November 18

               Facebook friends, since the early morning hours of Nov. 9 The Jourmudgeon has been inundated with questions about the impact of the Presidential election. They have ranged from “Whither (or maybe it was “Wither”) journalism?” to “Did you drink all the shiraz?” The Jourmudgeon answers as follows: 1) The Jourmudgeon does not know. 2) The Jourmudgeon does not remember.
Here is a sampling of other questions to The Jourmudgeon, and The Jourmudgeon’s answers:

1. Q: Sixty-one million people voted for Hillary Clinton. She got a million more votes than Donald Trump. How could she have lost?
A: They were the wrong 61 million people.
2. Q: Seriously?
A: Yes. Donald Trump won what is called the Electoral College vote. You see, Presidential elections in the United States are actually decided by the Electoral College, an online, for-profit diploma mill owned by Trump that is being sued for – excuse The Jourmudgeon. For a moment there, The Jourmudgeon got his colleges confused. The Electoral College was established by the Founding Fathers to prevent an unstable demagogue with orangutan hair being elected President by a deluded and angry rabble. Thank goodness for the foresight of the Founding Fathers. (The Jourmudgeon thanks his spouse, who was born a British subject, for this cogent explanation.)
3. Q: Nice work, spouse. Is that all?
A: Not entirely. The faculty of the Electoral College also doesn’t like people from New York, most of New England, California, Oregon and Washington. Also, a lot of Republican women who said they were disgusted by Donald Trump and would vote for Hillary Clinton lied. Trump won 53 percent of the vote from all white women. Also, in the Midwest alone, more than 215 counties that voted for President Obama in 2012 voted for Trump in 2016.
And another several million Democrats who were all fired up to vote for Clinton decided that they had something more pressing to do on Election Day, like sitting around looking at posts from other Democrats on Facebook congratulating each other because Clinton was going to win. (For a more cogent analysis of the election, and its expected aftermath, see https://medium.com/…/an-analysis-of-donald-trumps-election-….)
4. Q: Is there any significance to the fact that the Democrats have won the popular vote in the most recent, oh, 897 of 898 Presidential elections?
A: Not really. You see, while Democrats were busy congratulating themselves, or marching around protesting when things didn’t go their way, or dropping out of the Electoral College, Republicans were quietly (The Jourmudgeon hates sports clichés in politics, but what the hell. Also, the Cubs won the World Series) building a ground game and a farm system and a deep bench. This means they got themselves elected to majorities in most state legislatures, won most governorships, swept to control of both houses of Congress, and, perhaps most importantly, by dint of their victories were able to gerrymander legislative districts to ensure they would win all those elections for the foreseeable future. So now they will control all three branches of government at both the national and, in most cases, the state level. And while the Republican rank and file turned out for all those elections, Democrats were stroking themselves for winning the popular vote in Presidential elections and ignoring all those other voting opportunities.
5. Q: But how did the Republicans reach out to all those hearts and minds?
A: They saw the potential for using talk radio and cable television to motivate older, white, suburban, rural and working-class Americans while Democrats were falling in love with the internet and apps and ignoring what their former constituencies were still paying the most attention to.
6. Q: Was there a single overarching key to the success of that powerful multifaceted strategy for Republicans?
A: Yes. They voted.
7. Q: They are pretty savvy, those Republicans. Have the Democrats managed to accomplish anything as impressive as voting, meanwhile?
A: Yes — not voting. By not voting at all levels, Democrats most likely have ensured that conservatives will dominate the Supreme Court for at least the next quarter century. Along the way, they even managed to make Mitch McConnell look smart, which not even most Republicans thought was possible.
8. Q: I thought Donald Trump had alienated the Republican leadership.
A: Yeah, right. Trump got 90 percent of Republican rank and file voters. Their leaders can count.
9. Q: I found President-elect Trump’s victory speech very encouraging, as he called
for unity and said he looked forward to being president for all Americans. Are there signs that he really meant that?
A: Absolutely. For instance, he has named as one of his two top White House advisors the faux-media mogul Stephen Bannon. Bannon’s appointment won the enthusiastic endorsement of constituencies as diverse as the American Nazi Party and David Duke, the former Grand Exhausted Rooster of the Ku Klux Klan. And if you need more evidence, Mr. Bannon’s olive-branch gestures to the opposition over the years include referring to left-leaning women as “a bunch of dykes.” Also, in the year that Trump has been campaigning, much of it under the tutelage of Mr. Bannon, the number of hate crimes reported to the FBI has gone up sharply. So you can see how earnest Mr. Trump is about tolerance.
10. Q: I have heard some disturbing things about the potential for Mr. Trump’s myriad business ventures to cause conflicts of interest with his duties to the American people as President. Are my fears groundless?
A: Entirely. Those rumors have been perpetrated by unfair liberal news media that are grumpy because, unlike virtually every other major presidential candidate for the past four decades, President-elect Trump has refused to release his income tax returns. The definitive reassurance in this matter comes from the eminently sensible former mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani: “Trust him.”
11. Q: But isn’t trusting Mr. Trump a tall order, given all the lies he told during the campaign? And now that he is already backing off some of his campaign promises, won’t the people who voted for him start to question his veracity?
A: Absolutely not. Lying to the news media, it turns out, doesn’t count. That just makes him smart. And his supporters knew all along he didn’t mean any of it.
12. Q: Then why did they vote for him in the first place?
A: He wasn’t Hillary Clinton.
13. Q: Can I try my question about journalism again? I mean, has anyone in the news media set an appropriate example for how we should respond to Mr. Trump’s election?
A: Yes. Gwen Ifill. http://www.nytimes.com/…/the-life-and-example-of-gwen-ifill…