Election Days of Yore: 

A Retrospective of the Last 20 Years

Presidential only -- I'm not counting the mid-term elections.

 2004 -- This was the year I learned a valuable lesson -- don't listen to the echo chamber. Take any predictions with a grain of salt huge fucking barrel of salt. Huge.

I was living in my studio apartment in St. Paul and working at the temple. I was pretty psyched as Election Day approached, because I thought G-Dubs would be defeated. All my friends and coworkers seemed sure of it. They were all like, "Yeah, Kerry's got this. Let's face it, everyone is sick of this Bush/Cheney bullshit." I knew exactly one person who was voting for Dubya (a single-issue voter whose issue was Israel), and even she thought that Kerry probably had it in the bag. That's what the mood was like in Minnesota; nobody really thought Bush would get in again. 

Election Day came, and it was clear early on that Bush was ahead. I was flabbergasted. "But....but....what about the war no one wanted? The phantom WMDs? Bush is an idiot! Cheney is evil! I thought we were all on the same page? Hello?" 

I went home that day and didn't bother to turn on the news. Instead I smoked some herb and watched a DVD I'd checked out from the library, Novocaine, a black comedy starring Steve Martin as a dentist and Helena Bonham Carter basically reprising her character from Fight Club. It was a distraction. When the movie was over, I switched on PBS to see that Bush was fucking winning the election. I was beyond bummed, so I decided to watch Novocaine again. (I didn't have cable, so PBS was pretty much the only station that came in on the antennae. Needless to say, I rented a lot of DVDs back then.)

2008 -- A much better year all around. When Election Day arrived, I stopped off to vote after work, then came home. I was invited to my friend Katy's election party, so I texted and said I'd be there a little later, I just wanted to lie down first. You know how it goes, I didn't think I'd fall asleep, but I did. Two hours later I woke up, like, shit! It was dark and my windows were open, and I could hear what sounded like cheering and celebrations outside in the distance. I threw on a sweatshirt and sprinted the few blocks to Katy's. As her house came into sight, I ran up looking all wild-eyed and disheveled. There were some partygoers hanging out on her porch and I just yelled, "HEY! Did Obama win?" They responded with raised cups and "woo-hoos," and I was like, "YES!" 

The party was awesome, by the way. Katy's parties always kicked ass. After a while we all walked over to 26th and Lyndale to join a massive crowd of people who were celebrating outside Treehouse Records, holding Obama signs, cheering at cars who honked in support, and basically just looking at one another and going, "Holy shit, it's happening!" 

It's one of my favorite Minneapolis memories.  

2012 -- This election was pretty boring compared to the others. I mean, I remember the jokes and soundbites: Mitt Romney's dumb "binders of women" comment in the Presidential debate and Biden openly laughing at Paul Ryan throughout the VP debate. But other than that, it was all rather even keel. I miss uneventful elections like this one. Give us more of those, please, where we're not all out of our minds with terror. 

One notable fact--it was John's first time voting in a Presidential election (he became a citizen in 2009). So that was something. After we got home from the polls, I changed into my swimsuit and hit the pool, since we were living in Baton Rouge and it was like 85 degrees outside. 

2016 -- Oh, fuck that. Fuuuuuuck that. I'm not going there.

2020 -- I thought Trump was going to win and I refused to look at my phone or watch TV or listen to any news at all. I popped some Xanax, made a cup of Tension Tamer tea, and took to my bed, where I binged episodes of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood on YouTube for the entire day. I highly recommend this method for dealing with stress. It does help. (Xanax is optional, but Tension Tamer tea is essential.) 

And Trump LOST the election, just like he deserved. We still didn't get rid of him, but at least the fucker was out of the White House.

2024 -- Oh shit, I don't know. I'm tempted to do what I did last time: unplug my brain and spend the day in the Neighborhood of Make Believe. I did get invited to some watch parties, so I may hit those. 

Why this song? 

'Cause I dig it, baby.

To quote Morris Day in Purple Rain

"Tsk. Such nastiness."

I kind of hate to give bskillet81 any publicity for his (so awesome that it's password- protected) blog, or his--ehrm--"organization," the Christian Men's Defense Network, but I can't keep quiet about the malodorous torrent of soft-serve diarrhea he's excreted onto the interwebs on this post-election Thursday.

Today's Jezebel piece was the first I've heard of this guy, so it's safe to assume that neither he or the Christian Men Defense Network are creating much of a media storm. More like a bit of light drizzle on a pop culture feminist website. This bskillet81 (or B.S., because I refuse to type "bskillet81" again) fancies himself sort of a Nate Sliver for the right. B.S. blames Romney's loss and Obama's win on the emerging "slut" culture. Because a lot of women voted for Obama. And a lot of those women, B.S. reasons, happen to be sluts. 

Here are some of his excerpted brain droppings (again, courtesy of Jezebel): 

Women make up about 54% of the electorate.  It is very hard to win without winning that segment, or at least losing it only narrowly while winning men big. While the right usually wins married women, the fact is that married women constitute an ever-decreasing share of the female population.  Women want to delay marriage as long as possible so they can "have it all," and usually "have it all" means "have as much hot alpha sex as possible without any consequences."  And thus, less married women and more sluts.

Ooooh, there are many things I could say about this, but I think B.S. has done a pretty good job digging his own hole here. The funniest and most telling part of this paragraph is his assertion that single women are the only ones having "hot alpha sex". Is he saying married womenfolk don't engage in "hot alpha sex"? Maybe he assumes that a nice married (Christian) woman would be too busy cooking, cleaning, and taking care of her husband and chilluns to bother with a sex life, not that she would anyway because she's not a slutty sexy prostitute whore like these unmarried women intent on having as much slutty sexy alpha sex as possible. 

I know that men of his ilk think that women shouldn't even be allowed to acknowledge their private parts until marriage, that's why it makes him feel better to reason that any woman who defies this way of thinking and remains single (heathen!), actively dates (harlot!), and uses her no-no zone for something other than birthing babies (whore!) must be a "slut." In his tiny little mind this makes perfect sense. I mean, why else would an adult woman choose not to enjoy God-sanctioned holy matrimony? Because S-E-X, that's why! But when B.S. insults single women, he unwittingly insults married women, as it never occurs to these right-wing nut butts that many married women also can and do: a.) use birth control; b.) have abortions; c.) consider themselves to be feminists. 

B.S. seems to know a lot about sluts. For instance, he knows that a lot of sluts happen to be nonwhite. But B.S. isn't your average garden variety racist. In fact, he has a great deal of venom reserved for "white sluts" who--since they're sluts, of course--voted for Obama.  

....Obama appealed to white sluts by forcing someone else (the Catholic church, in this case) to pay for their birth control, and by scaring them about alleged threats to their ability to take advantage of Planned Parenthood's services (Planned Parenthood being conveniently located in the minority part of town, of course, so as to provide anonymity to visiting white girls whose white girl friends never go over there–except to visit Planned Parenthood themselves).  This created a wedge issue in the suburban community that allowed Obama to play more strongly there than he might have if the election ended up purely about the economy or the national debt.

Ah yes, the minority part of town. I love going there. I always run into my white girl friends at Planned Parenthood when I go for my annual pap smear (and maybe an abortion or two if there's time). It's great because when the doctor is finished rooting around in my downstairs parts, me and my slutty white girl friends grab handfuls of free condoms and head to the minority drinking establishment next door to celebrate our white sluttiness, preferably with a few well-endowed nonwhite minorities. Cause that's how white sluts roll.     

The right loses the female vote primarily because so many of them still operate from a feminist world-view:  Women are pure, perfect, kind, and altruistic, and the only reason they "get into trouble" is that some evil, conniving, manipulative man tricked them into sleeping with the entire football team.

"Sleeping with the entire football team"? This guy sure does watch a lot of porn, even for a Christian. And since when does the right "operate from a feminist point of view"? (Oh yeah, that Rick Santorum. Such a feminist.) AND since when does feminism mean holding up women as "pure, perfect, kind, and altruistic"? This guy has crawled so far up his own ass it's amazing he can still see to type out this ignorant bullshit.   

However, this election cycle shows that the Slut Vote is real, and Republicans lose because they discount the existence of original sin in women. 

So it's not that America fucked up when they gave women the vote. There's nothing wrong with women voting, as long as they're regular (God-fearing, Christian, married) women who will of course always vote Republican. Sluts, on the other hand? No way sluts should be allowed to vote. And I'm sure that if challenged, B.S. would be happy to devise some sort of "test" to separate the sluts from the regular women before the next election day. I mean, he'd be really, really happy to.

Because when you come right down to it, B.S. is just another guy who needs to get laid.