Danation: It’s Morning in America, Goddamn It
Photo by Jonathan Hinkle via flickr.com.
To the Tea Party, and everyone else who pulled the Republican Party so far to the right that it was barely recognizable even to its own extremely conservative base: Thank you, you backwards, noxious masses. You crazy-ass swine, you degenerate yahoos, you made this happen, and I love you. Because of your incredibly atavistic, utterly wrongheaded bullshit, you have guaranteed Barack Obama another term in office. Your dumbassed insistence that government should keep its hands off Medicare has now insured that the man you believe is a fascist communist Kenyan will now be president for four more years.
Of course, it’s more than just a bunch of swirly eyed, snake-handling simians that made this happen. It’s also you. And by you, I mean the fuzzy-headed, vaguely lefty folks who read this site and believe mostly in Barack Obama despite a lot of the misgivings you may have. You fought and you bled and you sweated and your man won because he was the better man. And, really, this should not have even been close. The fact that it was is entirely because of the amount of god-damned Tea Party cranks in this country and the fabulously wealthy donors behind them, few of whom have any idea what living in a republic actually means. You want a country based on narrowly defined religious views, move to Iran. (I realize it’s a long-term criticism from the left that the right is constantly telling them to move to China or something, and thus this is hypocritical, but I really don’t care at this point. These teabag-dangling jagoffs broke America with their intransigence, and they deserve every goddamn flogging I and everyone else on the planet can give them.)
For those of us who remain in America rather than adopt to our new Iranian homeland, last night was an unqualified success for the Democrats. Let’s look at some numbers.
First, I put up a post yesterday in which I said Obama would win 290 electoral votes to Romney’s 248, that the Senate would remain the same, and that the House would remain in Republican hands, but with seven Democratic pickups, making it 200 to 238.
Instead, Obama won with at least 303 electoral votes and will probably have 332 when all is said and done, as Florida has not yet been called. Obama leads here by about 46,000 votes out of 8 million cast. In the Senate, the Dems had 53 seats including two independents that caucus with the Democrats. Now, they have 53, including two independents. At least, that’s the most likely scenario. Maine’s newly minted Sen. Angus King has not said who he’ll side with, but he did admit that he voted for Obama. So, the Senate seems to have worked out pretty much exactly as I thought — except that two races remain undecided. Montana and North Dakota are still up in the air at this hour, but Democrats Jon Tester and Heidi Heitkamp are both in the lead. All precincts have reported in North Dakota, but Heitkamp is leading by less than one percent of the vote, and Republican Rick Berg has refused to concede. In Montana, Tester’s ahead, but the votes haven’t even all been counted. But if both of those Dems win, it’ll be 55-45 in the Senate.
Over in the House, there are still 15 races that don’t have an official winner. The count now stands at 191 Democrats to 232 Republicans, so my prediction of 200 Democrats in the House could still come true, especially since the Democrats are ahead in at least nine of those 15 races.
So, overall, I appear to have been pretty close to right yesterday, and if anything I wasn’t generous enough to the Democrats. That was true not only in races around the country, but here in Florida as well. In a post a few days ago, I wrote that there are 60 state and federal legislative seats up for grabs in South Florida, but that only six are worth talking about. And looking at those six races, I was less than sanguine about Democratic chances. But Democrats won all six of those races. Joe Garcia beat David Rivera, who really has better things to worry about than running for office, like criminal investigations directed at him. Lois Frankel beat Adam Hasner in perhaps the most gimme of all six of these races for the Democrats. And finally on the federal level, it appears as though Patrick Murphy has beaten deeply paranoid egomaniac Allen West. My former congressman’s reign of terror is over, for now. Perhaps now that he’s failed in Martin County, he can take his act on the road, find some even-more-conservative district somewhere else in the country and run there. Why not? He’s always been more a celebrity than a lawmaker and could probably get elected from any extremely conservative district in the country. Whatever. As long as he stays the hell out of my district.
Maria Sachs won the only competitive state Senate seat in the state. Gwen Margolis shocked no one by winning a quite Democratic district over a well-funded Republican competitor. And finally, the biggest surprise of the night went to the state Legislature, where rookie politician Jose Javier Rodriguez knocked off Alex Diaz de la Portilla, one of the biggest names in the history of the Miami-Dade GOP. The only other major shock in the South Florida state Legislature was the fact that Ross Hancock lost to incumbent Republican Erik Fresen by just 1,127 votes out of 57,971 cast. No one expected that race to be close, least of all me.
So, great night for the Democrats, right? Unfortunately, though, what we got from last night’s election was the status quo. Obama is still in the White House, the U.S. Senate is still barely Democratic, the U.S. House is still Republican, and the state Legislature and Senate are still dominated by far-right ideologues.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
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