On The 2016 Election: F*ck Me Gently With A Chainsaw
[Editor’s note: This is pretty much going to be a stream of conscious that is very NSFW because I don’t have the patience nor the fucks to give to edit it.]
Now that my overwhelming feelings of dread, disgust, and anger have gone down to DEFCON 3, I want to talk about the 2016 presidential election and outcome.
There is a lot of blame, yes, I mean blame, for Donald Trump being elected president. Donald Trump stands for the opposite of everything I was raised to be. From my LDS faith upbringing to my parents’ house where equality, justice, and taking care of those who need it the most were drilled into me every waking moment to studying ethics, especially rights, the Social Contract, and John Rawl’s “A Theory of Justice,” Donald Trump is the opposite of all of it. He is a narcissistic, racist, bigoted, sexist, petty little man who has never done anything for anyone other than himself. These descriptions are not opinions, they are hard, cold facts that he parades around like badges of honor. My hatred of this man is not because he is a Republican. I wasn’t a big fan of John McCain or Mitt Romney or even George W. Bush but I didn’t despise them as human beings. I despise Trump with the intensity of a thousand suns and always have long before he ran for president. The things he has said and done while running only intensified my hatred. He used the bully pulpit of a presidential campaign to whip up fear and anger towards many of our most vulnerable citizens. He did so because he knew he could. He knew racism, sexism, bigotry was easy to sell to a crowd of white Americans who have been force fed a constant diet of it for years from talk radio, FOX News, alt-right websites, and email chains. He preyed on the weak minded. This doesn’t take talent. This doesn’t take skill. All it takes to do this is an unethical fuck like Trump. He has normalized hatred, racism, and bigotry and, for this alone, I will always hate him.
Of course, Trump didn’t do all of this on his own. He had lots and lots of help. Right off the bat, I want to say, “Fuck uneducated white people!” They’ve been the bane of my existence every since I was a youth. They fucked up my childhood and now they’ve done just about everything they can to fuck up my country. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say this. And, don’t give me, “We lived through Obama, you can live through Trump,” bullshit. Obama saved their sorry ignorant asses from what easily could have been another Great Depression and has overseen the most successful economic recovery of any major industrial country. EVERY single economic indicator has been improved and then some under his leadership. So, if you come to me with any of your “economic anxiety” bullshit, I will bury you in a deep grave of facts, walk away and forget about you, forever. People who are so gullible they’ll take the advice and support a reality star shill and do so because he strokes their racist/bigoted fears can fuck off. Don’t tell me, “you have to understand where they are coming from.” No, I don’t. I don’t give a rat’s ass why someone is a racist. Understanding their racism isn’t going to make me feel better about it or them. In most cases, it is only going to make me more upset at their ignorant ass. If you want to be a racist, knock yourself out, but don’t walk your ignorance around out in public like it’s a prized Terrier. It isn’t. It is a rabid mutt that should be taken out back and Old Yellered. I, for one, have learned the lesson of how and why Reconstruction after the Civil War failed. In a nutshell, the lesson is-”You don’t give racist fucks any leeway when it comes to their beliefs. You don’t give them outs like “Southern Heritage” or “save face” or “honorable cause.” You eradicate their ideology whenever and wherever you can because the second you don’t, you get Jim Crow.” There is nothing anyone can say to me that can rationalize being on the same side of political support as the KKK, the alt-right, white nationalists, white supremacists… If they are on board, I’m jumping ship.
Don’t say to me, “Now you know how it felt for some of us when Barack Obama was elected in 2008 and 2012.” Really? You want to try and false equivalence this? Your fear of Barack Obama was based entirely on either your racism and/or contrived bullshit from the fevered swamps of Dumfuckistan. You cannot point to a single thing he said as either a nominee or president that is on par with the bigoted, racist, misogynist, xenophobic garbage Trump has said. NOT-ONE-FUCKING-THING! Your fear was and always has been based on complete bullshit. Mine and those feeling the same way right now are based on the actual fucking words of Donald Trump, his surrogates, and his supporters. All you have to do is go back a week where a pro-Trump person tried to heckle President Obama and see how he respectfully talked to and about the protester. Compare and contrast this with not only how Donald Trump blatantly lied about what happened, but watch how he talked about and treated protesters at his events. He encouraged violence against them.
Don’t tell me, “Some Trump supporters are really good people and they should be treated accordingly.” Maybe. The problem is I can’t determine who of Trump’s supporters are “really good people” and which ones are deplorable because they have largely acted and voted the same ways. It’s like going to a Klan meeting where no one is wearing a hood. How am I supposed to know which there really believe the racist ideology and which ones are there for some other reasons? I can’t. Yeah, Jethro is screaming and pumping his fist in the air at the racist things being said by the speaker but Otis is sitting there quietly nodding his head in agreement. Am I suppose to think Otis is any less a racist? When the meeting is over and the speaker asks the congregation for donations to support their cause, am I supposed to think the people who put money in a Confederate Flag wrapped hat to be “good people”? Not sure I can. Not sure there are any reasons why I should. If you donated to Trump’s campaign, if you canvassed for him, if you voted for him, you supported him and what he stands for. You can’t do these things and wash your hands of what he stands for, what he has said, what he has done. 91% of evangelicals in Georgia voted for Trump. Blessed are the pussy grabbers for theirs is the Oval Office. Jesus wept.
I’d be all in favor of understanding ignorant white Americans if they showed an inkling of self-awareness that they are ignorant and a scintilla of desire to not be. Unfortunately, the God’s honest truth is they don’t on either count. They pride themselves on being ignorant. If they can piss off a liberal by maintaining their ignorance, they see this as a win. Climate change? Who the fuck cares about what a bunch of egghead scientists thinks who are paid shills for George Soros, a cabal of Jews, and tree hugging hippies? It doesn’t matter that they can’t get water for their crops because of a long-term drought with no end in sight or their farms have been flooded over and over again due to once-in-a-century storms happening every other year. They’ll be damned if liberals are right. They’ll die in a hurricane that is the result of the over warming of the oceans and as the light of their last thought flickers across their only two working synapses, they’ll believe the storm was the result of two men getting married to each other in Montana. The reason Ron White’s joke, “You can’t fix stupid” is funny is because it is steeped in truth. I have neither the desire or the inclination to spend an ounce of my energy or time trying to fix what cannot be fixed. You might see this as a moral failing on my part. I see it as being pragmatic and realistic about the situation. Unfortunately, there are far too many stupid people and their stupid choices have a direct impact on people who are not stupid and on those who are but are working on not being so.
Next on my list of people I don’t give a fuck about are Republicans who sat idly by and let this man take over their party. There are fewer balls in the Republican establishment than there were in the eunuchs of the Forbidden City. Outside of a very small handful of national Republicans, they all gargled Trump’s balls to one degree or another. Some tried to only gargle one ball by saying, “I will vote for him but not support him.” What-the-ever-loving-fuck do you think voting for someone is if not showing support? You might think you are only gargling one ball with this pathetic linguistic nonsense but if you move your tongue just a tick to the right, you’ll see both are firmly in your mouth. The Republican Establishment were more than willing to gargle Trump’s balls because they fear the monster they created. They fear the rabid, racist, bigoted, ignorant masses at their doorstep who will primary their ass if they don’t get the political red meat they’ve become accustomed to getting from their creators. I’m old enough to remember when an elderly lady told John McCain she was worried about then candidate Obama being someone who hates and wants to destroy America and candidate McCain said, “No he’s not. He’s a good man who I just have some disagreements with.” This basic, common decency seems like ages ago with Trump supporters calling Hillary a “bitch” and a “cunt” and how she should be thrown in jail or shot for treason with absolutely no correction or push back from the candidate. Not only was their no push back, he and his surrogates egged it on. And where was the Republican Establishment? I’d imagine it is difficult to talk with an orange, shriveled nutsack in your mouth.
Two weeks before the election, Hillary was peaking and most of the polls had her winning the electoral college, handily. The Trump campaign was hoping for a miracle. You ask for miracles, I give you the F…B…I…
If you don’t think the FBI’s vague letter about “possible emails” didn’t alter this election, you are wrong. How much did it impact the outcome? Hard to know exactly but when you are dealing with razor thin margins of victories in key swing states, any impact would have been bad. It doesn’t matter if two days before the election the FBI comes out with a “Nothing to see here. Move along.” letter. The damage was done. A completely contrived, bullshit issue that had been laid to rest was now the top story and all the bullshit analysis and hot takes and accusations were Lazurused from the tomb they’d been buried in months before. The entire thing from the FBI was mishandled. The first time they mishandled not the investigation but his pronouncement of the outcome. James Comey went way off script and defied all norms, history, protocol…when he editorialized after saying no criminal charges would be sought. His fifteen-minute diatribe after was completely against what he should have done. His vague letter to Congress in late October was complete and utter ratfuckery. He could have easily gotten a warrant, looked at the emails, and made a determination without making it public. If there was nothing, as it turned out to be the case, then things would have progressed naturally. Instead, he threw a gigantic wrench into the works and to say he had to or he didn’t know the blow back is sheer idiocy. If you think the FBI isn’t political, I suggest you do a quick Google search. Start with J. Edgar Hoover. When a branch of government that is supposed to be a guardian of justice screws with the democratic process, this is the very definition of ratfuckery. I’m not laying the blame for Trump’s victory on James Comey but I’m sure as hell saying he was a willing accomplice.
Another group that deserves a lot of blame for Trump’s election is the media. I’m not throwing all the media under this bus because there has been some fantastic investigative journalism done by a small handful of people. Some from the right, like Ana Navarro, stood up and called out Trump for what he is. Sadly, these few people were drowned out by a horde of their colleagues who gave Trump the thing he craves the most-attention. I constantly heard reporters complain that the candidates never talked about policy, but time and time again Hillary would be giving an in-depth policy speech at an event and the networks would leave it to show a Trump rally where he was spouting the same, tired old, fear-mongering crap. If you look at the number of stories done on Hillary’s emails, a non-issue, it outnumbers all the other stories…COMBINED and it isn’t even close. I watched the media give no serious pushback to the Bush administration when it was trying to sell the public on invading Iraq on what turned out to be intentional lies. I watched the media do a bunch of navel gazing afterward and go through a “self-analysis” stage where the outcome was they were sorry and promised to never drop the ball again. They dropped it again and did it over and over and over and over… The main reason they dropped the ball is because news departments/channels in America are not about journalism. Yes, some journalism does happen in them but journalism isn’t the goal. The goal is profits. News departments are really nothing more than entertainment departments marketed as news. Trump and his surrogates dominated the news because he/they were entertaining and this means viewers and this means ad revenue and this means profits. CNN hired a Trump surrogate as on-air talent even though he was still getting paid by the Trump campaign, flying on Trump’s plane, going to Trump events. Conflict-of-fucking-interest? Anyone? It didn’t matter. CNN made hundreds of millions more this year than previous years because Trump, his antics, his fear-mongering…sells and that is what really matters. Leslie Moonvies, the CEO of CBS said, during the primaries about Donald Trump’s candidacy, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.“ They have no interest in journalism because journalism doesn’t sell. Entertainment, the dog and pony show, now that sells. You could try to get your information somewhere else, like online but that was inundated with more propaganda than a Tinder profile. Many a writer made a killing this election pushing click bait story after click bait story. H.A. Goodman made a name for himself churning out pro-Bernie/anti-Hillary garbage after shilling for Rand Paul. He and dozens like him peddled in fact-free, emotionally charged clickbait. They were rewarded not only by the ignorati but by self-identifying “smart people” who would click the link to be outraged and argue. When you are getting paid by the click/view, it doesn’t matter why. All that matters is they click/view the story. Advertisers on CNN don’t give a fuck why you are watching CNN, all they care about is you are watching. A functioning democracy depends on a working free press. When your goal is profits, it isn’t free. When clicks and views are the top priority, journalism is pushed down the list and we all suffer because of it. The ignorati didn’t become ignorant on their own. They’ve had a lot of help from the organizations that are supposed to truly inform and educate them.
Bernie Sanders can fuck off as well. I’ve gone on record as saying I like Bernie as a Senator. My opinion on this hasn’t changed, but when it comes to this election cycle, Bernie can fuck right off. Not because he was Hillary’s primary opponent or they went toe-to-toe. So too did Barack Obama in 2008. Bernie can fuck off because he gave credence to the election being rigged. Donald Trump did the very same thing and everybody with any sense of history, politics, democracy was outraged because talking about a rigged election, especially at the presidential level undermines people’s faith in the process, in democracy. If people don’t have faith in the system, then democracy cannot work. It is that simple. Bernie played up the rigged election, rigged system trope over and over and over again to where it has become gospel to many of his supporters. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a Sandernista who firmly believes Hillary and the DNC “stole” the primary from Bernie. This zombie lie (a lie that no matter how many times it is killed with facts keeps coming back to life) was eagerly spread by Bernie and in so doing, it has already had and will have negative repercussions on our democracy. I know he told all his supporters to vote for Hillary and campaigned a lot for her. For this, I am grateful. But, the damage he did with his rigged election/system talk cannot go with rebuke because it was used by Trump to delegitimize Hillary and it created a legion of voters who don’t trust the only system there is to protect and help them.
All third-party voters can fuck off as well. I watched Al Gore lose Florida (since I’m here, FUCK FLORIDA!) in 2000 in part because of Ralph Nader voters who felt they had to vote their conscience and in so doing gave us Dick Torture-Is-Okay Cheney and Augustus C-Minus and thousands dead in New Orleans, 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, the financial crisis, and the worst private jobs growth since the Great Depression. When third-partiers start spouting their purity, self-indulgent bullshit-to paraphrase Verbal Kint in “The Usual Suspects.” “Oh gee, thanks emoprogs, bang-up job so far. Thousands dead, millions of jobs lost; you’ll pardon me if I ask you to kiss my pucker.” As in 2000, the purity trolls put an unqualified person in the White House whose stated policies make George W. Bush look like Winston Churchill. I’m sorry your mommy didn’t love you enough or your daddy didn’t come to your clarinet recitals. Really, I truly am. But your self-indulgence has helped put someone in office who, with a Republican Congress will hurt everything you claim to hold most dear. Held a drum circle in a show of solidarity for the Native Americans in North Dakota? That pipeline is now going to be greenlit so fast it will knock off the dreamcatcher you bought from that nice Navaho lady outside Winslow on your way to Lake Havasu for Spring Break. It will be built and Trump will get a licensing deal where every single pipe in the line will have a not-so subtle racist logo that will make the Cleveland Indians’ look like Marie Barbera sculpture (look her up.) Your precious climate? Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump are going to do to your climate what the hillbillies in Deliverance did to Ned Beatty. Here’s a pro tip: If you are upset government isn’t doing what you want it to do for you, DON’T VOTE IN A SUCH A WAY THE PEOPLE WHO WILL RUN OVER YOUR PRECIOUS WANTS, BACK UP, RUN OVER THEM AGAIN, AND THEN GET OUT AND BEAT THEM WITH A TIRE IRON WHILE LAUGHING HYSTERICALLY THE WHOLE TIME! If you don’t understand this, then you are no better than the ignorati of Dumbfuckistan and I have no time for you. You can linguistically and logically contort your arguments as Circe du Solie as you want but the bottom line is, your “protest vote” ends up being nothing more than pissing in the wind except instead of you getting pissed on, it ends up being minorities, women, children with special needs, people in need of health insurance, your LGBT friends you claim to be an ally of… There are times and places for “protest votes.” A presidential election right now with the way the Republican Party has defined itself is NEVER…FUCKING…EVER…that time.
Third-party emoprogs are not the only progressives who can fuck off. So too can every single one of them who bought into, passed along, spread, and believed any of the anti-Hillary crap. Hey, maybe there is a lot of crap spread about her because she is viewed as a threat to the patriarchy? Every think of that in your “here be unicorns” pea brain? I know you’ve been politically active all of the lifespan and reliability of a Samsung 7, but maybe….just maybe it would be a good idea to stop being so irrationally self-assured and listen to those of us who weren’t in diapers or listening to “It Smells Like Teen Spirit” at recess in middle school and actually lived through the Clinton administration and witnessed firsthand the propaganda and ratfuckery. Is Hillary the perfect candidate? No, but no one ever has been or ever will be. Get used to being disappointed you petulant nits. Stop being so damn arrogant that you are unwilling to listen to people who know what the fuck is going on and why. Because, when you don’t and you try and prove you can handle the voting booth without a booster chair, you give us horrible people like George W. Bush and now Donald Fucking Trump. If you want to know the main reason government doesn’t work, it’s because you don’t vote for candidates who have an actual chance to win and let dumb fuckers slip in the back door. Some of you are so fucking stupid you believe that if things get bad enough, people will vote for your unicorn. No, they won’t. If/when Trump fails and fails miserably, Republicans will roll out a less horrible version of him and vote for him en masse. Your “strategy” is more directed to running against your fellow progressives than it is against the real enemy-conservatives. Until you figure out where the real threat to all the things you hold dear is coming from and act accordingly, change is not only going to not happen, the work necessary to make it happen will only increase because progressive victories of the past are going to have to be fought again. Why? Because you fuckers thought it would be a good idea to throw a hissy fit in the 2010 midterms. Thanks to your brilliant plan, Republicans who should have been pushed into the dustbin of history after the Bush administration, came back with a vengeance. They took back the House and a lot of state legislatures and governorships. With this new found power, they rolled back women’s rights and voting rights at record levels. If you don’t think shorter early voting, very long lines, and fewer polling stations in predominately Democratic areas doesn’t play a role in Republicans retaining power, you really are more stupid than I imagined.
To let you know how fucking stupid progressives can be, look no further than the Brer Rabbit the right has played on them. Conservatives have actively, vocally been against the government for decades. They stump on undoing government. When in power they fuck up government every chance and in every way they can. In response, many progressives say, “If the government isn’t going to work for me, I’m going to stay home.” Conservatives response is, “Oh, no! Whatever you do, don’t stay home! Don’t let us keep fucking up government!” And, damn, if progressives don’t do just that. Then, when government fails them once again, the cycle repeats itself. Do you want to know why the government isn’t functioning properly? It isn’t because Democrats have abandoned you. It isn’t because Bernie Sanders wasn’t the nominee. It isn’t because of the DNC. The reason government isn’t functioning properly is because conservatives NEVER PAY A FUCKING PRICE FOR THEIR ANTI-GOVERNMENT BEHAVIORS! Not by the media. Not by progressives. And, certainly not by their own base. Conservatives shut down the government in a massive hissy fit over not being able to take away health insurance from millions and their punishment? Progressives stayed home and let them take the Senate. Conservatives unprecedently hold up a Supreme Court nominee, select as their presidential candidate someone who stands against every single thing you hold dear and their punishment? They now control all three branches of government. They’ll get to put a strict conservative on the Supreme Court. They’ll be able to pass whatever fuckery they want, unopposed. Instead of making them pay a price for their behavior, too many progressives are trying to make other progressives pay for some perceived slight or another. FUCKING-STUPID-TO-THE-Nth-DEGREE! The only reason progressives don’t win elections is because of progressives. We have met the enemy and they is us.
This is why I have decided to go off the grid for awhile. For how long? I have no idea. It could be a week, a month, a year… I’m just not sure. I’m exhausted from fighting stupidity. It would be one thing if I was fighting it on one front, where I could get a reprieve every once in awhile from my allies. But, I’m having to fight on two fronts. One front comprised largely of uneducated, bigoted, racist, misogynistic, anti-science conservatives. The other front comprised of idealistic, childish, petulant progressives. The combination of battling these two fronts of idiots has drained me. The election of the personification of everything I despise has drained me. I don’t have the energy to listen to, argue against, deal with the dumbfuckery going on right now from these two groups. I need to step back and recharge. I need to reevaluate what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and what is the purpose. Right now, I don’t have good answers to any of these.
Finally, I’ve heard a lot of people say, “It won’t be that bad. We’ve lived through hard times in America and we’ll get through this.” This is a wonderfully rosy, privileged position to take. I heard this very argument made by two older white women in my office the other day. In my head, I thought, “Of course you are going to be okay. Your husbands have great paying jobs. You live in an upscale neighborhood. You are white.” As an older white male, I’m way down the list of those who might suffer. I don’t think any of my rights will be at risk. I am worried about more tangible things like paying my bills and having health insurance. The last Republican administration didn’t do me any favors. I lost my income, my job, my house, my marriage…all from the mortgage/financial crisis and the aftermath. I had to go without health insurance because during this time my rates went up on average over 15% every single year to where it was more expensive than my mortgage. Thanks to the policies and actions of the current administration, the sector that my income hinges on, real estate, has rebounded nicely, I’ve dug myself out of a serious hole, and I have health insurance for me and my children for the first time in years. All of this is at risk if Donald Trump does what he says he wants to do and with a Republican Congress that is on board with it. However, will all of this being said, my biggest concern is not for me. It is for all the people who have been treated like second-class citizens by Donald Trump and his supporters. Unlike conservatives who were worried about what a President Obama would mean for their lives, I’m worried about what a President Trump means for others. I’m worried for the LGBT community. I’m worried about the Dreamers. I’m worried about Muslim-Americans. I’m worried about Hispanics, African-Americans, Native Americans, women, the disabled, those with special needs… I’m worried about them because for my entire adult life Republicans haven’t given a fuck about them and because the leader of their party and next president has given credibility to hating, mistreating, even violence against these groups. As upset as I am about Trump, the media, conservatives normalizing lying, it pales in comparison to how I feel about they all view non-white Americans and women. It goes against every fiber of my being. It goes against everything I learned in church. It goes against everything I learned in ethics classes. It goes against everything I learned in civics classes. Don’t ask me to “play nice,” or “understand” people who don’t see it my way. Don’t ask me to be okay with the alt-right, neo-nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, racists, misogynists, sexists, bigots, and racists. If you do, expect my response to be, “Get the fuck out of here!” each and every time.
As I’ve watched this reality tv drama play out, I keep being reminded of the lyrics from Roger Water’s “Amused to Death.”
Amused itself to death
We watched the tragedy unfold
We did as we were told
We bought and sold
It was the greatest show on earth
But then it was over
We ohhed and aahed
We drove our racing cars
We ate our last few jars of caviar
And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen-eyed look-out
Spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah
And when they found our shadows
Grouped around the TV sets
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data on their lists
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death
No tears to cry no feelings left
This species has amused itself to death
I, for one, am not amused by the show, the drama, the racism, the lying, the stupidity… Unfortunately, too many of my fellow white Americans are and they voted for someone who personifies all these deplorable traits. I want to say, “We are better than this,” but it would be a lie. We aren’t. When it comes to white America, to quote Denny Green, “They are what we thought they were,” and that is deeply bigoted, racist, and uneducated.











