Welcome back to Group -- please grab a little something from the food-and-drink snack cart, and we can get started...
As you know, positioned here, as we are, on the lip of the smoking impact-crater of democracy, the first thing we've had to attend to is pulling out survivors from the white-hot and smoldering wreckage -- pulling people out from under towering stacks of collapsed polling data, out from under the shattered shards of broken dreams, out from under the formerly stable, non-psychotic, and modern-world construct formerlyt envisioned and expected by most people here and abroad.
True, it was never going to be an exciting run with Hillary, perhaps, but one could take sincere comfort in the routine ability to make plans for getting up in the morning, and still finding one's slippers on the floor, next to the bed -- and not discovering instead a radioactive hole 139 stories deep, vomiting up a shimmering, nuclear slag-heap of lava belching forth, champagne-fountain-style, resulting as an incidental, unexpected, and minor happenstance following a late-night, American Presidential Twitter-fight with China, Russia, and North Korea...
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For those who were curious, we have an initial summary report today from The Code Blue Project, the non-profit group surveying medical facilities and usage, following Tuesday's demolition derby with democracy.
With 94% of aid stations, urgent-care strip malls, and hospitals reporting in, it appears the group's top-line "Crash Cart" report shows more than 119 million people were given emergency defib treatment on Tuesday alone -- talk about paddling up a river with no canoe!
Yes, well... the breakdown of Americans was CLEAR! -- or so they themselves reported. The breakout of numbers was a pulse-pounding 50-50 -- with slightly more Democrats served than Republicans.
Field staff attributed this to the greater heart-load attributed to Democratic political expectations, and to their own overwhelming and historic sense of collective doom, although Republicans themselves reported feeling lost, helpless, panicked, and dismayed at the unexpected prospect of actually having to grow up, become adults, and govern for a change.
Democrats reported a sense of loss on par with the laws of physics being repealed, while Republicans said they felt a sort of "anti-gravity, flip-flop queasiness," as one high-level campaign worker put it, while sorrowfully contemplating the loss of being able to openly hurl threats, shout insults, urge followers to beat up people at random, and "howl at the moon like hyenas in heat."
In all, 59.6 million Republicans were given the paddles, and 59.8 million Democrats were paddled. While Dems paid more for their treatments, up front, Republicans -- and the rest of the nation as a whole, along with a major portion of the rest of the global population -- are expected to pay much, much more for their treatments in the long term.
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Small insights: Common sense is rare. A sense of common history is rarer. Any American paying attention to either is clearly not a highly paid, on-air television-news program host. Americans paying attention to both are statistical flukes and anomalies on par, with, say, a petulant, narcissistic, sexist, racist, bully-boy, pussy-grabbing, multiple-bankrupt, famous-for-being-a-famous-asshat, confidence-artist winning the American presidential election.
But, seeing as how this is the print medium, not TV, and seeing as how we here are completely unpaid in our labors of love, let us take a thin moment to observe several key facts as we breathlessly await the Dizzying Poll Autopsies, from the Finger-Pointing Institute, in desperate hope they will provide a ratings bump, now that things have slacked off again for the networks:
First, it is proper to note that many elections are about a choice between holding steady and doing something else -- the status quo and staying the course, or making a new path, and making wholesale changes, equivalent to throwing out the baby, the bath water, the tub, the bassinet, the rubber duckie, the crib, all the baby clothing, and, in fact, the entire house. And block. And neighborhood. And state. And region. And nation.
Then, owing to the sudden absence of terrain, we experience what scientists normally call an HSM, or Holy Shit Moment, in which multiple inrushing tsunamis occur, along with abrupt tectonic plate shifts and earthquakes, triggering volcanic erutptions, tornadoes, typhoons, and really awful hair days -- like Trump with bedhead, only worse -- all gelling up at once.
[My apologies for any small, overly sensitive support animals in the audience I may have accidentally startled with that bedheaded-Trump imagery.]
So, recent history tells us -- well, it pretty much just lays there, until you read it, or until you watch it, all vamped up and changed considerably on various cable channels, really -- that, after two terms, Americans are very fond of changing-out presidential parties.
(This didn't apply to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, nor to Benjamin Franklin. This is primarily because the 22nd Amendment came after Roosevelt's terms in office, and because -- sad but true -- Benjamin Franklin was never President, although his image adorns the nation's highest current-currency bill, which must surely demonstrate something wonderfully obscure and important [see local cable channels for program listings].)
So, between the lusty desire for change and the itchy need to swap out parties, well, it's part of the often-quoted "perfect storm" scenario: this time, we just happend to luck out and have it involve electing a someone inexplicably and exactly like Trump. (We can all continue to speculate on -- and undoubtedly will, helping keep up TV revenues -- all the other elements contributing to the far more rare, and much higher-level, more devastating Category 29 Shitstorm we experienced on Tuesday.)
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Somewhere, even if in a parallel omniverse, and/or if there is a Heaven, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is feeling unending, and very sharp, pangs of forlorn regret and deep, unconsolable yearning -- and a vague itching sensation in her moist membranes -- for having sabotaged Bernie Sanders's chance to have a fair chance to go head-to-head with Hillary Clinton, and with the full,and equal backing and support of the DNC.
Bernie was, and is, an incredible human being, an exceptional candidate, and an extraordinary, tireless, progressive champion of the people -- and has been for 35 unblemished years.
We had our chance, America, at a change agent who was also an Independent, in order to meet the change-parties-and-presidents needs, but we muffed it.
Bernie was sort-of allowed to take half-hearted cover under part of the Democratic Party umbrella for a short while, owing to the creaky party policies currently in place, and owing to the favoritism of persons in charge of the DNC who felt a candidate's gender and political affiliations, and time-in-service-coronation to be more important than other equally-favorable aspects of another candidate.
It should have gone to the jury, as they say -- but it did not.
But then, this is neither the time nor the place to start spouting off about election and campaign finance reforms. That sort of soul-twisting and splish-splash water-boarding of the American mind and superficial conscience can wait until later, when the real political recriminations kick in, after the first couple of minutes of the new president's term, when first actions are taken, when things start to occur, and, well -- as it has been so often said, when the Chickens Come Home to Roost and The Chicken Shit, Feathers, and Guts, and Beaks, All Start to Hit the American Public's Fans, and Then Their Faces.
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For the moment, though, it is not at all comforting to know that Every Other Country in the World has now jumped us from our old Dangerous Tots with Nukes category, which we always had with any GOP president, and we have now been moved up a few notches to the more jaw-dropping -- and never-before reached heights -- of Dangerous, Insane, Small-Handed, Orange-Raccoon-Eyed Toddlers Learning to Make Sentences Who Bear Nukes Itching to Be Tried Out.
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As members of the world society, we should be thankful that we are -- and have been for decades -- in absolute last place as far as educating our children in critical thinking skills; this provisionally proves the theorem which states Greatness Can Be Achieved Once More, And Some More, even without the effort required from hard work, higher education, or the even casual use of one's mind.
The provisional part is reliant upon on the not-melting-down or blowing-up fine print.
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Oh -- one more thing: The Trump Transition Team for An Incredibly Greater America Than You Could Ever Hope to Imagine, Really, and We're Not Kidding By Much, has released its initial, first-draft list for Cabinet appointments:
- Secretary of State - Rudy Giuliani
- Secretary of Defense - Ted Nugent
- Secretary of the Treasury - Robert Mercer
- Secretary of Homeland Security & Conspiracy Theories - Steve Bannon
- Secretary of the Department of Injustice - Newt Gingrich
- Secretary of the Department of Propaganda Services - Kellyanne Conway
- Secretary of Health and Zombie Services - Ben Carson
- Secretary of Transportation and Foodstuffs - Chris Christie
- Secretary of Getting My Damn Coffee - Ted Cruz
- Secretary of Negotiations, Liasions, and Grabbing Things for Me - Marco Rubio
More names and finalists to follow, after a potentially-prolonged period of high-level staff members calling each other "Sad," and "No Puppet!" according to spokesdroids.
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As always: Stay tuned, well tanned, and well-lubed.
