And you weren't to blame. We put Jack and Johnny Walkers' names In the policeman's notebook when he came.

 We're one full day into the Biden Administration. So, where do we go from here? I'm not talking about the American government, the yammering media, or even the washed hordes who don't understand how politics actually works. I'll get to them in a minute.

 No, I'm talking about me or, more specifically, the News. This will still be the usual stream-of-consciousness rambling on whatever is (or isn't) on my mind at the moment. The News was conceived during the Trump Administration and, thus, in an adversarial environment. I'm not going to put the shuck on you, though. I'll initially be a little nicer to a Biden Administration, mainly because if nothing else, I respect competency. Getting the job done properly goes a long way for me.

 And I will happily say the Trump Administration was uniquely awful. I went through the Bush Jr. Administration and the Reagan Administration, so I know horrid, evil politics when I see it, don't get it twisted. But the Trump Administration was something else. Horrid, evil politics done by cheap, half-bright grifters who've only been successful because they were wealthy enough not to be challenged by our culture.

 I understand the desire for "back to normalcy" that Joe Biden represented for a lot of people. I also understand the concern that "normalcy" is what got us to Trump in the first place. He wasn't an aberration so much as the logical end result of the evolution of the Republican party's molding of its base as well as the general fecklessness of the Democrats and the corporate media. Democrats do have a vested interest in keeping the ship of state not only floating but also moving forward, even if slowly. Republicans seem to think they'll have enough cops and soldiers on their side to put down the rabble should we get uppity.

 So there's that. It's pretty amusing to see how fast the Twitter intelligentsia has settled into its new roles. Conservatives - at least the ones not kneedeep in the Q muddy - are pretending Trump was an aberration and that those silly leftists were just overreacting the whole time and "so much for unity' has become their new rhetorical finisher.

 This should surprise no one. Biden made a big deal out of "unity" but he's a politician. That's part of the gig. If anyone thought the GOP - from the ones that never abandoned Trump to Never-Trumpers like the entire Lincoln Project - actually thought the party learned anything from the past four years of mean dumbness and cheap nationalism masked as "patriotism" has no one but themselves to blame. Hopefully - and this is a tall order - the Democrats will recognize that their base is what they should be concentrating on and if the work to make their lives better, the rest of us will benefit as well.

 I'm not talking about the soi-disant socialist left, mind you. They've pretty much proven they're useless in the grand scheme of things and bring nothing useful to the game. Furthermore, they seem content to keep up that stroke and sit with their thumbs up their ass for the next four years. I'm talking about people of color, particularly Black people. Folks like to say Black people saved us, but that's not quite it. They worked to save themselves, we just got to ride along.

 One last thing and I'll leave you alone. I really haven't put much time into discussing the QAnon thing because, frankly, I don't put much effort into messing with flat-earthers or anti-vaxxers. It's just not worth my time to fool with someone who's made up their mind about reality and decides to work backward from there.

 Apart from a few lulus who think either Biden was in on it or Trump's pulling some sort of Face/Off thing (no, really), a lot of those folks are having serious difficulty adjusting to the fact that absolutely nothing happened yesterday besides the rather banal ceremonies of a new administration. Neither Trump nor the military - nor JFK Jr., for that matter - came swinging in on a lanyard to save the Children of the World and start a New Golden Age. Indeed, a lot of them are coming to the realization they've been played like a mortgaged fiddle for the last four years.

 For what it's worth, I really don't have much sympathy or empathy for them. They weren't "brainwashed" and they're certainly not suffering from mental or emotional issues. They chose to believe what was obvious horseshit even in the face of reality constantly kicking them in the nuts. If nothing added up or a prophecy fell through, well, that means it's "all a part of the plan" and not "hey, maybe this is bullshit."

 I do feel for their friends and family members who've had to deal with this sort of crap - always antagonistic, often violent - and folks who've watched their loved ones dig themselves deeper into a conspiracy that had no basis in narrative structure, much less reality. I'm lucky, I know, that even in the very conservative family I have, none of 'em ever went full Q, probably because they hadn't heard of it. But I know what it's like living with someone who'd rather get drunk than anything else, and I can only imagine that having someone you love go full Q is something similar.

 That being said, the actual Q folks can go skip rope. No one forced them into it, they did it all of their own free will, and laying the blame on someone else infantilizes them and absolves them of responsibility. It's like The Great Man said, "You can't cheat an honest man. Never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump." They'll have to accept that and if they refuse to do so, well, I guess life will go on. With or without them, it don't matter, we've got plenty on our plate.