When you’re watching the TV news in horror (say, like, when a bunch of rightwing lunatics and Facebook friends of Sarah Palin are being freely elected to statewide and national offices by other people you gotta share the same land mass with) it can become almost apocalyptic when you’re suffering from food poisoning (as I was last night).

Or was it food poisoning? Maybe it was just seeing the leathery face of (presumed) new House GOP leader, John Boehner crying his crocodile tears, that turned my stomach so. Maybe it was seeing an asshat like Rand Paul getting the nod or the fact that hooker-hiring diaper-wearing shitfun meister, David Vitter got reelected (or the tragic loss of progressive hero Russ Feingold). Whatever the reasons, I puked my fucking guts out last night. I felt damned sorry for myself and even sorrier for my country.

On the bright side: No Sharron Angle, no Christine O’Donnell, no Carl Paladino (as if!) and no fucking Meg Whitman in my home state. (Full disclosure, I worked for Jerry Brown’s presidential campaign in 1991 in New York. I didn’t work for his gubernatorial campaign, but I did enthusiastically a vote for him yesterday).

This morning, I read that 47% of senior citizens voted for Tea party Republicans. Anyone looking at that figure can easily surmise that there was a very big enthusiasm gap at play this year. Old people and evangelicals ALWAYS vote for the GOP (they don’t seem to really know why, but they do). Had the Democrats been able to fire up younger voters—which they obviously were not—this wouldn’t have happened (certainly not in the same measure). But what reasons did young people have to go to the polls yesterday aside from voting against the GOP/Teabaggers? Certainly not to vote for Democrats. What have the Democrats done for us lately, besides behave timidly like moderates Republicans? Don’t get me wrong, I voted a straight Democratic ticket, but aside from Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer, it was hardly if I was voting FOR anyone.

Memo to Obama and the Democrats: It wasn’t because you were too progressive that you lost. It was that you aren’t progressive enough (although I expect that message fell on deaf ears).

Later this month, when the House refuses to extend UI benefits for the folks that have already used up their 99 weeks, and the freshman class of Republicans ARE going to refuse to extend them, that much seems obvious, the class war implications of what happened yesterday are going to be startlingly obvious. The next two (or ten) years are going to be pretty interesting, as in the Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times.”

But if you didn’t vote yesterday, you have no right to complain.

Photo via Gawker. Talk about a picture being worth a thousand words, eh?