Week of 11/14/2016

The Aftermath Of The 2016 Farce
– by David Matthews 2

Go ahead and get used to saying it...

President Donald Trump.

Wow.  Who would’ve thought it?

Actually... quite a few people did, with the first being the narcissistic self-promoting clown act that won the election.  And Ann Coulter.  And Fox News.

I know there are a lot of people that are scratching their heads, or pounding their heads against a brick wall, and trying to figure out just how the hell Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Lady Macbeth of our time, could somehow fail to win in the game that was pretty much hand-delivered to her on a silver platter by Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile and the cable news channels and the newspapers and the late-night comedians and the pollsters and the so-called “experts”.  How could they get it wrong?  How could they be out-played by a reality TV host and his “Basket of Deplorables”?

Well let’s get the big things out of the way.

Like I said in previous columns, this is all our fault.  Collectively, we’re stupid, willfully ignorant, and hypocritical.  We claim to want alternatives, but we didn’t vote for them because we moronically followed the prepared script that said they didn’t matter.  And, I would add delusional to the list of the collective sins, because I know that a lot of people bought into the myth called Trump The Redeemer and ignored the narcissistic chauvinistic self-promoting clown act that is Donald Trump. 

It’s not the first time we as a people made that mistake, though.  Remember “Obamamania” eight years ago?  The “Obama” that people voted for in 2008 wasn’t the Barack Obama we got in 2009.  We were promised “Hope” and “Change” but got despair and pocket change.

Yes, liberals, now you know what the cons and neo-cons went through in 2008.  Now you know how it feels when their own “establishment” candidate that they sold their own consciences and their own souls to promote failed against an upstart “rebel”.  Remember the failure that was Senator John McCain?  You don’t think the cons and neo-cons weren’t wringing their hands and stomping their feet over that failure?

And, liberals, you can get mad all you want about the end result, and you can finger-point everyone else and try to blame it on them that your candidate failed.  But the truth is that it is *not* the job of the world to somehow “stop” Trump from winning.  It was your candidate’s job to be the better candidate, and, in that regard, Hillary Clinton and her cronies and myrmidons and sycophants and... yes, you too, liberals... failed to do that.  That part is on you.  You failed. Period.

Of course, it doesn’t help when you’re running on the success of your predecessor and that “success” isn’t seen in the eyes of the great unwashed.  The Affordable Care Act is failing the American people, as witnessed by the higher premiums and the dwindling choices for those that need it.  Big Pharma has been screwing people over royally since the ACA was passed.  Life-saving drugs are now thousands of times more expensive than they were before, and despite the hand-wringing of those in Congress, nothing will really be done to help those that need those drugs to survive.

The economy has been treading water for the past eight years.  Yes, there have been jobs created, but there have also been jobs lost.  Yes, the unemployment rate dropped over the years, but that is also because the whole system of measuring unemployment only measures those that are currently receiving unemployment benefits.  And lest I remind you that those benefits were temporarily extended four times starting in 2009 and eventually each of those extensions phased out by design, which would obviously lead to a perceived “drop” in the unemployment rate.  In other words, the unemployment rate is rigged.  It has been for quite some time.  (And, yes, I’ve been saying this for years!)

Now, when people know the system is screwing them over, they don’t look for the candidate that says “stay the course”.  They look for the one that says “I can fix this.”  That’s why people listened to Bernie Sanders and it’s also why he had a hard time selling Hillary to his people after the DNC National Convention.  Hillary was saying “Keep Obama’s legacy intact”, while Trump was saying “Drain the swamp!”  Which message do you think appeals to the people that feel are being screwed over?

The liberals lost.  And they lost big.  The lost the White House.  They don’t have control of Congress.  They lost the balance of power in the Supreme Court. 

So... what are you going to do about it, liberals?

I know the clarion call is for them to do what the GOP has been doing for the past eight years, which has been to obstruct, sabotage, and throw screaming temper tantrums against everything Obama does.  But I don’t see the Democrats doing that at all.  History has shown that they are worse failures out of power than they are in power.  They can only get in power when the GOP fails.

You don’t believe me?  Remember when the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress in 2007?  They had the opportunity to put a stop to the Bush Imperium.  Did they?  Absolutely not!  They cowered and catered and caved and compromised.  Because that is the only thing they know.  And instead of acknowledging failure, they simply wrote their loss of power in 2010 to the so-called “Tea Party”.

You want that to change, liberals?  Give up the DNC.

Fire them all.  Not just Schultz and Brazile.  Forget bringing back Howard Dean.  Just give up the whole Democratic Party.  Let it die.  Give your time and attention to the Green Party or even the Libertarian Party.  You want real progressive change?  You’re not going to get it with the Democrats.

While we’re at it, pretty much every news service in America needs to send their pollsters and political experts their walking papers as well.  Anyone who predicted that Hillary would win needs to pay the price for their failure to correctly assess the voters.  But, of course, that won’t happen.  That’s just not how “the game” works.

Oh, and congratulations on discovering – albeit late – the potential power of the Electoral College to remedy your failure.  Now all you need to do is somehow convince a handful of delegates to become “faithless” so they won’t give Trump the 270 votes he needs.  If you can somehow pull that off and have those “faithless delegates” burden the political and criminal consequences of their actions, you might be able to tie things up enough to let the Congress make the final decision… the same Congress run by the GOP.  Well, good luck with that.

Yes, you have every right to be angry at the world for things not turning out your way.  Feel free to assemble and protest and scream “Not My President”.  All that you’ll do, though, is give your opponents ample ammunition to claim that they made the right decision after all.

And this B.S. idea of you guys wanting to leave the country?  Why?  Why run away when you can be even bigger pains in the GOP’s collective anus by giving them back everything they dished out for the past eight years tenfold?  Not only are you playing into the hands of the cons and neocons when you threaten to leave the country, but you’re ensuring they have even more votes in the elections to come. 

Hold on, cons and neo-cons; I haven’t forgotten about you guys.

First of all, congratulations.  You somehow managed to hold your noses and sell your souls – if you still had any – and back a candidate that most of you didn’t want anywhere near the White House. 

Yes, I remember the “Never Trump” crowd within the GOP.  And Trump does too.  Remember when Richard Nixon had his “enemies list”?  Nixon wasn’t as much of a narcissist as Trump is.  And Newsweek did a rather scathing report as to just how well Trump dishes payback to those that offend him, so I guess we’ll find out just how forgiving he is when it comes to the “Never Trump” people.

But, hey, you guys won!  You won the White House, you retained control of the Congress, and you get to pick the next Supreme Court justice and ruin that 4-4 tie that you engineered for the past year.

Now comes the really, really hard part: you need to keep “The Donald” to his promises.

And you’re already lagging behind on that!

Right off the bat, Trump gave a somber “gratis” to Hillary when he accepted her concession call.  No more talk of “locking her up”.  Now he’s saying that he actually likes part of the same “Obamacare” that he previously said was a complete and abysmal failure that needs to be repealed and replaced on day one of his tenure.  Oh, and his transition team is loaded up with K-Street lobbyists.  You know… the very “swamp” he promised to “drain”.  And that great and beautiful “wall” he wants built on Mexico’s dime?  Well, it could also be a “fence”.  It looks like the orange-skin-wacky-man is turning into just another Jersey-tan politician right before our eyes.

You see, cons and neo-cons, the beautiful thing about Trump is that nobody has to make anything up like you guys did with Obama.  He provides his own material.  Just hit up Google and Bing and Yahoo, or just watch his Twitter feed.  Every time he says “wrong” the response is “let’s go to the video tape”!  Who would’ve thought the Instant Replay rule would transition so well into politics?

Oh, and just a reminder: Washington inertia will only give him so much time to do what he wants to do.  He’ll get maybe three major things done on his to-do list before it kicks in, just like Obama had eight years ago.  Better make them count.

The other thing to bear in mind is that Donald Trump is not a king or an emperor.  He isn’t “Il Duce”.  A lot of what Trump says he wants fixed will require the GOP-controlled Congress.  And you better hope that the Democrats are as inept and as incompetent as they were in the past!  You gave them eight years of insurrection and sabotage… you better pray they weren’t taking notes.

Let’s get brutally honest here… barring any last-minute changes in the Electoral College, we will all have to live with at least four years of Donald Trump as the President of the United States of America, whether we like it or not.  No matter what side you are on, we owe it to ourselves to give him a chance to be the President.  Let him prove himself to be worthy of the job.  If he becomes every bit as bad as you fear him to be, then you have every right within the Constitution to protest it and urge for his replacement.

I gave George W. Bush four years before I finally accepted that he failed the American people.  I gave Barack Obama six months before I started talking about the “Obama Fail”.  But the point being, I still gave both of these Presidents the opportunity to prove me wrong.  We all should do just that as a general rule. 

And, by the way, if Hillary won, I’d be saying the same thing.

I keep thinking of the speech Michael Douglas made near the end of the movie “An American President”.  He said that “America isn’t easy.  It’s advanced citizenship.  You gotta want it bad, ‘cause it’s gonna put up a fight.”  I’m sure there’s a lot of people that feel that right now.  We’ve been through a tough two years.

If there’s one thing I could ask people, it’s this... shut the hell up about 2020.  Just shut that talk down right now.  Let us get through Trump’s first tenure before there’s talk of replacing him.  At this rate, the perpetual campaign mentality would qualify as cruel and unusual punishment even for an electorate this stupid and gullible.