My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.
–Hunter S. Thompson
I think Donald Trump is going to be bad president, worse than Reagan and possibly as bad as W. He could even be worse than W, though I’m holding out hope he won’t. I’m hoping that the mostly liberal asshole that he once was hasn’t been entirely subsumed by the frightening right-wing asshole that he now seems to be, and that he manages to surprised us by only being bad, rather that terrible.
But if he is terrible, that can bring us together. Remember how we used to all get together and hate George W. Bush as one? Before we divided into PUMAs and Obots, Bernie Bros and neoliberal shills, we just a ragtag team of misfits who banded together to laugh at a president who, to that point, had been the worst president of most of our lifetimes.
Remember how good that felt? We can have it again. But this time let’s try to do it without cheering on clowns like Anthony Weiner and Alan Grayson.
Omnes Omnibus
I am still at anger. Give me time.
p.a.
driftglass:
ChrisH
This is where I find myself in a bind on the ‘where do we go from here?’ question. I’ve seen a few think pieces now on how Democrats can’t ignore all the working class white voters out there, but what exactly can we offer that would make real headway? Providing facts seems pointless, even providing good results does little, people are often doing quite well compared to 8 years ago but ‘feel’ like the country is in bad shape.
Is there some combination of words and deeds that actually convinces people who voted for Donald Trump that they should vote for Democrats instead? Or has the rot run so deep that we are stuck with this authoritarian voting block for the next generation or two?
chopper
I’d be more in the mood for pointing and laughing if our environment were not now irrevocably fucked. we had a chance to do something and we elected a science-denying white supremacist instead. all of the last two decades of work are gone.
I’d say that someday I can tell my grandkids “I was there when the courage of men failed” but I have this fear that I’m likely going to be convincing my kids not to have kids.
mai naem mobile
I had this stupid bitch taunt Mr today with the “your girl lost,harharhar” She’s a low income Hispanic woman who is on medicaid who had a problem with Hilz being “for” abortion. She didn’t vote because they’re bo the same don’t change know. Had another moron tell me this morning that there wasn’t a difference between the two and the EMAILS. The emails showed Hilz was funding dontcha know. It took everything not to grab a rolled up newspaper and swat these two nincompoops. Jeezus. We have a stupid populace.
Omnes Omnibus
@ChrisH: If they want racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, we cannot accommodate them.
Adria McDowell (formerly LurkerExtraordinaire)
@mai naem mobile: she’ll enjoy her deportation, legal or not, I’m sure. Be sure to wave to her on her way out.
Amaranthine RBG
Looking forward to being united in hatred of Trump and feeling good about it?
That’s the whole problem here – – too many people look up politics as something to feel good about instead of making the cold calculation about what has the best chance of winning While being acceptable
Fuck how everybody feels about things.
Adria McDowell (formerly LurkerExtraordinaire)
@Omnes Omnibus: THIS.
Comrade Jake
I don’t know folks I’m still very much in shock. The wife works with undocumented students. This election was very personal for us, and I know, for many of you as well.
The media normalized this jackass because he was a Presidential candidate. They will be all too happy to go further once he’s finally in office. It’s already happening. Fucking depressing as hell.
Schlemazel
I think we have to demand that Trump & the GOP follow through on their campaign promises. Build the wall, all of it. Build it as promised. Deport 11 million people, get on that right away. Pull out of the TransPacific trade pact. Renegotiate NAFTA. Withdraw from the Climate accord. Give Ukraine to Putin. All of it you asshole, do all you promised. Finish the job Reagan started & W rocketed downward. I’m tired of trying to stop them, turn them lose & get it over with.
Kryptik
@ChrisH:
At this point, it feels like the only way to get them is to promise to ‘kick the (insert minority slur here) to the curb, and help America stay white for whites’ is the only way to get through to them. As you said, helping get results doesn’t seem to fucking matter because they get convinced they’re still doing worse. The only way is to cater to them, only them, and do plenty of hippie punching and minority bashing on the side to remind them regularly that we’re on ‘their’ side, not the ‘other’s’ side.
Essentially, the only way is to shuck everyone who depends on Dems and the left, because they aren’t and will never be real Americans to these fucks.
Mnemosyne
Here’s my snark of the day: how long before buyer’s remorse sets in and white voters start denying they ever voted for Trump? I say two weeks after Inauguration Day.
Major Major Major Major
@ChrisH: “radical Islamic terror”, maybe?
lamh36
Except it will be less fun for those closely impacted by the policies of a Congress and White House controlled by Republicans.
I’m sorry but I still not at the stage to see a silver lining…
Evil may be too tough a turn…but it’s certainly true that I find myself looking at the some people differently today.
It’s the marginalized that will bear the brunt of this and I think they//we deserve longer than 24hours to grieve.
proterozoic
It didn’t feel good. It felt like shit.
Kryptik
@Mnemosyne:
This presumes a large number of them will ever admit that Trump may be part of, if not all of, the problem. The blame shifting will be epic and endorsed by all the news channels.
Glyph_2112
What happens to the whole cottage industry of investigative panels now? They won’t be investigating the executive branch. How are the Repub thugs going to make a name for themselves?
Felanius Kootea
@Schlemazel: If Trump does everything he promised, that’s the end of the US as a superpower.
Jeffro
@mai naem mobile:
(just skip the ‘bitch’ part and we’re there with you ;)
In all seriousness, two updates here people:
1) Had no idea I could cycle through all five stages of grief twenty times in one day, but hey whaddya know and IM ALREADY (almost) DONE GRIEVING…ready to organize, do the fundraisers and op-eds, and win out in 2017, 2018, and 2020.
2) It finally came to me this evening while fixing inner – my perfect all-purpose response to Trump nitwits whenever they pop off with stupid stuff? “Well good for you – you clearly voted your values” (and then just move on). Let ’em deny it, try to explain it, own it, stew over it, double down, whatever, I don’t care. One of the side benefits of being a Democrat, especially after yesterday? I’ll never have to worry about trying to justify my vote for a monster due to my fears and prejudices.
Seriously, give it a whirl, folks: “Good for you – you clearly voted your values when you voted for Trump”.
Dog Dawg Damn
Just heard on CNN that he will appoint Guiliani as Atty Gen and will indeed proceed with prosecution of Hillary Clinton.
Is this happening ? Is this realistic ?
lamh36
This is real to people…4 years is a lifetime to folks who can and will likely be most effected by last night.
Don’t Just Grieve for Immigrants—Fight for Immigrants
Jeffro
@Schlemazel:
Let’s see how well his base deals with it when the wall-building never happens and he cuts taxes for billionaires. It’s up to the press to keep asking him about it – let’s make sure they do their job at every turn.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: I’ll take the under.
lamh36
Hm…I’ve never liked New Balance…so they won’t have to ever worry about me buying their shit. Now if NIKE goes down the rabbit hole…I’ll have to figure something else out.
@SoleCollector
.@NewBalance is the first major sportswear company to publicly back president-elect Donald Trump
Major Major Major Major
@Dog Dawg Damn: we heard at work today that Carson will be secretary of education probably soooo sure why not
DanR2
@Mnemosyne: Two weeks after inauguration? I couldn’t find anyone to openly admit to it to my face TODAY.
Bailey
Trump can be as liberal as Noam Chomskey and he will still be a terrible president because his temperament and personality dictate it.
ChrisH
@Mnemosyne: I heard buyer’s remorse today. NPR interviewed a woman from New Hampshire who, like those genius Brexit voters, cast a ballot for Trump as a ‘protest,’ convinced Hillary was going to win, and now is really worried about what he’ll do because he’s a loose cannon.
Felanius Kootea
@ChrisH: The only way to get the Trump voters, frankly, is for Dems to throw minorities under the bus. Trump already has a head start on that.
Jeffro
@Dog Dawg Damn:
No idea – this was some CNN talking head?
Wouldn’t be a bad idea for Obama to pull a Ford and pardon her (and a couple million non-violent drug offenders while he’s at it) on the way out the door. NOT that she did anything wrong much less illegal, but still – no way to overturn it and a nice way to leave the alt-rabies crowd frothing at the mouth.
I’m heartened at the thought that Trump’s going to blow his ‘change agent’ cover before he even gets sworn in. It’ll shorten the Dems’ spine-activation process if nothing else.
Felonius Monk
@Mnemosyne:
I think that’s a little too soon. I made a comment in an earlier thread that I thought sometime within the first 18 months they’ll be saying: “How did this idiot become President? Who voted for him?”
smintheus
I remember back to those sunny Bush era days; that was when millions of us had no health insurance. We’ll have that again to unify us.
danielx
The only – ONLY – bright side I have found in this conflagration is that whatever idiocies are enacted, they own it all. There is nowhere and nobody else with whom to spread or share the blame when people start dying. And make no mistake, people are going to die as a direct result of this election.
Felonius Monk
Sheriff David Clarke is being considered for head of Homeland Security. Oh, we are so fucked.
Omnes Omnibus
@lamh36:
Jesus wept.
Schlemazel
@Felanius Kootea:
Thats a done deal. The question is will it be fast or slow. If it is slow the right will continue to pretend it will work if we just do those things and drag it out making it worst. If they do it all the cause will be obvious and maybe we can rebuild while there is still time. The damage won’t be less doing it slowly
Roger Moore
@p.a.:
In response to what driftglass is saying: whatever we do, we have to hold onto our moral center better than the Republicans have. They’ve degenerated from a vaguely reasonable conservative party into a bunch of bitter assholes motivated by hatred and spite. We can’t let the same thing happen to us, or we’ll destroy the purpose of our victory even as we win it.
Jeffro
@lamh36: I think we owe it to Trump businesses and any business that associates with/endorses him to get a big ol’ boycott going. Throw in anything Koch or Mercer-related, too. I’d say burning New England Patriots gear on a regular basis, too (b/c Belicheck is a Trumpkin) but I already do that ;)
Create a comprehensive boycott list – just one more thing for tomorrow’s to-do list. Thanks a lot, Michigan!
Omnes Omnibus
@Jeffro:
Nice.
Gindy51
@chopper: Already did that with my child. She would get her tunes tied tomorrow if she could but no one will do it. She’s 27.
p.a.
My CBT support group this evening (support, not therapy) doesn’t allow political or religious discussions, but it was apparent how many were worried about losing their health insurance. Many have physical as well as psychological issues; often they’re interrelated.
Roger Moore
@Comrade Jake:
FTFY. They never would have normalized his filth had he been a Democrat; instead they would have demonized the whole party for not heaving him out.
Imonlylurking
@Mnemosyne: unfortunately there is a loud contingent of Trump voters-and some children of Trump voters- that are thrilled to be their truest selves. It hasn’t even been 24 hours and I am heartsick.
lamh36
The numbers…
White women supported Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton
“Shocking” to some, but not surprising to some of us.
BTW, 94% of Black women voters voted for HRC….
lige
The worst part is I think Congress under Ryan and McConnell are actually worse than Trump in a lot of ways. We may end up happier with him than the Republican base at times if he upends some of their cherished austerity measures in an effort to look like Santa Claus to his supporters. I guess the only hope I have is based on 2004 when Bush held all the cards and somehow didn’t get to dismantle Social Security.
jk
Post Election edition of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee is airing at 10:30.
Schlemazel
@Jeffro:
The wall is impossible. It has to cross a lot of private land with owners who are not keen on the idea. Sure they can take the land via eminent domain but there will be court fights and the loss of the anti-government types who seem to think only liberals do that sort of thing. Then there will be the cost, billions of dollars.
Same thing with deportations. Demand that they do it. It will take 10s of thousands of agents and billions of dollars, it won’t be effective and it will piss off the farm community and construction. Meat packing will be hit hard also & resultants will close for lack of staff.
The reason to demand they do it is because they will fail spectacularly.
BC in Illinois
Immigration. Justice. Voting Rights. Human Rights. Torture. Health Care.
But let me focus on one area – – Climate Change / Greenhouse gasses.If Trump simply pulls out of the Paris Agreement, stops the investment in wind and solar, and goes full throttle back to coal and other fossil fuels, his damage can be immediate and lasting.
He–and the Republican Party that is by his side on this one–will not only be lamented for years to come. They will be DESPISED for generations to come. They will go down in history as people who made the world worse, for their having been in it.
And it can all happen by next summer.
Abraham Lincoln, Message to Congress, December 1861
p.a.
“Making them own it” is made more possible by a non-supine press. So, not likely but not impossible.
lamh36
Major Major Major Major
@lamh36:
Only 94? No wonder we lost. Lazy bums.
//
Omnes Omnibus
@BC in Illinois: Torture. I was talking to someone on the phone to tonight and, when she mentioned that he would normalize torture again, I literally shuddered. Horrifying.
lamh36
Hey kids…don’t cry…it’s only 4 years…◔_◔
joel hanes
@lamh36:
Evil may be too tough a turn
No.
Hannah Arendt figured this one out for us.
Evil is that nice Mrs. Schmidt next door who sometimes gives us a dozen cookies, but doesn’t trouble her head with “all that stuff” — she just votes. And goes to rallies with her friends. And hates “controversy” — it’s so rude!
She doesn’t like rude, or different, or out-of-line, or undocumented — why can’t they just be nice, like her?
smintheus
@ChrisH:
Republicans for decades have offered nothing but smash-mouth politics. To the extent it works, it’s because it gets the attention of voters; they see a party that fights the opposition, and voters imagine that the GOP might actually fight for things that could benefit them. Even when Democrats do provide results they rarely get as much credit as the GOP, for its empty and futile fights, because Dems don’t try to portray their agenda as an all out fight for political dominance. They gain a reputation of fighting only when they can’t compromise. Voters say they want compromise, but they actually don’t really care and pay little attention to quietly worked-out deals.
mdblanche
Being the opposition party is not without its benefits. The time to start planning for 2018 is now. It’s not the Democrats who don’t show up for midterms, it’s the party in the White House that doesn’t show up. That was the Democrats in 2010 and 2014, but not next time. No time like the present to start recruiting candidates for Congress and the states. Don’t forget gerrymanders drawn back in 2010 grow a little less effective with each passing year of population movement. Until then, congressional Dems need to use McConnell’s playbook and start obstructing everything. Don’t try telling me two wrongs don’t make a right, last night falsified that. Sometimes you’ve got to fight dirty. Obama might not approve but Reid would. It sounds like the Republicans might not have the votes to abolish the filibuster so hopefully that will be available to use on everything. Pelosi can dust off the campaign plan against Social Security privatization from 2005 and granny-killer ads from 2011. Even if we can’t stop them, make them pay. And given how factionalized the GOP caucus is, stopping them might not be hard. If Ryan or whoever replaces him can’t find the votes on his side of the aisle, don’t bail him out. Come up with new creative ideas like the House sit-in last summer. Screw going high. Whatever unwritten norms this violates will never be observed by the GOP again, so there’s no point in us observing them. Not against a party that’s transformed itself into a white nationalist party and whose legislative agenda is repealing the past eight decades. Not when lives are on the line. Cause it’s still dangerous out there. The deplorables are emboldened to attack minorities. The executive branch is going to have a questionable commitment to constitutional norms. There will be blood but we must fight back. Last night I mourned, now I’m ready to take Joe Hill’s advice.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Felonius Monk: I’m gonna breath deep on that and the Sarah Palin for Interior rumor, also Giuliani as SoS. Trump might like the in-your-face, reality show circus appeal of those nominations, Ivanka and Jared probably don’t even need much help to understand that those hearings would be disastrous for him and the party.
Not that the eventual choices will be more polished and substantively worse, so maybe I should be hoping that Reince and Kelleyanne let Trump be Trump.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
Yeah, having a government that’s actively hostile to me and people I care about is fun. When Trump tanks the economy and I lose my job, I’ll have a lot of free time for extra bonding. Hopefully I’ll be out of work even longer than I was the last time a Republican crashed the economy.
No offense, DougJ — I’m just stuck in the anger stage of grief and I either snap at someone on the internet or I bite my husband’s head off. But the fact is, this is not going to feel good for a lot of people, no matter how much bonding we do.
Major Major Major Major
@joel hanes: yep. The Nazis weren’t particularly smart or even especially competent, either.
joel hanes
@danielx:
they own it all. There is nowhere and nobody else with whom to spread or share the blame
Somehow they managed to blame much of the worst of W on Dems, at least as a talking point, the last time they owned all three branches of the government.
Quinerly
KKK has announced on its website a victory parade in NC. Big, bold picture of Trump.
mdblanche
@mdblanche: Okay, I understand a lot of us still need more time to mourn, but soon we must organize.
joel hanes
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
those hearings would be disastrous for him and the party.
Nonsense.
Do you not remember, during the W unpleasantness, how the R chairs of committees would freeze out the D members? Not allowing them the mic? Changing the places and times of meetings without notifying the D members? Their base loved it.
They’ll pay no price for destroying the norms of civil governance.
Not enough people understand and care.
cokane
hear hear doug! i shared this sentiment earlier. people’s whole careers blossomed out of being bush critics, Jon Stewart, Paul Krugman, this here blog.
lamh36
Tomorrow President Obama and Michelle Obama will welcome the new President-Elect and his wife to the White House.
Barack and Michelle will have to sit across from this man who not only questioned Barack Obama’s legitimacy but also spouted the most racist and bigotted thing imaginable and smile and make nice.
EVERYDAY, you can find a person of color who has to smile and make nice when we are screaming inside.
So excuse da fuq out of me if less than 24 hours later, I’m STILL not ready to make nice with certain folks…
lige
Also the whole Trump coalition could splinter when he tries to get congress to confirm all his deplorable associates. Unless McConnell just decides to skip all hearings.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Mnemosyne:
Eh, I give it a month. I’m heartened, a little by the protests going on now in NY, SF, Oakland, Portland, Seattle, etc. – but we have to see the heartland get some heartburn from his actions before we can see change. I will bet that in a year you’ll have a Woodstock phenomenon where thousands of regretful Trump voters will claim they were at these protests – including some in places where they aren’t actually occurring.
Felanius Kootea
@efgoldman: Exactly my point. All the people handwringing about regaining working class white people’s votes on the Dem side don’t seem to understand that the only way is to appeal to their bigotry. When Michigan voters are more upset about Hillary paying attention to Black Lives Matter than many other issues, that tells me something as a black woman. These are not people that want to be on the same team as minorities. I read Joy Reid’s tweet about David Duke congratulating Trump and exhorting his followers to “take their country back.” Trump knew exactly what he was doing. When any Northern European immigrant who waltzes in to the US today gets more respect instantly than a black American whose family has been here since the 1600’s, there’s not much that’s holding the citizens of the country together.
Kryptik
@lamh36:
It’s not just that, it’s that Trump and his crew have outright promised to raze every single achievement of Obama’s presidency to the ground, first 100 days.
Trump wants to erase the entirety of Obama’s legacy. And Obama has to smile and play nice because that’s the way it has to be. If that isn’t a fucking perfect metaphor for how fucked up and racist this country is…
Felonius Monk
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Not entirely rumors.
Major Major Major Major
@lamh36: not to mention trump is planning to undo every single part of Obama’s legacy and has the means to do so. Should be a fun dinner.
khead
Worse than W. I’m an optimist.
3Jane Tessier-Ashpool (formerly known as Lorinda Pike
@Mnemosyne: I’m not sure some of it hasn’t already set in. I ran into a couple of people I KNOW voted for The Yam, and they know where my allegiance lay.
They didn’t say a word, and they had constantly bombarded me with nastiness about Obama for the past eight years. Maybe they are having Brexit-remorse or something.
satby
Huge protest in Chicago
I guess bigger earlier, but it’s been going all day. My nephew is tgere.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: I spent the day numb and shocked, like TL said, as if someone close to me had died. About 2 1/2 hours ago, I flipped to anger. Fuck Trump. Fuck the voter ID laws that lost MI and WI. Fuck all these motherfuckers. Fuck!
Aleta
@ChrisH:
Perhaps affordable college education (or more scholarships}
also closing the gap in opportunities for young people
The night before yesterday I went to a discussion by about 9 people who’d known each other at university 50 years ago. (Now writers, teachers, organizers.) They had protested Vietnam together, worked on the newspaper together, worked in groups against racism and to change the campus power structure. One thing they mentioned was that quite a few had arrived as freshman from very conservative Republican or working class backgrounds. Some from very poor families (no indoor water). Some had come as strong supporters of the war, wanting to enlist, wrote columns in favor of it.
They said it was talking with roommates and friends that developed their minds outside of their previous world. They said that they were changed by the action of thinking together about problems and taking action together. (I think that registering for the draft and being close to the possibility of going to war intensified their minds/actions of course.)
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
I just Googled “Norway immigration.” It’s all we’ve got – my husband’s grandmother was born there. My people have been in this country, mainly illiterate poltroons achieving nothing and voting for racists, for 300+ years. Maybe we should just take ourselves out of the equation.
cmorenc
@lamh36:
Exactly – and this includes neighbors I’ve been friendly with in non-electoral times, some friends, and some collateral relatives (wife’s blood relations) whom I’d grown close to in tough times and good. It includes the seemingly nice, polite, friendly white lady at the local Y desk who checks my member card, who I overheard talking with another (white male) employee about how they liked Trump at the first debate, and thought he was the better choice to win last night. Did all of them simply mentally block the firehose of obvious information about the man’s narcissistic, sociopathic, sexually predatory misogynistic nature? About all the “little people” like themselves whom Trump had screwed over by stiffing subcontractors? The overtly xenophobic, racist appeals he made a core part of his campaign? His rudely disrespectful, bullying manner with other GOP presidential candidates? Or does all this perversely appeal to the base parts of their own nature, their desire for an authoritarian strongman?
For quite awhile hereafter, I will have to fight against feelings of repulsion when I’m around them, and try to remember how face to face, they’re often graciously friendly, considerate people who would do anything within reason to help me out if I asked, or volunteer to help even if I didn’t.
smintheus
Serious question: Is it possible under US law to adopt an adult (as it was under ancient Roman law)? If so, that might be a way to protect undocumented immigrants from the Trump monster: mass civil disobedience via adult adoptions of the parents of immigrant families.
Shalimar
@Felonius Monk: Fun fact: Sheriff David Clarke doesn’t actually have a jurisdiction. All of Milwaukee county is incorporated, so all he does is run the county jail, provide court bailiffs and police the interstate. Homeland Security is going to be a massive step up from anything he has ever managed before.
EllenH
@mdblanche: this! Thank you!
Turgidson
@danielx:
They’ll blame Obama. Or Hillary’s emails. And our useless, obsequious press will strike their chins and nod, and punch a hippie if there are any nearby. It’ll take into Trump’s 2nd term (god help us) before the GOP gets allocated a single shred of blame for any of the damage they’re about to do. If we’re lucky.
Omnes Omnibus
@lamh36: He won’t smile. He will be icily polite.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Omnes Omnibus: I have a scene imagined in which Trump tries to embarrass Obama by bringing up Obama’s charge that he’s unfit for office, and Obama responding with a brief list of reasons why.
satby
I posted that “why we grieve” piece on FB and am now enjoying men, unknown to me but friends of friends, who feel the need to come to my FB wall and tell me how wrong I am.
Is one of the stages of grief hate? Because I’m at hate.
Chris
@Kryptik:
This is the central problem with fascism and with far right politics in general: it’s invariably in full denial of reality and therefore basically impossible to address.
The threat of, say, communism, is based on actual material problems. You can defuse it by materially improving the lives of voters, providing them with prosperity, stability, and opportunity so they realize there’s no reason to support communism. And this is, in fact, how we defused that threat in Western Europe after 1945.
But fascism? Fascism isn’t based on resentment of material or economic problems: fascism is based on resentment of things like “the Jews control society.” How can you possibly address that? You can’t – those people are not persuadable. The only solution our ancestors found involved all-out war, decades of martial law/military rule, and the complete remodeling of the societies where it took root. Not exactly an encouraging start.
I honestly don’t see what we can do other than continue working on voter turnout on our side, which was the thing lacking this time around. Given how many alleged liberals turn out to want ponies and unicorns, that’s not necessarily an encouraging thought either.
Kryptik
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I expect whatever happens, it’ll be like the myth of the Clintons stealing the WH furniture and prying W’s off the government keyboards. It’ll be pure bullshit, but it’ll paint the Obamas as petty sore losers and Trump as the gracious conquering hero riding into the city.
lamh36
@NewYorker
Trumpism has expanded the challenges to African-American voters.
Folks expect us to walk across glass shards with no shoes to vote, while they just waltz in on soft carpet and vote easily.
Then they get mad and blame us because not enough folks are able to withstand the pain…tell me if that seems fair to anyone?
Felonius Monk
@Shalimar:
I recall reading an article about him recently that quoted the Police Chief of Milwaukee, I believe, saying something to the effect that David Clarke talks a lot about law enforcement but doesn’t do much of it.
debbie
@efgoldman:
Nice article. I hope they choke on food not tested by the FDA.
Doug!
@Dog Dawg Damn:
He’d be very stupid to do that.
mdblanche
@Kryptik: Just thinking about that turns my stomach.
Felonius Monk
@Omnes Omnibus: I’ll bet Trump calls him boy.
debbie
@satby:
I hope they stay safe but I hope they keep it up. Trump lost millennials by 18 points, so I hope they become the barb in his fat, flabby side.
Capri
I’d like to see the Democratic party go back to being the party of labor. Instead of pining for assembly line jobs that aren’t coming back – work to increase the lives of every working person right now. Up the minimum wage, work on workplace equality as a means towards social justice. Nobody who works 40 hours a week should earn less than a living wage.
Shalimar
Trump will be far worse than W. Republicans in general are far more radical and hateful than they were 16 years ago. They used to try to hide the more destructive and dishonest things they did. Now they brag about them.
Kropadope
@ChrisH:
Perhaps not harping on the general awfulness of white men? Focus harder (still) on making sure that programs to help people are there for the working poor and lower middle class? Listening when most of the country despises the nominee the party’s unquestioningly lining up for?
ChrisH
@cmorenc: There’s a good horror movie plot in there somewhere, as all the nice gracious people of a town suddenly turn into crazy murderers under the right circumstances
mdblanche
@Doug!: So, that’s not a no.
Kropadope
@Capri:
Perhaps they could work harder to protect collective bargaining and create more opportunities for job skill development. I’d also like to see them do more to make Healthcare more affordable.
FWIW, even though it was the so-called Senate moderates who killed the public option, it would have made the ACA more acceptable generally to the American public, since they’d have an option besides buying insurance privately. It wouldn’t seem quite so coercive.
Aleta
I realized my state today has been the same feeling of stunnedness as after a violent attack, but this time without the positive feeling of having fought it off and escaped. It’s beyond losing the election. It’s that monsters are going in to the place that the Obamas have turned into a respectful and positive place of good laws and progress. And knowing that thousands of things will be done against my will to our laws and operating structure and our people, and I can’t prevent it. It’s definitely the PTSD feeling I have lived with before. Such despair at having it so strong, at this level, now going forward for years. Bush years almost destroyed me; not sure I can go through this.
Chris
@Shalimar:
This.
The party is worse by far than it was even in the 2000s, when it was plenty horrific enough. And Trump himself is, incredibly, temperamentally far worse than Bush.
Every Republican presidency in recent history has been worse than its predecessor’s. Reagan had all of Nixon’s criminality, and brought back Gilded Age economics that had been buried for half a century. Bush wanted to be the second coming of Reagan, but was dumber and more overconfident and left us with a disaster in both foreign policy and economics. Trump… is an out of the closet racist who ran and won on sentiments that even Bush didn’t touch on out loud, so you can imagine where this goes.
Ohio Mom
I went to a Post-High School Options for Special Needs Students event tonight. Information tables from colleges with special programs, work programs like Goodwill, that sort of thing. I’m pretty chatty at these kinds of things and through my small talk discovered what I already know — too many of my fellow special needs parents are hard-line Republicans who voted for Trump/Pence and whomever they could send to Congress.
Now I’d hope those suckers get stuck with their kids at home the rest of their post-school lives, with nothing to do all day but regress and act out in boredom, with inadequate health care, without the Social Security and Medicaid benefits that would let them have a modicum of independence and a decent life in the larger community, but of course that will end up being my kid too.
But talk about denial, they’re white and they think their kids are somehow exempt. I hate em. Despise them.
opiejeanne
@Dog Dawg Damn: T….. What a SuperNova Asshole.
Is that even a thing? It should be.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@ChrisH: The Visit, by Durenmatt, also, too, that one Twilight Zone, The Monsters on Maple St, not quite murderers, but masks are dropped. I’m also thinking of a certain Hitchcock movie, but don’t want to spoil it.
Adria McDowell (formerly LurkerExtraordinaire)
@Dog Dawg Damn: shit is gonna get very very bad before it gets better.
We’re in Godwin territory now.
Major Major Major Major
@Kropadope:
Did the right-to-work fight in Wisconsin where the democratic lawmakers left the state to prevent a quorum not happen in your world? When was that, 2010? 2011 maybe? Not that Wisconsin remembered either, going by your theory.
There’s that year 2010 again, being relevant here somehow, I just can’t put my finger on it.
Have you not been paying attention to Democratic politics since 2010, despite your presence on a Democratic political blog?
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: Turnout was not necessarily the issue. WI and MI lost a lot of voters due to voter ID laws. I haven’t looked at MI, but it would have flipped WI.
satby
@Capri: yeah, they were already doing that. It was all in the platform Clinton was running on. Stumps voters weren’t voting in economics. They were voting against everyone not them.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@debbie: Yeah, I just hope the demos stay peaceful
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: Democrats have had that for years. Oddly, it never gets reported.
Kropadope
@Major Major Major Major:
Am I going to have to explain to you the difference between “more” and {“some,” “any,” “for the first time ever,” etc}?
opiejeanne
@efgoldman: I just figure that any program or project that Republicans hate will be gone or ruined within the next two years. The EPA, Clean Water Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc, all will be dropped or transformed.
Health savings accounts instead of insurance, as if that would pay for Chemotherapy.
Major Major Major Major
@Kropadope: Maybe I’ve accidentally tossed you in the purity pony bucket, but it sounds an awful lot like you’re forgetting the exact nature of the opposition.
Kropadope
@Omnes Omnibus:
Maybe Hilary could have used her ad time for that rather than Trumps already-well-publicized awful statements. She probably could’ve gone farther with her proposals too and emphasized that working families would be the primary beneficiaries. The media isn’t the only entity that did little to push policy, which was where Clinton’s strong suit should’ve been.
Mobil RoonieRoo
I’m beginning to think I need a long break from the Internet. Just completely unplug.
Mnemosyne
@lamh36:
There’s a reason I hugged one of my (Filipino) friends at work this morning and told him I was sorry that white women are assholes.
Chris
@Aleta:
Thinking is a contact sport, and the fact is, despite Republican fantasies of dystopian monolithic Marxism, college is one of the best places to develop it. You’ll rarely find a place where you run into people from so many different backgrounds and with so many diverse outlooks on the world. It certainly challenged and changed me, and I’ve seen it done the same for other people. It’s one of the many things that make it valuable as more than just a degree factory.
Conservative students, in my experience, can usually navigate through college while keeping the violation of their brains by new thoughts to a minimum – there are enough support networks, from the Federalist Society to the College Republicans to on-campus religious networks, etc, to ensure that their bubble remains intact. But the opportunity is there for those who want it.
Major Major Major Major
@Mobil RoonieRoo: I strongly recommend it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: Oddly, I am going to try to be a peacemaker here. The day after this election, we should give people, who aren’t real trolls, some room. Emotions are high. Anger, despair, etc. I am at anger, fwiw. Different people are in different places. Let’s try to be kind and understanding.
satby
@Kropadope: a former neighbor in MI, a millennial 30 something with a four year old and a baby on the way, went Drumpf. He’s had health insurance for the first time since he became an adult since Obama care and his kid is on SCHIP. Just like the people in Kentucky, he voted against his and his children’s own interests. Because of some long convoluted grievances about immigrants getting $50k a year and the old Clinton corruption chestnut. I have hired him to do odd jobs and helped keep his family afloat when I could, but no longer. I hate to think how his children will suffer for the father’s spite and racism.
Adria McDowell (formerly LurkerExtraordinaire)
@lamh36: God, those tweets. Those poor kids.
Kropadope
@Major Major Major Major: The opposition claims falsely that Democrats are only interested in giving free shit to the indigent. That’s why I think an unrelenting focus on working people is the right way to push back.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’ll be flipped into overdrive with Trump in the White House.
They want a return to the era of poll taxes and political machines, and by God they’ll get it.
Major Major Major Major
@Kropadope: @Omnes Omnibus: Fair enough, both of you! Feh!
Kropadope
@Omnes Omnibus: It may not come across because my Masshole gets in the way, but I am trying to be understanding. But I do also want to discuss what happened and how we can prevent it in the future.
opiejeanne
I am actually physically ill from the results last night. I didn’t realize it until this evening, but it’s like having the stomach flu (or do I mean food poisoning?), intense knot-like cramping in my middle and all the attendant delights of the condition, except throwing up. I haven’t gotten there… yet. I don’t think I’ve experienced a grief this deep and shocking before, and I’m 66 and I’ve seen a few things.
We don’t know what to do with ourselves, other than not watch the news. We’ve been reading detective novels today, watching House Hunters International, think we may hit a movie tomorrow: Dr Strange 3D is playing in my little town and that may provide some relief.
My adult children are saying we should all move to Costa Rica, and I have to admit I did look at a coupe of nice places there, but I think I need to get more deeply involved in politics and work harder toward 2018 and Congress.
NMgal
I just donated to Amnesty International and the ACLU. I think we gonna need ’em.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: She could have. She picked a strategy. It was patterned on Obama’s. It didn’t work. I maintain that voter suppression in WI and MI mattered. I have professional knowledge of how WI elections work.
WereBear
I am usually a total softie, but I must admit that I now have a total repulsion towards half the people I encounter. Like they gave a handgun to the toddler and are all defensive about it. “They weren’t supposed to shoot people!”
TriassicSands
@Felonius Monk:
But Joe Arpaio is free. Surely, there is a place in the Trump administration for Joe. If not head of HS, then I guess he gets the nod to head the Border Patrol. Or maybe they can put him in charge of the slave labor gangs who will build the Wall.
TriassicSands
@Shalimar:
“…now they brag about them.”
Like NC legislators bragging about African American turnout being down after the courts had declared their voter suppression efforts targeted like lasers at minority voters.
Hey, if you can’t accomplish something good, accomplish something bad. Half the voters can’t tell the difference.
Mobil RoonieRoo
@Major Major Major Major: thank you. Might seem odd but that actually helps to have a fellow bj-er agree with that thought. I suspect once I get past the first couple of days of itchy brain I will find it getting easier. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to fix my computer set up to make some obstacles so that I can help myself not just start surfing.
eemom
@satby:
I am too, and for a number of reasons no one is interested in hearing, I see no reason, other than perhaps my own sanity, to even want to leave there.
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’m sure you’re right, and I am fucking disgusted that the Michael Moore fellators of the left have exhibited zero interest in that today.
lamh36
I’ve always been a cynical person by nature. I consider myself a optimistic pessimist. I expect the worse, hope for the best.
And I freely admit, that the results of last night through me for a loop. I expected closeness, but I didn’t expect an actual loss.
So I find myself unable to process it is as well as I should. I know it’s been only 24 hours. But I am angry and pissed.
It has slowly but maybe completely changed my interaction with certain people, known Trump voters yes, but also people who I had considered, good honest people. The results yesterday has totally shaken my perception of those “honest” people. It’s not like I’m some sort of extroverted people person to begin with, but I found myself today unwilling to even engage in small talk with certain people.
Will it continue this way? I don’t really know. Right now though, it is raw and it is not wavering…I have to work, so I have to continue to work with these people, but I can take some time away from internet, particularly a few of my fav liberal blogs and the like…or at least stick to post I can actually read through without feeling what I’ve been feeling in my heart since yesterday’s results came through…
Good night…BJ…
Major Major Major Major
@efgoldman: Oakland I believe has (reliably) fucked shit up. And there was one in SF this evening in the Castro, pretty low-key.
Adria McDowell (formerly LurkerExtraordinaire)
@lamh36: it’s not fair. It’s not.
America is gonna learn the hard way: black ladies are always right! Listen to the black ladies!!
Peale
@Amaranthine RBG:
Tried that. It was called Triangulation. It lasted through two Clinton terms. Then people noticed that it wasn’t principled and they voted for Bush over Gore.
Mary G
I am downloading the citizenship application for one of my housemates. He has a green card and his wife is a naturalized citizen, but there is no guarantee Trump won’t just cancel them all Jan. 21 (for the brown people anyway.) Best to hopefully get the process started ASAP. I don’t know if it can be done while Obama is still in or not. Does anyone know how fast it can be done?
It feels good to have something to do. I am a master form-filler.
Major Major Major Major
@lamh36: Goodnight, sweet dreams.
Mike G
I think a Trump presidency will feature all the incompetence, willful ignorance and aggressive stupidity of the Bush/Cheney clown show, with the self-dealing and corruption cranked up to 11. And plenty of blame hurled at everything except themselves.
He’s a casino owner for pete’s sake, his whole life has been skating around the law.
It’s beyond me what kind of standards these voters have, what they will actually take responsibility for or what action could possibly be considered unacceptable given who’ve they’ve picked. The Repukes’ neglect of education really paid off for them.
Adria McDowell (formerly LurkerExtraordinaire)
@ChrisH: Hot Fuzz. Amazing film. Love it.
Mary G
@lamh36: It’s not at all fair. Seeing that 100-year-old lady get cut off was just the beginning, I’m afraid.
bluefoot
@lamh36: Yep, this. As I said to someone before, there is no neutral position with respect to genocide. Half the electorate wants to make sure I and people like me are either eliminated or stomped on (literally or figuratively) to death (literally or figuratively). Make nice with someone who believes I don’t have a right to exist? Fuck that, and fuck them. They voted for xenophobia, misogyny, recklessness and a complete disregard for the rule of law. Now they can own it, all of it. If their precious fee-fees need to be soothed (“don’t call me racist!”) by those they are victimizing while they burn the planet down, well, I for one refuse. I might as well be saying “thank you sir, may I have another.”
Omnes Omnibus
@eemom: About 300,000 eligible WI voters could not get proper ID. The asshole “won” by 30,000ish. Golly.
WereBear
Some of you are acting like FACTS MATTER to Trump voters. Like we can persuade them to join liberals and women and POC and the LBQT folks with reason and simple cause and effect.
That is not what they are using to vote with.
Half the country is that bully on The Simpsons whose greatest pleasure is making someone else suffer and saying HAW HAW like a Chick tract. They have this primitive magic in their mind that when they beat up on others itlessens the chances they will get beat up, not even realizing it only increases it.
I can feel sorry for them and loathe their unthinking nastiness at the same time. I am complex. I contain multitudes.
Lizzy L
I am still at stunned and sad; I could welcome anger, it might feel cleansing. I don’t want to eat because my body is so tense. I barely slept last night — planning on chemical help tonight, because going w/o sleep sucks: I have to drive, and make decisions. Had a conversation this evening with a long time friend, a woman a little older than I am. We came from the same milieu: NY Jews, born in the 1940s, whose great-grandparents came to the U.S. to escape persecution and pogroms. We took different lessons from our early years. She says, Sew the jewelry into your shirt and get out before it’s too late. I say, This is MY country, damnit, I won’t leave. We agreed: we don’t know if democracy in the US will survive four years of Trump. We’re both pretty sure it won’t survive eight.
I’ve got some financial decisions to make now — figuring how best to protect myself — and some political ones: how can I protect other people who are more at risk than I am.
Chris
@eemom:
I really don’t know how the hell else I’m supposed to react to people who have a problem with my very existence and whose entire political platform is based on finding the thing that fucks me over the most.
The moment where Rand Paul was asked “should people without health insurance just be left to die” and an audience member shouted “YEAH!” is the entire party in a nutshell.
Kropadope
@efgoldman:
Why always the assumption that people who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton would have been inclined to do so absent a third party choice. For all we know they wouldn’t have voted at all and it would’ve hurt the downballot.
Mnemosyne
@opiejeanne:
I’m watching Blazing Saddles. It’s from the more innocent time of 1974 when we thought we were working through this racist bullshit.
Suzanne
There is no answer to be found for the Democrats in adopting new policy positions or measuring results. The brand is tarnished. Trump won this because he realized that this is not about governance. It is a marketing exercise. The Democratic brand is too narrow and nerdy and unfun. Hence the gigantic social temper tantrum we saw last night from people who literally voted for a whole pile of nothing because he wasn’t from the party with the black dude and the old lady.
Omnes Omnibus
@WereBear: No, facts matter to us. We want to understand how this happened. We are considering carrying baseball bats and shit because of our new world.
Major Major Major Major
@Kropadope: For all we know they would have voted for Generic R absent Johnson, and voted for the real R downticket, and it did hurt downballot.
Chris
@bluefoot:
That meme is already going into overdrive on Facebook. (With, thankfully, at least a little pushback).
The amount of gaslighting this country does to itself so that butthurt white reactionaries can feel good about themselves is breathtaking. It started when we decided the Civil War was about states’ rights in contradiction of the plain language of the Confederates themselves, and it hasn’t let up since.
dww44
@efgoldman:@opiejeanne:
I too have steered away from news and from TV altogether until 8 p.m. this evening. I watched MSNBC: Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and then Lawrence O’Donnell. Both Chris and Rachel were good with Rachel doing one of her better jobs of linking last night’s trauma to earlier and consequential, (damaging to liberals) Presidential elections. Also, I didn’t know about the organic and peaceful Trump protests which have sprouted across the country from New York to Chicago to Tempe, Arizona to Seattle to Portland and to Oakland.
However, I was honestly blown away by how extraordinarily good LOD’s entire 1 hour show was. He had an introductory monologue that pulled no punches, he had Al Franken, he had Tavis Smiley (who’s no Obama fan, but I knew that) and Doris Kearns Goodwin.
I’ve got slow internet service these days and I can’t tell if they’ve posted tonight’s show on the playlist at his MSNBC site. You really need to reward yourself and alleviate your pain by making the effort to watch his show. The link provided is to the generic playlist, not necessarily to the videos from tonight’s show.
NMgal
@opiejeanne: I hear you. Couldn’t eat much today. Hey, silver lining, maybe I’ll lose weight. Nah, I’ll probably replace the calories with booze.
I’m of an age to remember quite a few gut-wrenching electoral failures: Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry. The last two were especially bad for different reasons and for the basic reason — they would leave us with W as president (I knew from W already in 2000 having lived in Texas). In 2004, discovering that enough of my fellow Americans would vote *again* for the clueless bastard and his wrecking crew completely stunned me.
This is worse. Surreally, world-historically worse. Bad for me, my family, my community, my country, and the globe. The tiniest silver lining is that at least he didn’t win the popular vote. But that makes me angry about the completely dumbass electoral college. I have never felt this bad about the outcome of an election. All I can look forward to is the day the physical symptoms pass and the psychological symptoms ameliorate and I can decide what I can do moving forward.
Fuck. Thank you all for being you. And may our tribe increase.
Kropadope
@Major Major Major Major: What makes any of these theories better than the other? Maybe instead of there being something wrong with the voters, could the politicians have been the ones to let us down?
Suzanne
Oh, and right now, I am at ANGER. More like seething, unfathomable rage. Like I hope that the white working class communities of the rust belt and the south are leveled by heroin and meth and diabetes and suicide, and that they lose their jobs and their homes and their children and their friends. And I want to sit back smugly and enjoy it and say LA LA LA I WAS RIGHT.
I’ll say it: I hate the rural south and the Midwest. It is gross and tacky and full of people who got Cs in high school and I don’t even like flying over it. And yet I voted and gave money and spent hours and hours canvassing all for a candidate that would ACTUALLY HELP THOSE PEOPLE THAT LIVE THERE LIVE LONGER, BETTER, MORE PROSPEROUS LIVES. Which they don’t want. They want to be more openly hateful. Well, okay, be my guest. Imma sit back and watch and enjoy your suffering.
joel hanes
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Nope, your aim was true.
Major Major Major Major
@Kropadope: Absolutely, but the causes in order are:
1. People who voted for Donald Trump
2. People who voted for somebody else not named Hillary Clinton
3. People who did not vote
4. Politicians
smintheus
@bluefoot: You left out torture and war crimes. First time ever a presidential candidate has run on a platform of ordering US troops to commit war crimes and American agents to torture prisoners in the most brutal ways he can conceive. Trump is determined to make George W. Bush and Dick Cheney look like humanitarians.
Kropadope
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Denial much?
caring and sensitive
@efgoldman:
Thank you. That’s exactly what it is like. I hadn’t been able to put my finger on it. I was 17 and at university and I remember it like it was yesterday.
Kropadope
@Major Major Major Major: Hey, remember how many blamed the voters rather than the politicians for 2000?
How did 2004 turn out for you?
dww44
@Kropadope: On one of the 3 MSNBC shows I watched, and I believe it was that stellar LOD one, a chart was put up showing that of all registered voters in the U.S. around 44 percent of us didn’t vote at all. Hillary got 25.something percent as did Trump, with the 3rd party candidates receiving an inconsequential % of the vote. This might be a valid reason to have mandatory voting on the part of registered voters. Not make them get registered perhaps, but if they do require that they vote.
Chris
@Suzanne:
I’m dubious of the validity of the original quote; but Golda Meir’s “we will not have peace until they love their children more than they hate us” seems like a perfect summarization of modern American politics.
And it’s hard to be optimistic when one considers that the white South has been in this cycle of “shoot yourself in the foot, blame the blacks and the Yankees, shoot yourself in the foot again, lather, rinse, repeat” has been going on since the 1865 and shows no sign of letting up.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kropadope: Snappy comeback, derivative 1990s sitcom character. It’s all gonna burn now, just like you hoped for.
(I know, precious, you were four parts pissed and playing a character)
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: I lived in Wisconsin, I got good grades. I was a National Merit Scholar. I earned an International Baccalaureate diploma.
Step back please.
How many years of Arpiao do you want me to apply to you?
Major Major Major Major
@Kropadope:
Pretty well, considering we were trying to unseat a reasonably popular incumbent during two wars.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: How did it turn out for you?
dww44
@efgoldman: I don’t know if this got answered by anyone else, but McCrory does appear to have lost in a very close race to the Democrat. There were other bright spots. Appropriately, Hawaii’s entire State 25 seat legislature is not 100% in the hands of Democrats.
Kropadope
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: What the fuck are you talking about I hoped for this? I voted for Hillary Clinton, donated, told all my friends why she was a good candidate, tried to get people registered to vote, etc. But none of that’s good enough, I have to stay silent about any misgivings.
Newsflash, your “clap harder” strategy didn’t work before the election, it sure as fuck isn’t gonna work now. And if you can’t tell the difference between, ordinary conversation, strongly held opinions, and a complete 180 from one’s ordinary attitudes; that’s your problem. Why do Hillary voters never get over the primaries, even if they win?
smintheus
@efgoldman: There will be good people retiring from the service. The nastiest scum however will cling to the rim of that toilet bowl.
amk
apartheid amurkkka, here we come.
joel hanes
@Chris:
you can imagine where this goes
Winter is coming.
I’m feeling the need to make a nice pot of soup, and read wise books.
These seem appropriate to the season :
Candide, Voltaire
because in the end, even amidst all the horribles and suffering, we must tend our garden
Heart Of Darkness, Conrad
to stomp firmly, again, on my own perennially-blooming delusion that people are hard-wired for empathy, and can thus be reached for Good.
And my concomitant delusion that I know Good when I see it.
And to learn, perhaps, to practice discipline and restraint.
Great Heart, Rugge
Perspective for when I mistake my abstract, first-world problems for real problems.
The Prince, Machiavelli
Because this ain’t beanbag.
EBT
So a serious question. How fast can McConnell and Ryan kill off the social safety nets?
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: I will get past this but right now I am angry. I hate the fucking Litterbox of Despair that I reside in, too, and I have frequently said so. When Arizona shits the bed and everyone here says it’s full of racists and rednecks and Jesus freaks, I nod, because it is true, rather than take it personally. If it’s not about you, it’s not about you.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
No need to be so specific in your silence, dumbass.
Kropadope
@Omnes Omnibus: Well, the media and Democratic party did everything they could to crush a VT statewide politician I favored to the benefit of a “safe” party hack.
Adria McDowell (formerly LurkerExtraordinaire)
So, I have mentioned before that I am Catholic. Not a good one, but still. Last night, I prayed that the worst didn’t happen, and yet it did. I cried all night and much of this morning. I found myself asking why we as humanity have to suffer so much before we learn anything, only for our grandchildren to forget. Then it occurred to me that this is a test. Maybe of faith, definitely of humanity. My job now is to protect my family, raise a little warrior for people who cannot fight for themselves (or need help doing so), and be a little light in someone’s darkness. That’s really what we all should be doing (obviously when we can).
I’ve talked to a few LGBT friends, and they are terrified of what comes next. I’ve let them know I support them and are here for them whenever they need me. So reach out. Reach out to those who are vulnerable right now, or who will be tomorrow. Make a plan- even if it is to leave if you have to, hide if you have to, or stand and fight if you can. Or do it for others. We can save lives this way, and if that is all we do, then we’ve done something great.
Good night, BJ. The sun will rise again tomorrow and work will have to be done.
bluefoot
@Chris: The last few years (say, anything post-Trayvon Martin) really drove home to me that “conversations about race” exist to make white people comfortable/feel good about themselves. And this election has shown me that more than half of them don’t operate in good faith and want to see minorities pounded down – they’re willing to burn the planet down just so they can hate and feel “above” anyone else. So screw that shit. It’s not my job to make bigots comfortable. They voted for it, they own it.
I will calm down and get constructive, but I’m not forgetting – they’ve shown who they are.
Major Major Major Major
@EBT: Senate rules (which of course can be changed at the drop of a hat, but they seem to have staying power) around cloture have lots of waiting periods. But, basically, “as fast as they’re willing to”.
joel hanes
@eemom:
other than perhaps my own sanity
That’s a good enough reason, eventually.
I’m with you at “hate”, but I know it’s more poisonous than jimpson weed, and harder to give up.
Kropadope
@Jim, Foolish LiteralistObviously I’m not going to do what you tell me to. You aren’t the boss of me.
But yes, I will accept failures to honestly engage and discouragement from expressing myself as attempts to silence. The others are playing nice tonight, what’s your continued issue?
Omnes Omnibus
@smintheus: @efgoldman: Long, long ago.
EBT
@Major Major Major Major: Cool, so I should plan on not getting a February check.
bluefoot
@smintheus: The whole idea of going back to torture, to normalizing torture, sends me into blind panic. Not just because we are the United States of America and are supposed to be above that, and follow the rule of law, and that torture corrodes who we are. But also because there are people I love who are brown, or Muslim, or gay, or would be arrested protesting while brown or black or gay….how soon do you think it will be before torture on US soil become normalized? Can we say Homan Square?
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: None of rest of us are pissed off?
dww44
@dww44: obviously Hawaii’s 25 seat legislature is NOW 100% Democratically controlled
Major Major Major Major
@efgoldman: Well, they can plop down a piece of legislation to do it (you know they have them already written) and ping-pong it in ten minutes if they can wrangle the egos together and rewrite the rules. But yes, in practice, longer.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Suzanne is having a really crappy year overall, and she walked her feet to stubs canvassing door-to-door. Let her be mad for a few more days.
Kropadope
@efgoldman:
Unwinding? Are you under the misapprehension that Republicans ever EVER plan something out? The bill they finally pass will possibly read “Repeal Obamacare yesterday.”
Mnemosyne
@Kropadope:
Please explain how a Jewish Socialist defeats an anti-Semitic white supremacist.
inventor
I’ve been a Clintonian since the early primaries, so this is not BB bad grapes: but the problem was the candidate. Not that she is corrupt, she isn’t. As a candidate she could not turn out the base.
Trump got LESS votes than Romney. There was no hidden white vote. If she turns out even close to 2012 Obama, it is a landslide for Clinton.
As more information filters in, it seems apparent that the GOV was not very well organized or targeted. Also, ignoring Wisconsin and the other “firewall” states was a mistake
Kropadope
@Mnemosyne: Approximately the same way a black man beats racists. Also, the Democrats committed major malpractice by not fielding more candidates.
ETA: And the candidate I was talking about in that post was Howard Dean, FYI.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Sure you’re pissed off. Probably at the same people I’m pissed off at. I would suggest that you realize that I am speaking in broad brush strokes right now, as is everyone else on this thread, and that I didn’t intend any insult to you personally. I think anger at the white working class of the rust belt and rural south, who basically just released the Primal Scream Of The White Moron, is entirely justified. We tried to save them from themselves, and to thank us for our efforts, they voted for a lunatic to give us a giant kick in the gut. So fuck them.
Mnemosyne
@Kropadope:
Yes, because Romney complaining about “the 47 percent” was the same thing as the KKK endorsing Trump.
Were you paying any attention to what Trump was saying and who he was getting endorsements from?
WarMunchkin
@EBT: The bill to repeal Obamacare and gut Medicaid is already drafted and set to launch, so Day 1.
smintheus
@bluefoot: I agree, it’s a real danger here in the US. We used to use waterboarding regularly in the South on black prisoners, more or less routinely.
Since this is the season of recriminations, I’ll return to an old complaint: Obama could have taken the Bushies’ torture seriously and made sure some of them got prosecuted for their use of torture, but he decided it was more important to ‘look forward rather than backward’ [i.e. prosecute criminals]. There wouldn’t be a lot of people eager to resume torturing if the Bush era torturers had been sent to prison.
Major Major Major Major
@WarMunchkin: It’s already written.
Mnemosyne
@Kropadope:
I preferred Dean myself, but Joe Trippi was a crappy campaign manager. He ran out of money just when Dean needed to be running ads towards the end.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
You skipped a step between “prosecution” and “sent to prison”
Kropadope
@Mnemosyne: Are you seriously arguing that Obama didn’t have to face racism as a presidential candidate? Just because the candidates were a little more coy about their racism, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there and didn’t animate the same assholes. Trump got fewer votes than Romney, so it’s not like the explicit expression of racism brought them out in bigger numbers.
Suzanne
@inventor: No, the problem is that the Democrats are running 20th century campaigns about policy and issues and consistency. 21st century campaigns are about image and branding. Trump, for being a shitty businessman, is an excellent showman, and he knew how to do this.
Sebastian
Some of you are further through the stages of grief, I am still alternating between denial and anger.
There might be a silver lining though:
Trump won’t change. We know he will go after his enemies in the House and Senate. Graham is already being targeted. What about McCain? Cruz? Cruz for sho is not going to help Donald.
I personally think Donnie is going to fire a broadside into Confress because he is The Prez without too much thinking about the consequences. This is going to be interesting.
Mnemosyne
@inventor:
Unfortunately, no one seemed to realize that the “firewall” states had implemented voter suppression of minorities in the form of Voter ID. Omnes had a link to the article about WI, and MI, OH, and PA all had them, too.
My shorthand is that they gerrymandered us — they got just enough states to win the Electoral College, and they arranged that long before Trump was even the candidate. I suspect the hand of Karl Rove — it’s the kind of underhanded long-range planning he excels at. Couple that with Breitbart’s racist propaganda and you have a greased slide just for Trump.
Major Major Major Major
@efgoldman: And their bosses.
@Mnemosyne: Ugh, you’re kind of right.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Suzanne: I’d only argue about the 20th/21st century distinction. Reagan and Perot in my 20th century memory, ran empty, sloganeering campaigns based on the idea that complex problems were really easy to solve. Reagan was gonna get government out of your way, etc, Perot was gonna run the country like a business, get under the hood and fix it. Trump is gonna get tough, find beautiful solutions, so beautiful, etc.
Or, as Al Franken put it (I think), Democrats campaign with white papers, Republicans campaign in bumper stickers.
WereBear
Since it’s the DNC’s JOB to realize that kind of thing, I think we’ve got way too many Peter Principle types there. There should be blood letting.
EBT
@Suzanne: We could try running Springer next time?
Not even sure if I am joking on this.
Mnemosyne
@Kropadope:
No, I’m seriously arguing that Trump ran as an out-and-proud anti-Semite and white supremacist, and white voters in the Midwest ate it up with a spoon. No dogwhistles, just Stormfront and Breitbart.
Add in the suppression of the minority vote that no one (including the DNC) seemed to realize had been baked in after 2012, and you get what we saw last night. Minority voters didn’t just magically decide not to show up — they were deliberately prevented from voting in large numbers. South Carolina lost over 8 percent of their Black vote but added 22 percent more white votes just by selectively closing early voting locations.
If there’s malpractice here, it’s the voter suppression coordinated in multiple states by the Republican Party that the Democrats were unable to effectively fight against. That’s the post-mortem I want to see.
Major Major Major Major
@EBT: Honestly if he was younger he would probably actually be pretty good.
Suzanne
@Mnemosyne: There was a great piece in the Atlantic a few weeks back about how Trump’s voters, en masse, changed their position on trade to match his. They didn’t look for a candidate whose views matched their own. They looked for a cult of personality and then adapted themselves to fit into that. That is exactly the same behavior that successful retail brands know how to stimulate—create a strong brand associated with certain qualities and certain kinds of people, and then it will act as a magnet for more. There’s a great deal of social science and marketing research about the “personal brand”. Trump came to this with a brand, which other people wanted to graft onto their own. They’re not actually concerned with results. This is incredibly powerful shit, and we will not win elections if we don’t figure it out.
Mnemosyne
@WereBear:
I’m starting to lean that way myself. There are also stories of outright voter intimidation, but the MSM would rather talk about how minority voters just happened to not show up.
Loneoak
A mild suggestion here: some of us will respond to this situation by burning shit down in a methodical fashion. If you find yourself on the more classical bent of liberalism, please refrain from tut-tutting us. The tut-tutters are the enemy, not the burners, at least for a little while. Every civil institution that was supposed to keep a demagogue out of office failed us, so please don’t be quick with a lecture about civility.
Also too, it shoulda been Bernie.
Viva BrisVegas
@Sebastian:
Graham and McCain will just quietly retire before Trump squashes them like a bug. Graham is already a Republican outsider for obvious reasons and McCain is not long for this world anyway.
Cruz will do whatever it takes to get to the next step on the ladder. If that means endlessly fluffing Trump, so be it.
Major Major Major Major
@efgoldman: night, efg.
EBT
@Major Major Major Major: He has the benefit of both being a showman and having actual experience in governance.
inventor
@Suzanne: There’s a great deal of truth in that. The free fawning media along with his TV exposure for years helped him, especially in the primaries.
Still, he got fewer votes than Mitt Romney. I think the years of unwarranted and often ridiculous negativity hurled at Sec. Clinton depressed turnout on the Dem. side. Comey delivered the final blow from which she only partially recovered.
I’m not saying Bernie would have won, but that Clinton, in particular, had too many obstacles to overcome and did not, after all, have the organizational acumen that she needed.
Trump didn’t need organizational acumen, Republicans just showed up like always, no more.
Suzanne
@EBT: I think we look for the Cory Booker types—younger, more physically attractive, rescues people from burning buildings, doesn’t always have polish. HRC was a candidate for an era in which skills and content mattered. That is not this era.
One thing that no one really talks about is that BHO is really good-looking, and his wife is incredibly hot. It is sick, but that matters. I genuinely think that helped him.
GrandJury
@Loneoak: Fuck civility. I’m ready to occupy wall street or something. Not right now though. When the time is right. Trumps gonna shit the bed guaranteed. I can’t tell you how or when. But he’s gonna shit the bed. That is the time to start protesting.
These protesters in the street right now are just the start I think. The opening salvo. While futile, I think it’s necessary to signal that people are gonna just roll over. Or maybe I am wrong.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@efgoldman: IANAL, but my worry would be that acquittals would set a precedent for a definition of torture that would only become more flexible
I think Bushites defending the Homeland from Terr’rists to keep your children safe would’ve had limitless funds and the most expensive lawyers in the country– can Senators file amicus briefs? testify?. The Bridgegate operatives are small timers working for a (probably?) has been. Elliott Abrams and John Poindexter were convicted and hired by Bush II, and I doubt either had to move back in with their parents between prison and that return to the Executive Branch. Ollie North, convictions overturned on appeal (I remember that’s when my father briefly quit donating to the ACLU) never returned to gov’t service, maybe because Cheney had seen his full personnel file, but probably never needed to.
sukabi
@Felonius Monk: well that’s a rogues gallery of fail.
Major Major Major Major
@EBT: Oops, not born American.
Suzanne
@efgoldman: Hugs. Take care of Mrs. efg, and you.
inventor
@Suzanne:
Very true. Good looks and charisma will turn out a few more people, and that’s all it takes. It shouldn’t be true, but it is.
fuckwit
Still meditating on Cole’s notes downstairs:
They never have. And they never will.
Hate to admit it, but Dilbert was right.
Obama was a once-in-lifetime event; a singular talent. He was able to make his case emotionally– to people’s lizard brains– but to also have a command of the facts and policy on his side. And he also found a way to make his case in a positive way, with hope, not hate. He managed to uplift and inspire, while also being correct and kind-hearted. This is a very difficult circle to square.
The problem with Democrats is we are dependent upon this kind of genius-level political talent in order to survive. The Rethugs are not.
Troll, Reagan, Shrub, and their ilk do not need the facts and policies, because they do not matter. They never did. They never will.
Political geniuses like Obama, Bill Clinton, Kennedy, and FDR know how to appeal to people’s emotions while actually having a command of policy, facts, and truth– and a positive motivation and progressive ideals.
That kind of genius is a black swan event. Democracy itself, actually, is a black swan event. It’s extremely fragile and hard to maintain.
Humans are monkeys. Under normal circumstances, the vast majority of us want the meanest, loudest, chest-thumping Alpha Male to dominate and protect us. Some of us don’t like that and prefer logic and reasoning over monkey-emotions. We are in the minority. We always have and likely always will be in the minority.
What Troll did was, as Dilbert noted, straight-up hypnosis. He doesn’t even speak in full sentences. Shrub talked like that, as did his father at times too. Because it works.
Don’t think of an elephant. What’s the matter with Kansas. Dilbert.
Obama had facts and policy. But it didn’t matter. What did matter was his soaring rhetoric and personality. Now that he is out of office, we are screwed.
EBT
@Major Major Major Major: There goes that idea. Same with the 24 guy.
smintheus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yeah, I guess I did. Obama though skipped all the steps.
Mnemosyne
@Suzanne:
Some of this is the Jesse Ventura/Arnold Schwarzenegger effect — even a top-level politician has trouble holding their own against a trained actor (another reason Reagan was so successful). Obama is one of the very, very few who can do it, and it’s unfair to hold Hillary to that standard.
Add in Trump’s simple message that he would put white people (and especially white men) on top of the social heap again and you had a message that was almost unbeatable for Republican voters. Then add suppression of just enough minority voters to win the firewall states, and you have Tuesday night.
It wasn’t just one thing — it was multiple things. Almost a black swan event, given the voter suppression shenanigans that started being implemented in 2012.
sukabi
@Turgidson: 70 yo yam will be lucky to make the full 4 year term without serious health issues…provided he isn’t impeached for something even the repubs can’t over look.
fuckwit
@Suzanne: Yes. This is marketing 101. Obama understood this. Bill Clinton did too. Hilary either did not, or got so piled-on by the media that she never got a chance to work this angle.
I am very, very heartened by how fast the BJ commentariat has figured this out. We are monkeys with very dextrous thumbs. And you win elections on emotions and personality– on BRANDING– not on policy and facts.
I remember going on and on about this after we lost the Senate in 2002, were unable to stop the war, and Kerry got his ass handed to him. People didn’t listen or didn’t understand. Nowadays it’s more widely-understood, it seems.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@sukabi: my not-very political brother surprised me by being really pissed off today. He said Trump will either stroke out or quit within a year.
I”m not much for conspiracy theories, and I would think they’ll be afraid to piss off their own by impeaching him, but I’d bet 3/4 of their House caucus and at least 45 R Senators would love to impeach/remove him and put Pence, dumber than Reagan if not as useful on TV, in the Big Chair.
GrandJury
@Mnemosyne: I’m not fully buying into the voter suppression thing. It certainly did not help. It wasn’t the only reason. Haven’t heard any talk about citizens united either. So not sure if that was much of a factor. For downticket probably was.
GregB
I bet there is a nice detailed email trail that exicitly lays put just what percents of the urban vote needed to be caged in each state.
Imagine is some self described advocate of transparency were to releade them in drips and drabs to the public?
Major Major Major Major
@Suzanne: Ah yeah, I remember that one, now that you mention it. I’ll have to pull that up and rememberize it for the next time somebody gets all Thomas Frank up in my grill.
@fuckwit: It’s amazing, once the purity ponies, concern trolls, and troll trolls go away, the conversation calms down so much and I feel like I gain ~15 IQ points. I’m really sensitive to this stuff!
EBT
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: He is in tremendously bad shape. 70 pounds over ideal, terrible eating habits, doesn’t exercise.
Mnemosyne
@inventor:
Also, too: voter suppression. The “missing” minority Democrats didn’t decide to sit it out because Hillary wasn’t as charismatic as Obama. They were actively prevented from voting.
fuckwit
@Mnemosyne: Yes!
It’s unfair to hold *any* politician to that standard.
The problem is: we Democrats *need* politicians of that standard in order to even survive. The Rethugs do not– they can float any hateful, angry, empty-headed huckster and win. We are at a strategic, systemic, almost existential disadvantage because of that..
Our candidates have to be twice as good, even to have a fighting chance.
Suzanne
@Mnemosyne: Yes. But much of his appeal is the real talk, the saying-shit-no-one-else-would-say, the outrageousness. Even the Access Hollywood video helped perpetuate it—WHAT will that crazy Donald do next? Vote for him to find out! Cult. Of. Personality.
We need Democratic politicians being less crazy, but equally magnetic and creative in how they form their brands. Martin O’Malley? PLEASE. Sanders got it. Doesn’t mean he would win, but he found his thing, and he went all in on it. A successful politician needs to remember that they are essentially a reality show star.
Peale
@Suzanne: yep. Lets think about that 90% support he got from republican white men and women. Are they all “Working Class”. Nope. Not by a long shot. Some of them work for global corporations, just like I do. You think all of those white collar VPs who voted for him are really against NAFTA and trade deals? Nope. I guess they are now.
Mnemosyne
@GrandJury:
What part of, “It was not one thing, it was multiple things” was confusing to you?
The fact that this voter suppression happened right under our noses and you still don’t believe it explains why it was such a successful strategy. It sounds so conspiratorial, but you can easily Google “voter ID” and the state and read multiple stories about it happening in all of the firewall states.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: don’t feed the shomi.
Damien
Never Forgiven.
I’m sorry if this sounds harsh, but fuck everyone who’s talking about reconciliation and reaching across the aisle. That’s how you normalize shit like this, and we’ve already seen that movie once in German; I’d rather not have an American remake.
Fuck our fellow citizens who got on this train: they will never be forgiven. They shouldn’t be.
And lastly, fuck peace. I will spit in the face of every Trump supporter I meet from now until my salivary glands dry up like prunes. I will key every Trump/Pence car I see. Let’s riot outside the governor mansions and state legislatures. Let’s fuck. Them. Up.
Mnemosyne
@fuckwit:
I watched the debates. IMO, Hillary more than held her own, but by holding her own, she played right into the stereotype Trump voters held about her: the Feminazi that Limbaugh claimed she was. I honestly don’t see how any woman would have been able to hold her own against Trump because of the misogyny of his voters. Evidence of competence and charisma actually counted against her.
As I keep saying, there were multiple things at play, but the pre-planned voter suppression in the firewall states tipped the scales, and that was baked in long before 2016.
Aleta
Besides the destruction of more parts of the democracy, more standards, many more of our least protected people. I’m livid and afraid at how the Republicans have destroyed Hillary Clinton. Not forever we probably assume. But we don’t know the extent. They keep pulling out the stops. It’s beyond the pale, and the media has fed off it.
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
Actually, we’ve been having decent conversations the last day or so. He will probably revert to trollishness soon, but I’m willing to converse in a normal way.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: Yeah, I noticed that too. I’ve been going out of my way not to engage so that I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything when he goes back to being really really really annoying. Hell, I’ll even give srv the time of day when he’s being reasonable, but this one… blech. Can’t take the whiplash.
Lemon Kraken
@Suzanne: Delurking because THIS.
Suzanne
Oh, and since we’re listing our resumes, I was also a National Merit Scholar, but I don’t have an IB diploma since my hellhole of a high school didn’t do that at the time. (I got the “honors academic” diploma, or WEV.) Am I allowed to be pissed now?
Another person who is awesome at personal branding—Caribou Barbie.
SoupCatcher
Popping into my head today, at random, have been faces of Americans killed by other Americans for who they were – Gwen Araujo, Matthew Shepard, Trayvon Martin, and more – interspersed with old photographs of smiling white crowds celebrating lynchings (such as this one – trigger warning).
I owe it to those who have been killed to make sure that Trump supporters own the next deaths. They have sold their souls and they are responsible.
Mnemosyne
Crap. I just had a sudden realization: the reason Karl Rove was so shocked by the election results in 2012 was that he had already put his plan to break the firewall states into play, and he was shocked that it hadn’t worked.
And then he had four years to perfect it.
Fuck.
sukabi
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’ll be surprised if he lasts 2 years. I’ve come up with 3 scenarios… Stroke or other health related issue, impeachment, or some type of “freak food poisoning accident”…
Of course I also think mr. Holier than thou Pence will have a scandal of his own…
GrandJury
@Damien: Everything you said minus the physical violence and property damage. Protest yes but not physical assault or property damage. Otherwise you just get labelled a hooligan.
GrandJury
@sukabi: Impeachment is our best hope and that’s pathetic. But then it’s president Pense which is going from one kind of hell to another.
Trump may very well be in the early stages of dementia. I doubt his voters will care and the media will say it makes him seem more presidential….sigh.
SC54HI
@Mary G: It will take 6-8 months if they’re lucky, up to a year or more if they’re not. My spouse is finishing it up, waiting for the oath ceremony, having filed in May. There is huge backlog of naturalization cases because there was an increase in applications (probably due to the election year) and the dysfunctional roll-out of the electronic records system called ELIS. Not only does it not work well but many staff aren’t trained on it or can’t use it effectively. It’s a mess.
waysel
@Kropadope: Autopsy: Election 2016
ROBERTS COURT GUTS THE VRA: Rampant voter suppression in Rep controlled states.
THE MEDIA: Billions worth of free air time for DJT/ normalization of his outrageous ideas/ almost no digging into his past endeavors. Heavy anti-Hillary bias 24/7, all sources. All pundits, eyeballs, and click-bait motivated. All about ad revenue. Most outlets have right wingers as owners.
BERNIE: Killed trust of the Dem. party for most of his fans.
COMEYS FBI: July 2016 statement with insane bias/ innuendo./ Oct statement 11 days prior to election, unfounded accusations. Prior ‘leaks’ to Gulliani/ campaign.
WIKI/PUTIN: ‘Nuff said.
So can we stop fu*kin’ blaming the Dem. voters and/or Hillary Clinton? Just stop. And don’t even suggest to me that Bernie would’ve won it. I will not engage with anyone that trys that crap with me.
ruemara
@Capri: they’re not in power. How are they supposed to achieve this agenda?
waysel
@Kropadope: @Kropadope: 1)Media anti Hillary bias/ in the tank for DJT/normalizing him/ $billions in free air for DJT. 2)VRA gutted in 2013. 3)Comeys June public rant/Comeys Oct surprise. 4) Wiki/ Putin. Screw off blaming Hillary. MSM woulda reamed BS a new one.
waysel
@Kropadope: Test
NotoriousJRT
@Omnes Omnibus:
Me, too. Not sure how much time will be enough.
opiejeanne
@efgoldman: So, there are protests against Trump all over the country tonight, started last night in DC, and many thousands have come out to participate. In Seattle tonight, a man pulled a gun and shot 5 of the protesters; one is in serious condition, the other four have minor wounds in their legs. My older daughter and her boyfriend were at the protest and left just before the shooting. The earlier press release pretends that the shooting had nothing to do with the protest, which most of us were not buying then, but it may have changed by now.
waysel
My comment, which I tried 3 times, vanishes immediately when I hit submit. Help? ‘Test’ did fine. Do posts with illegal words vanish that quickly? I included no known bad words.
waysel
Can I / divide sentences/with slash marks?
waysel
p test
dogwood
@Kropadope:
Feel free to spend the rest of your life dreaming up left-wing policies that will appeal to these Trump voters. Republicans poisoned Flint and Democrats saved the auto industry. They choose Republicans. These voters don’t give a shit about policy. Since the tea party we entered a very ugly reactionary period in American life. it’s really starting to heat up now. How long it lasts and the degree of intensity and destruction are yet to be seen. There’s no policy that will let us get around this, we have to go through it. But have a great time pretending that if we just become real progressives we’ll turn these folks around.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The house mate’s girlfriend was pointing out to me that Trump is a long time democrat who vowed to destroy the GOP. Considering it the GoP is the collation of the Christian Taliban, the Granny Starvers and Know Nothings with Trump to hold them together, I can see Trump doing that, even if he really doesn’t want to. Ya’, I don’t like the GOP, but someone who shares my ideas and bent on destruction as president, I don’t see any good coming from that.
CarolDuhart2
Be careful with the protests. Throwing things around may seem gratifying to some, but it’s a great way to turn marginal sympthasizers into enemies. And it’s also ineffective in getting more than attention.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@waysel: 5) Decades of Trump having a TV show depicting him as some kind of super hero businessman to a bunch of voters who use a TV to do their thinking.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@dogwood:
Well there are my union member, now retired and dependent on Social Security relatives in Pennsylvania who constantly vote Republican because of abortion. The only reason Penn trends blue is because of the non boomers whites who’ve rejected religion and the blacks.
dogwood
@Kropadope:
One thing we know is that Bernie will never let us down. He’s already reached out to the Donald.
rikyrah
@ChrisH:
A serious question : how the phuck have Democrats ignored White working class folks?
What policies were enacted or that Democrats propose are anti White working class. And what different problems do the White working class have that are different from the Black, Asian, Native and Latino working class.
rikyrah
@danielx:
It is one of the saddest things that I continue to write;: people are going to die because of these policies
dogwood
@rikyrah:
Dems haven’t ignored them. They aren’t policy voters; they are culture wars voters. Dems over them policies that would improve their lives. Repubs offer them Jesus, gun and “real” American values. What we offer is good, but what they offer is defining.
Applejinx
I hope at least some of you are able to watch this recent post-election video in which Mark Blyth and Wendy Schilling deconstruct what the hell happened.
Wendy is echoing some of the epistemic closure I see here, and Mark is and has long been on the ‘economic’ slant. And it’s genuinely shocking to me how much Wendy is just outright lying, making stuff up, making no sense and getting louder. It’s like the Dem version of Alex Jones.
She starts right off by claiming Mark (like her) is surprised by a thing he has been predicting, publically, for months. He violently shakes his head and denies that, and I’ve seen the videos and indeed he has been predicting this the whole time and explaining how and why we will get the result that in fact we got. Later on she takes a thing (being ripped off in the grocery store) and claims it is inflation, and again this is economics and Mark is forced to interrupt and say no, they’re just stealing from you. Commodities prices are not rising. They’re just stealing from you…
Stop insisting that America is racist and wants to hurt black people, gays, women etc. because they are racist and evil and that’s what racists do.
It is not true. This is a sustained refusal to even admit the possibility of other motivations.
‘Mr. Brexit’, who literally ran on defeating both the Republican and Democratic establishments and continually brought up Bernie Sanders as a victim of said establishments, who literally won in the Rust Belt by calling for (unrealistic) anti-globalization measures, ran a campaign as much about economic injustice as Bernie Sanders had. Mr. Brexit won, and has probably got even LESS of a clue what to do about it than Bernie had, but that’s at least as important to his voters as racism.
Racists WANT to behave as if they got a mandate, but they fucking didn’t and people will be epically pissed off if this all is derailed into culture wars.
Republicans AND Democrats wage endless culture wars while people increasingly starve. Stop trying to redirect this onto culture wars and consider the point that Mr. Brexit cannot deliver on his promises to the Rust Belt, not now, not later, not ever. Not even if he actually wants to.
Applejinx
@dogwood:
If Trump legit starts taking directions from Bernie Sanders, it only underscores the point that Trump defeated and completely eviscerated the Republicans long before November 8. It is the final humiliation and the last thing Washington DC Republicans (or the Village) want.
Just because Trump won doesn’t make him a Republican. He’s a goddamn lunatic but a clever manipulator, and absolutely narcissistically self-absorbed. There is no loyalty to the Republican platform there, and if he wants to hold on to the Rust Belt power bloc it’d be completely reasonable for him to get advice from Sanders, who also did well in Rust Belt states.
Imagine what Paul Ryan must think about the prospect of the ‘Republican’ President taking advice from an old Vermont Socialist.
mak
Speaking of “bright sides,” in addition to the unifying effects of living in a fascist state and seeing the Supreme Court rigged for a generation or more, I have found that the unthinkable nature of what the fuck just happened is literally unthinkable, in that I simply cannot bear to dwell on what the fuck just happened for more than a moment at a time, and so avoid all contact with any media that discusses it (which is to say, all media). As a result, with my usual avenues of procrastination cut off, I’ve found myself actually taking refuge in the work that I usually dutifully avoid. I’m avoiding my avoidance. My concern is that this is akin to the psychological jiujitsu seen in those who, say, un-un-endorse a presidential candidate, and that I am becoming a Republican. Thanks a lot, Trump!
dww44
@Mnemosyne: I agree. I canvassed in the poor neighborhoods, of which there are far too many, and it was evident that far too many voters get tripped up on the small stuff. Like telling the pollworker that you live in a different place than is on your photo id and being denied a ballot on those grounds. Just because you didn’t change your “local” address with the Board of elections, even though one’s voting precinct didn’t change.
Gavin
All the establishment hacks [both DNC and MSM] who feel that they can/should lecture the rest of us on electability should be consigned to oblivion. What do they know? They lost an election to Donald Trump, the White Man’s Obama.
The neoliberals, Clinton, Obama, their entire coteries, and the MSM must be removed from power within the Democratic party. The only way forward is with both social justice and economic justice i.e. social democracy. Decoupling these two principles is extremely dangerous – and challenging for the existing leadership.
Mel
I want to cry even more when I see all the “let them burn it all down” comments here. Why? Because “they” won’t just be burning down life for Trump voters, but for a shockingly high number of Dems, too. Dems of all ages, races, backgrounds. Dems with one thing in common: we don’t have enough to money to make a financial safety net for ourselves and our families.
Please bear with me. Everybody’s story is different. But before you yell, “serves them right,” or “nothing we can do, and they get what they voted for”, try to think about all the people who did not vote for this and will suffer horribly anyway.
I am one of those people on the edge of falling. And I am not a repub, a low-info voter, an uneducated voter, or an inactive, lackadaisical person politically. So why am I at risk? Because, like it is for so many others, life happens.
I worked from the time I was 12 years old: babysitting, odd jobs before age 16, and then retail jobs through high school and college. I didn’t have to financially as a young child and teen, but family taught me the importance of working hard for what you need and want. Got very good grades, got a Pell grant, but college was still very expensive, esp since Dad had gotten “downsized” out of an excellent paying job due to his age, and had to take a job paying about half of what he had earned before. Still, Mom’s small salary and the fact that she could keep us on her health insurance, plus a short bit of unemployment payment kept them afloat while he hunted every day for work. In a Trump world, we likely would have gone under then, instead of having a second insurance to fall back on and a social safety net to buoy us through a few very scary months.
That showed me just how close to the edge most of the people I knew truly were, and my Quaker family always asked me to ask myself, “How can you be most useful?” For me, the answer then was to help people get a good education. We always believed that education was so important. So given a once between medicine and education, I picked education and counseling, b/c I believed that I could be useful in a lot more lives that way. I also knew that the college debt I would have would be large, but not as crushing as facing med school debt while working in e public or non-profit sector.
Fast forward a decade: now married; hubby and I have paid off our school loans, have moved to a very poor rural area reminiscent of where I grew up, are both working in jobs we love: he doing low-paying but vital non-profit work, me working as an educator, counselor and liaison for at-risk adults and children. His work had full-time benefits; mine was “part-time” , no retirement, no benefits, even though I actually worked about 65 hours a week and sometimes more. We thought it didn’t matter: we weren’t spenders, saved money, drove our old cars until, they just couldn’t be repaired anymore, didn’t vacation, and it was truly, truly good: we loved our work, loved each other, had our pats and our friends and our families, and we’re getting ready to start our own family. And then it happened.
I got sick. Quickly, terribly, horrifically sick. The details aren’t important. What is important is that, like for so many others who just are not wealthy, we quickly discovered how NOT fireproof we were. It suddenly DID matter that I had no paid sick leave, no disability insurance through my work. Despite all that saving and living frugally, our savings were gone within a year, and our little nest egg investment gone within another 6 months. We were very far away from high quality medical care (almost 3 hours drive one way to get an MRI), and my husband had to leave his job, which provided our ins and our only income, to move us to an area with access to major hospitals and medical care. My parents tapped into their small retirement to help us move, putting themselves much closer to the edge of financial instability). I’ll be honest – several times during that period, had I had the physical strength to do the deed or any ready method at hand, I would have taken my own life spare my family, esp my hubby, the horrors we have gone through. You can’t imagine unless you have been through a catastrophic illness or love someone who has, and I hope that none of you who have your health ever, ever have to go through this.
Being able to get disability enabled me to get insurance again, and that small monthly check enabled us to just stay afloat while my husband found work closer to family. We had hope once again, despite empty bank accounts and having paid over $200,000 out of pocket in medical bills over. We were barely making ends meet, and many months my husband would, unbeknowst to me, not purchase his blood pressure and other medicines, b/c he was using that money to try to pay down the over $50,000 worth of medical debt we still owed, most of that on credit cards that we had essentially never used before the we had to start putting company’s and medicines etc on them to survive.
Ten years ago, we had hope. We had a well-used but much loved old house in a diverse neighborhood, hubby had a job with health insurance, I had access to good medical care and some new medications that didn’t make me well but allowed me to at least have enough relief from the pain, fever, cognitive problems, etc. to have a couple of days a week where I could see a tiny glimmer of light at the end of this long, dark horrible tunnel of illness, fear, debt, and grief.
And then the market crashed. My poor, sweet husband lost his job again when the company he worked for closed its doors. Because of his references and his education, a couple of head hunters approached him and wanted to represent him. His resume got immediate hits, even in the horrible job market. But every employer who wanted to see him right away, THAT day, would then add, “as soon as I see the dates on his resume for his undergrad and college education and his earliest employment in the field. Why? because it was a way to make sure that the candidate was young. Which he is not. As soon as that received the resume with dates, “Must see this guy right away!!!” turned to, “Sorry, we’ve decided to promote in-house” within ten minutes.
When you are desperately ill, it is hard for people to see. It reminds them of their own mortality, of how easily it is for any person’s life to change at a moment’s notice. When a friend or loved one goes from a familiar financial state to being working poor or unemployed, it is hard for people to cope with. When a person is too sick or too broke to do the things that their group of friends has always done, a large majority of those friends will quickly drift away. At first it hurts unbearably to be so alone. Then you forgive when the pain fades. You see how hard it is to stay and watch the suffering, and you forgive and understand. And you treasure the ones that do stay – they are your miracles in a shitty, shitty world. They are the reason you get up every morning and try again against all the odds.
Hubby cobbled together contract work and part-time work (sometimes over 80 hours a week, running all over the city, all for about the same amount per hour that our teenage neighbor was making at his part-time job in clothing retail), no insurance, no benefits, no hope. We nearly went under more times than I can tell you. We huddled together in a house with the temperature at 50 degrees in the middle of a snowstorm, just holding each other and crying because there wasn’t anything we could do to fix any of it. We made just enough money to not qualify for any help, and not enough to do anything but cling on by our fingertips. I started going without the most essential medicines. I didn’t even buy socks or new underwear for 4 years because, simply, we needed every single penny to keep a roof over our heads and keep me alive. We never gave up, although we never knew from day to day how we would get throughMy doctor begged drug reps for samples to try to enable my hubby to get his much needed heart medication. We ate rice or Mac and Cheese for many meals, and sometimes went without in order to not lose our house. When it looked like we might despite it all, my husband’s sibling who lives and works overseas kept us afloat for another two months until my husband got a full time job when the economy started to pick up.
Ours is not the only story like this. We are a mere drop in the bucket. Many had it even worse. Many did not survive, regardless of their political leanings, their education level, or anything else, with hope for employment, a roof over their heads, or their marriages or relationships intact. Our old house has leaking gutters and a roof that needs repairs. We cannot afford to do the repairs, and we cannot sell without losing everything ( we bought right before the market crashed b/c we had to move then, with no delay) without the repairs being done.
President Obama worked hard and long to reverse some of the damage caused by the previous administration. Because of the ACA, my husband was able to get insurance for the first time in five years. Because of disability insurance and my husband’s love and sacrifice, I am here drawing breath today. On November 7th, I had hope in my heart for the first time in a long time. There are some off-label medications on the horizon for some of my autoimmune conditions. None of them are truly safe (Google rituximab and read that black box warning), and none of them are covered by my insurance, and none of them are affordable, and they might not even work if I could try them. But hope, right? Surely the ACA expansion under a Clinton Presidency might have brought those within my reach at some point. And My wonderful Doctor stated that they would fight for me to be able to try the meds, even if it meant fighting for a spot on a distant clinical trial and knocking on every door of the drug company for years, to try to get an off-label “compassionate” lower cost supply.
For the first time, hubby and I talked about taking a vacation , maybe going to see our new grand-nephew next year if I could get the doctors’ okay to travel. We even had someone come to give estimates on the repairs, hoping that by next spring we might have some hope of being able to take on that additional debt, make those repairs, and move closer to my parents since my mom recently got diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. They were there for us; we have to be able to be there for them!!! Hubby and I dared to talk about some of the ifs. if I could get my health stable, if free state college tuition came to fruition, maybe someday I could go back to school and get training as a medical assistant or a nurse. Maybe I could give back in a way that would help other people going through what I am going through now. I thought, maybe there is hope. maybe I can be happy, useful, productive some day again.
So… Hope. there itwas. there it went.
Because despite the fact that I have never voted republican , despite the fact that I believe with all my heart that we are all connected and that we have to look out for one another, despite years of volunteering, GOTV before it had an acronym, despite trying all my life to do work that does good in this world, here I am, on the brink of destruction just a surely as all those folks who did vote for Trump.
And I am not alone. There are so many of us. So, please, please, despite the anger we all feel, the grief, the fear, please, if you have the luxury of a safety net that can sustain you through four years of this, if you have the ability and the finances to get out of the country, please know that I am so, so happy that you do, and I know that even if you do have that safety net, you are as raw and angry and shocked and terrified as I am right now.
But, please, please don’t throw up your hands and say, “Burn it all down”. Because it’s not just people who voted for this that will suffer. It’s me and all the other people like me, and all of their loved ones, and the elderly who can’t care for themselves, and the kid who bags your groceries, and the teacher who gave you hope when you were having a bad year as a child, and the receptionist that got your child in for that emergency dental appointment, and the guy who cleans your office at night and your neighbors’ autistic son, and the list goes on and on.
I’m begging you to try to keep this in mind as we all work through the shock. I will admit, I had that same feeling on Wednesday morning that I had years ago. Is it worth fighting, when the odds are so insurmountable? My hubby has a chance of surviving this without me as a burden. With me – I don’t know. That moment was fleeting, it has passed, and I mention it only because I know that there are others out there feeling the same despair. You are not alone. I wish I could reach through this screen and hug every one of you. Hubby begged me to not give up. And I am begging you to not give up either. Like my hubby says, “What would the pets do without you?!?”
I only recently started commenting, but for several years this site has been a place where I find hope, humor, peace of mind when things look very bleak in my life. And I thank every one of you for that. Please don’t give up.
Ab_Normal
@efgoldman:
Just shared on Facebook. We’ll see how many family members I lose. Fuggem.
Это курам на смех
Check 1. Check. Check. Is this thing on?
Steeplejack
@Это курам на смех:
When you use a new nym you automatically go into moderation until a front-pager vets you. But you should be good to go now, comrade.
Doug!
@Mel:
Thanks for this!