culprit is the Internet. More people are paying bills, sending invitations and writing personal letters online. The volume of mail dropped into mailboxes has dropped 35 percent since 2006, said Sue Brennan, a U.S. Postal Service spokeswoman.

If a mailbox gets fewer than 25 pieces of mail per day over a six-to-eight-week period, it gets targeted for removal. The Postal Service posts a 30-day warning notice on the box, during which time people can complain to the postmaster, then it's off to the great dead-letter office in the sky.

Thieves often target the remaining post boxes, as happened in 2016 to boxes in San Bernardino.  Leftists, of course, noticed this only yesterday and instantly blamed Trump:

The Lincoln Project, a group of failed Republican party consultants who, out of pique and evil, turned against Trump for daring to win without them, have been telling people that the USPS is trying to steal the election for Trump.  That led to a funny Twitter moment when Jamie Lee Curtis appeared to take this claim seriously and then assured people she was just joking:

What makes the Lincoln Project's claim truly ludicrous is that the USPS workers' union backs Biden.  While there are many hardworking and lovely people at the USPS, there are also people who are not bringing their A-game and know that Trump is a new broom sweeping clean.  Combine their worries about job security with the Democrats' insistence on having the entire election held using only the mail, and you have a perfect storm of insanity.

Nancy Pelosi has chosen to ride the Democrats' crazy wave by demanding that House members return immediately to D.C. to vote on legislation banning Louis DeJoy, whom Trump named as head of the U.S. Postal service, from implementing any reforms before the election.

Meanwhile, the same Democrat activists who insist that it's too dangerous to vote in person are gathering by the hundreds to protest in front of DeJoy's house:

They’re ignoring the fact that even Dr. Fauci says that if people can shop, they can vote.  This is a tempest in a teapot, all with an eye to creating election chaos and throwing a potential Trump victory into doubt.

I have no conclusory words to end this post.  This picture, I think, says it best:

Image: US Post Office Mail Box Still Standing by Phillip Pessar on Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

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