Unidentified NOAA photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
As a girl needs her beauty sleep, I declined my father’s invitation to stay up through the wee hours to watch the midterm results. Given the five-hour time difference with New York, I figured it was better to wait until there was conclusive evidence of a trend.
The day before the election, Dad and I made two €10 bets: one on the House, the other on the Senate. Whoever came closer to the results would win the bets. I predicted that the Democrats would win the House with a 10-seat margin; Dad bet on 30 seats. As for the Senate, I was certain the Democrats would gain only two seats (North Carolina and Kansas) and fall short of wresting control from the GOP. Dad was equally certain the Dems would flip seven seats and maybe ten.
“Dad, there’s no way Americans are going to elect a Muslim senator, and it’s unlikely they would elect a gay senator. With all the money the Muskrat poured into the other red states, I don’t see how the Democrats can pull it off. Trump’s hand-picked toadies nearly always win!”
“Not this time, Sunshine—just wait and see. It’s going to be 1966 all over again, but this time it’ll be the GOP that takes a whacking.”
I woke up the next morning, skipped my usual coffee and cigarette, and headed straight for my computer. When I opened the New York Times homepage and saw that the Democrats were crushing it, I screamed at the top of my lungs, triggering Alicia to wake up and see if a banshee had decided it was time for me to croak off. “Look at all that blue!” I explained, and she let out a scream of her own. We spent the morning watching the returns roll in, and by early afternoon, it was obvious that for the first time in my life, I had lost a bet I made with my “born to lose” father—and I couldn’t have been happier.
Well, it turns out that I did get happier after realizing that the Muskrat had pissed away about half a billion bucks and that both of his companies were getting hammered in the stock market. LOSER!
Though capturing both houses of Congress is a big step in the right direction, voters should not expect immediate improvements. The Executive branch will be led for another two years by a demented, hateful, and thoroughly incompetent president who presides over an administration of demented, hateful, and thoroughly incompetent appointees. Voldemort has already doubled down on his belief in white supremacy by making Hitlerite Stephen Miller his Chief of Staff, an appointment that should scare the shit out of all non-whites, legal immigrants, gays, and disabled citizens. There aren’t enough Democrats in either chamber to override presidential vetoes or defund ICE, but the veto power should not deter the Democrats from passing bills designed to keep their promises to lower health care premiums, gas prices, and grocery bills while asserting the exclusive constitutional right of Congress to impose taxes and define tariffs to improve affordability. If the GOP fails to support those efforts or Voldemort vetoes those bills, voters will remember that in 2028, but it’s going to be a rough ride until then.
The Democrats have already made one mistake by warning members of the Executive branch to “lawyer up.” One of the lessons of the midterms is that the populace is sick and tired of divisiveness and yearns for bipartisan collaboration. They might be able to work with lame-duck Republican Senator Thomas Massie, who wants to bring impeachment charges against macho dickhead Pete Hegseth, but they should let the GOP take the lead in eating one of their own. Corruption investigations are indeed necessary, but Hakeem Jeffries will need to take the temperature of GOP reps before calling hearings. Any move that feels like the Dems are taking revenge will wreck their credibility.
The real danger is in the area of foreign relations. Voldemort has cast his lot with Putin, making a European war much more likely. He agreed with his dummy of a vice-president that the war with Iran cost them the midterms, but then said, “At the same time, if I had to do it again, I’d have to do it again. You can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”
Had the Democrats lost the midterms, I would have given up on the United States, completed my study of post-WWII music and reinstituted the American Boycott. At last, there is a ray of hope for the land of my birth—and thanks to a European country that is falling apart at the seams, I was inspired to make a major addition to my study of American music.
The news from France has been pretty fucking bad the last few months, so I’m happy to report that at least a sliver of the population experienced an evening of hope and togetherness on October 15, when Stevie Wonder played Songs in the Key of Life and a few other compositions to a packed house in Paris. Bruno Lesprit of Le Monde wrote a rave review of the concert and the album, describing the latter as “a masterpiece by a genius.” After reading that article, I decided that if the Yanks pulled off the miracle, I would review five albums from Stevie’s “classic period” and give him a spot on the menu bar. In preparation for that effort, I took my review of Innervisions offline because it was a piece of crap written in my early days and did not do Stevie or the album justice. The first Stevie review should appear in a few weeks.
In closing, I asked my father to select a song that fit this moment in American history. He thought about it for a minute, and remembered Senator-elect James Talarico’s victory speech, where he spoke about the importance of love. “People might think this is hippie silliness, but it’s exactly what they need to hear right now if we’re going to save this country.”
I think Dad nailed it.
Gotta love that big blue wave. Or maybe it should have been a tsunami. Now that is what’s called a landslide. However, unless the two houses band together to get rid of Turdfinger I don’t think things will change all that much as long as he can veto anything he doesn’t like. I am hoping that this silly tariff fiasco with my country ends soon as it’s doing no-one any good although I do think it’s made Canada realize that we can’t rely on the U.S. as much as we have in the past and that we need to look elsewhere. Prime Minster Carney is absolutely right on that count. (Now that is what a real leader looks like.) Having said all that I am very happy to know that the American people are not the easily led sheep that Trump and his lackeys imagine them to be.
As a side note, I was not able to comment on your Bruce Springsteen entry for some reason but if it’s available to you in Ireland his tour ending Philadelphia show is available in four parts on Youtube.
Maybe we can all sleep just a little bit easier now.
Wow. I think I have only heard this masterpiece in monoaural before. So cool to hear it in stereo, although I have fondness for the monoaural version. With monoaural, the vocals are in one speaker, the band/instrumentation in the other. This takes the emphasis off of the vocals, and presents the song as a “cooperation” between the singer and the band, which in a way is the actuality of a song when performed in public.
I have mixed feelings about the events of Tuesday evening.
Yes, the Republicans deserved to have their asses kicked. I was particularly delighted at Vivek Ramaswamy losing to Amy Acton in the Ohio gubernatorial race given the ad he ran using Acton’s estranged mother, a woman who had side with her daughter’s rapist and had not spoken with Acton in half a century.
I was also delighted at Keisha Lance Bottoms being elected Governor of Georgia. I’ve admired her for years and she was Atlanta’s mayor when I briefly lived there. That an African American woman has not been elected Governor before Tuesday night is a crying shame. Indeed, prior to Tuesday night, only four African Americans had ever been elected as governors – Douglas Wilder in Virginia, Deval Patrick here in Massachusetts, David Patterson in New York and Wes Moore in Maryland. With Moore’s re-election, joining him are Bottoms in Georgia, Byron Donalds in Florida, David Crowley in Wisconsin & Aaron Ford in Nevada. Yes, Donalds is MAGA and will probably be a continuation of Ron DeSantis. Still, the fact the number of African American Governors doubled in a single night is noteworthy.
I do look forward to the possibility of Lauren Boebert losing her congressional seat in Colorado and to the possibility of Democrat Scott Colum ousting Cindy Hyde-Smith (or Cindy High Prices as he likes to call her) from the Senate….in Mississippi.
Yet I am also appalled at the election of Abdul El-Sayed to the Senate in Michigan, Darializa Avila Chevalier to the House in NY & Nithya Raman as Mayor of LA. All of them are raging anti-Semites & the Democratic Party is legitimizing anti-Semitism as an acceptable form of political discourse. El-Sayed excused the terrorist attack against a Michigan synagogue while Chevalier took part in the pro-Hamas demonstration in Times Square the day after October 7th. Most Democrats are content to look the other way. Of course, Republicans aren’t much better where it concerns anti-Semitism. JD Vance eagerly blamed Republican losses on his party’s support for Israel while never mentioning tariffs.
I concur with you where it concerns Trump’s appointment of Stephen Miller as White House Chief of Staff. Too many people think Trump & Trumpism are done. The fact that Trump has appointed Miller tells me he is going to accelerate his war on Americans with help from his goons in ICE.
Change needed to come. But I have my doubts if it will be change for the better.
I will never understand anti-semitism. The Jewish people have made significant contributions to humanity in every field—the arts, sciences, everything—and they still take a lot of crap. Some progressives have a hard time distinguishing between the Jewish people and the current administration and forget that Israel has always been surrounded by enemies who would love to destroy them. They forget that the Hamas Covenant calls for the destruction of Israel, and for fuck’s sake, Israel has the right to defend itself. I do not approve of Netanyahu’s aggressive posturing and the unnecessary killing of children, but Hamas shares equal blame for those tragedies by placing them in harm’s way. Chuck Schumer seems to be one of the few Democrats who support Israel’s defense needs while criticizing Netanyahu, and of course, the progressives want to get rid of him. Have they ever heard of diplomacy and dialogue? You can’t change policies through demonization.
Thank you for this, ARC. I agree with every one of your sentiments. We need to enforce the rule of law (obviously), but a be lot of folks don’t want to focus on trials and impeachments just yet. Here’s hoping that the Democrats tread intelligently…and that AOC runs for the top spot in’28…psyched to read the Stevie reviews!