ISSUES AROUND 2016 ELECTION
2016 November 13, Sunday

     There are scads of revelations to be had from our 2016 election in the United States. When I went to work out with my friend Tuesday night in a room without a television set, I expected to come home to find out Hillary was winning, to go to bed, and to wake up with President-Elect Hillary Clinton on the news and a sea of sickeningly-smug postings on Facebook, and maybe a few of the gloating emails I got in 2008 and 2012 over the Obama victory. I was frightened for my country. Since my country has been the global sanctuary for freedom, I was frightened for the entire world. The last embers of a brilliant and wonderful light were about to be extinguished.

     Imagine my surprise when I got home 2016 November 8, Tuesday evening, flipped on my social media, and saw wisecracks about what President Trump was going to do. I poked at some news sites that cited numbers that were decidedly not favoring Hillary Clinton. (I wasn't completely shocked as I considered the 2016 polls volatile enough to make a bet for Trump with two-to-one odds in my favor. I put up three bills to my friend's six, winner takes all nine.) My opinion of America's left wing, already quite low, was about to change, and not for the better, in the aftermath. I have other pages that deal with details, so let's cover the broader view in this essay.

     The immediate effect I observed was the intensity of the reaction. Knowing who the Democrats are and who Hillary is, I have to see any support for her as been a lesser-of-evils thing, a reluctant admission of support in the face of a perceived greater threat from Trump. (Whatever my enthusiasm for Gary Johnson, his presentation of himself during the campaign was mediocre and he wasn't going to win a third-party victory in any case.) Instead they were in agony varying from hate to tears. I got an invitation to dinner with the caveat in writing that, if I didn't vote for Hillary, I was not to talk about politics.

     My initial reaction seeing the charts wasn't joy or gloating, simple amazingly-strong relief. My sick, ailing country has just dodged a probably-fatal bullet and been spared agonizing death throes. The movie "Hillary's America" covers some of this, but only begins to describe what I see in almost all facets of American politics. My take was, "We have another chance at life."

     Realize that those who favor Hillary's vision can go anywhere they want to get it. If you throw a dart at the land area of the world, 98% of it lives under similarly-controlled conditions, 95% of the world's population. One nation, one community, one heritage shares a vision of freedom and dignity that started 1215 June 15 with the Magna Carta and ended up 1787 September 17 with the signing of the Constitution of the United States of America. My expression of that vision is the moral compass of human life, liberty, property, livelihood, and contract. The reason to come here and to try to change our country is to exterminate the one place on earth that is different, that is proud and free, that follows that morality. The American left doesn't want to live, they could do that anywhere else, they want us to die. They did not get that in the 2016 election and that moves them to tears.

     The polls were funny, well maybe not so funny. Except for a couple of offbeat efforts out of the vehemently-pro-Hillary mainstream, everybody was "scientifically" predicting a Hillary landslide. I remember all the scientific predictions from "warmist" scientists about how global temperature would rise from 1998 to 2013. There's a comfort in lying here, but it's more than that. It's substituting what people want to hear for describing what really is.

     Our news medium shirked its responsibility big time here. Given what happened, and that non-biased pollsters saw it coming, it clearly and shamelessly reported what it wanted to happen. If Hollywood entertainers in their entertainment medium want to take sides in political issues they know nothing about, then, well, I guess the First Amendment gives them that right, but I don't have to listen to it and, more importantly, it doesn't emit the aura of truth that a news agency has. Their ultra-kind images of Hillary's transgressions and ultra-evil images of Trump give emphasis to their failure to do their jobs. (Imagine the reverse bias with every news report having some Clinton scandal starting with state-favor bribes and working down to stealing dishes from the White House and cussing out White House workers and imagine a corresponding story about some Trump business success with interviews of the people whose jobs he created. That would have been just as shameful, but I have to admit it would be fun to see after all the left-bias so far.)

     Whatever our opinion is of the political parties, the 2008 Obama platform delivered continuation and amplification of the economic destruction of the previous two years, massive increase in government intervention in industry, and a slew of new government programs ranging from health care to school lunches. That's what happened, for good or for bad. I happen to think it's bad. What the left-wing community has done is to revise history and to say it didn't happen, that our economy is booming and that tens of millions of people have "left the work force" instead of "losing their jobs" or "being unemployed." We conservatives were concerned about Obama victories in 2008 and 2012 and, alas, we were vehemently vindicated.

     There was an outpouring of postings from my Facebook community defending the Democrats and their values. In other essays I have described my take on the Democrats from their values to their history . Dinesh D'Sousa's movie "Hillary's America" covers the racism aspect quite well, biased in tone but factually right on point. I happen to share his bias against racism and hate, so I enjoyed watching the movie. The Democrats have taken the evil side in six basic areas:


economics from the New Deal and the Great Society to today,
• racism from the Ku Klux Klan through the Black Panthers to Black Lives Matter,
• tyranny from supporting Stalin and Hitler to Arafat,
• anti-semitism from the United Nations through ISIS,
• pseudo-science from eugenics through global warming, and
• the morality of the minute as opposed to a moral compass.

They have also become the champions of corporatism with literally trillions of dollars in bailouts and stimulus packages. That massive transfer of wealth from people trying to work for living to rich friends of government leaders should bother the hell out of us.

     Some have answered these concerns about the Democratic Party saying we're not electing a party, we're electing a candidate. I would first point out that Hillary Clinton specifically paid homage to Margaret Sanger, a totally evil woman in my book, famous for her work in eugenics and founding Planned Parenthood in 1920. I would second say, "Okay, let's look at Hillary Clinton, the candidate."

     The Clintons are crooks and terrible people. Bill Clinton's last six years as President went well, but he faced two Republican houses of Congress during that time. His first two years went badly enough to create the "Contract with America" with Newt Gingrich and company. I thought it was bad enough that the Clintons stole $200,000 in dishes and furniture when they left the White House, but since then, using Hillary's position as Secretary of State, it appears they have accumulated $200 MILLION in bribes for state favors. This is what many of us were hoping the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) would investigate, not some lost emails or a screw-up in Benghazi.

     Corruption, bribary, and jeopardizing national secrets notwithstanding, the Clintons have been just horrible people. With his wife's understanding and acquiescence Bill Clinton has been a symbol of misogyny. The Clintons have made racist comments as well. Reports from White-House staff at the time say the Clintons treated them far worse than their predecessors or their successors. It's hard to imagine anybody's character looking bad in the presence of William Jefferson and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

     Whatever Trump's competence, I think the media character smear is a good test of people and they didn't do well: Donald Trump has been in the public eye "since forever," more than half his life, as a famous rich man, a big brash bold braggart billionaire businessman. He may or may not have been very good at it, but he and Harry Helmsley had a lot of money and were visible. He lived his whole life in New York City, a true melting pot of black, white, yellow, brown, male, and female and worked with all these various people with minimal incident. He runs for high office against Democrats and suddenly he's an octopus with eight penises raping eight women simultaneously while discriminating against the dark ones and hating the lesbians. His detractors burn and smash things while hurting people and hurling insults and he is blamed for that, too, in the press. Left-wing web pages are calling for electoral subterfuge and assassination. (One of my friends, who has posted the majority of really wrong-headed, wrong-fact political memes I've seen on Facebook, represents all this as being done by Trump supporters. How bad and silly does it have to get before the message gets through?) The message I get from all this is clear, compared to the conservatives, the American-left Democrats have been bad winners, bad losers, and egregious crybabies.

     I have some serious concerns about a Trump presidency. As a libertarian, I'm a "social liberal." I believe in legal gay marriage, I'm pro-choice on abortion, I believe Emma Lazerus's "Golden Door" of immigration should be open as wide as we can safely make it, and I want the Internet to stay free of government controls. While Donald Trump waved the gay-marriage flag in favor, the Republican-Party platform is not so kind. I believe all of us who believe in less-invasive government on social issues should go to a computer and write emails to our representatives in government. If they give a shit about representing us (and who knows? they might), then let's give them a message about what values we want represented. I went to contact pages and wrote such a letter to my Representative, my Senators, and to President-Elect Trump specifically on these issues. If you don't have a computer, then use a typewriter and a postage stamp. If you don't have a typewriter, or don't remember how to use it, then use a pen. I think it is important to give our future leaders a message of what we want them to do and what rights, privileges, and privacy we want them to respect. It sounds a bit preachy, but I say it anyway: If we don't tell them what we want them to do, then we have little right to complain if they do something different. I don't want anybody to interpret this election as a mandate for "religious-right" moral conservatism.

     In 2008 and 2012 the Obama victories sickened me. Remember, I really saw what was going to happen, maybe not as bad as it actually turned out, but enough to bother me. I didn't smash windows, burn stuff, hurt people, write nasty racial slurs on rocks, or poop on Obama signs. While almost half the country shared my fears, nobody else did that shit either. A system we weren't entirely happy with, but that we had more-or-less agreed to live under, produced a horrifying result and we were going to have to live with it. The Trump victory produced the same frustration from the other side. Never mind what carnage that side has produced since 2008, they feel strongly that what they're doing is right and they're as deeply disappointed in their loss in 2016 as we were in 2008.

     So what was the American-left reaction? Even seeing us conservatives as an example in 2008 and 2012, they took offense, pillaged our cities, and gave offense. No election in American history is as embarrassing to me as the response of my fellow Americans to this one. People voted against a history of racism, for a positive economic future, against corporatism and corruption, and for a businessman's vision. Some folks don't like that and I understand, really. It's time to grow up and to behave like adults.

    

    

    

    

If you want more of this kind of material then here are my American-issues essays.

Today is 2024 March 28, Thursday,
4:49:54 Mountain Standard Time (MST).
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