This week’s bottom line is that there is good and bad news. The good news is that things will stay pretty much the same. The bad news is that things will stay pretty much the same.

And yes, it could have been much worse. But I don’t give up my experience and my call for perspective.

I was taught to understand politics in a detached, objective, and hopefully helpful way without being sucked into the current sad whirlwind of hatred and eternal argument.

It is possible. If you spend time with politicians, it’s wise not to take them or their antics too seriously.

So I want to sum up what was important about Tuesday’selection.

First, it’s essential to understand that no significant poll or “mainstream” news organization predicted or anticipated the results of Tuesday’s election.

There is little point in paying too much attention to either.

I find that liberating. I can think for myself, and I’m stunned to say I’m right  more than they are. You probably are too. There is something wrong with that system.

Cutting sharply back on the news is also healthy and builds perspective.

First off, the country remains bitterly and almost evenly divided and deadlocked. Although it sounds like everything is changing, the truth is that nothing is changing or has changed for some years.

Once again, the Republican Party managed the art of  Immaculate Self-Destruction, the motto of any Donald Trump political adventure.

He is doing to his party just what he did to the 2020 campaign and his casinos, only this time, Daddy is l dead. There are, fortunately for Trump, other billionaires to bail him out.

The weird truth about Trump is that if not for him, the country would probably have a Republican President who beat Joe Biden, who was never very popular, then or now.

And if grim but savvy Mitch McConnell had chosen the candidates for Georgia and Pennsylvania, the Republicans would have taken over the government and Congress on Tuesday.

Trump was and is the very best friend the Democratic Party has had in years.

The more he denies that he lost the 2020 election, the more he loses the other ones. He has become his worst fear – a loser. I’m betting he can’t handle that.

Millions of people love Donald Trump and will always love him. May God have mercy on them; they deserve better than this. Perhaps Ron DeSantis can give them what they want.

In a year when there should have been a big sweep, Trump, his followers, and acolytes managed to scare off enough independents and ordinary voters to turn it all into a messy draw and a victory for the opposition.

In politics, you can often win by losing.

We are more divided than ever, but we are not yet suicidal as a nation.

Since Trump does not believe he can fail, even as he does, again and again,  he will be around for a while, making noise and stirring some hatred and living in his fantasy of the world.

It’s getting old, and it’s getting sad,  just like him. In 2016, he was new and excited, something different.

Now, he’s old fish, as exciting as Dragnet, a National Headache, and embarrassment, leading his party right over the cliff. DeSantis is not the winter, the excitement.

I still don’t know what being “woke” means, but DeSantis has turned it into the hottest national movement of the hour.

The Republicans will still take control of the House and have pledged to halt, disrupt or eliminate any or all of the significant initiatives or decisions the Biden Administration has made or wants to go. That won’t be possible, nor can they abandon Ukraine and expect to win the next election.

Ukraine is much more popular than they are.

The news will be upsetting, often wrong, and maybe even worse. I’m leaving it behind.

The Democrats will almost certainly retain control of the Senate, largely thanks to Donald Trump’s poor choices in two or three of his Senate endorsements.

The election of John Fetterman of Pennsylvania to the United States Senate was the single most significant race of the evening. Futterman is authentic and very appealing.

Fetterman might have been a creation of Studs Turkel or Kurt Vonnegut, his charm is not that he is smooth, beautiful, or perfect, but that is none of those things.

He is just himself, which is stunningly original in American politics, primarily when campaigning against a carpetbagger millionaire who doesn’t know the names of local supermarket chains or the football teams in your state.

Fetterman is the closest thing to the anti-Trump I could imagine.

He may be the ugliest Senator to go to Washington in modern times and, indeed, the most original – tattooed and promising to wear shorts on the U.S. Senate floor.

His campaign staff was the most innovative and agile of any I know.

From the first, he used social media to tag his opponent  (accurately) as a carpetbagger and elitist. Those claims work best when there is some truth, even if there isn’t.

Fetterman was extremely vulnerable after his stroke and his painful debate. For a week or so, he was behind in those polls. In his struggle, he seemed more heroic than crippled.

He bounced back by being honest and truthful and very, very real. We all know John Fetterman, an everyman, and if there is a message for the democrats, it is to look for real, not radical.

The second most significant happening of the evening was the end of Donald Trump as an influential leader to be dreaded.

He is essential and always dangerous, but the handwriting is on the wall.

His party can win without him but no longer with him. In politics, that’s fatal.

The other most crucial race was Governor DeSantis versus Donald Trump, already bitter rivals. It seems DeSantis is five times smarter than Trump. He has managed to be Trump while, at the same time, not being Trump at all. Quite a hat trick.

He is Trump without the Trump and the drama. Wait until Trump insists that his donors and followers choose between the two or pay the price. I’m not ready to bet on that one. And believe me,  Trump is foolish and ego-centric enough to do it.

DeSantis beat Trump’s brains out Tuesday; he did everything most of Trump’s chosen feet kissers could not do, and he won big.

DeSantis is the most popular governor in Florida’s history and the likely Republican Candidate for President. Trump endorsed him at the very last minute,  but it was irrelevant and false.

DeSantis won bigger than anybody.

Trump’s graceful response to the Governor’s victory was to call him “DeSanctimonious” and threaten him with revealing dirty details about his life if he runs against him.

DeSantis assembled the perfect coalition imaginable in America in 2022: women, suburbanites, Republicans,  Latinos, the young, and the old. Republican strategists were drooling about DeSantis all over cable and social media Wednesday.

No rational Republicans – and there are still quite a few – would choose another Trump circus and doomed national campaign over DeSantis’s intelligent, disciplined, and fabulously expensive triumph.

He had so much campaign money $90 million was left over.

Trump’s time is ending. DeSantis’s time has just begun, and he’s almost half Trump’s age.

A coalition like the one DeSantis built would carry the country, like it or not. Imagine what would have happened if Trump were that smart.

But it’s fragile in this environment, and if we are learning anything about American politics, they can change on a bitcoin. DeSantis is highly controversial and often extreme.

Now, he’s a target in a very new way. His opponents have years to peck away at him.

DeSantis’s big and perhaps only mistake is that while he is tuned into the Florida zeitgeist, he is too extreme and stiff to win the presidency against the right Democratic candidate.

Unlike Trump, a born showman, DeSantis has the personality of a telephone pole.

The right Democrat to run would not, in my opinion, be Joe Biden.

He’s older than me, and I couldn’t last a week in that job.

Biden needs to step out of the way. His time is over too.

But he is also a miracle worker, and I have to give him some credit.

To have blocked the mythical Republican “wave” against precedent and all odds amidst inflation, obstruction, war, and division is one of the premier political achievements of modern times.

There wasn’t a single pundit I know of that saw all this coming.

Polls and pundits have become almost useless in modern times.

People do not tell the truth to pollsters, which is no mystery in a bitterly divided nation where death threats often follow an honest opinion.

Still, there was a lot to feel good about Wednesday morning. The election deniers and voter thieves did not have nearly as good a night as they wanted.

The great red rave turned into a pink trickle.

Although this angry and disturbing movement really shouldn’t be a surprise. Jefferson predicted it, and so did H.L. Mencken:

“As democracy is perfected,'” wrote Mencken, “when the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and a downright moron will adorn the White House.”

The Senate too.

However infamous, he’s diminished. All you need to know about Mr. Trump this week is that Tuesday night, he hosted a lavish election celebration party at his palace, Mar-A-Lago.

He never spoke or said a word to the crowd gathered to hear his victory speech. There was nothing to say.

By this time next year, he will be spending much of his life in court, back whining on Twitter with his new friend and supporter Elon Musk (if ever two billionaires deserved one another), watching his company and fortune dwindle, not out bloviating under the lights on the campaign trail.

Look out for those DeSantis caps and posters.

Let’s keep some perspective.

The Apocalypse is not here, and neither is Armageddon. People who call themselves progressives might consider giving up on hysteria and doing some door-to-door campaigning.

Rough times are ahead; the country is slowly but surely regaining some sanity.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is not the problem or the danger. Last week, she promised some constitutes that if the Republicans take office, “Ukraine will never get another dollar.”

In the long run, or even in the short run, she is a pimple on the ass of our civic life. She is not the future. H.L. Mencken called politicians like that Boobus Americanus.

They are an integral part of our political history.

If Marjorie Taylor Greene bothers you, check out young Florida Rep. Alan Grayson, who makes Rep. Greene sound like John Adams. He said this about the Republican proposals for health care:

“Don’t get sick,” he said. “That’s right, don’t get sick. If you have insurance, don’t get sick. If you don’t have insurance, don’t get sick. If you’re sick, don’t get sick.”

A policy for the ages. What’s in the water down there?

The Boobus Americans have always been around; they will always be around. We just never paid so much attention to them before.

Everything Greene says she stands for was rejected on Tuesday. The Republic stands. Ukraine will win. If you haven’t been paying attention, they already have. The Republicans will not abandon the war any more than Vladimir Putin did.

This week again shattered the conventional wisdom we are being taught to believe.

A Revolution is going on, but it is not Donald Trump’s or Marjorie Taylor Greene’s.

Republicans supported Democrats, and Democrats supported Republicans.

Party didn’t matter as much as we were told it would, and Americans are not the bovine cows we were assured they are. People made their own choices; they made their own decisions.

For all his cynicism, Mencken loved Democracy, and I think a lot of Americans agreed with him this week:

“I believe it is better to tell the truth than a lie,” he wrote. “I believe it is better to be free than to be enslaved. And I believe it is better to know than be ignorant.”

Tuesday night suggests that more and more people understand that that is what they are voting for.

The people gave Democracy and the two-party system, and the love and compassion movement another opportunity to save themselves.

Hold your breath and pray that Democrats and Republicans will choose and elect a President who can lead us back to Church.

In the meantime, my idea is to step back,  take a deep breath and do some good.