October 14

    Facebook friends, like Punxatawney Phil, The Jourmudgeon this week emerged briefly from his pre-election bunker to test the political climate. Seeing not a shadow of evidence of a functioning two-party system, The Jourmudgeon concludes that the United States faces four more weeks of unremitting shit storm. The storm is apparently being caused by a high pressure/low threshold system that exerts such soul-crushing force on individuals that the only survivors are two unsteady septuagenarians, one a highly qualified veteran of public life, but brittle, defensive and deeply flawed, the other a sociopathic, name-calling misogynist with no qualifications whatsoever. Floods of campaign sewage triggered by the shit storm plagued Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and other battleground states. To wit:

1. In the wake of two weeks of unremitting revelations that no one could have foreseen unless he or she had done fifteen minutes of research, Republican leaders expressed shock at discovering that Donald Trump, their nominee for President of the United States, was actually a liar, sexual predator, jingoist and tax dodger named Donald Trump. Some of them were so outraged they said they might not even vote for him, but then some of those acknowledged they were just kidding. Veteran Washington observers were reminded of a crisis more than four decades ago, when Republicans discovered after nearly 30 years that Richard Nixon turned out really to be Richard Nixon.
2. House Speaker Paul Ryan announced he would no longer defend Trump. That prompted observers to question why the hell he had ever defended him in the first place. But Ryan stopped short of withdrawing his endorsement of Trump. That prompted observers to wonder why the hell Ryan’s other statement made any difference.
3. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who announced in 2009 that the Republican Congressional agenda would be to undermine any legislative initiative by the nation’s first black president, did not withdraw his support for Trump. McConnell apparently learned from his crack Senate staff that, unlike the two most recent Democratic presidential candidates, Trump, at least, is a white male.
4. Russian leader Vladimir Putin, a man much admired by Donald Trump, bombed two hospitals and a humanitarian aid convoy in Syria.
5. Voters disaffected with both Trump and Hillary Clinton, many of them too young to remember the gag candidacy of Ralph Nader in 2000, continued to boost the electoral fortunes of Libertarian Gary Johnson, who thinks Aleppo is one of the Marx Brothers and that other nations, if there are any, don’t have leaders. Among other planks in Johnson’s platform sure to charm his young supporters, if they bother to check: Eliminate environmental regulation, abolish the income tax, do away with public schools and government-backed financial aid for college, and dismantle Social Security and Medicare.
6. In its own response to a series of shooting deaths of civilians by police, and police by civilians, The National Rifle Association prepared to unveil a new promotional campaign: No Lives Matter.
7. Finally, for those seeking shelter from the storm, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Journalists of a certain age lined up to ask him: “How does it feeeel? How does it feeeel?”