I.
Now listen, if you're a Democrat, I'm not saying that you, in your every day life outside of what you think about politics, are insane– or at least I'm not saying you're any more insane than every other homo on this planet (genus, not orientation). But the voices of your party have lost their God damned minds.
They are having a terrible, slow motion meltdown live on everybody's phone, computer, and television screen, running furiously in vicious circles trying to find some way, any possible way, that you weren't all wrong about Hillary Clinton.
Couldn't be that she really lost. It just couldn't be! It must have been the Russians! The Russians, yes! They interfered in our election! And Donald Trump conspired with them!
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| America's future former newspaper of record. |
II.
It's not good when an entire political party responsible for governance in the United States is in July 2018 still hysterically channeling Rosie O'Donnell's Mar 2017 public meltdown very shortly after Donald Trump was inaugurated.
Rosie O'Donnell: "The Charge Is Treason."
But Rosie's meltdown was far more understandable. She was having a hard time accepting that Donald Trump– who's bullied her for years on Twitter, and publicly humiliated her for cheap laughs and elicited thunderous applause during a televised debate– had become the president of the United States.
For Rosie it really was personal. And it was about Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton. And it was right after the inauguration.
But Democrats are still in deep, white hot denial, going on two years later, that Hillary Clinton could have actually lost to Donald Trump, and they're taking it insanely personal instead of being curious and well-meaning enough to open their eyes and try to understand what really happened in the 2016 election.
What Really Happened in 2016
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| Every. Four. Years. |
III.
For the good of your political party if not your own mental health and the stability of our society, you are going to have to stop this madness and just admit that Hillary Clinton was a crap sandwich, and that you and the establishment Democrats in the DNC and media who picked her for you were willfully blind to that.
And that you were wittingly naive and foolish enough to choose not to see that electing a uterus to steal more billions for thieving Wall Street banks, and continue over half a century of the U.S. raping and burning the Middle East and Africa to the ground is a seriously impoverished and decadent conception of progress.
That it's not because Russians stole the election from her that she lost, but because as deeply unpalatable as the television clown was, he still wasn't as bad as the deeply corrupt, influence-peddling, bloodthirsty, warmongering Hillary Clinton, and all her friends on Wall Street and the military industrial complex.
IV.
If Democrats can't bring themselves to do that, then at the very least just let it go and move on. Do like the Republicans did with George W. Bush and Iraq– just have mass amnesia!
They were so epicly embarrassed and mortified about that bloody nightmare of an administration, they spent the 2008, 2012, and 2016 campaigns pretending the Bush years never happened.
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| Look at it! Hillary Clinton voted for this. |
Every Republican candidate on the primary debate stage for three presidential elections had to reach all the way back to 1984 and promise they would be the next Ronald Reagan, because no one dared suggest they might be the next George W. Bush.
The only way they could get a Republican in the Oval Office was by nominating an ex-Democrat from a liberal state (just like Reagan), television actor (just like Reagan), with the campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again" (just like Reagan).
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| It'll be like Bush never happened :) |
V.
At least the Republicans had the good sense to have selective amnesia so we could move on as a society instead of twisting their minds and everybody else's to find some explanation, any reason, however tortured and specious, that they weren't actually wrong about George W. Bush and the Global War of Terror.
But the Democrats can't even muster that demented form of good grace for all our sakes and their own. We're nearly to the first midterms after Clinton's defeat, and they're still stuck in the Denial stage of the Kübler-Ross model of grief, and sliding into Anger, still trying to convince themselves that they were right.
If you're frequently frustrated and angry, bitter and resentful– the kind of person who yells at your Twitter feed or rages at other drivers during rush hour– like very many of the people who vote and go to protests and get swept up in political movements, you might be in denial about something important and personal to you, something you're afraid to face because it's painful.
VI.
Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed her model based on her experiences working with terminally ill patients, but it seems to describe a mental process of resistance to any revelation or change in our lives that is painful and difficult to cope with, and the gradual, begrudging path we take to acceptance.
"1. Denial – The first reaction is denial. In this stage, individuals believe the diagnosis is somehow mistaken, and cling to a false, preferable reality."
When we cling tightly to our denial, every aspect of reality that threatens to shatter it, that shines a light on it and proves that our denial is wrong and that what we are denying is true– enrages us. We drive ourselves mad shoring up our denial and our fantasy reality with "alternative facts" (lies). If we're especially desperate, we are driven to find refuge in elaborate conspiracy theories.
And our spinning minds spin faster, desperate to shut out the truth, more afraid now of what we've been avoiding than ever, willing to believe anything, however ridiculous, that shields us from what we're denying, and madly determined to live forever in the false reality we've split off from the world to hide in.
2. Anger – When the individual recognizes that denial cannot continue, they become frustrated, especially at proximate individuals. Certain psychological responses of a person undergoing this phase would be: "Why me? It's not fair!"; "How can this happen to me?"; "Who is to blame?"; "Why would this happen?".
"How can this happen?" Sustained loud insistence on bizarre, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about Russian interference in the 2016 election. "Who is to blame?" Nazis! Putin! Russia! Hackers! When we cannot bring ourselves to blame ourselves we desperately find someone else to take the blame for us.
If nothing else, I hope this understanding of a terrible propensity of the human psyche may be of personal benefit to you, and steer you away from the grave danger and suffering of this pitfall of the human soul. Or that should you fall, these words may come back to you during a time of darkness in your life.
Though it's not easy, the only way out is to face the dragon forthrightly, with courage and hope. If you won't swallow the bitter cup to the last drop, it will become an ocean and swallow you.
VII.
The more viciously and bitterly we cling to denial, the more frustrated we become at anything that threatens our denials, and the angrier we get at the scapegoat we've made to take on the blame that we fear we cannot bear.
Even more bitter and painful to see: Our actions in clinging to our denial reveal the falseness of our original intentions, which we believed were good. Truth, justice, the good of humanity– how could it have been about all of that if we are so willing to sacrifice the truth to avoid the pain of personal responsibility?
We are shocked and disgusted to find that we have become– that in fact there was always in us– that which we purported to hate! We have become cartoon caricatures of the very despotism we thought we had originally set out to defeat!
The Democrats who started out with a progressive humanitarian message of overturning despotic authority, have ended up by crying out in the same voice as the most iron-fisted, petulant, conservative, Old World monarch, whose feeble pride has been insulted by some slight: "Treason! Treeaason!"
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| OFF WITH HIS HEAD! |
Like all political rhetoric, all that talk about progress and female empowerment was just talk. Now we see what we would have gotten if Hillary Clinton had won. A mob of blood-thirsty tyrants, and maybe another God damned war– with nuclear Russia.
