Three Other Voices From This Thin Raft

I'm still trying to figure out how to continue expressing my rage at a nation where 62 million fellow Americans voted for an openly sexist, racist con artist to represent us to the world, but until then I have to find comfort from the others in the blogosphere who still have their voices and a keen understanding of the hell we're about to enter.

First off, there's Driftglass, who's been railing against an intentionally blind and self-serving media elite for decades now, and who had just written a long and beautiful argument about the media's folly allowing such a crook to dominate them (and us):

But messaging itself is not the problem.  The media is the problem.  And since, as the man said, the medium is the message, until we start taking on the media as Public Enemy #1, we're going to go right on losing...

Judging by policy statements made, resources allocated, attention paid and political capitol spent, it's quite likely that history will judge the Obama Administration to have been the most consistently pro-manufacturing administration since Eisenhower...

If you are a member of the general public, unless you made an extra special effort to inform yourself, you are blissfully unaware of any of this.

If you are blissfully unaware of any of this, it is not because the Obama Administration failed to talk it up at every single opportunity, but because over the last eight years the American political media collectively decided that instead of boring-ass stories about what the Democratic party has been trying to do to improve the lives and futures of the working class Americans, what you needed to hear were lively fairy tales about Birth Certificates and Death Panels.  Email servers and Benghaaaazi.  A Republican rebranding scam called the "Tea Party".  Instead of stories about the Caucus Room Conspiracy and Republican sabotage and sedition, you needed to hear endlessly, plaintive cries from all the usual Beltway hacks about how Barack Obama was refusing to lead!...

Ask a Trumpshirt if they remember any of this at all and they'll give you a dirty look, followed by a dozen "Yeah, but what about..."s, each of which will also be bullshit.  Then they will scamper away, because they have literally been conditioned by years of hate radio and Fox News and the Breitbart Collective not to remember anything from The Big Scary Past that is ideologically inconvenient.

In other words, if a dirty Libtard says it, it ain't true, and anyone who says anything I disagree with is obviously a dirty Libtard.  QED...

Then there's Rude Pundit, who like me was stunned by the result, spent time in the wilderness collecting his thoughts, and coming back today to discuss his insights (some of which, especially about the fucked-up electoral process, I agree with):

But lately, I've come around to another way of thinking. I wasn't wrong. Our election system is so innately fucked that it got it wrong. Right now, Clinton is up by nearly 3 million votes. That's 2 percent more than Donald Trump, with a lead that's growing with every precinct finalized. Yeah, yeah, she didn't win the presidency. But I wasn't wrong about the country. Nearly 54 percent of voters rejected Trump. And a plurality supported Clinton by far. Sure, that's way too many dumb fucks for any nation, but fuck you if you think Donald Trump has a "mandate" or a "historic victory" or some such shit. It's a goddamned embarrassment to say to the world, "Yeah, over here each person's vote is totally not equal..."

Trump won Petroleum County (yes, there is a goddamn Petroleum County) in Montana with a total of 278 votes out of 322 cast. Clinton won Manhattan's county in New York with 515,481 votes out of nearly 600,000 cast. In your precious list of counties won, those are each counted once.

I got nothing against the shit kickers and roughnecks of Petroleum County and I hope they don't have anything against us up here in the Northeast. But double fuck anyone for saying that 1 Montanan who voted for Trump is worth the same as over 1850 people who voted for Clinton in Manhattan. Your history-making is bullshit. Trump is the Loser-in-Chief, and he will always have asterisk after his name that'll drive him insane(r)...

Trump won because the Founders created a fucked-up system to make slave states feel wanted because conservatives have always thrown a fit if you don't just accept their ignorance. We can delude ourselves and say that "in their wisdom" the Founders created the Electoral College as a way to put the brakes on the election of a vile blithering idiot with dictatorial aspirations. But it's that very system that has gotten us to this point...

And then there's John Cole at Balloon Juice, who has a pretty blunt way with words:

If I read one fucking more thinkpiece, blog post, semi-literate tweet, or Facebook forward blaming whatever the fuck “identity politics” is for Democrats losing the election I am going to lose completely and totally lose my shit and climb a fucking bell tower. I don’t even know what people mean when they say identity politics anymore. So let me ask you:

Is it identity politics when you cater to white supremacists, the Klan, and neo-nazis to win an election?

Is it identity politics when you say white lives matter or blue lives matter?

Is it identity politics when you cheer building a wall to keep out rapey Mexicans?

Is it identity politics when you intentionally close voting districts in minority areas to suppress the vote?

Is it identity politics when you pass bills saying you can legally discriminate against the LGBT community?

Is it identity politics when you threaten a cop for wearing a hijab or try to rip the hijab off people in public?

Is it identity politics when you call for a ban on Muslims and claim that a government list of Muslims is a good idea?

Is it identity politics when your healthcare bills do nothing for women’s health but hand out Viagra like skittles?

Is it identity politics when children of color are disciplined more frequently and severely than white schoolchildren?

Is it identity politics when your #1 priority is passing bills telling what women can and can’t do regarding their reproductive health decisions?

Is it identity politics when the justice system systematically incarcerates minorities or when cities set up nuisance policing policies in minority communities?

Is it identity politics to insist that everyone say Merry Christmas?

Is it identity politics when you cheer stop and frisk in minority communities?

Is it identity politics when you claim “coastal elites” aren’t real Americans and that the heartland is where the “real people” live?

Is it identity politics to pay women less than men (and women of color even less)?

Is it identity politics to totally lose your fucking shit over a black Santa Claus or a black Jedi or boycott Rogue One because WHO FUCKING KNOWS THESE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING NUTS?...

I left the GOP because of their identity politics. I couldn’t sleep at night being aligned with warmongerers, homophobes, christianists, climate deniers, flat earthers, racists, xenophobes, and every garden variety bigot under the sun. The Republicans are the real party of identity politics- it’s all about stroking the few, the white, the privileged, and that’s all they have. They don’t actually have policy proposals or ideas, unless “Fuck ’em let them starve,” “Fuck ’em they don’t need health care,” “Fuck it, let’s bomb them,” “Fuck it, let’s put them in jail,” “Fuck it, the bible says so,” or “Fuck it, let’s burn it all down” count as policies and ideas...

I know where Cole's coming from: I'm also a former Republican driven away by the Culture War madness and their obsession with a tax-and-slash agenda that's been proven twice to be bad ideas (as though the third time or the thirtieth would be the charm).

Each one of those three voices are expressing the reality of the horror Trump and his fellow Republicans are going to inflict on the rest of us. All because of a rigged game and a broken electoral system. And none of this is going to get fixed until the entire thing collapses, ironically because these Republican policies are self-destructive and doomed to fail.

We can see this train wreck acomin' and nobody's going to be able to do anything about it until it's too late. And by then the body count of the innocent will be terrible to behold...