This is what “no future” means. This is unsustainable. When people are endorsing a candidate on the basis that everything he’s said for the last year and a half is false, and what he said before that is true, and obviously he’ll go back to the way he was, and the people who pushed him to the right will go along with this – that is insane. If logic doesn’t matter, if reason doesn’t matter, if the words coming out of the candidate’s mouth don’t matter, then there’s no point in even attempting to have a democracy or anything like it. If truth means nothing, if reality means nothing…well, welcome to everything people bemoaned back when I was in college English. Welcome to the truly and completely postmodern world. If we as a nation actually decide that the truth is whatever you want it to be…well, maybe there’s enough medication and booze to help me see the world that way.
-5 Nov 2012
Forget everything you hear about the “moderate Republicans” or the “grownups” – there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the GOP and the Tea Party, there never was, and the successful laundering of the Republican label in the wake of 2008 while going even further to the right is one of the amazing mysteries of our time….And don’t underestimate the chance of Clinton Fatigue dragging Hillary down to the point where he – or another of his neo-confederate pals in Amen Corner – finds himself in the Oval Office on January 20, 2017…Better days are coming. They can’t live forever. The only catch is, can we last long enough to ride it out.
-20 Nov 2014
My mistake was in thinking that 2012 really was last call. I was right about Clinton Fatigue, except that Hillary actually finished with over a million more votes than Trump. What I wasn’t really prepared for was that the FBI would sandbag her, or that Russian misinformation would be gladly laundered through Wikileaks and Facebook, or that the press would run with it in a spirit of false equivalence and that we as a nation would just let that go, and that it could be enough to thread the needle in enough states to allow this to happen.
But this should be the take-home: for the second time in the last five elections, the popular vote winner lost the election. That hadn’t happened for over a century. Now, two out of the last 5. 40% is a bad failure rate for a democracy in the 21st century, and that can’t be left to lie if we want to keep it.