"JOY!!!"

Democrats excel at ruining things. They are ruining joy for me.

Let me back up, I don’t want to sound like a perpetually whiny leftist who won’t be satisfied until Democrats disband U.S. empire and give Bill Ackman’s mansions to poor people.

I get why people are excited. I’m excited! Even just for selfish reasons: working in journalism in the Trump era was psychic hell. I had a job doing breaking news writing and every day—every hour—was the end of the world!!! It really was crazy. Just constant, nonstop hysteria. Let’s just take one story, and on an issue I actually care about, unlike the made up Russia conspiracy theories: sexual assault.

Those two weeks during the Kavanaugh hearings were insane. I remember when that slimy Republican, I don’t recall his name, melodramatically declared that he’d hold his vote while pondering the issue further, after some women hysterically screamed at him in the elevator. “Great,” I grumbled. “He’ll obviously vote to confirm in the end, but now I have to cover this shit for another week.”

Women came out of the woodwork to make ludicrous claims about mass gang rapes involving Kavanaugh at frats, etc. It really was wild. I think Christine Blasey Ford was telling the truth. I also think that late middle-aged men should not be punished for what they did as teen boys. I think this about people who’ve killed people. And ultimately, it’s not like Kavanaugh was going to make drunken sexual assault legal. And any conservative was going to vote the same on abortion.

Also, in the Trump era, you had to go along and pretend that absurd stories like the pee tape were true and virtually everyone went down the Steele Dossier rabbit hole and Russiagate. That, in turn, transformed formerly smart, skeptical journalists like Matt Taibbi, into cranky right-wingers.

And you had to pretend that Mueller would put the Orange Bad Man Drumpf in a prison cell! Mueller time! Blue MAGA was real and it was fucking nuts and a lot of otherwise smart, rational people got sucked into it.

Anyway! Joy! Joy is definitely better than all of that. Completely leaving aside policy (just like Harris!) it’s better than Donald Trump’s mean, nasty snarl — in 2015, the mean nasty snarl was directed at the morally bankrupt flatfooted GOP establishment and then at a profoundly disliked Democrat. And, frankly, he was funny. This time around, he isn’t entertaining. And the campaign seems to be run by people who view their target constituency as weird Joe Rogan obsessed incels. The Vance cat lady comment was a clunker for the ages. Because there’s no way he actually thinks childless women have no stake in the future, the line was most likely crafted by the campaign.

Anyway! Joy is good.

Here’s what makes me sad about Joy!™ DNC.