Well, now we live with it.

It seems we have a Republican house, and are damn close to having a Republican Senate, or at least a Senate with no clear majority. This is no real surprise, although it is a bit of a disappointment. However unrealistic, I had rather hoped for a surge of 'not gonna let it happen' from the Left. (Rand Paul? Really!? You thought this was a good idea? SRSLY!?!)

So now what? If the GOP is as uncooperative as they have promised they will be, I suppose this will be a few years in which there will be a terrific noise and bluster, and little real action. There is of course, talk of impeachment, but I hope I am not optimistic to say I think that threat has no real weight behind it. Clearly, the White House will be able to get nothing done, which is to say that it will accomplish even less than it has so far, which isn't saying much.

All in all, I'd rather have a mid-term shift than a term-end sweep. At this point, I guess the best possible thing is to hope that the Tea Party Right make such collective asses of themselves that even the mouth-breathing, slack-jawed, knuckle-dragging electorate in this country will have no choice but to show them the door for a good long time.

I just wonder what this place will look like by the time people figure out they've been had?

The Tea Party Won, America Lost

I have decided to see just how bad things are. I took the transcript of Keith Olbermann's Special Comment "If the Tea Party wins, America loses," with its laundry list of the insanity from the Tea Party, and checked it against the election results. Let's see how many of the nutjobs he mentions won their races, shall we? I bolded those who won, italicized those who did not. If the race has not been called, it's underlined with the percent up or down in parens. Remember, as you read, the people whose names are in bold are now numbered among our nation's lawmakers. I warn you, it's not a pretty picture....

( The list portion is under a cut, for those who want to preserve their belief that America makes any kind of sense at all. (And because it's long, but mostly the former) )

Olbermann closed by saying, among other things: "You are willing to let these people run this country? This is the America you want? This is the America you are willing to permit? These are the kinds of cranks, menaces, mercenaries and authoritarians you will turn this country over to?"

The answer is apparently yes. Not all the loonies made it, true. Some of the most bizarre were weeded out, true. But a lot got it. A whole lot. Over the next two years, we MUST fight to take it back, to discredit the insane Tea Party, to push these lawmakers to reveal their flaws, show their agendas. And in two years, we have to make it right. The democratic congress blew it in the last two years. And we blew it this fall. We have two years to get our shit together and make damned sure we don't blow it again.

If the Tea Party Wins, America Loses

Here's the Olbermann comment referred to in my last post: