No need to apologize Unblinking. You are not alone. We are all in this together.
On further examination, I realized that there have been some political satire stories that I've read recently that I didn't feel the same reaction to, and I thought it worth examining what the difference was.
A couple examples:
"A Trump Christmas Carol" by Roz Kaveney, Laurie Penny, John Scalzi, and Jo Walton at Uncanny
http://uncannymagazine.com/article/trump-christmas-carol/"How to Talk To Your Children About the Bowling Green Massacre" Elizabeth Miller Coyne at McSweeney's Internet Tendency
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/how-to-talk-to-your-kids-about-the-bowling-green-massacreI think the difference, for me, is rooted in a few things:
1. If the story is clearly rooted in CURRENT politics I want it to say something clever or interesting about CURRENT politics.
Since this story started on inauguration day 2017, and was also published on inauguration day 2017, it doesn't get more clearly about current politics than that. The references to Clinton and Trump as having run in this same election back that up as well--it's an alternate reality but the visible differences were probably only a year or so ago.
I spent much of the time listening to the story trying to pick out what it was saying about current politics. The only thing that I got any sense of was what I mentioned before--the false equivalence, that either Clinton or Trump would be equally bad, hence why a clearly evil third party candidate actually succeeds here. But the false equivalence is a statement that I've gotten very tired of in this election cycle--the two candidates were unequivalent in every respect.
It's not that I'm opposed to statements of equivalence, I still like the Southpark episode where they are voting for a new school mascot, and because of some joke nominations they end up having to vote between a giant douche and a crap sandwich, and when one of the characters doesn't see the point in voting his friends chide him for not being involved in the process. I've felt that before to some degree, but in the case of Southpark though they may have been referring to specific candidates at the time, I don't remember who since they weren't characters in the story, and so it felt like a more general feeling about elections, than about specific candidates.
2. As an offshoot of #1, it probably needs to published in a quite timely manner for it to still be as relevant at the time of publication, if related to current politics.
In the case of the Uncanny story it was published near Christmas, appropriate for A Christmas Carol parody, and was published between the election and inauguration. In the case of McSweeney's it posted the day after the relevant comment it is satirizing was made.
Though this one referenced the current election cycle I felt like it was written a long time ago and so didn't comment much about it--audio publications have a disadvantage in that respect in that it takes time to find narrators and do the audio editing and stuff, you can't just write it up and post it the same day. (Maybe it was written more recently than that, since the timeline branched early enough for Cthulhu to be a major player in the election year, maybe it's just that anything that might seem relevant didn't happen because of the split)
3. On the subject of political discussion on the forum, one reason (which is not necessarily fair to EA but is how I feel) is that I value this specific forum for the discussion, and feel the moderation policy is well-handled in keeping things like current events generally out of story threads, and so when I saw some version of current events in the story I was dreading where that thread would go (which it hasn't, unless you count my own ramblings, and I hope I haven't annoyed anyone too terribly much). This is contrasted with, say, Uncanny or McSweeney's--I don't care what their commenters say, they could have YouTube commenters for all I know, I don't really know or care, so I don't care where their discussion thread goes. But because I value EA comment threads highly in my estimation of places on the Internet, EA comment threads are of much more concern to me personally.