Bad Medicine
In December 2015, my wife and I were visiting family in the South. Driving through Gulfport, Miss., we stopped for a snack. A cafe waitress told us Donald Trump had just been there. He had filled the local arena with 5,000 people and a thousand more had waited outside. “And it wasn’t even in the news,” the waitress said. “No one covered it.”
I remember thinking how peculiar it was for a fledgling presidential candidate to be visiting such a remote location, and before the primaries where he’d receive little or no news coverage.
I realized later that before the first primary election, Trump had appeared before tens of thousands of people in some of the country’s deeply rural locations, far from the glare of big-city news cameras. These were people who had rarely seen a candidate, much less a celebrity. They must have been thrilled by his attention, and were certainly the kind of people who would believe anything he told them, most of which were lies. Who would ever come through later to argue the truth? Trump was the only Medicine Show in town.
Well, the Medicine Show is over, and Trump has taken the rubes for every vote they had, just as he’s taken every other ingenuous collaborator in his illustrious life as a con artist. We’re the latest suckers. Four years? If he does everything he has promised to do, we’ll be in a deep depression and at war in the streets before the midterms. We’re in for a memorably bumpy ride.
Rohnert Park
Happy Daze
Traumatized by Tuesday’s election results, I failed to pick up the Boho until Friday. Imagine my relief! On the basis of a massive disinformation campaign probably funded by the Koch Brothers and Putin, I had incorrectly believed that He Who Cannot Be Named actually won the American presidency, with all the nukes and guns and poison gas and fracking and financial evil that entails.
But now I know the truth, thanks to the Boho! Clinton won! Yeah! I feel so much better now, thank you for having the courage to be the only newspaper on the planet to print the truth.
I do have a small favor to ask though, could you recheck your sources? I have it on good information that Jill Stein actually won, which is a far, far better outcome than, er, Clinton or You Know Who.
Petaluma
Dept. of Corrections
As we were finalizing last week’s paper Tuesday night, polls across the country had Hillary Clinton running away with the win. We believed those polls and made no secret of our support for Clinton. Our news story “Madam President” asked a number of local and national figures to express their hopes and fears for a Clinton presidency. We hedged the story a bit, but we thought she was going to win and the story reflects that. It’s not quite a “Dewey Defeats Truman,” but with an early deadline and monumentally off-the-mark polling data, we jumped the gun—or drank the Kool-Aid. We will rue the error—and the turn of events—for the next four years.
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