I'd count replacing stupidity and malice with just plain malice as a win.
i'd prefer a bumbling idiot over mike "boy with long hair? to the electric chair!" pence
Dude totally the opposite of that. Imagine the shit we'd be in if these guys didn't suck at their jobs. What if the muslim ban hadn't been totally half-cocked? What if they'd brought Bolton in day 1 by design instead of day 600 by default? What if they'd been able to collude with Russia without posting the very emails in a bass-ackward attempt to prove their innocence? I like my antagonists as dumb as they come. It minimizes the lasting damage. Visualize, for a moment, the hell we'd be in if we had President Tom DeLay.
I'm not convinced. Pretty much every federal department, maybe excluding the military ones, is going to have a lot of catching up to do when we have a functional executive branch again. President Pence trying to pound his bullshit through a hostile congress, and the bureaucracy functioning normally again, still looks like the less dire scenario to me.
Presupposes a hostile congress. Suppose Democrats win house and senate. Suppose they shoot the moon. It's not like Mitch McConnell is going away. At 255-179, under a Democratic president, the 111th Congress barely passed Obamacare. We don't get to "all better" from here. We get to "maybe a little less fucked." And in the meantime, the less skill and artistry employed by the executive branch the better off we shall all be.
McConnell is old, and if he loses the Senate I'm not so sure that he would retire rather than face re-election in 2020 at the age of 78. Then again Kentucky would just replace him with an Alex Jones/Breitbart ultra winger who wants no public education funding and would work to bulldoze the Appalachians for the last crumbs of coal.