First, a hearty FUCK YOU to every single person who voted for Trump, all 57,518,551 or so of you. Even if you don’t consider yourselves stone-cold racist, misogynist pricks like the president-elect, you’re as bad as he is. If you were stupid enough to believe that your vote “sent a message,” you’re right: By voting …
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Trump is my enemy, and so is everyone who supports him, and starting tomorrow, I will do every nonviolent thing I can to oppose Trump and the sycophants and drooling morons who surround him. In contemplating this ghastly outcome, I keep coming back to something Kay said months ago, about how all the institutional barriers that were supposed to keep a manifestly unqualified and objectively terrible person away from the Oval Office had failed, including the Republican Party and the Beltway press.
And now we can add the Democratic Party to that list. I think Newell’s conclusions as excerpted in Mistermix’s post below are right on in some places but wrong in others. Hillary Clinton didn’t graft her 2008 campaign or Bill’s 1992 crew onto 2016. Obama people were running her campaign! She didn’t ignore Bernie at all but rather co-opted large chunks of his agenda! And trying to lay this at the feet of Debbie Wasserman Schultz strikes me as pointless. But that said, Kay was right about institutions failing, and so is Newell, to some extent. So here we are.
The thing that prompted me to turn off the TV before they called the race was an MSNBC commentator who spoke of Trump rising to the occasion and doing the fabled “pivot” to be more presidential now that he was actually going to be the, you know, president. She might as well have expressed a wish for a winged unicorn that pisses bourbon and shits bacon to visit the set.
There will be no “pivot,” no matter what words Trump’s PR flunkies put up on Trump’s teleprompter. He’s a walking collection of personality disorders who operates on the principles of dominance and vindictiveness. There is no reasoning with him, and soon he will have all the instruments of the US government at his disposal as he enters the White House with a GOP-controlled congress.
In short, friends, we are fucked. I’d say our only immediate asset is the near-certainty that Trump will continue to act like a crude, paint-huffing toddler because that’s who he is. And in doing so, he will fuck up so spectacularly that, if we survive the phenomenon of his ego gratification dramas playing out on a world stage with the trappings of democracy intact, we’ll have a decent chance of pummeling the Republicans in the midterm and reinstalling Speaker Pelosi.
So, that’s the goal at the federal level, in addition to strengthening networks and getting involved in state and local politics as if our very lives depended on it. Because you know what? It does. Yes, we should learn from this debacle, adjust and move on. No, we shouldn’t tear our party to pieces, not when we’ve got an honest-to-Christ fascist to oppose.
Anyhoo, that’s where I am at 4:30 AM-ish on November 9, 2016. You?