“But tears were not the things to find their way to Mr. Bumble’s soul; his heart was waterproof.” – Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist.

I didn’t get everything right in the November election, but I scored on the big ones: Trump lost, Biden won, and Trump will be leaving office on January 20 to entertain and horrify us elsewhere.

Welcome to Bumbledom.

While the President is busy terrifying,  upsetting, threatening, and frightening Republicans and Democrats alike with his latest bogus sedition and impossible run at the Supreme Court, there is a real, serious political story taking place in Georgia.

That one is very much based in reality.

Don’t look know, but a series of fresh new polls conducted since the November 3 general show that both Senate runoffs in that state are very close.

In the regularly scheduled Senate race, Republican Sen. David Purdue is tied with Democrat Jon Ossoff, while in the special election, Democrat Raphael Warnock, pastor of Dr. Martin Luther Kings Ebenezer Baptist Church, has been holding a narrow lead over Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler (who was appointed in January 2020 to fill a  vacancy, which is why she’s up for election.

Mr. Bumble, as I’ve taken to calling President Trump, has been busy digging another huge hole for himself by accusing loyal Republican officials and officeholders in Georgia of fraud, incompetence, and cowardice.

He pays no mind to the deadly pandemic; he’s on the phone most of the day threatening cowardly Republicans to help him overturn the November election. But he’s persuading the wrong people. None of the right people, the federal judges, and the honest Republicans – are biting.

Some of you might recall Mr. Bumble, the fictional character in the novel Oliver Twist. He is the cruel, pompous beadle of the poorhouse where the orphaned Oliver is raised.

Bumbledom is a term named for him; it characterizes the self-importance, cruelty, greed, and incompetence of the petty bureaucrat. Mr. Bumble would make a wonderful poster child for the Trump years, our new Bumbledom.

The outcome of the Georgia race is in the hands of the moderate, suburban, and independent voters who have moved to Georgia in recent years in great numbers and proven recently to be a decisive political force there.

They and African-American voters in Atlanta won the state for Biden, shocking the pundits and sending the leader of the free world over the edge, from whence he may never return.

At stake is nothing less than control of the Senate.

Republicans have flooded the state with money – more than 300 million dollars. They admit privately that they are horrified by Trump’s erratic and self-destructive assaults on Georgia’s government, which is entirely run by Republicans.

How do you get your supporters to come out and vote while you’ve tweeted more than 10,000 times that the process of voting where they live is fraudulent and their elected leaders complicit?

To please President Trump, Sens. Loeffler and Perdue both cravenly demanded that the Republican Secretary of State resign over the President’s unproven fraud accusations.

President Bumble had the chance to win moderate voters by acting like a more normal President. Instead, he’s given all of us a horror show preview of what four more years of Donald Trump would be like with Batman Rudy Guiliani running the new Conspiracy Division of the federal government.

Orwell didn’t have a clue as to what 1984 -2020 might really look like.

Instead, Mr. Bumble has triggered a civil war within the Republican party in Georgia. That’s not what they need right now.

Trump is, as always, worried about Number One. He is busy persuading die-hard Republicans that there might not be any point in voting at all if the state and its leaders have, as he has repeatedly claimed, stolen the Georgia election from him.

Sen. Loeffler and Perdue are stuck in the middle of a whirlpool that spins more and more every day.

Trump has done the truly impossible – he is convincing a lot of Georgia voters that there are worst things on the planet than radical, evil socialism.

Next up,  Trump will befriend Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and put her in charge of the environment. That’ll show ’em.

Trump supporters in Georgia are dizzy, not sure who to hate or threaten from one day to the next. Mobs of MAGA boys rush from house to house at night, waving their guns, honking their truck horns,  threatening poll workers, and scaring children on behalf of their leader.

They don’t impress those moderate and independent voters either.

The pundit class insists the odds are against two Democrats winning Georgia Senate seats.  Republicans always win runoff elections in the South, they say.  With no presidents on the ballot, Democrats don’t show up. They think the Biden win was a fluke. For all I know, they may be right.

But if you’re thinking of hyperventilating over Mr. Bumble’s Hail Mary Supreme Court Gambit, I’d skip it.  It’s really not worth your time. There are better things to obsess over.

Ossoff, according to the newest polls, leads with 48.6 percent of the vote, Perdue at 48.2. Rev. Warnock polls at 49.1 percent, Loeffler at 47.1. There is plenty of time left, and rivers of Republican money pouring into Georgia. But still…

I nominate Georgia as the place to fuss over, it’s the focal point of America’s agony right now.

The lawsuit Trump and his cowed attorneys general brings to the Supreme Court and orchestrating is not even comprehensible, let alone enforceable.

The idea of Texas and 18 states asking the court to overturn elections in four other states and disenfranchising millions of voters because a Biden victory somehow violates all of our constitutional rights is a jaw-dropper, a fitting confusion to the Guilian sideshow.

They could have come up with something better.

Rudy, get those hands out of your pants, please.

If this foolishness should ever happen to get through the court, I’ll be on the next plane to Costa Rica or a train to Canada. We have to find a place that will take donkeys because Maria will never leave them.

I never thought it could end that way. They have lots of good farms for donkeys up there.

(Rest assured, it will not happen. My last days will be right here.)

But a Georgia surprise just might happen, it is likelier to happen that Mr. Bumble’s stupid lawsuit and my gut is twitching and eager to predict that because of Trump’s loud but spectacular bumbling – Tulsa,  the Clorox cure, promising the coronavirus would go away soon, his mad ride about Walter Reed Hospital, his raving first debate performance,  his assaults of Republican leaders in key battleground states – is showing us that somehow, he will find a way to get Joe Biden into the White House.

This whole election is about the deep holes he’s dug for himself and fallen into. Several more are scheduled for the coming weeks.

I have a good friend who works at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and he says there is now a good, even 50-50 chance that President Bumble will end up giving control of the Senate to the Democrats.

“The suburban and moderate voters who voted for Biden are truly traumatized, even frightened,  by Trump’s behavior,” he told me today. “And the Republicans have no idea what to do. If the moderates and blacks all vote, the Democrats will win both seats. A few months ago, nobody here even dreamed that the race would be tied one month before the election.”

He said the race is way too close to call.

I wish I knew enough to predict that the Democrats would win, I don’t have that kind of a feel for Georgia politics, but I think it’s getting to be a better bet every day.

It has gone from impossible to very possible.

If we have much to resent about Donald Trump and his four years as President, there is also much to thank him for. As Mr. Bumble, he has saved us from himself.

Every day he gives a compelling tutorial about the dangers of voting for demagogues, liars, and sociopaths. At the epicenter of President Bumble’s Caligularian madness, Georgia seems to be getting the message that so much of America missed in 2016 and then again in 2020.

There is a lot of insanity in America now, but there is also a lot of sanity.

Many unpredictable things happened this year; one of them was that Donald Trump managed the impossible: he blew almost sure-fire re-election while performing rain dances for his loyal supporters. Joe Biden’s election was simply impossible at the beginning of the year, just like a win for two Democratic senators.

There weren’t angry enough to pull Trump through it then, and there aren’t enough of them, now. That’s the danger of appointing judges with convictions. They might turn around and bite you on the ass.

Meanwhile, a raging and deadly pandemic reminds us that he is both a liar and a fool every day. His kind of stupidity and selfishness kills people.

I wouldn’t spend a lot of time worrying about the Supreme Court this week; they turned out to be much too smart to plunge headlong into this cesspool, now nothing more than a bizarre, almost pagan dance of fealty to the Mad King.

I’d start paying some attention to Georgia instead what an amazing story might be developing there, right under our noses.

Maybe, just maybe, democracy might give us another big win.