Less Profanity About the Election

I stand by the Muslims, the Mexicans, the immigrants, the Jewish, and everyone else who Trump demonized this year in his race for the White House.

I do fear that Trump will genuinely work to make life worse for some of these people, and I will stand by you, even if it's only in what I write and how I act in my day-to-day interactions with you.

I also stand by the people who voted for Trump because they've been left behind by global shifts in the economy and they genuinely think he can make a difference.

I do fear that he's a liar and that he's not going to do a thing to help the poor and the non-college-educated that supported him, that he'll actually make life worse with trade barriers while offering a facade of support through attacking "the other". I'd love to be proven wrong, but if I'm not I hope you'll remember what Trump said he would do for the economy and for the working class ... and measure it against what actually happens.

5 Things I'm Already Sick Of

1. Democrats Saying that Someone Else Would Have Won

I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary, but here's the thing: you have no idea whether Bernie Sanders would have outperformed Hillary Clinton or whether Joe Biden would have or whoever. None. It's an impossible hypothesis to prove because there's insufficient data. We don't know how the states would have broken differently, we don't know how they would have performed in the debates, we don't know what dirty laundry would have come out. We don't know how the general voting population would have reacted to a self-avowed socialist or how they would have contrasted a pugilistic Democrat with Donald.

All we do know is that no one else who actually wanted to run was able to earn enough votes among Democrats to win, and that's not a good argument for being able to do so in the general population.

So, shut up and move forward.

2. People Saying that 538 Should Retire

The pollsters definitely have some 'splained to do because they sucked. The thing is, they weren't off by much at the national level. Final national averages had Hilary at +3% and Upshot is still saying +1.3%. A 2% polling difference is well within the realms of reasonable margin of error and well within the historical margin of error.

Where pollsters utterly failed is at state level polls.

Where aggregators utterly failed is in understanding that Clinton's coalition was inefficiently distributed across the states.

Oh wait, there's one site that didn't: 538. They talked about Clinton's electoral weakness many a time, and said it could easily cost her the election if things dropped to 2% or worse. And there's one site that was giving Donald a one-thirds chance of winning until the day before the election (when it dropped to one-quarter). That's 538 too.

But there are a lot of morons out there who don't seem to understand that a 1 in 3 or a 1 in 4 odd is actually pretty likely. That it means it should come up every three or four elections. And it did.

538 got it right all around.

Now Princeton Election Consortium, the Dailykos, and some other sites that had the odds in 90%+ range for most of the last weeks. They got some 'splaining to do too.

3. People Saying that the Majority of Americans Have Spoken

Yes, Trump won by the rules of the game that Trump and Clinton agreed to before the contest started. (Well, except for the fact that Trump secretly had the FBI and the Russian gov't working for him.)

But don't pretend he has a mandate. And definitely don't claim that the majority of Americans or even the majority of voters spoke.

Well, they did, but they said they wanted Hillary.

She absolutely won the national vote count. Current numbers say by about .2%, while Upshot's calculations say 1.3% when everything comes in.

In other words, Trump's vast mandate is 18% of the population, or a losing minority of about 47% of the vote.

4. Media Not Doing Their Job

The media pretty much made President Trump. Congratulations, take a bow. And it's because they've become entertainment, not the news. Which is a damned shame, because that's not why the gov't gives airwaves to networks. We do it because they promise to practice journalism, not the pablum they're doling out now.

But they treated Donald like entertainment, airing every irreverent breath he took during the primaries.

Then they balanced him with false equivalency, acting like he and Hilary (or any sane politician) were the same.

Then they whored after their ratings by describing a horse race even when there wasn't one.

Meanwhile they breathlessly did the work of the FBI and the Russian Government, making up stories about stolen emails, even though any one's emails could make them look bad, then horribly misreporting the FBI's claims about their investigation.

Real journalists would have put the truth above ratings. They would have investigated. They would have said it like it was. They wouldn't have been tricked en masse by criminals in our government and in the former Soviet Union.

There were moments of light in this year's media coverage, when the so-called journalists seemed to realize that their horrible malfeasance might elect an insane idiot to the White House. But they flickered out the next time some tainted raw meat was dangled in front of them, and all their supposed ethics and supposed competence went right out the window.

Kurt Eichenwald of Newsweek is excepted from this diatribe. He seemed to be the only one doing his job, but no one cared. Also that guy who found the pussy tape (but not CBS who tried to hold it back).

5. Deplorables Acting Empowered

The worse thing about the Trump campaign is that it empowered the people that Clinton unartfully called deplorables. Let's be more clear and state who they are: KKK Members. Antisemites. True Bigots. Gamer-Taters. PUAs. Other Misogynists. Transophobes. Homophobes. Islamiphobes.

We've seen it spill out into classrooms and into communities and I'm truly, truly sick of it.

I'm hopeful that Donald will leave these deplorables at the altar now that he doesn't need their vote any more. Because that's his modus operandi. I think He is truly an Islamiphobe, that he was broken by 9/11. But I don't think he's most of those other things.

So I hope they'll wither away in the light of indifference now that he's had his way with them.