"(1) Trump wins a clean victory. In this scenario, Trump wins the Electoral College fair and square and holds Harris to a plurality in the popular vote."
In that case then, Trump's victory was cleaner than clean with him receiving a popular vote MAJORITY, and relegating Harris to a popular vote MINORITY (not even a plurality)
I’m a pretty liberal guy and I want to say that I will be forever grateful to the folks at the Bulwark for the courage of shedding their former tribal affiliations, risking relationships and careers to oppose authoritarianism. I’m proud to be part of a coalition with people of such high character. I’m feeling heartbroken about what a Trump popular vote win means about our fellow countrymen and what hell a second Trump term might be unleashed on vulnerable communities, but I feel some steel in my spine to figure out and effectuate what small impact I can have with the knowledge that I’m not alone. Thank you
My theme for the day: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." H. L. Menken
On the positive side I am glad Trump (not happy) got the popular vote and wasn't elected by Electoral College nullification as in 2016. At least it seems that this is the democratic result for which we all longed. Not a good result but definitely the right one for a free and fair election.
On the negative side? Too many to list but we all know what they are anyway.
With the Senate in Republican hands and Trump in charge we can assume the filibuster rule will go away. Disempowering Senate Democrats completely. If the Republicans keep their House majority as expected then there will be nothing to prevent Trump from dismantling the administrative state.
Justices Thomas and Alito can now safely retire and be replaced by young Justices eager to take an ax to all precedents they don't like, or ordered to remove by the oligarchs and who will be on the court at least 40 years.
This is the curse of living in interesting times.
It will be interesting to see what shape resistance, if any, will take. A parade of women in pussy hats and performative protesting through the antisocial media platforms isn't going to cut it this time.
I guess Bezos made the right decision after all--- a Harris endorsement probably wouldn't have helped her--- and provoking Trump a huge risk.
Also the stock market is soaring today just as Trump predicted it would.
The curse of interesting times... I appreciate everything you wrote. I hope we still have elections and real parties in two years. That's a long time and they have been shown to be skilled at rewriting facts with their prefered fictions.
Definitely the victors always write the history. They did a bang up job before they won--- now they have power we can guess the revisions will continue.
January 6 will be celebrated as a second 4th of July. The insurrectionist will be pardoned and allowed to sue the DOJ for false imprisonment. We can surely expect prosecutions of the January 6th Committee. An Ashli Babbitt memorial will be erected in the Capitol Building. I could go on but you get the picture!
JVL, I think your analogy is on point but you got it backwards. Trump isn’t the Heel - he is the Hero. He is who the American public wants to defeat the lib’tards (the actual Heel). The lib’tards hate America, they are enemy within, and public needs the Hero - the Hero alone - to put things right. The January 6th rioters are also Heroes - the Sgt Slaughter who ultimately conquered the Iron Sheik. This is what a plurality of America has told us.
The Cleatus’ are too dumb to realize their lot in life will only get worse (tariff-induced inflation), and the opportunistic wealthy, who absolutely know what they are voting for, will enjoy the benefits of the tax cuts to come. It’s a win-win for ignorance and cynicism. Se la vie.
Yep. Total bummer. But Kamala turned out to be as weak a candidate as was originally feared, and Biden got out too late for there to be any other option. She did as well as she was capable but people want the xenophobia, hate and division. And the show, of course. On that, JVL was 100% correct - it is all about the show.
People rejected Biden and Harris, after 4 years, because they were bored, and irritated. They said they wanted politics to be "normal" and "ordinary" again. They may have believed it. But they were lying to themselves.
Politics has come to seem like something that must entertain us, as a science fiction movie does, with villains and heroes. Biden and Harris both refused to govern like that, or politick like that. It seemed like the right thing to do. It might have been, morally. But, well.
As far as inflation goes--yes, Biden and Harris seem to have been done in by it, as many politicians around the world were. It would be convenient to believe they could have prevented that by "cutting down on the spending", or whatever. But that's yet another lie we tell ourselves.
Trump, in his second term, will not be done in by inflation. Voters will not care about it once he is president. His policies will cause inflation to skyrocket, and the inflation during Biden's term to seem a cakewalk--and voters will not care.
He will frame the suffering that results from it as the fault of China or immigrants or the evil liberals on their side--and just enough voters will believe it, and give him a pass, again.
Because in the end, it's not about inflation, or prices, or the economy, or too much leftism. It's because voters are bored, irritated, and care less about policy than their egos, their basest emotions, and being entertained.
So, you weren't off this whole time about the wrestling component. I'll still never watch the stuff. But I think I'm learning some stuff about it, and life, from you here.
Also, from watching the catastrophe last night. :/
Decadence. That’s the one-word summary of your post. “I’ll vote for the arsonist because he’s more entertaining than the firefighter and I’m bored” is the epitome of decadence.
YES. Bored. And, frankly, as a student of Christian religious history, I think especially as it relates to US History that American Christians are bored with the "Jesus message." Like Patton many of them want to grab "the Left" by the nose and kick them in the pants.
They did some polling of recent converts to evangelical Christianity lately. Disturbingly, a large portion of them seem to have not even believed in God.
Which is also kind of disturbing, but in a more Christianity-specific context.
Many theories out there as to why. Mainly revolving around the notion that lots of big, new, growing churches are now oriented around lifestyle, tribalism, and politics, de-emphasizing the Biblical aspect. But hard to pinpoint exactly, through polls.
Ah! Arianism is back. "De-emphasizing the biblical aspect ..." Huh. Well, there are several inconvenient behavioral suggestions in the Bible, after all. All that stuff about forgiveness, selling your gear and giving money to the poor, caring for widows and orphans. Sounds way too much like "Obamacare."
Am so very much Dem (enough that I bristled when Kristol is like after the Selzer poll and being strangely optimistic he goes "If they only ran Nikki Haley they win this election quickly" -- he would have supported her?! Something about her policies and the 6-wk ban is attractive?).
But also enough of a institutional defender of processes and democracy that if Trump was running for us I would easily vote for a milk toast process Republican.
But during so much of the stress reading, the commiserating -- this site was shining light to defend propriety and process and democracy. Gladly paid to become a subscriber
Hoping you can keep it going strong. Because the $2-billion we spent was not enough. It has to come from your side or it does not happen.
Here we are on the other side, and it is very dark.
How did this country go from a generation that fought global facism, and won, to a generation one down the line that embraced facism, at home and abroad?
That is the question.
And: how do we get out of it? It took a catastrophe on the scale of losing in WW2 for the Italians to turn on their fascist leader. Is that what we need, a Trumptastrophy? I suppose a botched pandemic response was not enough for Trump voters to turn on their supposed savior.
My honest reply: 1) The generation that fought fascism is fading away, and with them the memory of the "Why." 2) The GOP took on the marketing of racism as an empowerment strategy in the late 40s after FDR/Truman got more serious about getting serious with Black civil rights after WW II. 3) The Christian revival movement of the 1960s in the face of the "Generation Gap" and popular protests also got a thumbs up from the GOP. 4) Finally, and most immediately: the election of Obama was a fatal wound to the white male American psyche. Obama was a novelty, Clinton in 2016 would have been more novelty, and Harris was novelty off the scale and a strange entry at the last moment. MUCH more deliberation and listening to rank-and-file has to go on now. (All this is my opnion.)
If you are right - and you sound very on the mark, to me - then this election, which we thought and hoped would be about women, driven by women, was actually more driven by men, and there is exit polling to back that up. This election was then about male fragility. And Trump played on that, big time, w his instinctual misogyny and toxic paternalism. And he did not just prey on white men! He targeted Latino men to terrible electoral effect.
Oh, I also agree with David Dickson's comment above that BOREDOM is a factor, too. The "geist" of American politics has changed substantially over the years. It used to be Duty, Honor, Country. Now it's ... Wrestlemania.
All the podcasts helped him do that. The one we derided as a chaos clown with a shitshow campaign had a better media strategy. What exactly did Kamala’s billion dollars buy?
There is no universe in which Kamala’s campaign did not strive their utmost to get their candidate on these bro-oriented podcasts. You’re assuming a level of dismissiveness and Pollyanna condescension by the actual people in charge of her campaign that has no reality behind it..
What almost certainly happened is that these podcasts decided they were on Team Trump, no matter what, and refused to book her. Rogan, to cite the biggest example, gave bullshit excuses why she could not come on his show that were not on the level.
I actually agree she should have “gone on Rogan”—but that would require Rogan himself dealing in good faith with her. I do not think he was.
This was not simply a “bad media strategy”, in other words. This was a hefty part of the media—the podcasts, specifically, deciding they were MAGA long before she entered the race.
I think the evidence will show she did everything that was humanly reasonable to try to make inroads with that demographic. But you can’t simply “go on Fox”, as the saying goes, if Fox itself has decided not to give your message oxygen.
Rogan is not simply a button you can decide to press. He can, and almost certainly did, make the decision to move heaven and Earth for Trump this election many weeks (and possibly months) before endorsing.
Too many finger-pointing liberals right now are not grasping this, because it’s too depressing to contemplate who truly owns the levers of media now, and whose tank they’re now in. They will, eventually.
JVL, you were/are rightr. NC resident here, voted Mrs. Harris, had her sign on our lawn in Charlotte. Bulwark founding member, I don't like saying this, but this election was not a Biden or Harris failure, they were fine more or less. It was America. It was the "collective us ." I am of perhaps an unpopular opinion, that we deserve what we get now. Perhaps, we deserve an unrestrained 47th President. Let the American people feel the consequences. The people have spoken. May they (we) now get to experience what we have warned against for the last 10 years. Perhaps, history will write something along these lines about this time, "We (Americans) tried to save us from ourselves. We failed." May our Lord have mercy on us all.
You are right, Geoff M. This outcome is not about Trump. Not really his fault. Because the voters are the end users here. And “we” - as a group, as a society - voted this maniac in. Nor is this about Harris. She was a terrific candidate, ran a near-flawless campaign, and yet her honesty and empathy and problem-solving focus could not overcome the conspiracy quackery, dishonesty, fear, anger and cruelty of the Republican machine, and its end users - those voters who essentially chose evil over good.
The only thing that can save us from Trump now is…Time.
He is old. He will fade, perhaps before his term ends. And hopefully the GOP will have the courage to take Granpa’s car keys before another 4 year accident spree.
Then I’m sorry, but America’s so-called adults will have to act to protect its own children. And we all know American adults still make excuses, without a hint of contrition or shame, for why their gun collections are sacred while their children do active shooter drills at school. They might still kid themselves with tropes about America’s fundamental decency, but maybe this shows decency is not a passive trait that can be taken for granted - it must be won. And kept.
Early Weds morning and the joy is hard to find. Script 1 where JVL said this: "I rate this finish as extremely unlikely" has become a reality and a really ugly one at that.
The tragedy of course is wrestling is fake and the booker/script writer's simply want to sell more tickets, put more eyes on the product. For all of us, election day was real...and the outcome unimaginable. There's nothing fake about what we saw happen in very real time.
The good guys lost to the evil within and the celebrations of evil overcoming will be hard to take. But alas, life is filled with the ups and downs. We'll all survive, albeit in ways we have yet to discover or discern.
It is simply hard to grasp American being this pathetically inept at picking their leadership.
I did not watch last night, I didn’t watch anything. I just knew deep down inside that our rot from the inside would take over. America hates women. Period. Ugh.
I know, that is the other complicating factor. I don’t know that we were better off with Joe Biden. I’m not second guessing any of that. What I know is what I’ve experienced my entire life, that people in America don’t like women. I’ve been a coder for more than 30 years, which is a field dominated by men. I know how men feel about women and i know that lots of women feel the same way. I’ve had people say it directly to my face. So it is was it is. And we will get through this, but it will be painful.
It’s not that they don’t like women in general. Men don’t like women who don’t do is they are told. And the women who don’t like other women, well, they don’t like other women who are somehow, in some way, showing them up. They don’t like women who are… You name it… smarter than them, prettier than them, skinnier than them, more independent than them, taller than them, better dressed than them…I never understood it, but I don’t waste my precious time competing with other women. The only way we will get our independence is if we lift each other up instead of tearing each other down.
Once again we have been shown how deeply divided our country has become. Our work continues, but it will not get any easier. My family and friends that voted for Trump will still be family and hopefully friendships will survive.
Roll up your sleeves and let us toil on. We are all still in this mess together and only we can change it. Nobody said it would be easy.
https://time.com/5506809/richard-nixon-inauguration/
JANUARY 20, 1969
Overhead, the low Atlantic sky was the color of wet concrete, threatening rain.
President Nixon got into his bulletproof limousine and kicked off the inaugural parade, which would take him within a literal stone’s throw…
…of the thousands of protesters who lined the winter streets.
DO NOT sit around on your couches and blame anyone…
…EXCEPT DONALD TRUMP and his vast right-wing conspiracy.
We organized this protest after Nixon won in 1968. We traveled to Washington DC.
We protested on January 20, 1969.
We Americans better do it again on January 20, 2025…
…or we won’t have a country anymore.
TRUMP INAUGURATION PROTEST : JANUARY 20TH, 2025
See your there !
.
"(1) Trump wins a clean victory. In this scenario, Trump wins the Electoral College fair and square and holds Harris to a plurality in the popular vote."
In that case then, Trump's victory was cleaner than clean with him receiving a popular vote MAJORITY, and relegating Harris to a popular vote MINORITY (not even a plurality)
.
.
"So the writer brought an old, beloved performer out of retirement (Biden, obviously) to beat the heel and serve as a transitional champion."
Yes -- this is why imo Biden flat out lied to and deceived us
Biden promised(?/intimated?/hinted?/whatever) us during his 2020 campaign that he WOULD be a one-term, transitional President, a bridge to the future
Biden. Lied.
.
I’m a pretty liberal guy and I want to say that I will be forever grateful to the folks at the Bulwark for the courage of shedding their former tribal affiliations, risking relationships and careers to oppose authoritarianism. I’m proud to be part of a coalition with people of such high character. I’m feeling heartbroken about what a Trump popular vote win means about our fellow countrymen and what hell a second Trump term might be unleashed on vulnerable communities, but I feel some steel in my spine to figure out and effectuate what small impact I can have with the knowledge that I’m not alone. Thank you
My theme for the day: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." H. L. Menken
On the positive side I am glad Trump (not happy) got the popular vote and wasn't elected by Electoral College nullification as in 2016. At least it seems that this is the democratic result for which we all longed. Not a good result but definitely the right one for a free and fair election.
On the negative side? Too many to list but we all know what they are anyway.
With the Senate in Republican hands and Trump in charge we can assume the filibuster rule will go away. Disempowering Senate Democrats completely. If the Republicans keep their House majority as expected then there will be nothing to prevent Trump from dismantling the administrative state.
Justices Thomas and Alito can now safely retire and be replaced by young Justices eager to take an ax to all precedents they don't like, or ordered to remove by the oligarchs and who will be on the court at least 40 years.
This is the curse of living in interesting times.
It will be interesting to see what shape resistance, if any, will take. A parade of women in pussy hats and performative protesting through the antisocial media platforms isn't going to cut it this time.
I guess Bezos made the right decision after all--- a Harris endorsement probably wouldn't have helped her--- and provoking Trump a huge risk.
Also the stock market is soaring today just as Trump predicted it would.
The curse of interesting times... I appreciate everything you wrote. I hope we still have elections and real parties in two years. That's a long time and they have been shown to be skilled at rewriting facts with their prefered fictions.
Definitely the victors always write the history. They did a bang up job before they won--- now they have power we can guess the revisions will continue.
January 6 will be celebrated as a second 4th of July. The insurrectionist will be pardoned and allowed to sue the DOJ for false imprisonment. We can surely expect prosecutions of the January 6th Committee. An Ashli Babbitt memorial will be erected in the Capitol Building. I could go on but you get the picture!
JVL, I think your analogy is on point but you got it backwards. Trump isn’t the Heel - he is the Hero. He is who the American public wants to defeat the lib’tards (the actual Heel). The lib’tards hate America, they are enemy within, and public needs the Hero - the Hero alone - to put things right. The January 6th rioters are also Heroes - the Sgt Slaughter who ultimately conquered the Iron Sheik. This is what a plurality of America has told us.
The Cleatus’ are too dumb to realize their lot in life will only get worse (tariff-induced inflation), and the opportunistic wealthy, who absolutely know what they are voting for, will enjoy the benefits of the tax cuts to come. It’s a win-win for ignorance and cynicism. Se la vie.
Wish I didn't agree with you, but this is where we are at.
Yep. Total bummer. But Kamala turned out to be as weak a candidate as was originally feared, and Biden got out too late for there to be any other option. She did as well as she was capable but people want the xenophobia, hate and division. And the show, of course. On that, JVL was 100% correct - it is all about the show.
Looks like voters went with 1).
But I think your wrestling analogy has merit.
People rejected Biden and Harris, after 4 years, because they were bored, and irritated. They said they wanted politics to be "normal" and "ordinary" again. They may have believed it. But they were lying to themselves.
Politics has come to seem like something that must entertain us, as a science fiction movie does, with villains and heroes. Biden and Harris both refused to govern like that, or politick like that. It seemed like the right thing to do. It might have been, morally. But, well.
As far as inflation goes--yes, Biden and Harris seem to have been done in by it, as many politicians around the world were. It would be convenient to believe they could have prevented that by "cutting down on the spending", or whatever. But that's yet another lie we tell ourselves.
Trump, in his second term, will not be done in by inflation. Voters will not care about it once he is president. His policies will cause inflation to skyrocket, and the inflation during Biden's term to seem a cakewalk--and voters will not care.
He will frame the suffering that results from it as the fault of China or immigrants or the evil liberals on their side--and just enough voters will believe it, and give him a pass, again.
Because in the end, it's not about inflation, or prices, or the economy, or too much leftism. It's because voters are bored, irritated, and care less about policy than their egos, their basest emotions, and being entertained.
So, you weren't off this whole time about the wrestling component. I'll still never watch the stuff. But I think I'm learning some stuff about it, and life, from you here.
Also, from watching the catastrophe last night. :/
Decadence. That’s the one-word summary of your post. “I’ll vote for the arsonist because he’s more entertaining than the firefighter and I’m bored” is the epitome of decadence.
YES. Bored. And, frankly, as a student of Christian religious history, I think especially as it relates to US History that American Christians are bored with the "Jesus message." Like Patton many of them want to grab "the Left" by the nose and kick them in the pants.
They did some polling of recent converts to evangelical Christianity lately. Disturbingly, a large portion of them seem to have not even believed in God.
REALLY! Oh, if you have the citation, I'd like to read about that!
Hmm, one correction. A large portion of them do not believe Jesus is God.
https://evangelicalfocus.com/life-tech/7775/30-of-us-evangelicals-does-not-believe-that-jesus-is-god-survey-says
Which is also kind of disturbing, but in a more Christianity-specific context.
Many theories out there as to why. Mainly revolving around the notion that lots of big, new, growing churches are now oriented around lifestyle, tribalism, and politics, de-emphasizing the Biblical aspect. But hard to pinpoint exactly, through polls.
Ah! Arianism is back. "De-emphasizing the biblical aspect ..." Huh. Well, there are several inconvenient behavioral suggestions in the Bible, after all. All that stuff about forgiveness, selling your gear and giving money to the poor, caring for widows and orphans. Sounds way too much like "Obamacare."
Am so very much Dem (enough that I bristled when Kristol is like after the Selzer poll and being strangely optimistic he goes "If they only ran Nikki Haley they win this election quickly" -- he would have supported her?! Something about her policies and the 6-wk ban is attractive?).
But also enough of a institutional defender of processes and democracy that if Trump was running for us I would easily vote for a milk toast process Republican.
But during so much of the stress reading, the commiserating -- this site was shining light to defend propriety and process and democracy. Gladly paid to become a subscriber
Hoping you can keep it going strong. Because the $2-billion we spent was not enough. It has to come from your side or it does not happen.
Keep going.
The heel wins a clean victory.
Here we are on the other side, and it is very dark.
How did this country go from a generation that fought global facism, and won, to a generation one down the line that embraced facism, at home and abroad?
That is the question.
And: how do we get out of it? It took a catastrophe on the scale of losing in WW2 for the Italians to turn on their fascist leader. Is that what we need, a Trumptastrophy? I suppose a botched pandemic response was not enough for Trump voters to turn on their supposed savior.
My honest reply: 1) The generation that fought fascism is fading away, and with them the memory of the "Why." 2) The GOP took on the marketing of racism as an empowerment strategy in the late 40s after FDR/Truman got more serious about getting serious with Black civil rights after WW II. 3) The Christian revival movement of the 1960s in the face of the "Generation Gap" and popular protests also got a thumbs up from the GOP. 4) Finally, and most immediately: the election of Obama was a fatal wound to the white male American psyche. Obama was a novelty, Clinton in 2016 would have been more novelty, and Harris was novelty off the scale and a strange entry at the last moment. MUCH more deliberation and listening to rank-and-file has to go on now. (All this is my opnion.)
Thank you for the thoughtful response, Liz C.
If you are right - and you sound very on the mark, to me - then this election, which we thought and hoped would be about women, driven by women, was actually more driven by men, and there is exit polling to back that up. This election was then about male fragility. And Trump played on that, big time, w his instinctual misogyny and toxic paternalism. And he did not just prey on white men! He targeted Latino men to terrible electoral effect.
I thought I read somewhere that Latino citizens consider themselves white, not person of color
Oh, I also agree with David Dickson's comment above that BOREDOM is a factor, too. The "geist" of American politics has changed substantially over the years. It used to be Duty, Honor, Country. Now it's ... Wrestlemania.
I think we're going to find out that many millions of men voted for the first time this election, and close to two-thirds of them voted for Trump.
All the podcasts helped him do that. The one we derided as a chaos clown with a shitshow campaign had a better media strategy. What exactly did Kamala’s billion dollars buy?
Define “we” here.
There is no universe in which Kamala’s campaign did not strive their utmost to get their candidate on these bro-oriented podcasts. You’re assuming a level of dismissiveness and Pollyanna condescension by the actual people in charge of her campaign that has no reality behind it..
What almost certainly happened is that these podcasts decided they were on Team Trump, no matter what, and refused to book her. Rogan, to cite the biggest example, gave bullshit excuses why she could not come on his show that were not on the level.
I actually agree she should have “gone on Rogan”—but that would require Rogan himself dealing in good faith with her. I do not think he was.
This was not simply a “bad media strategy”, in other words. This was a hefty part of the media—the podcasts, specifically, deciding they were MAGA long before she entered the race.
I think the evidence will show she did everything that was humanly reasonable to try to make inroads with that demographic. But you can’t simply “go on Fox”, as the saying goes, if Fox itself has decided not to give your message oxygen.
Rogan is not simply a button you can decide to press. He can, and almost certainly did, make the decision to move heaven and Earth for Trump this election many weeks (and possibly months) before endorsing.
Too many finger-pointing liberals right now are not grasping this, because it’s too depressing to contemplate who truly owns the levers of media now, and whose tank they’re now in. They will, eventually.
JVL, you were/are rightr. NC resident here, voted Mrs. Harris, had her sign on our lawn in Charlotte. Bulwark founding member, I don't like saying this, but this election was not a Biden or Harris failure, they were fine more or less. It was America. It was the "collective us ." I am of perhaps an unpopular opinion, that we deserve what we get now. Perhaps, we deserve an unrestrained 47th President. Let the American people feel the consequences. The people have spoken. May they (we) now get to experience what we have warned against for the last 10 years. Perhaps, history will write something along these lines about this time, "We (Americans) tried to save us from ourselves. We failed." May our Lord have mercy on us all.
"We have met the enemy and he is us". - Pogo (Walt Kelly)
You are right, Geoff M. This outcome is not about Trump. Not really his fault. Because the voters are the end users here. And “we” - as a group, as a society - voted this maniac in. Nor is this about Harris. She was a terrific candidate, ran a near-flawless campaign, and yet her honesty and empathy and problem-solving focus could not overcome the conspiracy quackery, dishonesty, fear, anger and cruelty of the Republican machine, and its end users - those voters who essentially chose evil over good.
The only thing that can save us from Trump now is…Time.
He is old. He will fade, perhaps before his term ends. And hopefully the GOP will have the courage to take Granpa’s car keys before another 4 year accident spree.
I don’t disagree entirely, but my son is 9 years old and he doesn’t deserve any of this shit, nor do the rest of America’s innocent children.
Then I’m sorry, but America’s so-called adults will have to act to protect its own children. And we all know American adults still make excuses, without a hint of contrition or shame, for why their gun collections are sacred while their children do active shooter drills at school. They might still kid themselves with tropes about America’s fundamental decency, but maybe this shows decency is not a passive trait that can be taken for granted - it must be won. And kept.
Well put. The arc of the moral universe isn’t gonna bend towards justice by itself.
An excellent point.
Early Weds morning and the joy is hard to find. Script 1 where JVL said this: "I rate this finish as extremely unlikely" has become a reality and a really ugly one at that.
The tragedy of course is wrestling is fake and the booker/script writer's simply want to sell more tickets, put more eyes on the product. For all of us, election day was real...and the outcome unimaginable. There's nothing fake about what we saw happen in very real time.
The good guys lost to the evil within and the celebrations of evil overcoming will be hard to take. But alas, life is filled with the ups and downs. We'll all survive, albeit in ways we have yet to discover or discern.
It is simply hard to grasp American being this pathetically inept at picking their leadership.
I did not watch last night, I didn’t watch anything. I just knew deep down inside that our rot from the inside would take over. America hates women. Period. Ugh.
It’s not just misogyny, Teresa. The racism runs deep here, too. We were better off with old Joe, but I was saying that all along.
I know, that is the other complicating factor. I don’t know that we were better off with Joe Biden. I’m not second guessing any of that. What I know is what I’ve experienced my entire life, that people in America don’t like women. I’ve been a coder for more than 30 years, which is a field dominated by men. I know how men feel about women and i know that lots of women feel the same way. I’ve had people say it directly to my face. So it is was it is. And we will get through this, but it will be painful.
It’s not that they don’t like women in general. Men don’t like women who don’t do is they are told. And the women who don’t like other women, well, they don’t like other women who are somehow, in some way, showing them up. They don’t like women who are… You name it… smarter than them, prettier than them, skinnier than them, more independent than them, taller than them, better dressed than them…I never understood it, but I don’t waste my precious time competing with other women. The only way we will get our independence is if we lift each other up instead of tearing each other down.
Don’t get me wrong, I voted straight blue down the ticket. But I always do that.
Once again we have been shown how deeply divided our country has become. Our work continues, but it will not get any easier. My family and friends that voted for Trump will still be family and hopefully friendships will survive.
Roll up your sleeves and let us toil on. We are all still in this mess together and only we can change it. Nobody said it would be easy.
The conflict that will kill us is the oligarchs against everyone. Maybe what has happened is unbearable enough for us to tackle that. Geoff Deihl is very good on this: https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/will-the-corporatocracy-stand
Let me get this straight: 4 years from now, JD Vance will be certifying an election? No wonder I can't find the bottom of the darkness.
No Trump will have ceded the presidency to Vance, because of poor health or something.