Simon and Garfunkel nailed it over 50 years ago: “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

Since the election, we’ve endured a day-by-day litany of wackos, cranks, and sex-offenders nominated (by a wacko, crank sex-offender) for cabinet positions. During commercial breaks, ACLU television ads begin with a maudlin rendition of “We Shall Overcome,” and I want to hit the mute button. How do you overcome something that has just made a comeback from having been overcome? “Overcome” is in the past, folks. Overcame R US.

Face it: Over half the electorate will believe anything that reinforces what they want to believe. So if the guy and party and news source that fan their flames say it’s a landslide, it’s a landslide.

In truth, it was a landslide. Not for one side, but for non-voters, 38% of eligible voters compared to 31% and 30% for the two major party candidates.

Here’s how my friend Helen Highwater, editor of the Saint Volcano Fallout, a monthly mag that covers the Pacific Northwest, put it:

Voters did not simply vote for Trump. Millions (compared to 2020) simply stayed away. The war in Gaza, I think, drove voters away from Harris, away from voting at all, despite the math that made their absence a factor in electing Grump (deliberate sic). Discussion of this topic, in today’s vocabulary, has been “canceled,” due to its confused association with charges of anti-Semitism. In other words, this topic is too fraught with complications for public discussion.

Harris also apparently confused Dem-leaning voters by traveling with Liz Cheney. Could Harris have let Cheney endorse her without the appearance of an embrace?

Change Gaza, Harris, and anti-Semitism to Vietnam, Humphrey, and Communism and she is describing 1968. Back then, though, Republican VP candidate and Maryland governor Spiro Agnew seemed the only clown, and a mean one at that. Now it’s from the top down: DT, JDV, RFK, Musk, Gaetz, Gabbard, Noem, Stephanik, Oz, and who knows what flame-throwers are yet to come?

She’s not alone in emphasizing the tour with Cheney as a bad move. Jon Stewart did the same on the Daily Show, which led me to regard it as the logical culmination of the Democratic Party’s bent on out-Republicaning the Republicans that began with the rise of the Clintons, plural, in 1992.

When I sent that to her, she responded:

Some Senate Rs are daring to pose questions about these jokers, but I can’t picture them denying whatever Grump (again) wants. I dread that will include RFK Jr for HHS. The next 4 years will make 45 look like a park ranger, as 47 proceeds with divine retribution, baby.

What she dreaded became true before I read the email. I offered possible explanations: 1) Rs in change of Sen & House might simply go on recess and let all DT’s fruitcakes take over, uncontested & unchecked. 2) Let congress stop the fruitcakes, then send up the serious, tactical flame-throwers. And 3) Many Ds & wanna-be moderate Rs (Murkowski, Collins, perhaps Thune) will think they can only vote against one, so they’ll nail one (Gaetz or Gabbard, possibly both) and the rest will skate. (Since that missive, Gaetz made it a bit easier for them by his withdrawal.)

As for the rest, I added, even if they screw up their attempt to end all public services and privatize everything, I don’t see how the environment will survive four years of a kakistocracy bent on serving themselves and their corporate donors. I told her of the brush fires here in the northeast corner of Massachusetts and how three of my days in Salem’s witch-trial reenactments were canceled:

So I can now put a price tag on what climate change has cost me. All while we are about to see the erasure of the EPA & NOAA, as well as a US/Russian assault on the Arctic under the banner of Drill, Baby, Drill!

Prediction: Trump will broker peace between Zelenskyy and Putin. Ukraine will keep all its land, but will stay out of NATO, with Russian citizens living in Ukraine symbolically having some rights guaranteed for Putin to save face. DT will be hailed as a miracle peacemaker, and Ukraine will be relieved and happy. Putin? He’ll start sending ships with drills into the Arctic which will be made entirely open to him.

Access to the Arctic was the primary reason for Russian interference in the 2016 election. It was mostly aimed at Hillary Clinton because any Republican would have opened it to Exxon-Mobil, and Exxon-Mobil already had a partnership with Rosneft. With Trump they struck it rich. This is why, for his first Secretary of State, Trump “selected” Rex Tillerson even though he didn’t know him. Tillerson was the CEO of Exxon-Mobil, well-known to the oligarchs in Russia, a place once described by John McCain as “a gas station masquerading as a country.”

The time between the peace accord for Ukraine and Russian drilling in the Arctic will be enough that the American public won’t make the connection, will refuse to believe there is a connection, or in most cases just won’t care.

Highwater joked that what’s left by a melted Arctic might be named for her, and then she drilled into the method behind the madness:

I’ve been thinking the election explanation is more haze than belief… DT emits haze, continually contradicting himself from moment to moment.

And his followers either do not notice or do not care. Worse, they do it themselves. Case in point: Fox “News” hosts praising Kennedy’s talk of America having a more healthy diet were the same people ridiculing Michelle Obama’s initiative for nutritious school lunches.

Now that he has won, and has raised his loyalty requirements, will he leave all gov biz to his underlings and go back to his golf clubs? How long with these loyal underlings last? If Rubio is fool enough to leave the Senate for Foggy Bottom, how long can he last?

Probably irrelevant if they can follow Project 2025’s plan to wreck the federal state. Drowning it in a bathtub has been the aim for decades.

Yes, that was 45’s intent when elected eight years ago, but he was too blundering, careless, and ignorant of how DC works. Today, 47 knows his way around and is too motivated by revenge to let anything slide. Take a look at the company he keeps, his cabinet picks, his advisors, his preferred foreign allies, and Highwater’s crack that 47 will make 45 look like a park ranger seems imminent.

Then again, I would have said “zoo keeper.” It is, after all, all happening here.

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