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Saturday, October 15, 2016

Long Way Down

In its late but welcome death throes, Drumpfistan seems to have declared nuclear jihad on everything and everyone. His latest target is the chairman of the Ohio Republican Party. It goes without saying (but we will anyway) that Ohio is a fairly important state in the scheme of things.

This is awesome and at the same time unsettling to watch. It is more proof on an already-high stack just from this past week, that the Drumpf scampaign is in full-on bunker mode. Candidate and fans live not only under their own set of "facts" but rules of logic. Only the polls that show them winning are accurate. The election itself is rigged and fraudulent, unless Cheeto Hitler emerges triumphant.

This is the sort of "heads I win, tails you lose" self-serving bullshit that used to lead to people being burned or drowned alive for witchery, never minding that if they were actually witches, they could get easily get out of the crude restraints. It is the logic of morons and children, people with at best a random epistemology.

Individual polls are rarely worth bothering with; only averages and aggregates can provide enough context and sample size. To that end, only the Real Clear Politics polling average and the betting markets are worth following. The RCP average currently has Clinton ahead by 6.7% (not even counting the 4.5 MoE and six-point GOP skew of the LA Times/USC poll), and the wagering sites are all in the mid-80s percentile. The yacht is taking on water, because it was a leaky piece of shit to begin with.

Against my better judgment, I engaged in one these arguments with an old work friend on Facebook the other day. It was my fault -- he has been posting Drumpf-supporter nonsense all year, to be ignored by most everyone. What pitched it the other day was when he asked at large if people thought Hillary would win. Seeing no response, he then took it as collective assent that she would lose, that the polls were lying, the fix was in, etc. At which point I peeked in and offered that I thought she would probably win. No snark, just a semi-educated concise opinion based on evidence and reason.

What followed was a generally cordial but revealing exchange, one that showed a high degree of wishful thinking, and ignorance of math and demographics. It may take another few years, but eventually it should dawn on even the most diehard Drumpfkin that you can no longer win the presidency with old white men as your sole constituency. But right now, they are all deep in the bunker. They have their own sources of disinformation, and they are channeling Baghdad Bob.

And yet there's no smugness or even pleasure to be derived from the self-immolation of this noxious toad and his dipshit flock. Because the defining characteristic of the Drumpf "movement" is precisely that of a cult, and those fuckers don't go down easy or clean. Steve is correct that Drumpf is basically doubling or quadrupling down, committing suicide by media cop, because he has no other option, because it's the only way he saves face in a crushing defeat, by convincing enough maroons that the fix was always in, the media always against him.

In the meantime, he has picked a nasty scab and exposed a festering wound on this nation's soul, giving voice and encouraging a subset of miscreants who mean nothing but harm and malice. These are dangerous people, who in ordinary times would be marinating in hate and fear and grain alcohol, marking time to a slow, early death. Now they are stoked up thanks to a year's worth of Clownstick's empty exhortations.

The idiots in Kansas who were plotting to blow up the apartment complex full of Somali immigrants had planned the event for Election Day. Whether as celebration or warning, depends on your perspective, but the fact is that some not insignificant number of these folks have gone mad-dog on us. They are fully invested, and are about to lose the entire nut. They are seething, itching for violence and retribution.

Come November 9th, some of them may decide to eat the applesauce and ride the comet, and some may decide to go the Tim McVeigh route. Most will just have another hard-luck story to add to the litany of failure -- someone else's fault, like every other item on their lists. There is never any shame in their game.

There will be the usual rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, but we'll all be back to our normal dysfunctional selves by Black Friday. But it will be a hairy six weeks in the meantime. Get out there and vote, and record and post everything, especially the vigilantes outside "certain" polling precincts. We don't have to take this shit from these people.

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