Frank Rich, who you may recall has always said this was going to be close, with a candid look at the future and how uncertain it is.........
“There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America,” said Barack Obama a dozen summers ago. “There’s the United States of America.” RIP, the sweet audacity of hope.
We’ve lost a lot of illusions during the resistible rise of Donald Trump. An entire political culture has been leveled; it’ll be a long time before we hear about the virtues of a “ground game” or the nerdy brilliance of data-driven poll analysts without laughing (or crying). The “values voter” is dead, and so is the quaint conviction that newspaper and magazine editorials might somehow save the world. But some of these illusions were due for demolition anyway. What makes this election soul-sickening is how it has crushed our most romantic ideals about America itself.
One of the very few left leaning pundits who said loudly and plainly Trump is going to win was Michael Moore - it was on the Bill Maher show and it was in the middle of July....two minutes....
My opinion is the reason he was so confident is that he is one of the only media figures who has deep working man roots, and he's definitely not one of the elite.....
Written at 3am this morning by David Remnick in the New Yorker, an essay of pain....
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.
Looking at the TV last night with the cities in blue, and most of just about every state's counties in red, I thought of this story that says the real schism in this country is the cities vs rural America......it's excellent....
There's this universal shorthand that epic adventure movies use to tell the good guys from the bad. The good guys are simple folk from the countryside ...
Lionsgate Films
... while the bad guys are decadent assholes who live in the city and wear stupid clothes:
Lionsgate Films
In Star Wars, Luke is a farm boy ...
LucasFilm
... while the bad guys live in a shiny space station:
Thomas Frank, author of "Listen Liberal" also called this result because the Democratic elite chose Hillary, then beat Bernie [thanks Debbie Wasserman Schultz] and discouraged Joe Biden.....
Want to know what went wrong? Read this....
There was Joe Biden, with his plain-spoken style, and there was Bernie Sanders, an inspiring and largely scandal-free figure. Each of them would probably have beaten Trump, but neither would have served the interests of the party insiders.
Amonth ago I tried to write a column proposing mean nicknames for president-elect Donald Trump, on the basis that it would be funny to turn the tables on him for the cruel diminutives he applied to others.
I couldn’t pull it off. There is a darkness about Trump that negates that sort of humor: a folly so bewildering, an incompetence so profound that no insult could plumb its depths.
He has run one of the lousiest presidential campaigns ever. In saying so I am not referring to his much-criticized business practices or his vulgar remarks about women. I mean this in a purely technical sense: this man fractured his own party. His convention was a fiasco. He had no ground game to speak of. The list of celebrities and pundits and surrogates taking his side on the campaign trail was extremely short. He needlessly offended countless groups of people: women, Hispanics, Muslims, disabled people, mothers of crying babies, the Bush family, and George Will-style conservatives, among others. He even lost Glenn Beck, for pete’s sake.
And now he is going to be president of the United States. The woman we were constantly assured was the best-qualified candidate of all time has lost to the least qualified candidate of all time.
And now might be a good time to watch Trumpland, Michael Moore's newest movie, with the benefit of hindsight. If every Trump voter had seen it, our election might have had a different result.....we saw it at the Enzian, and it was excellent....
It's on Amazon for $4.99....
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MPYBZTG/?ref=dvm_us_tvod_sl_Q4tst_44_ec_trumpland
Sorry, no jokes today.....
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