Saturday Morning Cartoons
The endless campaign has exhausted nearly everyone, particularly anyone actually paying close attention. There are numerous interesting themes that will no-doubt keep doctoral students and talking heads busy for decades analyzing the causes and consequences of the rise of Trumpism. I admit to finding these sometimes puzzling questions enticing, but today I seek refuge in some cartoons.

David Horsey is my favorite cartoonist and he hits on an important theme here: the role of the larger Republican Party (leadership and rank-and-file) in both the rise of Trumpism and its stubborn persistence as election day nears and fears us.

Many Republican leaders have been courageous, like our governor and John McCain and Colin Powell and many more, but those currently in power...not so much.

The party of law & order (which studies show is actually a trope designed to rally working class white voters' hatred of non-whites) has chosen the deeply unpatriotic and anti-American path these past 8 years of obstructionism rather than loyal opposition, choosing to mislead average voters by pandering to falsehoods like birtherism, the president is a Muslim who (with HRC) founded ISIS, that Obamacare is a government takeover rather than a plan designed to support our private sector system for providing health insurance based on a Republican idea (individual mandates), and more.

...As a result...we have a candidate who gleefully encourages us all to support burning down the house, exterminating the Great American Experiment, on the basis of obstructionism exemplified by his own party and special interest's tilting the battlefield against working families as exemplified by the candidate himself.

Many on both sides have (and continue to) contributed to the very real frustration and economic hardship driving some to seek solace in an angry loudmouthed bigot.

But that does little to change the fact that his message is incoherent and dangerous and misguided and narcissistic and hate-filled and even more divisive than politics before his campaign.

This one is still more aspiration than reality, because Trump is too close to winning for anyone to take anything for granted. If, however, the decency of the average American voter prevails against the sleeze industry on the Alt-Right and their Fox Noise and Republican collaborators...then the image may capture a fitting outcome: electoral and commercial defeat on the basis of a campaign that did what campaign's are designed to do: reveal what a candidate is really about.