Oh well, what the hell

I've always liked this classic Ron Cobb cartoon, which dates back to the Sixties.

I don't suppose you could do a modern version, since it would be hard to indicate that he was holding a smashed phone, trying to get a signal, looking for a place to recharge it, and still show the stunned look on his face.

And I'm fighting off a temptation to simply put the cartoon up there and say nothing, because that would be phony and pretentious: I'm actually not quite that stunned this morning after all, though I think Nate Silver and some other people have an awful lot of 'splaining to do.

Nor are those "other people" confined to pollsters, and I wish this turn of events would force some higher-ups to cast their eyes beyond the Beltway and their own bellybuttons.

Had Saul Steinberg drawn his iconic New Yorker cover of DC rather than the Big Apple, the self-involved myopia would still apply but it would not be nearly so endearing.

Last night, I heard someone say that a lot of people in this nation hate being referred to as living in "flyover country." Perhaps it was Sherlock Holmes.

The combination of "If it happens in NYC or LA, it gets 10 times the coverage," plus the nauseating chumminess of which the Annual White House Concubines Dinner is only the tip of the iceberg was, indeed, a factor in the backlash.

And somewhere I'm sure there is a record of my having said, back in the Bernie days, that it made no sense for the Democrats, if they were going to shove a candidate down our throats, to choose someone who was already so widely disliked.

Yes, most of the things she was accused of were phony and had been drummed up by the vast rightwing conspiracy that absolutely did exist.

But here's how out of touch the Powers That Be have been: The insiders who know her best were aware of what a good person she really, truly is and either it never occurred to them, or it didn't matter to them, that millions of people outside the Beltway did not share that knowledge, much less that belief.

"Oh well, what the hell," as McWatt said.

I've seen several cartoons in which the gag is that this campaign is over and they're already putting up campaign signs for 2020. I understand that it's a joke about the length of our presidential races and I get it and if it's not a fresh commentary it's at least a relevant one.

But it's time to focus on 2018, because Trump with a compliant Congress is the immediate problem.

Bernie's revolution initially involved gaining the White House himself, but was more widely based on the idea that Hillary Clinton would do no harm while a Stage Two campaign would secure the legislative branch. I think he overestimated the length of focus of his Children's Crusade, but the theory was good.

And if we find Congress stripping away people's health care and acting to restrict women's right to choose, there could conceivably be a movement from the left to mirror the Tea Party movement that arose in the wake of Obama's election and ensured that he would lose his Congressional majority with the next off-year elections.

Which, if Ruth Bader Ginsburg's health holds out for the next two years, could keep the Supreme Court in play as a check on the other two branches.

Whoever President Trump puts in Scalia's seat will simply return us to the situation we had when Scalia was alive. It's the next vacancy that could tilt the scale and potentially allow a long-term shift in the character of the nation.

Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see how the Executive and Legislative branches interact, even with a GOP majority.

The notion of Rudolph Giuliani as Attorney General ought to scare Congress as much as it scares anyone else who has seen Rudy foam lately, and there may be some arm-twisting and log-rolling behind the scenes as Trump sets up his Cabinet and begins to consider his major policy targets.

In fact, it makes me think a little of the apparent situation in the Philippines, where the head of state makes insane, bloviating comments and then the rest of the government quietly says, "There, there, he didn't really mean it." 

I don't know how long you can play that game before somebody with an army gets pissed, but I hope it's at least four years.

So let's find a place to plug in our smashed TV set and find out what's on next.

 

 

Comments

[sean martin]

I dont even know how to comment cartoon-wise on this appalling disaster. What started out as a joke campaign — he even said as such — turned into a genuine, 100% made-in-America fiasco in which all those flyover folks gleefully accepted the swill he and the rest of the GOP was throwing out there. No matter how outrageous, no matter how much a distortion, they believed it and accepted it as Gospel, and the video is out there to prove it.

Sorry, bud, but your country is headed over a cliff, nukes and all. The ACA will be abolished, with nothing to take its place. Same sex marriage will be overturned by the very court that allowed for it. The EPA, the NEA, and other "entitlement" agencies will be gutted down to a single office with a nameplate on the door and no one inside.

So the people didnt like being thought of as flyovers? If that was their reason for voting for this monstosity, then indeed your country will now get the governance it so richly, richly deserves. The GOP led them by the nose with all kinds of mindless fears about terrorists and God only knows what all else... and they freaking believed every single word of it. Let's see how these people feel in a couple of years when they suddenly realize that, like most of his vendors and employees, Trump is selling them a bill of goods he has no intention of delivering.

[parnellnelson]

I'm afraid that the country is in for a hard four year lesson in "Be careful what you wish for..."
And I think one of the underlying (no pun intended) factors in the lack of Hillary Enthusiasm was that, having just gone through 8 years of "America's First Black President" and all the attendant political drama, many people felt too fatigued to go through at least 4 years of "America's First Woman President" and the even greater drama that would have come with that.
And the Mighty Ship of State sails on...?

[Bookworm]

Heard on the news this morning that the Canadian immigration website was down. Guess I'll stick it out and see what happens. I keep remembering that he was a Democrat for a long time and hope some of it rubbed off. But I don't have a good feeling about it. I'll be reading more fiction for the next few years.