I promise this post is not intended to piss people off, BUT...just suppose for a second

[DFW]

That the November election had gone as predicted.

There would be President Hillary in the White House with a competent, if not entirely firebrand cabinet, Garland instead of Gorsuch (of whom we would never have even heard) on the Supreme Court, and the Senate with a razor-thin Democratic majority. A weakened--both in numbers and credibility--Paul Ryan remaining (for now) as Speaker of the House with the radicals and Big Money leaning on him like Al Capone to be a worse obstructionist than Bonehead and McTurtle combined ever were. Ryan would be pushing back to keep the title of "Worst Speaker of Modern Times" squarely in Bonehead's portfolio.

Would we be celebrating the continuation of a Democrat in the White House with a new (sort-of) Democratic majority on the Supreme Court, and the likelihood of one remaining for the next two decades?

Or would we be tearing apart every detail of every initiative of our first Madame President because not every little tiny detail fit into our individual imaginary ideal Christmas stocking? Like so many of us did with Obama--or so it seemed--would we already be piling on her for not having cured cancer, eliminated poverty and disease, not having rid the oceans of pollution, and not having brought about world peace within the first 72 hours of her presidency? Would many of us be yelling for her "corporatist, oligarch" head for not fulfilling our wish list before she had completed her first two weeks in office?

Would we be screaming in rage that as president, she did not exceed her constitutionally limited powers--limits for which we are now immensely grateful, limits that (sorta) restrain Trump from being far worse than he has been so far?

I suspect that all that negative stuff listed above would have been our all-consuming pastime, excluding only the few whose "Rome was not built in a day" pleas, which would have been drowned out by the smug "I tolja so, she never should have been our nominee" crowd--even as the leaders of the world, both friend and foe, breathe a global sigh of relief that America has not gone completely off its collective rocker after all.

Because I'll tell you one thing, my friends: looking at America with my "rest of the world" friends here on the other side of "the pond," America DOES TOO appear to have gone off its collective rocker, and if we don't want to see a European Defense Force and a European Monetary Fund, and a visa requirement for U.S. Citizens like we have for almost everyone else, and a lot of unpleasant "etc.," we have a LOT of work cut out for us. The first step might be to cut out this coulda-shoulda stuff of last year (foreign espionage election meddling excluded, because we need to give that one a lethal injection). Sure, it was Bernie's fault. Sure it was Hillary's fault. Sure it was Putin's fault. Sure, it was the Media's fault. Sure it was Comey's fault. I might as well toss in the San Andreas Fault for good measure. Enough blame tossed around for everyone's liking? Good. To use the quote from "Yuri Rozanov" in "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming,"..."don't do it no more." If by now you don't have bigger fish to fry, please remove yourself from the kitchen.