Open Eyes, Insert Icepick

Imagine for a moment that you’re a member of a political party – let’s call it the Good Party – and you’ve been in power for eight years, led by an elegant and sophisticated President who has done many great and wonderful things. Now it’s election season, and the Good Party has put up as its candidate a woman with vast amounts of political experience, though she admittedly lacks the charm and charisma of the sitting POTUS. Still, all she has to do to continue the Good Party’s legacy of doing great and wonderful things is to beat the candidate of the opposing political party – let’s call it the Bad Party – which wants to do trivial and awful things, so it goes without saying it must be defeated.

Happily, the Bad Party has nominated a complete oaf as their standard bearer. He is rich, loud, and stupid. He’s a braggart. He has weird hair. And, most appalling and revealing of all, he comes out of the gate filled with hatred and invective against Muslims and Mexicans and all things foreign. Such a terrible human being MUST be defeated, and because of his obvious shortcomings, that should be a fairly easy task.

Then the unthinkable happens. Against all odds, the Bad Party’s candidate wins the general election. As a member of the Good Party, you ask yourself how this could have happened. And the answer is self-evident: he must have cheated.

In fact, it’s the ONLY possible explanation. It couldn’t be because the Bad candidate outworked and out-thought and out-maneuvered the Good candidate. It couldn’t be because he spent far less money, because the party that spends the most money almost always wins elections. It couldn’t be because he had a message that resonated with voters, unless they were as stupid and awful as he was, which a lot of them were, but not all of them, like college educated white women, who, for unfathomable reasons, voted for the oaf and not the history-making female. It couldn’t be because a vast number of Americans were just sick and tired of being looked down at by the smugly complacent media elites who openly rooted for the Good Party and called the Bad Party candidate and his supporters every unflattering name in the book. And it couldn’t be because this totally unqualified Bad Party candidate outlined a clear plan of what he wanted to do if he won, because the stupid and bigoted morons who make up the Bad Party base don’t understand or care about the nuances of policy-making, so busy are they swilling crappy domestic beer, shooting off guns, and having sex with barnyard animals.  

So The Big Orange Clown Douchebag must have cheated. (That’s the ticket. And if he didn’t actually cheat, he probably wanted to. That’s the kind of disgusting person he is.) So let’s follow the logic. Cheating usually implies an act that’s also criminal, so we now have a criminal occupying the White House, which is very very bad for the Republic. The exact nature of his criminality can’t yet be known in any great detail, but we know that it exists, somewhere – an intercepted phone call… “Vlad, this is Jered Kushner, calling with an interesting proposition from the President Elect”… or maybe photographs of the President Elect’s daughter talking to a Russian nanny… or… something. Evidence of criminal activity must exist, and if we can’t find any actual evidence of wrongdoing, it’s not because it doesn’t exist. It’s because we haven’t looked hard enough.

So… what to do about it? A man that you KNOW, deep in your heart, is a criminal and quite possibly insane, is inaugurated. And that’s unacceptable. That cannot stand.  He’s not your President. He’s illegitimate, a make-believe “President” who must be stopped before it’s too late.

RESIST! RESIST! RESIST! Those are the fighting words that make the rounds in your pea-sized brain. Resist, because you have no ideas. Resist, because you have no Good Party candidates sitting on the bench who might stand a chance in the next election. Resist, because being more virtuous than thou is the sine que non of the Progressive identity. Resist, with your ironic pink pussy hats and your marches, and if a couple of store windows get broken, it’s completely understandable, because the horrid new “President” is such a polarizing figure he evokes hatred even in the purest of hearts.

Perhaps you hoped that all that marching and protesting and resisting would cause the “President” to reconsider, to realize he was in way over his head and resign, you know, for the good of the country. But of course he didn’t do that, because he doesn’t care about the country. He only cares about himself.

Fortunately, the Constitution gives you a way to get rid of a big fat stupid liar misogynist pig “President” who doesn’t care about the country and only cares about himself. It’s called IMPEACHMENT. With the Bad Party now in control of both Houses of Congress, impeaching the “President” will be difficult, but not impossible. If the electorate can be convinced the “President” is an incompetent boob, being investigated for colluding with the Russians to throw the election in his favor; if the media continues to examine every single POTUS misstep – and there will be many – with the intensity of Watergate or the Warren Commission; if every news show on the fake “President” lards every story on his actions with words like blunder, bungle, blooper, botch, gaffe, treason, collusion, conspiracy, Russia, racist, impeachment, chaos, lies, failure, fiasco, impeachment, white supremacy, amateur, Putin, impeachment; if every executive appointment is slow-walked; if every legislative proposal put forward by the Bad Party is ridiculed and lied about and obstructed; if every success is ignored or impugned; if all this can be accomplished without ever resorting to actual facts or evidence, maybe you’re on to something.

Maybe you can break away a fraction of the drooling illiterate Red State dopes who voted for the Bad Party and convince them to vote for the Good Party by sheer repetition of unsubstantiated and ultimately trivial charges. Maybe by pointing to falling poll numbers you can unnerve a dozen Bad Party congressmen and a half-dozen senators into voting for articles of impeachment, and get rid of the fake “President” in a constitutional way.

And if that doesn’t work, there’s always rioting and looting and stamping your feet, holding your breath, and shooting the occasional Bad Party Congressman.

Because, you know, love trumps hate.