Trumped

In spite of a clearly rigged process, The Donald will be our next Bad Hair Piece in Chief. The liberals, in their typical fashion, are being sore losers. It's been entertaining to watch all the MSM's turning themselves inside out trying to explain how they could have been so wrong in all their predictions. They seem to be settling into a "we would have won if all those deplorables would have stayed home like they were supposed to" line of rhetoric. My favorite explanation for Trump's win comes not from anyplace mainstream of course, but from Cracked magazine:

"Nothing that happens outside the city matters!" they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you'd barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.

But who cares about those people, right? What's newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.

To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. "Are you assholes listening now?"

The assholes are probably not listening quite yet, but they will be. After decades of feeling powerless and irrelevant, the rural working poor seem to have found their voice. I've been saying for over a year, what comes after Trump will be far more momentous than Trump.

The view from the liberal side of the universe (at least the thinking liberals that were against Hill&Bill from day one) is similar:

This election result was also a reaction to the smug elitism and myopic self interests of the white liberal class. Woman over 45 voted Trump. Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Florida — all Obama states, voted Trump. Non college educated white men voted overwhelmingly for Trump. The white working class, which is mostly NOT working, have been hit as hard by neo liberal economic policies and by trade deals like TPP and TTIP. And by NAFTA, ushered in, remember, by Bill Clinton. The utter indifference of the DNC to the suffering of vast chunks of the U.S., and the indifference of the smug supporters of Hillary who stigmatized and tried to shame third party candidates and those voting for them, came back to haunt them. They couldn’t imagine why everyone didn’t support their privilege. The logic of lesser evilism became an accusatory intolerance with opinion differing from their own. That they seemed more concerned with Trump’s pussy remarks than with Clinton’s cackling at her orchestrated assassination of Qadaffi, or her planned coup in Honduras, or the CIA led fascist coup in Ukraine began to be noticed. Many people who voted for Trump did so not because they like Trump, but because they fucking hated the privileged white bourgeoisie that was constantly scolding them and ridiculing them. In a sense this mirrored the Brexit vote. And it is worth noting Bill Clinton’s recent remarks about Jeremy Corbyn (“a person off the streets” “maddest person in the room.”).

It's been a given for a couple decades among us deplorables that the sort of white, hipster, latte-sipping, I-only-use-minority-shaded-emoticons liberals were nothing more than a bunch of self-righteous hypocrites. Nice to see other people are finally catching on.

John Michael Greer's post-election essay zeroes in on the new habit in America of focusing exclusively on a candidate's personality while rarely if ever considering just what sort of policies a candidate at least claims to support:

It seems to me that something has been forgotten here.  We didn’t have an election to choose a plaster saint, a new character on My Little Pony, or Miss (or Mister) Goody Two-Shoes 2016. We had an election to choose the official who will head the executive branch of our federal government for the next four years. I’ve read essays by people who know Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump personally, and claim that both of them are actually very pleasant people. You know what? I literally couldn’t care less. I would be just as likely to vote for a surly misanthrope who loathes children, kicks puppies, and has deviant sexual cravings involving household appliances and mayonnaise, if that person supports the policies I want on the issues that matter to me. It really is that simple.

Exactly. I'm not sure when being nice became a prerequisite for the Oval Office. I'd much rather have a president who would walk down the steps of Air Force One and would instead of bowing to some foreign asshat like Kim Jong-un, haul off and kick him in the balls (diplomatically, of course). I'm certain I am not the only person who is sick of watching our president get pushed around by tin pot despots.

My personal view is that it really doesn't matter who is sitting in the White House as the US economy is already heading down the drain. All Trump has won is the privilege of taking the blame for whatever happens between now and sometime in early 2017. Frankly, I'm astonished that the economy hasn't already blown itself apart. I fully expected a big crunch sometime in the August-through-October time frame. It look like it will hold off until early next year. We'll see. One thing the bastards in Washington have perfected is keeping all the economic plates spinning.

Well, I should probably try to get a bit of outside work done while the sun is shining.

[Edited to add a nice bit from HuffPo:

In the face of Trump’s willingness to boldly proclaim without facts or evidence that he would bring the good times back, we offered a tepid gallows logic. Well, those jobs are actually gone for good, we knowingly told them. And we offered a fantastical non-solution. We will retrain you for good jobs! Never mind that these “good jobs” didn’t exist in East Kentucky or Cleveland. And as a final insult, we lectured a struggling people watching their kids die of drug overdoses about their white privilege. Can you blame them for calling bullshit?

Off course, HuffPo being HuffPo, they do work in a few redneck jokes.

Obviously not outside working yet. I'll get there at some point.]