HBIC

Well, the corrupt left-but-not-quite-left-enough press finally did their job and stole the Democratic nomination away from Bernie Sanders and his penis. Everyone knows presidential politics are the exclusive province of peen-havers, so Hillary was always going to need a massive institutional conspiracy of secret forces* with enough influence to lever over the giant, cylindrical, bulbous-headed monolith of male political dominance. In this case, we can at least identify the Associated Press with their conveniently timed slanted coverage based on mathematics and passive-aggression** and Donald J. Trump, the greatest, most powerful, best looking, terrific-est guy pretty much ever, who also came along--super conveniently--just in time to pre-break a bunch of glass ceilings right before Hillary Clinton could swoop in and try to take credit for doing it herself, just because she's won enough delegates to secure the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Bitches, man, am I right?

Now President Obama has gotten involved and officially endorsed Hillary, doing it via a YouTube video that is frankly just designed to make me tear up. It's that kind of inclusive positivity that's been a staple of Barack Hussein Obama's particular form of witchdoctor hoodoo that made me vote for him twice and also be super depressed that he's leaving at all. You've already won, sir, what else could you possibly want from me? I will not bleed for you, sir! Well, not unless you asked directly. Or implied it strongly. Or thought it one time, like ever.

Doubt his powers of persuasion if you want to, but one meeting and even Bernie Sanders' damn-the-torpedoes rhetoric and his patented light touch of a political arsonist had softened to "we can all agree to agree that Donald Trump is a giant douche" or thereabouts. Which is a start.

I was also kind of pissed off about the AP story the day before primary voters went to the polls, but not because I felt like it screwed Sanders. I may started out slightly ambivalent about Hillary, mostly because I'm afraid of her political baggage and the automatic built-in negative reactions she's engendered over 24 years in the national political arena; but Sanders is running in the Democratic primaries as a non-Democrat, which has bugged me from the start. And his message of revolution just rings as dully impractical to my increasingly insensitive middle-aged ears. You can't man a barricade with all this tendonitis going on.

But I live in California. In California, we always vote late in the process (well, almost always). It was a chance for us to be politically relevant for once, not just an afterthought of a token campaign swing where the already-all-but-nominated candidate swings out West to sleep in the Santa Barbara guest bedroom of some old hippie who sold out and made a billion dollars in soy futures and Indonesian slaves and now buys elections as a hobby. The AP story declaring Hillary the winner came out one day before we were going to get to be the Deciders. It's like they waited as long as possible to snatch it away from us, just so it would hurt more.

I've come around on Hillary, though. Part of it was examining the roots of my skepticism, to see how much of it was sunk into some unseeable bedrock layer of doubt in women as leaders. There was probably some of that there, I'll admit, but I think I'm through most of that. I say "most" not because I'm reserving some misogyny in case I need some in an emergency, like in a particularly poorly cast season of The Bachelorette or something, but just because the perniciousness of anti-female feeling in western culture is deeply ingrained, seeping into the roots of just about everything else that grows out of it, socially speaking. Modern racism is genuinely awful and disgusting and the author of so many tragedies and alienations in this country, but one could argue that was only invented as a bullshit contrivance to separate poor white people from poor (and enslaved) black people over about 400 years. Misogyny goes back to... well, we'd probably have to check the fossil record. I'm pretty sure all the subjects of cave paintings were dudes.

I'm not nervous anymore, though. Hey, you wanna know the only person with more negatives than Hillary? It's the guy she's running against.

I guess I should look out though for what's coming. Because, according to Trump, the coalition he's building is going to be a landslide. Any day now, he's going to start dominating all across demographics of race and gender and education, even the dumb-dumbs. Look out, because he's promising that women are going to love him and the blacks and even the Hispanics. He keeps telling us that, he promises, all these folks are going to come around eventually. Which, now that we're down to just the two candidates, and the general election field is set... uh... isn't it... um... I mean, if you're going to... shouldn't you... like... now? Whatever the button is he's going to hit where people he's insulted, ignored or incited violence against are suddenly going to be so, so excited for a Trump presidency that they forget everything he's probably ever said over 35 years of public life and go "Wait, did he say NAFTA? Yeah, fuck NAFTA! Trump! Trump! Trump!"

If you heard his election night speech after California and New Jersey, you heard him attempt to relitigate the scandals of the 1990s. It read like a transcript from Keith Olbermann's first MSNBC show, back when Hillary was, you know, not the president. But leave it to Donald to decide that, even after Hillary is nominated in 2016, he'd like to make it between himself and Bill. You know, don't let the lady worry her pretty head about it.

You know, I didn't cry when she was nominated finally. It wasn't as emotional for me as it was when Obama finally clinched it, a black man running for president in a nation built on slavery. But I think the main part of it was that in 2008, it was down to either a woman or an African-American on the Democratic side. So a lot of that emotional prep work for last Tuesday had already been done. And the rest of it... yeah, probably some more of that bedrock uneasiness with women as leaders. I'm going to keep working on it. I expect in this cycle, I can at least vote my way out of it.

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*Usually this means Jews, but probably not in this case.

**Seriously, in the snarkiest move of ninja-level internet-savvy passive-aggression, it's not the headline or even the body of the AP story about the Sanders reaction to the earlier Clinton projection, it's in the URL, which says "sanders-supporters-angry-clinton-wins-sufficient-backing."