Well, there it is. Hillary Clinton is going to be the next President of These United States. We can all relax now.

Oh, we’ll still have to go through a painfully long and deeply vicious campaign. There’ll be an obscene amount of money spent, and it’ll get ugly really quick, but it won’t make much difference in the end. And, of course, there’s that whole election business, but I don’t think the Republicans can disenfranchise enough voters to prevent her election. So unless she does something incredibly stupid, Hillary will be the first woman president. It’s as inevitable as anything can be in American politics (which is to say it’s pretty fucking inevitable).

Hillary Clinton – Democratic candidate for president

Here are three reasons why she’ll be elected. First, she’s a Democrat and right now the Democratic party is the only party in the U.S. that isn’t completely batshit insane. The GOP has encouraged and nourished extremists to the extent that nobody can survive a primary race without embracing at least a half-dozen policies that are so fucking ridiculous and/or hateful they’ll make the general public recoil in horror. Or, worse, laughter. Whoever survives the GOP cannibal island primary and gets the nomination will either believe or claim to believe some lunatic fringe ideas. Like evolution is ‘just a theory’ or ‘there’s no scientific consensus on climate change’ or ‘there is a war against Christians in the U.S.’ or ‘the Second Amendment is under attack.’

The most only closest thing they have to a serious candidate is Jeb Bush. Jeb Bush is about as interesting as a blancmange.

Jeb Bush — Republican candidate for president (probably)

Second, Hillary Clinton is oddly scandal-proof. It’s not that she’s immune to scandal; it’s that she’s been a scandal magnet for so long that another scandal won’t really matter. Even better, so many of the scandals attached to Hillary have been so patently absurd that they suck the energy out of any genuine scandal. She’s been the target of a couple dozen Congressional investigations, all of which received a lot of press attention and all of which ended with a quiet ‘no actual wrongdoing was found’ report.

The Republicans will attack her, to be sure. The problem for them is that so many of those attacks will be clearly deranged. Every time some fuckwit calls her Hitlery, or attacks her as a Communist lesbian who killed Vince Foster to prevent him from revealing the Arkansas drug smuggling ring, it’ll chip away at any legitimate attacks that could (and should) be made against her. In that sense, the crazier the Hillary conspiracy theory, the better for her candidacy.

Hitlery – delusional fuckwit candidate for tyrant

Third, like her or not, as president Hillary Clinton can be counted on to do some things no Republican would do. Like protect marriage equality and the Affordable Care Act. Hillary may not want to move the U.S. forward very far or very quickly, but at least she’s not trying to drag us back to some whitebread misguided fantasy of the 1950s.

I admit, Hillary Clinton isn’t the candidate I’d have picked. She’s not progressive enough for me, and she’s overly concerned with secrecy (though it’s hard to blame her for that, given the public shark pool she’s lived in for the last three decades or so). She’s too friendly with Wall Street, and she’s too inclined to consider the politics of an issue before anything else. But she’s pragmatic, she’s smart, and she’s been around the block a few times. We could do a lot worse.