You Go Girrrl!

Women are in da House! I have been on about this for years. It’s high time we turned the reins of governance over to women – because we men have been fucking things up forever.

Don’t get me wrong – of course I am aware that there are, and have been, plenty of good and decent men in government. However, it seems that the integrity of these good men has been neutered by the overwhelming amount of corrupt males who see governance merely as an exercise in gaining and holding power and little more. I am speaking in the main of Republicans who, as anyone that knows me knows, I have no love and far less respect for.

A case in point of how men, particularly Republican men have been primarily interested in power is this; in this mid-term Democratic Senatorial candidates amassed three million more votes than their Republican Senatorial opponents and yet the Republicans increased their majority in the Senate! This is owing to the fact that our male dominated Congress has spent their time, and our money, on making certain that, in spite of who and what Americans cast their votes for, they — Republicans — could hold on to their precious power by scrubbing voter rolls and, most importantly, Gerrymandering America.

This, from Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight; “As these figures make clear, the number of swing districts has been on a steady decline since at least 1992, and the number of landslide districts on a steady rise. The year 2008 was a partial exception: the number of landslide districts rose slightly from 2004, but so did the number of swing districts. However, the polarization of Congressional districts became sharper again in 2012.

Some of this was because of the redistricting that took place after the 2010 elections. Republicans were in charge of the redistricting process in many states, and they made efforts to shore up their incumbents, while packing Democrats into a few overwhelmingly Democratic districts. In the few large states where Democrats were in charge of the redistricting process, like Illinois, they largely adopted a parallel approach.”

That’s not me…that’s Nate Silver. And that’s the doing of men. And particularly Republican men.

So, in the spirit of making an effort to be positive — in spite of being aware that unless we address our environmental issues (I almost typed crisis) — which men, by and large, have allowed to get worse — perhaps this mid-term will go down in history as the one where women began to take over. To put a fine point on it; I mean that in electing more women to Congress this election will lead to more women in charge and thus less war, a concerted effort to fix our environment, universal health care, and a return to civility and compromise in governance to the benefit of our entire population.

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Barking in the Dark is run by Tony Powers, a writer/actor/musician.