Never been one to let the carrier drop

Well, it’s over. Four years of a con man grifting as much as he possibly could, and watching some people unable to comprehend that everything he said was a lie and that he was destroying us.

Now i can go back to having my normal level of loathing for our government, which is still a very long way away from what you might expect to find in a utopia. This will leave me much energy to spend on other, more productive things. I can probably even return to facebook. I look forward to someday in the near future having no idea what the president is up to, and not needing to know.

I do note that not only did the Republicans bring us two of the worst presidents in a hundred years – dubya, who started a war over false pretenses and got a million plus people killed, and Trump, who drove a wedge into the already growing divide between left and right and hammered it repeatedly, lied, stole hundreds of millions of dollars, committed so many impeachable offenses (including ignoring the emoluments clause) that most of us have lost count, and was such a badly-behaved child that he couldn’t even accept losing reelection and lied repeatedly, causing a small insurrection that undoubtedly has done much damage to the thousands of fools who believed his lies and broke into the capital.

Both of them lost the popular vote, but were placed in office anyway. Perhaps we could learn from the mistakes of history and either do away with the electoral college, or make it true proportional representation. It’s already demonstrated that it does not perform it’s desired function of not allowing dictators and demagogues to ascend to the office of the presidency (largely because by the time such a person can get elected, the brainwashed faithful are everywhere)

A lot of this does underline the evil of people like Rush Limbaugh and stations like Fox News – who have been lying repeatedly because it makes money to lie – the more you rile the people up, the more the advertisers will pay you. Rush had better pray there is no such thing as karma.

Anyway, so, we have people living in two different realities. The one I inhabit seems to match observable reality, in which, for example, the COVID virus did *not* go away in the spring. The one in which people continue to support republican politicians requires being willing to ignore those lies. Heinlein had a story that I’ve referenced before, ‘pravda means truth’ in which he talked about how a important aspect of living in the USSR was a willingness to forget the previous “truths” told by the government whenever a new “truth” came along. This is definitely a requirement to live in the modern conservative party, and even more so if you want to for example be a Q or CCP conspiracy nut.

Will they ever figure it out, or will we have republican suicide bombers insisting that the election went for Trump (*common sense* will tell you why it didn’t – he *barely* made it in the first time in a perfect storm, and then he spent years pissing off just about everyone by being his awful self. But, if you believe every lie he told, which some people do, then you believe he’s the best president we’ve ever had and you’re puzzled as to why he was not reelecte)

The one good thing I will say for Trump is that he didn’t start any foreign wars. That still probably makes him a better president than Dubya. However, I think history is a lot more willing to forgive Dubya for being easily duped than Trump for being a asshole who couldn’t even handle losing and threw a trumper tantrum that involved a violent assault on the capital by his followers.

Hopefully it’s over. I don’t expect to love Biden – he’s a moderate in a era when what we badly need is a extremist extreme enough to do as much good for the nation (and heartbreaking to the republicans) as Trump was willing to do bad for the nation. Even Bernie is to the right of me, though. I would be working on redesigning the resource allocation system, I’d be disbanding almost the entire military and outlawing ever having a bigger military than the two other largest nations, I’d be working on universal health care, universal income, mass automation to ensure no one starves, 3D-printing houses for the homeless, and so on. But I could never be elected, because as we said, I’m to the left of Bernie. So Biden’s legalistic tendencies and beholdenness to the powers that be are likely to annoy the heck out of me. But at least he won’t be actively swinging a sledgehammer at everything that’s good about the country (Trump tried to destroy the *post office* in order to win) and there is some hope that Trump will start his ‘Patriot’s party’ and A: they’ll agitate for ranked choice voting, since it benefits them too, B: they’ll occupy the extreme right, letting the Republicans become moderates and the Democrats become left and C: hopefully for a while, they’ll help make sure neither they nor republicans get elected by splitting the vote.

As I said above, I’m looking forward to not *needing* to know what the idiot in the while house is doing. while Trump surrounded himself with criminals because he is, at heart, a con man, Biden is surrounding himself with smart and capable people. They may be way too in love with the awfulness that is the criminal justice system of America, they may be way too in love with the horrors that are capitalism, but at least they are not idiots nor grifters. It’s a step in the right direction.

I also appriciate that unlike Trump, who was always very clear about the fact that he didn’t care what the majority (Democrats) wanted, Biden does express a desire to work for all the people who are here. It is a long standing problem that my utopia and conservatives’ utopia would be two wildly different places.

So, here’s to moving forward, hopefully away from the wildly awful behavior of the right. I still hope we do the right thing and put Trump in jail – it is important that politicians see consequences for behavior like his, or we will see Trump after Trump, eventually from both the left and the right. Trump belongs in jail. Eventually hopefully we can make even the conservatives understand how many different horrible things he did. “Orange man bad”. I think history will decide that Trump cared only about Trump, and did much damage to the world.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2021 at 6:20 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.