I've Heard Some Pretty Silly Post-Election Blather, But ...

These 3 take the cake for being the silliest and most unproductive:

(1) "If third-party voters had voted for Hillary, she would have won!"

Get real.  If those third-party voters had wanted to vote for Hillary, they would have voted for Hillary.  She was on the ballot right alongside the Libertarians' Gary Johnson and the Green Party's Jill Stein.  OK, riddle me this, Batman: Why do people vote third-party? ... Well? ... Because they don't like either of the two mainstream parties' candidates!  This should be obvious.  People complaining that third-party voters "should have voted for Hillary" have missed the point entirely.  Some of these folks (many of them? even most of them?) were never going to go for Hillary, period.  While I'm at this, who the heck are you to tell third-party voters whom they "should" vote for and then try to shame them for not doing so?  Go jump in a lake in Minnesota in January.

(2) "Bernie would have won if he had run!"

Fine, I think that the wacky Vermont socialist would have been more competitive than Hillary if he had been the Dems' nominee for the general election.  But he wasn't, so this line of whining is pointless.  Nobody knows or can know if Bernie Sanders would have won against Trump because he didn't run against The Donald, and nobody will ever know what would have happened.

(3) "Women who didn't vote for Hillary have internalized misogyny!"

This is the boringly familiar sexism smear taken to stupid lengths, prompted by the humiliating fact that women voters (notably white women) did not break for Hillary in the vast numbers that the Clinton campaign hoped for after it traded on the idea with its (face it, uninspiring) slogan of "I'm With Her."  Calling a woman sexist (even misogynist!) for not voting automatically for another woman is a shameless bit of nonsense, and the very idea that a woman should vote for a candidate - even a hopelessly flawed one - because that candidate is a woman is a ... wait for it ... sexist fallacy.  Shockingly enough to some of those pundits and partisans, women have minds of their own, and this time around a whole bunch of the ladies decided against Hillary.  Oh, don't get me wrong: I think it'd be great for the country to elect a woman to the White House (Taiwan just elected its first female president recently, and the UK was first of all to be a major Western nation to have a woman as head of government with the Iron Lady decades ago).  Still, I don't want just any woman to be president, and I sure as heck didn't want a mendacious career political sleazemonger like Hillary.  It's not enough to be just any woman candidate for president.  You have to be the right one if you want my vote.

Bonus: "Let's get rid of the Electoral College!"

*sigh*  Good luck with that.  

The Day After

Well, I gotta admit, I was not expecting that! Trump carried Pennsylvania? Michigan?

The wailing, gnashing of teeth, and the wearing of sackcloth and ashes by distraught Hillary fans proceeds apace around me, but let's get real here: she was a deeply - and, in the end, fatally - flawed candidate. As the incomparable Iowahawk said:

Hillary Clinton got her dream opponent, a barely literate reality show orangutan, AND SHE LOST TO HIM.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) November 9, 2016

Also, it turns out that smugly, contemptuously belittling, insulting, demeaning, stereotyping, alienating, mocking, and occasionally outright demonizing an entire segment of the American public and then expecting those "deplorables" to vote for you ... doesn't actually work. (Shoot, even a leftist paper like the Guardian figured it out. See this too.)

As for me, I'm just glad that the absolute worst presidential election in living memory is finally over and that I can sort of stand to look myself in the mirror.

One more thing: Drink in the hysterical, disconsolate, Schadenfreudelicious tears of the media as it flings itself into a total meltdown.  It behaved horribly with naked bias throughout this entire business, and any good Greek tragedian would nod sagely to see that in so doing it chose the form of its destructor when it thought it was about to crown its anointed and sail into a paradise of influence peddling and cozying up to the halls of power. You made your bed. Now lie in it.

Still, let's end with a joke, shall we?  

Election Day 2016

Aside from perhaps endorsing  the Sweet Meteor O' Death, this is all I'm going to say:

Satire Alert: The Onion On Political Pandering

I laughed out loud: "Newly Redesigned HillaryClinton.com Allows Users To Fully Customize Issues Page To Suit Own Preferences."

The Perfect Metaphor for 2016

Nothing that I could possibly write about Brexit or US politics or Venezuela or anything else (and all related mass hysteria on social media)  could be better than this image as a metaphor for the entire kit and kaboodle:

#Flood water pushes a burning #home down a creek in #WestVirginia. #wvwx
🎬 Amanda Carper pic.twitter.com/zJSMe95nLk

— AMHQ (@AMHQ) June 24, 2016

I Promised Myself I Wouldn't Blog About Politics. I Lied.

I'm sorry.  But I ran across this piece by Camille Paglia about the New Hampshire primary, and I can't help quoting it:

"Despite emergency efforts by Gloria Steinem, the crafty dowager empress of feminism, to push a faltering Hillary over the finish line, Sanders overwhelmingly won women’s votes in every category except senior citizens. Last week, when she told TV host Bill Maher that young women supporting the Sanders campaign are just in it to meet boys, Steinem managed not only to insult the intelligence and idealism of the young but to vaporize every lesbian Sanders fan into a spectral non-person. 

Steinem’s polished humanitarian mask had slipped, revealing the mummified fascist within. I’m sure that my delight was shared by other dissident feminists everywhere. Never before has the general public, here or abroad, more clearly seen the arrogance and amoral manipulativeness of the power elite who hijacked and stunted second-wave feminism."

BOOM.  In fact, it's so simultaneously mordantly hilarious and accurate that I'm giving Paglia her own tag from here on out.  

So basically you're telling me that Steinem and then Madeleine Albright reverted to outright, cynical, sexist bullying in their attempt to eke out a desperate win for Hillary.  If you're a woman, you must vote for Hillary!  NOT A CHANCE, SISTER.  (And, yes, I am using "sister" in utter sarcasm.)  If I'm not going to let a man tell me how to think and vote and live, you can bet your bottom dollar I'm not going to let any woman do it either.  Thanks, by the way, for confirming every sneaking suspicion I've ever had that a lot of the hot air being bandied around under the banner of "feminism" is, at its core, about the snarling, grasping pursuit of raw, naked power.  How's that for "mean girls"?

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog vs. the 2016 Election

Once you get past Triumph's usual naughty schtick, you just might decide that the puppet's made the best political satire of this entire insane election cycle.  (Caveat: this isn't for kids, heh. Triumph never is or has been, after all!)

There's also an entire segment with Triumph taking on some college students over trigger warnings and whatnot, and I laughed out loud.

Run, Bernie, Run!

This is probably the first actually interesting thing that's happened in the "I wanna be a candidate!" blitz.  

I'm not saying that I would leap on the Sanders bandwagon in earnest, but I would be darn pleased to see him challenge Hillary, because the whole "Hillary is inevitable" PR attempt reeks of ludicrous entitlement and should be challenged vigorously (not to mention soundly mocked).

While we're at it: Can we PLEASE on principle say no more Bushes and Clintons and nose-wrinkling whiffs of political dynasties and oligarchy?