Remember, remember

...the fifth of November.  For an off-off-year election it yielded some fascinating results.  Trump took time out of his busy schedule of abusing allies and coddling dictators to campaign for Matt Bevin, the incumbent governor of Kentucky, who is as popular there as tornadoes on Derby day.  But it wasn't really about Bevin:  "You gotta vote because if you lose, it sends a really bad message...You can't let that happen to me."  But it did, and Andy Beshear won by a few thousand votes, virtually the only Democrat elected.  Moscow Mitch must be hoping Trump will forget his name by next year.  It could happen.  He calls his wife "Melanie" and Kevin McCarthy "Steve."  There has been a blessed silence from the world's most overused Twitter account today, and no whining at reporters while Marine One whined in the background.  Peace, it's wonderful.

Beshear will have a steep climb, but in his speech he promised to work on voting rights, education, healthcare and government pensions, issues which apparently resonated with the voters even more than their disgust with Bevin/Trump.  So of course the Experts were all over the shop, warning Democrats that they need to nominate a presidential candidate who will tack right-center on voting rights, education, and especially healthcare.  And, it goes without saying, is male.  In a bizarre New York Times op-ed Jesse Wegman panicked at the remote possibility that Nancy Pelosi might become President.  I don't know Wegman, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he did not choose the photo of the Speaker's high-heeled shoes which ran with it.  He just rehearsed all the right-wing arguments -- she's of a different party, she was only elected by the voters of one Congressional district (like Gerald Ford), she doesn't have a penis (no, sorry, that was only implied).   It's easy to forget that Mike "Mr. Cellophane" Pence exists, but I think he would have time to choose a vice-president before being raptured, or whatever fate Wegman anticipates for him.  Impeachment is a long, slow process, some would say too damn slow.

Of course Trump learned nothing from the Kentucky and Virginia elections, just as he learned nothing from the World Series and Ultimate Fighting debacles.  He's making a personal appearance at a Veterans Day event in New York City, on the assumption that no one would boo a solemn wreath-laying.  I trust New Yorkers to silently give him the finger.