President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Any other election I would have not only watched the returns but spent days and weeks poring over the data. You can guess why I’m not doing that deep dive this time around.

That said, the fact she drove turnout up there actually gives me a little hope, along with the number of down ballot Democrats who outran her numbers. Were there similar numbers in other battleground states?

 

I'll be the first to admit that I have this luxury, as a 48-year-old firmly middle class white man, but I'm just not going to let this guy dictate my moods and blood pressure for the next four years. I extend empathy to those who do not have the same luxury, and I completely understand the real fear of what his administration is capable of. But this motherfucking cocksucker is not going to yuck my yum. No more.

 

I thought it came from "fundamentalist Christian theocracy."

 

So we got four more years of this bullshit, huh?

Time to plan.

As Tip O’Neill said, all politics is local. Time to start there.

Fucking Kansas and Kentucky have Democratic governors. Hope is not lost.

Planning includes helping our friends and family who will get fucked over. Safe havens for abortions. Funding women’s “camping trips” to Canada or “vacations” to Ireland. Let’s do it.

Let’s be cognizant of those who will suffer. There always will be “losers” at the game of life, folks at the bottom of the pecking order. Be kind to them, even if the law isn’t.

And for fuck’s sake, try and do some thinking. What subtle behaviors do we all have that lead those who voted pro-MAGA to think this is OK? Because surely they exist. You don’t develop such extreme ideology without feeling it is safe to do so.

A random aside: I’ve discovered an ex is on the MAGA train. Not the most educated person in the world, but she does have a BS in nursing. I’m guessing her blue-collar construction worker boyfriend sank his political fangs into her. She started showing signs of MAGAdom during COVID, but I shrugged it off as her naïveté. She doesn’t want to argue her positions, which tells me she doesn’t believe strongly in them and is along for the ride. So glad she’s not the one I proposed to. And in typical MAGA fashion, everything is always someone else’s fault.

 

Add a few years, and I am in lockstep with my man Cosmo.

And to partly answer wicked's question, I haven't given it great thought, but I think years of liberals telling conservatives, "Sit down; you're stupid; let the grown-ups talk," probably has come back to bite us a bit.

And you KNOW that's how liberals sounded. I mean, this is an 8,815-page example. And I say this fully knowing that I have been guilty of this my own self.

 

If you want to have a real conversation - which, I dunno if you do, given that you're just taking words and riffing on them - then I think you'd know I'm talking about a larger cultural thing than the last three months of the campaign.

I'm talking about 10 years of what the left has become, and how ungainly the fit of that left is with the quickly aging Democrats of Biden and Clinton, and how, even if Obama is down for what the left's become, how different it is from who he was as president.

We're coming up on five years since Thunberg's speech at the UN, which of course was aptly timed and orchestrated to be heading into the Democratic primary season and the 2020 election season. The "How Dare You!" was pure theater, using a kid to do it, attached to very few to no policy goals. It was a scolding from the heart of this "humankind is evil" worldview and with Trump winning again, I'll be curious to see if the doom cult mindset returns.

Now, it's possible you think I'm full of it, or just wrong, and that's fine.

 

Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeit I saw my unused "I voted" sticker in my cup holder today and tossed it in the trash. Not even close to a memory I want lingering around.

 

Seems to be down. Then again, it's only one kind of "crime."

 

I think you're obsessed by somebody the vast majority of Americans couldn't pick out of a lineup - "the left" included.

Weird flex to be saying "the left" has a doom cult mindset when Trump hisowndamnself campaigned with and verbalized a doom cult mindset. Who are the optimists? The people who say "we can do better" or the people who say the USA is "going to hell" and "like a garbage can for the world?"

 

And years of conservatives calling liberals commie baby-killers?

 

We were supposed to be smarter than them, and by extension, perhaps not so easily triggered?

Look, I can only speak for myself. I get in trouble when I speak for others. But I know I have sounded like a Missouri professor at times. Maybe owning it is a positive step.