With apologies to the rest of the planet

As you might imagine, I—like slightly more than half of America—am sporting that deer-in-headlights look today. Because throughout the vicious, disgusting, underhanded campaign that the Republicans ran from the get-go, I still thought that enough reasonable and unfearful people existed to make a good choice in this election.

We was wrong.

It turns out that the American electorate is even more misogynistic than it is racist. And it’s deeply, powerfully racist.

They’ve not only given the best set of toys in the history of the world—the US military, the US economy, the US legal system—to a 70-year-old orange toddler with no impulse control and no adult supervision. They’ve surrounded him with spineless, unprincipled lickspittle Republicans at every level, who are even as I write this congratulating each other on having dodged the bullet that the Chaos Monkey candidacy seemed to have aimed at all their hopes.

The party of “Jew-S-A” and Rope-Tree-Journalist has control of every branch of the government. And they’ll plunder the country for every last nickel of profit for themselves and their corporate partners, as they eagerly gut social support for those not part of their plutocratic world view (read: the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, minorities of all stripes, and all the suckers in the working and middle classes), scrap infrastructure investment, throttle freedom of the press, undo what environmental protections we still have, and generally feather their own nests.

Look at this photo—that obscene tee shirt isn’t even the most disturbing part of it. The look on that woman’s face, and on the girl’s, is the kind of thing captured on the faces of bystanders who cheered as Jews were driven out of German towns 80 years back. We saw it again during the 60s on white faces as blacks and others were set upon by dogs and doused by fire hoses outside public schools and lunch counters.

This election marks not only the triumph of racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic, greedy, vindictive, ignorant bullies. It is also an expression of how magical thinking has enabled people—even those who profess religious principles—to brush aside a flood of empiric evidence that the Chaos Monkey is a serial liar and empty boaster; a dishonest businessman who stiffs employees, vendors and tax jurisdictions—and brags about all of it; a creature with such a loose grasp on reality that he denies words and actions that are recorded and accessible; an empty husk of an ethics-challenged humanoid whose most strongly-held principle is his tenacity at holding a grudge; an absentee father who cheated on each wife with a mistress who became his next wife; a shameless malignant narcissist, fraudster and long-time scam artist…and, even if they uneasily tsk-tsk at a few of what are considered mortal sins, they somehow think that by conferring upon him the most powerful office in the world, he’ll rise to the occasion. Cognitive and moral dissonance of Biblical proportions, if you will.

Jesus wept.

Somewhere the devil is counting 59 million souls who swallowed their scruples about lust, lying, greed, idolatry, cheating and the rest of it in exchange for electing someone who wasn’t black and wasn’t a woman.

The Monkey’s supporters roared their approval of his blustering promises to restore the cosmography they feel is threatened—the one in which white people prevail no matter what, simply by virtue of being white. When men without college educations could still build a secure life with a good job, with a wife and kids at home and a solid pension. You know what made it possible for men without college educations to achieve that economic security? Unions. You know who is antithetical to unions in any manifestation? Yeah. The party of plutocrats that you just gave a lock on the government.

These supporters are just like the Germans who voted for the NSDAP: they clamor for authoritarian policies to clamp down on the [Mexicans, Jews, Muslims, uppity women, not-us, not-me] who threaten their king-of-the-hill expectations. It never occurs to them that the authoritarian powers they so eagerly confer on the present-day Nazi surrogates will ever be used on them.

This is a classic example of the turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.

The man goes on trial in a few days for child rape. His aides had to take away his Twitter access because he couldn’t control his urge to slag off critics and toss out edicts like Elagabalus. (Like Elagabalus, he also has delusions of deification.) He had his lawyers file a lawsuit in Nevada courts on Tuesday to suppress lawful voters whose transgression was "voting while not white."

(Fortunately a Nevada judge told them to pound sand. But under a Chaos Monkey administration, it's going to be harder to see justice done. At every level.)

And this is what the American electorate thought was preferable to a woman succeeding an African American. We went low when we could have gone high.

There are two modest upsides to this debacle, I suppose:

Brits are feeling reassured that they are not the most pig-ignorant fuckwitted electorate on the planet. 

And the descendants of Warren G. Harding are doing the happy dance because he’s no longer hogging the position of worst President in US history.

Okay—one more positive; for reals. Throughout her campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton has shown remarkable grace, strength, determination, focus and resiliency. Yes—mistakes, slips, bad days. But on the whole she absorbed more unfounded abuse, vilification and revolting accusations than any human should have to take, and she never faltered. The next woman to run for President will have a much smoother path because Clinton blunted the edge of this misogynistic rage and terror. God bless her.