When everything's gone wrong somehow...

I've had a little while now to process that the guy with the truck is about to be the junior senator from Massachusetts, but I've been preparing myself for it for about two weeks. Mostly with scotch. So let's start where we must, and then go on to the "what now?"

Martha Coakley, her campaign staff, the Massachusetts Dems, the national party... they're all to blame for basically the worst campaign I have ever seen in my life. And I voted for Shannon O'Brien in 2002, which should give you a good idea of my threshold there. To decide (as one friend put it) "Hmmm... we're running an establishment Democrat in an era of economic turmoil. I know! Let's run as though the election were merely a formality! After all, it worked for President Hillary Clinton..." is bad enough. To then double down upon that stupidity by delaying debates, mocking the very idea of old-style hustings, and (GODDAMN it I can't believe this matters but it does) implying that one of the most beloved sports figures in the state roots for the Yankees? The English language fails me in attempting to describe the awfulness. If ever a candidate deserved to lose, and lose humiliatingly, it was our otherwise competent AG.
Of course, here's where we come to one of the best phrases Molly Ivins (and man, oh man, could we use her around these days) ever used. There's an old leftist concept of heightening contradictions. The idea, basically, is to let the center-left parties swing, and let the rightists run things for a while, and everyone will see how awful it is and come running to the left. Political problems aside, Ivins's response was always to imagine the mother of a soldier, or an uninsured cancer victim, saying "not with my child's life." Because the problem with giving up on the "left-wing" of the two legit parties is that the right-wing one gets to be in charge, and they will get people killed. Martha Coakley deserved to lose. But that does not mean that we all deserved to suffer the consequences of her failure.

So what will those consequences be? Well, that seems as good a series as any to actually get this blog on a roll. I'll cover a bunch of aspects of the fallout over the next week or two, and with any luck it'll be enough of an impetus to really make me a blogger.