Vee

Oh lord. That'll be a barn burner. I wonder if they'll keep mistaking Paul Rauch for Linda Gottlieb like they did in Jeff Giles' oral history, where they credited Rauch for their amazing work together. He'd been fired by the time they were paired, IIRC.

You know I'm not interested in putting you on ignore. But I don't think it's too much to ask that we acknowledge the victory we have. There are a lot of people who've worked very hard and will still have to work hard, but who accomplished a pretty impressive victory despite everything we've all been through and are still going through, and that gives us a path to a much better future than the alternative. That all counts for a lot. If we'd lost to Trump then I'd have a lot more time for statements like 'the country is dead.' No, the country just proved it isn't. And it doesn't mean we're sweeping the real future challenges and heartaches under the rug to acknowledge that and have some hope for tomorrow.

Obama states what we all already knew:

Non-positive thoughts are one thing. God knows we've all been enduring them for years. But I'm sorry, saying this country is 'all but dead' when we just won an election pretty handily in spite of the racist, ignorant segment of the country that has always been with us - it didn't just spring up in the last week, or the last four years, so what they're doing now is no surprise - is just not accurate. The country just showed us the exact opposite of that statement. Our country actually has a verifiable future path now. I am able to white-knuckle through my hours, days, weeks and months a few less than I could five days ago. We have an incoming administration that can act on things in a positive way despite limitations (as Biden's new climate plan indicates, among other things) and that counts for a great deal. You know I care about you Carl, but I am not the first person here to call you recently on this sort of stuff. It's one thing to struggle with what we live with. It's another to give into despair in the face of reality. We won and I'm not here to pretend we lost and give up. We have too much work to do.

This is neither accurate nor what any of us need to hear after winning an election with a commanding result.

It's not going to happen, lol.

Caveat: The Daily Mail.

On the LGBTQ tip, this is something I suspect is largely relevant to the white posters among us but still something to discuss and something I've been pondering while lurking in certain dark corners of the Internet over the last few days for schadenfreude: The amount of increasingly earnest sounding posts at various right-wing Trumpist cesspools from cis/hetero young men saying they've been holding back wanting to transition or come out of the closet over the last four years and "suppressed it" bc they thought Trump would make America great again and help them overcome, and now they want to surrender the fight, is truly unusual. It's not all trolling - there's a real psychosexual/identity complex for some of these very shut-in young men. It's not an excuse for their behavior I would ever personally accept or tolerate. But it seems like Trumpism became a convenient cloak and denial mechanism for some struggling young people, and I am not the only one who's noticed this in the last few days. I await the first deep dive into it. Trumpist culture (which IMO cannot and will not replicated with another GOPer, because none of them have the longstanding media/popcult appeal of Trump) crossed party and racial/social lines, including to some of the Latino vote or two disaffected swing voting idiots. It reached red state or overcompensating (or both) questioning young men. It consumed everything.

Journo Twitter is getting a lot of pushback/ratio on this love letter to Haberman, the 2010s answer to Judy Miller. This excerpt seems sociopathic to me.