There is no schadenfreude in the Smoking Lounge. Every single thing I wrote and predicted about Barack Obama in 2008 was true, true, true, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy watching the nightmare unfold. After all, the reason I cared so much in 2008 was because I was so desperate to stave off the disaster. Now that I’m living through the disaster, I’m not exactly enjoying it.

The news is so bad I can hardly stand to read it, much less blog about it. The president goes on TV to fellate the ghost of Ronald Reagan and apologize for being a Democrat; the Catfood Commission unveils its brainiac plan to starve old janitors to death; the White House agrees to keep the tax cuts on the aristocracy and announces it will work with the nutjobs in the House who are planning to grind the economy to an absolute dead halt.

This is what you get. It’s exactly what I said you would get. In one of those many, many posts in 2008 I wrote something like, “Obama represents the metastasization of the Republican cancer to the Democratic party.” People called me a racist for saying that. They accused me of being a wingnut racist Republican mole who was flinging mud to besmirch Obama’s name. Funny.

You know what else is funny? Nobody has ever apologized to me. Not that it would make a difference, but still. Not one of those people who accused me of being a racist and secret wingnut has ever said, “You were right about Obama. I’m sorry I called you those names.”

What they do instead is claim that no one could have known how Obama would turn out. He seemed like cream of Jesus on toast, so how could they know? Nobody could know! And as for the uncomfortable fact that a bunch of people, including me, seemed to know exactly how Obama would turn out and were saying so loudly in 2008—well, that was just coincidence. I’m still, according to this logic, a racist unfeminist wingnut on the Republican payroll whose 2008 rantings just happened, by sheer coincidence, to accord precisely with unfolding reality.

The other thing they do is claim that Hillary would have been even worse. To which I say: horseshit. Hillary is a moderate Democrat, but she’s unmistakably a Democrat, in both ideology and practice, with a lifetime of public service to prove it. Besides, her base was the working class, and she knew it. It is unimaginable that Hillary would preside over the economic disembowelment of the very people whose swing votes put her in office. Hillary is also a feminist, and after Stupak and Obama’s Executive Order No. Fuck You, all those twits who claimed Obama would be “better for women” need to do about five years of public penance.

But they can start by apologizing to me.

P.S. Actually, I did get one thing wrong in 2008: when I predicted, with more hope than conviction, that voters would reject Obama. Oh well, it was worth a shot.