My inclination right now is to tell Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon (eg) - and everybody else who sat on their asses complaining about Hillary instead of chopping the wood and carrying the water - my first inclination is tell y'all to fuck off.
Show the fuck up or shut the fuck up.
I'm nowhere near as calm or as gracious as either Hillary (or Kate pretending to be Hillary).
It may be a while before I'm at all pleasant to be around. And I'm not begging your indulgence here. I'm not asking anybody for anything - not your patience, not your understanding, nothin'. Ya pays your money and ya takes your chances.
I'll try to suck it up; rub some dirt on it; walk it off and get back in there. Just know that if you say anything that sounds like "Told-Ya-So" or the fantasy bullshit about Bernie and unicorns and rainbows and free puppies, I'm likely to tell you to take a flying fuck at a rollin' donut.
Large percentages of American voters believe in angels and talking snakes. They think Creationism isn't much different from Evolution. Half or more of the US population can't name the 3 branches of government. 40% can't identify North America on a map. And about a third don't know that the Earth orbits the sun.
They were convinced Hillary would abolish the 2nd amendment, outlaw Christianity and convert the US to Sharia law by importing millions of Muslims from Syria to slaughter her Christian enemies. And just because she could, she'd go ahead and suspend the rest of the Constitution because Presidents don't really need that shit anyway. (I'm not making any of that up, btw - that's all from actual conversations with actual rubes over the last several months - and there's plenty more where that came from)
I think I finally get what driftglass has been saying for quite a while.
Get over the idea that a well-reasoned argument will bring the "conservatives" over to your side. You can tell 'em your Democrat or that other Democrat or this Socialist or that Independent thinks just like they do, and that if they could just listen for a minute, maybe we could make some common cause and blah blah fucking blah.
"Conservatives" have become Informationally Isolated. Guess what happens when part of a species is totally isolated from the rest of that species?
In a small simplistic nutshell, here's what it comes down to, Lefties: - You Are The Liberal Elite as far as the rubes are concerned. You can make as much noise as you want. You can stomp and stumble and trash the jungle, but there it is - they believe you're no different from Hillary, so You.Are.The.Liberal.Elite.
You wanna tell everybody what they can eat and what kinda exercise they hafta do and what cars they can drive and what light bulbs they're allowed to own and on and on and on.
It doesn't matter that you're not trying to dictate anything to them - it doesn't matter that all you wanna do is convince them to give it a shot and see for themselves...what did I just say?!
They don't fucking care what's true - they only care about what they believe
Here's the kicker - as far as I'm concerned, you just handed it all over to them because you were too busy breathing your own farts, and so you didn't show up.
I'll keep hoping the really shitty parts of this nightmare don't materialize, but now the GOP is one simple-majority vote away from changing the filibuster rule in the Senate - and then the game is fucking over. The Republic dies. And if that's how it works out, then all we're doing right now is arguing over who gets to do what with the corpse.
'Course, I'm sure you'll have a grand old time finally getting your chance to lie down in front of that tank.
Like I said, I keep hoping - and if there's any chance down the road, I suspect I'll be right back chopping wood and carrying water again, but yeah - not gonna be very pleasant for a while.