“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
–George W. Bush, 2002

George W. Bush was an ivy-league educated candidate who had been governor of the largest state in the union, and who, by many measures, had done a pretty good job of it. When he was (finally) elected president, putting aside all the hypocrisy and political subterfuge to get him there, the country had every reason to give him a fair shake.

We could understand, just as I’m sure many republicans who reluctantly voted for Hillary Clinton on Tuesday thought, that he would be an adequate, if not stellar, steward of our country. He mightn’t have been the brightest bulb in the batch, nor one with a spine of steel, but we thought at least he would govern from somewhere that resembled the middle.

And he turned out to be a horrible, terrible, awful president. (Newsweek)

The wars he began were just a small part of his awfulness. Some of us marched in Boston and New York and Washington DC. Some railed on television after his lousy decisions. All of it too late, of course.

Some of us remember very clearly the lessons of a president who acted like he had a mandate, governed like he knew liberals would do what they always do and cave in with an olive branch between their teeth – and when they did, he and his dark overlord buddies took full advantage of our newfound apathy.

It is with this in mind that I am incredulous that there are those (small in number, thankfully, for now) on the left uncomfortable with the fact that some of us, many of us in fact, think this KKK-endorsed president-elect deserves nothing more than a cup of his own medicine.

For those of you who didn’t vote for him, who are now calling for unity with a GOP that doesn’t even recognize itself – like this is some kind of normal transition of power – for those who are calling for giving this poser an opportunity, I have a question (or ten) for you, not the least of which is, at what point will you say enough?

I have a sneaky suspicion that you think somehow the GOP will do something different than they have been telling us (and showing us) they would do.

• Did you think they were lying when they said on day one of the Obama administration that they would do everything in their power to oppose him?
• That they would gridlock Congress for as long as they could, even if it meant harming the people they served?
• That they would oppose even bringing this president’s SCOTUS nominee to a vote?

Who could have thought? The answer is, a lot of us. And we weren’t wrong.

So, at what point will you realize you’ve had enough? Unbelievably, his campaign wasn’t enough for you.

Does your self-righteous piety tell you exactly when you will finally realize how dangerous this is? Will it be:

• After he nominates the most racist, uneducated, xenophobic cabinet imaginable? (The Washington Post, Nov 11, 2016)
• After he guts ACA, but leaves children on the plan to appease only the most naive of liberal voters, leaving families who are faced with losing their homes to pay for life-saving medical expenses?
• After his appointment of supreme court justices – and I’d bet my bottom dollar the first Supreme Court nominee will be a right-wing, right-to-lifer woman whose track record should send cold shivers down the spine of any person who respects a woman’s right to choose?
• After he lays the first brick in his beautiful wall between Mexico and the U.S?
• After he holds how many of his proposed rallies will you be begin to be concerned that this seems awfully Nazi-esque? (New York Times, Nov. 12, 2016)
• After he appoints his son and other family members to his cabinet?
• After he is allowed to keep his fortune in a blind trust so that the American public will never know how (not if) this snake oil salesmen is benefiting from the decisions he makes? (Washington Post, Nov. 11, 2016)

Please enlighten me – explain how you can give a chance to someone who, less than seven days ago, was standing by his hateful words, his disgusting characterization of women, blacks, the handicapped, Mexicans? The same person whose election evoke cheers of glee from his white supremacist supporters? (White Supremacists Plan Rally)

My anecdotal take on the small group of you who are telling the rest of us to stand down (and in the wee hours following the election, no less), to get over our whining, to be a good American – is that most of you I know didn’t work very hard, if at all, for the Democratic candidate. Not one of those in my circle of friends who are bemoaning the anger on the left stepped foot outside of their homes to knock on doors, not one made phone calls, and in several cases, didn’t even bother to show up to vote.

A tangential acquaintance of mine was one of the first out of the gate to righteously call for her women “friends” to calm down already. She, by the way, is a white liberal woman in a swing state who actually came to this country as a refugee, but seems to have forgotten that a lot of people fought hard for her right to be welcomed.

By early Wednesday morning, my Canadian friends, and not just a few of them, were already helpfully suggesting that we Americans who were so angry and in shock by what had just happened should try to see the other side’s point of view – posting lots of cheery articles about how we need to work together. Spoken like an expert who has no idea of what it means to a middle-class hardworking family to have to sell ones house or go on welfare to pay for medical bills or one who has never lived under a regime that starts wars to fund an oil empire. I suspect when the next president’s EPA chief, who, by the way, will not believe in global warming, allows further deregulation – our rancid acid rain showering down on their fair citizens might goose them a bit.

My all time favorite over the past few days posted from white men in deep red states is that the hate speech, signs, notes, graffiti admonishing blacks/Muslims/Mexicans to go back to where they came from are some isolated incidents that liberals are making into a big deal. (Rash of Racist Attacks)

Please. Stop yourself.

For one moment, consider that many of us felt personally abused by the next president of the United States. His words cut deep, his actions even deeper. He called people whom we love horrific names. He threatened children and their families. He bragged of sexual aggression. The closest analogy I have to how your calls for us to just stop our whining is a scenario of a rape victim being asked to sit down and find common ground with her rapist. Too dramatic for you?

Okay, how about this.

When your daughter tells you that today at school just as she was sitting down at her lunch table with all of her friends, the school bully yells out for everyone to hear, “Look at what Susie’s eating! She’s a fat pig!”

Or, the bully yells out, “Hey, Ahmed, go back to Africa!”

Or , when your handicapped daughter wrangles her leg braces into a pep rally at school only to hear some loudly whisper, “Here comes the retard!”

Or, maybe when your teenager is standing in line at Starbucks and the guy behind her puts his hands on her ass and she flees, terrified.

Will you stand by your admonition to just give the abuser a fair shake? Will you march your daughter or son over to his house and force them to sit down with him to try and find common ground for the sake of school unity? I imagine you might. Because peace at all cost is far more important to you, it would appear, than her sanctity, the way she thinks about herself, who she allows to touch her, and how your son feels when he is told he doesn’t belong.

So, here’s my olive branch. Get angry. Get involved. Learn the lessons of those who have gone before you. Do it in your way, in your voice, and at your speed. But, don’t admonish those of us who are genuinely hurt, horrified, and disgusted by someone who believes he represents over half of this country. He doesn’t.

There’s a whole lot of Monday morning quarterbacking going on and so much of it is so inaccurate and selfish and just plain wrong. This one worked for the unions so HE knows exactly what happened. That one lives in rural Ohio and HE knows why we lost. She worked for the last administration and THIS is what happened.

Bernie Bros hold Clinton 100% accountable.

“Angry” White Working Men hold Obama 100% accountable.

53% of Women Who Voted for Trump – well, who they say they blame and why they voted the way they did – the jury is still out on this one. I have my thoughts and I think I’m right and I believe the post mortem will support me, but for now, I’ll save the theory for another day.

However, if hell freezes over and an honest media (ha) can find a way (good luck) to tease out the lies they tell themselves and the lies we overlay upon them – well, good luck with that. It ain’t gonna happen. Not one of them, not my white catholic relatives who could never vote for a candidate that supports killing the unborn (and they are not fooled by words they consider rhetoric that involve the word choice), not my white working class colleagues whose husband has convinced them that blacks and Mexicans and immigrants (and, and, and) are gonna take their jobs. No, I don’t think this is a group, in large measure, that is gettable to our side. Not that they aren’t worth some time and effort, just not much. My opinion. Be like Trump and sue me.

Clinton received, what is being reported this morning as nearly 300,000 more votes than her Republican opponent. What we know, obviously, is that the 300K didn’t come in counties where it counted.

I’ll discuss my fan girl love for Karl Rovian political strategy (not the man, please, not the man himself) at another time. It is key and it is complicated and it is boring as all get out. But, it works. Another day for all of that because it’s too early for me to even start the exhausting feat of caring about why what happened, happened. But, as my brain starts to wake up from the fog of the last three days, I know that Democrats forgot a couple of things, in my opinion:

1) Good policy, even great policy, does no good in the voting booth if the electorate doesn’t understand how it came to be – who was responsible for it – what their lives would be without it – in clear, succinct terms.

2) None of it makes a difference if they don’t show up anyway.

3) We went for the middle when we should have been going for the left.

4) The Today show had the bigot himself on nearly every day by phone or in person during the primaries, yammering on about God knows what, but he was there, selling his snake oil until it became fact. We rarely had someone on – and when we did, we had some second tier policy wonk. Our leaders could have called them out. Instead, we thought all the attention would give the bigot enough rope. Well, we learned how that works. All press, even bad press, is better than no press. Media matters – even a dishonest, ratings whore of a media.

Democrats need to sell a bit of their self-righteous soul and understand that being able to communicate is what matters in an election. A vacuum will be filled by something. This time around it was racist language, audacious comments, and a plagiarizing porn star, though I’m sure she is a nice lady, for our next first lady. When the religious right allows themselves to be co-opted by THAT (Mormons excluded here), then you know you’ve lost the public relations game.

There are facts about what the Obama administration actually did that impacted the working class. And then there is the media’s projection of the GOP talking points that is parading around as fact.  I’m dismayed to hear that kind of horseshit coming out of liberal’s mouths these last 36 hours. They know better. We know better.

Soon, we will also have facts about who in those populations didn’t get the message that they were, in fact, helped. Hello, white working women – Lilly Ledbetter, anyone?

The Obama administration was handed an economic crisis to deal with in the same fashion that Bush was handed 9/11. No, they aren’t the same thing. But they were both devastating crises from which both candidates had to recover. In the case of Obama, any improvement in the economy was a boon. For Bush, standing on a pile of rubble and shouting into a bullhorn to the real working men and women doing the search and recovery efforts will ever endear him to many of us, even those who came to deplore him. The aftermath of his alliance with the dark overlord is another story.

From a PR standpoint, and the view from my owned biased lens, I lay much of the election loss at the feet of the media. Coverage of the next president-elect was so over-bloated, beginning at the primaries, that I’ll never trust much of the on-air fourth estate again. My news will come from the writers that I trust. Who got it and will continue to get it. Those who called the bully a bully. Those who weren’t afraid to define the next president of the United States in terms of his actions and his deeds. Those who weren’t afraid to use the words xenophobe, racist, sexist, misogynist without then also trying to save their reputations of being too liberal by providing some false equivalence addendum. I’ll trust those writers going forward. The on air media can go to hell. Matt Lauer and NBC – ya listening? I turned off my morning television months and months ago and I’m betting my hat that many others did the same.

So, what do we liberals do?

It will be a long time before I can break bread with anyone who voted for the next president or voted for a third party candidate in a state where it may have mattered. As someone who is a better communicator than I said, this isn’t political, it’s personal. Their vote was for party over country. Personal over friendship. It will be a long time before they are forgiven for the statement their vote made about the people I love. And, it is not irony that the few of them that I care to (or have to) keep in my orbit who did vote for the bigot, will scarcely be touched by the policies of the new administration.

I will not negotiate, compromise, find middle ground (blah blah blah), or pretend to work with someone who voted for a man to represent our beloved country who said those things about my family, my friends, the people I care about, the people I work on behalf of, the people who I share a gender with.

Because here’s the thing no one is saying: We’ve been in their midst for a lifetime. They are the ones that post side-by-side pictures of Michelle Obama and an ape. I have been in hospital waiting rooms, grocery market lines, hair salons when I’ve heard them talk about black people. Except they didn’t use the term black people – because they didn’t think they had to. The N-word worked just fine. Family members, when they thought they were in closed quarters talked about our current president in ways that made me physically ill. No, we already know who they are – and where they hide, right behind their fake outrage about voting for someone who will “shake things up.”

But these ignorant people have no idea what that means. They couldn’t know, because their new leader has never told them, though he did give them a cool hat with a lofty slogan and they love their slogans, as we know. And, if they succeeded in getting that black family out of their White House, well, there was no way in hell they would let an even worse abomination in the form of a woman take the reins.

I am embarrassed by some of my liberal allies who say we must listen to them to understand where their anger roots itself.

Really? Because I would say, do you honestly think these people are stupid enough to admit to you that they voted for the man because he will stop giving jobs to black people? or poor people? or brown people? C’mon now.

An honest reporter would delve further when they say – I want immigration reform. Well, what do you mean by that? What does that look like? How has it HONESTLY affected your job. Show us how. Tell us how. They can’t, and they won’t. Because, for many of these voters, it doesn’t exist. It’s a convenient cover. The angry white man has always been an angry white man. He just chose not to vote all those other times, because a white man in a white house is nothing to get to worked up about. A black man or a women, well now. That’s a different story.

That’s not to say there isn’t pain out there and there are not improvements to be made and unemployment rates to tackle and salaries to raise. But we know the real story here. We’ve always known.

We already know racism is alive and well, and when our free press chooses to ignore that and instead creates a story that was never there (he’s for the common guy! she’s a crook!) and then hounds that message into the uneducated white working class’s collective head each and every day for months on end (it used to be known by another word, propaganda – google the words Nazi Germany), you get a narrative the most base of our nation can hide behind. You, my liberal kind hearts, will not be able to tease out the why.

Wanna work on racism as a way to calm their fears? How ’bout working on first things first. Get Democrats elected who will re-install the Voter Rights Act. Who will insure that gerrymandering isn’t a way of life. Who will make it so that people like me will want to go live in (formerly) red states. Okay, that will never happen, but sitting down and talking to racists to find out why they feel the way they do? Please. Been there, done that.

Put the horse in front of the cart, for Pete’s sake. Racists fears will be calmed when they realize Democratic ideals actually help them. That their guns are firmly in their racks by their front door. That their God didn’t go away when a woman was elected president. That Democrats pray, and shoot, and say stupid things, too. That their wives actually do want a choice.

Until THEY change their hearts and minds, I don’t want them on my team.

And we don’t need them.

If Democrats would stop wasting their time on this baseless class of xenophobes and start putting their energy into crafting a message that actually resonates with the people who didn’t vote – because, truth be told, all cards on the table here, we have our own uneducated working and poor classes that DO have the ability, whether they know it or not, to vote.

These are the people that we need to sit down with. The Bernie Sanders supporters who actually held their nose, for the good of the country, and showed up at the polls and voted for Hillary Clinton. THEY will be the leaders of tomorrow that will shine and save us from ourselves. They want all the things my Democratic party is built on. They are not the fringe left. They get it – and they are smart and mature enough to sometimes take bad medicine when it will help prevent what happened on Tuesday. They won my heart and my loyalty. No, I will never be a third party voter. I will never vote for the Green Party or for the Independent Party. I’m a yellow dog democrat in the way that Elizabeth Warren is. We believe our party isn’t perfect, but it is very, very good. And change can (and has) come from the inside, bottom up.

But, I will work hard to find common ground with others (on the left) who don’t identify as a Democrat. I firmly believe if we can link arms and figure out a way forward together – that we not let the fact that I care a lot about the environment, but when forced with a choice, I may have to swing toward better welfare for the working poor and not hold that against me – then we can start moving forward. I will do the same for them. We must realize, as the Republicans have, that we have each other’s back. Ministers in deep red Ohio admonishing their congregations to overlook the language and the actions of a known bigot because he is in the party of GOD and the Democrats are not? If my (white, male) educated lawyer friend buys that, then surely we can find common ground between people who need healthcare and people who want to save the environment. Surely.

They get, as I do, as almost everyone I respect does, (and frankly, as I believe Hillary Clinton does), that perfect is the enemy of good. The stars make a pretty great place to live when one falls short of the moon, after all.

But, these folks and the working poor, and the poor who are not working, have a whole lot of shit in their way. Child care, bills, food, the inability to get an ID card, the fear of showing up at a polling place, transportation, television sets and the time to watch them, and the list goes on. I can sit in my nice house, and watch my daily news programs, and eat my fancy Thai take out and rage about the latest policy change, and celebrate the new unemployment numbers, but we know, we KNOW, we simply know, that many of the people who clean our houses and serve our coffee, those who go to our community colleges and take our tolls, won’t get that kind of message delivered in that kind of way. Not now, and probably not ever.

I was in the bowels of a government office building last night and two janitors, Hispanic and young, were emptying waste baskets. One said to the other, “yeah, did you hear about the election?” The other said, “no, was it this week? Did that white dude win?”

I thought to myself – here are two young people who had some periphery knowledge that an election was taking place at some recent point and a vague recollection that some white dude might have won. But that was it. They moved on to another subject.

Now there’s a group worthy of the Democratic party’s time and effort.

I had the privilege of being in a small group conference with Lilly Ledbetter last month – SHE could have made a difference to white working women voting in this week’s election. Her message was clear. Her story was compelling. Her every-women twang was real. She could have made a difference. She was nowhere on the campaign trail.

Policy schmolicy isn’t going to reach them, baby. When the MSM isn’t a factor in their lives, nor are newspapers, or rallies, nor leaflets or yard signs,  nor even wages – unless they understand who is responsible for that raise or that job – then, it is our mission to find out what will get to them. Unions used to do a good job at that – we knew that unions were responsible for fighting for our wages and our jobs. It was easy to know, if we wanted to keep our jobs, then we should vote for whatever candidate supported the unions.

Easy, peasy. The message was there: Unemployment down. Jobs up. Equal pay for equal work a law. Healthcare for all. It just failed to appear on the campaign trail because the media made sure we were instead consumed with slowing down as we passed the train wreck on the other side of the road.