Finally

Now we need to get to work and push that lackluster centrist dork leftward to get essential changes made. No complacency allowed!

I hear Trump left the White House this morning to go golfing. He should probably cut that short and start making plans to flee the country. He might be welcome in Russia, although I hear they don’t much care for failures. North Korea?

End it. End it now

Every morning now I get up and check the election returns, groan in disgust, and never look again until the next day. The first day or two, yes, it was ambiguous, the counts were incomplete, it was a close contest and it’s fair to avoid calling it for one or the other. That’s not the case anymore, though — the ineluctability of the math means it’s clear that Biden wins Pennsylvania, tacking 20 electoral college votes onto the 253 he already has, pushing him over the 270 vote threshold and making him the president-elect.

However, the television networks, which have somehow become the final arbiter of our electoral process, have been reluctant to declare an end to the four antic years of the reality TV presidency. Maybe they fear losing my once-a-day click on their news sites (because they will; I never want to hear from CNN or FoxNews ever again). Even the newspapers seem to regret that Trump’s chances are “fading”.

I know my country is afraid of math, but it’s kind of unavoidable when you’re tallying up the votes of a few hundred million people. Accept it. Only now are the news media, cowards that they are, beginning to question the wisdom of airing Trump’s lies. Hey, maybe post-election, Twitter will finally attain a spine sufficiently rigid to finally ban Trump’s racist ass, as they finally did Bannon.

Also, while I’m speaking of math and counting the hordes, I’m tired of the claim that Pennsylvania is going to win this for the Biden/Harris camp. It is only a quirk of the timing of the count and variations in election law that mean Pennsylvania might carry this one across the finish line — the whole country had to struggle and work together to barely eject the fascist/racist slug.

Another reason to end it now: the Republican cheaters are working hard to call any results into question. A couple of QAnon supporters were caught trying to smuggle a truckload of fake ballots into Philadelphia. You know they were going to try to blame the Democrats for ballot fraud, it’s just that they were caught doing it first.

Two armed Virginia men who were arrested Thursday outside the Philadelphia Convention Center were “coming to deliver a truck full of fake ballots” to the city, CNN affiliate KYW reported, citing prosecutors.

The center is one of the places where election workers have been counting votes from the 2020 general election, which includes the race for president.

Text messages reveal that the men were concerned about the tallying of votes at the convention center, prosecutors said, according to KYW.

Right. Because bringing fake ballots to the election center is exactly the thing to alleviate people’s concerns.

Both men were carrying loaded handguns, and police found an AR-type rifle in the Hummer, authorities said at a news conference Friday. About 160 rounds of ammunition were found in the weapons and the vehicle, authorities said.

We need to end this election farce because at some point we’re going to have to confront the seditious armed militias and conspiracy theorists who have rallied behind the worst president ever.

Almost tempted

I hear distant echoes of a possible Biden/Harris victory, but I refuse to believe it until the hammer drops and the evil orange turd is declared a loser, and fired. Until then, I’ll just read The Rude Pundit’s take.

I gotta tell you: I watched Trump’s appearance today in the White House press room with enough burning schadenfreude to power a small city. As much as I wanted to be appalled and saddened and enraged, mostly what I thought was “Suffer, motherfucker.” If Biden ends up winning, as almost everyone seems to believe he will, this excruciating ballot count will have been worth it because Donald Fucking Trump was dragged down into the shit he created, watching it all fall apart. Sure, a swift ending would have been preferable, but this is so obviously tearing his tiny brain and his titanic ego to shreds that I’ll take it.

I’m almost tempted to tune into the preznit’s Twitter feed or to watch one of his press appearances just to see the meltdown in progress, but I shall resist. Get him out first, then let’s sweep out the rest of the slime.

But I’m not celebrating yet. I’ve witnessed too many years of Republican ratfucking.

Eastern Oregon is where the losers dropped out of the Oregon Trail

Isn’t it strange how rural voters don’t understand the concept of democracy? There’s the idea of making a decision based on the consensus of a majority of the citizens that conflicts with their belief that they should always get their way, in spite of the desires of the vast majority. And that’s why two Oregon counties voted to recommend that someone study the possibility that they maybe secede from the state and join Idaho. While I agree that the rights of minority citizens must be protected (do you think they’d see what I did there?), and that there’s power in forming coalitions with shared values, it’s still a really stupid idea.

The rich part of Oregon is the western side of the state, and especially the city of Portland. They want to cut themselves off from that — I guarantee you that those two counties receive greater benefit from the state of Oregon than they contribute — and join with a poorer state with less influence. Just more cows and sheep. But cows and sheep don’t vote, and neither does acreage, another concept that hasn’t yet sunk into the selfish conservative mind.

But then, I guess we should expect these kinds of contradictions and failings in a nation founded by wealthy white male landowners virtue signaling about freedom and equality and justice while arranging the laws to benefit slave owners, and setting up a powerful Senate that favored large empty states with low populations over dense states with many people. Oregon ranchers just want to follow those poisonous traditions!

They probably also want their hispanic immigrant workers to count in inflating their population size (maybe only as 3/5 of a white person?) while preferring that they don’t actually vote. Although maybe that’s why central Oregon, with a larger immigrant worker population, didn’t sign on to this silly initiative.

Welcome to our muddled hellscape

I totally shunned all sources of news yesterday and last night — I remember the 2016 election, and I expected my country to let me down, again, yet there were so many annoying sources gloating about an imminent landslide. It was better to avoid all the suffering of an agonizing night of ups and downs that would only end in disappointment and disillusionment.

When I got up this morning, and once I’d had a sip of coffee, I recorded my reaction to opening up the news for the first time in 24 hours. Bleeah. Shouldn’t have bothered.

The answer is…we don’t know who won yet. We may not know for a while, even though our Preznit has predictably declared victory. The fact that couldn’t get a definitive majority when one candidate was a corrupt, incompetent ass, and that we’re still playing games with that archaic electoral college, tells me that I’m living in a shithole country run by corporate stooges pandering to an ignorant, racist white electorate. At least we’ve once again established that fact, even if our media will continue to make excuses and the Fox Propaganda Channel will continue to deny reality.

Now that you’ve voted, I’ve got another job for you

This is important. Turn off your TV. Don’t visit five fucking thirty eight. Don’t check CNN every five minutes. You know that “election night” is a social construct, right? It’s an event contrived by television to fuel an obsession with minute-by-minute election returns, so that you’ll center your life for at least a day around watching advertising, just as all the media have turned elections into a horse-race monster where all that matters is who is ahead right this minute. That process culminates today and tonight in goddamn stupid election night parties and people spending their evening in the the glow of their TVs, listening to assholes making state-by-state predictions and pontificating on the “will of the American people” and solemnly declaring that one person ultimately has a “mandate”.

Don’t waste your time. Go play a video game or watch a movie or have sex or read a book or do your fucking grading or cook something delicious or go for a walk. Anything else. You’re fascinated with politics? Fine. Sit down and make a list of effective actions you can take, starting tomorrow. Plan your election strategy. Call up your local pols — it’s not as if they’re doing anything, they’re all glued to their TVs — and talk to them about policy.

Slap yourself out of the “event” mindset. This election is the result of years of accumulating bullshit, and it’s only going to be corrected by years of shoveling. If the less-evil guy wins, your hard work is just beginning. If the evil guy wins, well, you’re going to have to tear the whole system down, which is even more work, and you won’t get that done in a day and a night of listening to Jake Tapper yapping vapidly.

You voted. That’s your sole substantive contribution to politics today. Now do something else.

P.S. If you’ve already been roped into some election night waste-of-time, the only solution is to turn it into a drinking game. Bring a fifth of whisky and a fifth of tequila, and tell that annoying person who is making you suffer through this that they have to take a shot a) every time a loser from the primaries is asked to opine, b) every time they make a big show of changing the color of a state on a giant map, c) whenever the say the words “too soon to call”, and d) there is a lull in the incoming data that they fill with a network airhead babbling his opinions. If the network brings on some wretched evil dinosaur like Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, or Rick Santorum, you have to chug until they’re off the screen, or you lose consciousness. Your night will be mercifully brief, I promise.