There is no doubt that the 2016 Presidential election may ultimately be declared the most divisive and the most problematic election in American history, indeed the beginning of an unwelcome watershed event.
As the 2016 election approached, the importance of the Electoral College was never an unknown obscurity of American politics. Everyone knew the magic number of 270 electoral votes. Certainly that fact should have been of uppermost importance in the HRC and Trump campaigns. As should be completely obvious, a campaign based on reaching that Electoral College number is a very different campaign than one conducted simply to achieve the highest total of popular votes. That is Lesson #1 in Elementary Presidential Campaign Organizing 101 but HRC never grasped that she could not manipulate the final result, whatever the outcome.
My first indication that there would be an ultra-upset with the results was a very late election evening call from an east coast Dem-Lib friend who had supported Bernie – sobbing and wailing; at times it was difficult to understand her; Initially I thought she had tragically lost a member of her family, perhaps the family dog had been hit by a car. “What is happening to our country? I can’t believe it,” she cried. She was inconsolably distraught that the nation was about to be taken over by gangs of the indescribable ‘deplorable’ type running wild through the streets; setting cars on fire, blocking traffic, burning the American flag, breaking store windows and causing general mayhem while committing acts of civil unrest and even threatening Constitutional order.
Well, she was correct; some of that happened but it was not the deplorables who took to the streets, gloating in triumph or taunting the losers with defeat. To consider the anti Trump street protests as ‘resistance’ may be more about wishful thinking since they were clearly orchestrated by Soros-sponsored groups like MoveOn.org which will continue their ‘group think’ campaign to manipulate a public response to The Donald.
Like many of us during our voting years, there has been no candidate whom we truly believed would make a Great President. Many of us have spent a decade or two of disillusionment on election night and yet our inner Snowflakes never cried, spun off into hysterics nor did most of us ever have the luxury of having a tantrum or an emotional breakdown. Disappointment yes - like when Ralph lost the 2000 election and then again in 2004. What was wrong with the country? Why would anyone vote for a Democratic party that had dismantled welfare reform, throwing single moms and their kids off their monthly pittance and do nothing to initiate a modern day Reconstruction for the inner cities? Why would anyone vote for a Democrat who was, at best, an undercover Republicrat? Why couldn’t the rest of the country see through the partisan platitudes and lies?
If the response to Trump’s election had been spontaneous and independent uprisings as acts of defiance, the opposition would be validated as authentic and powerful glimmers of a true democratic movement. Unfortunately, they are more reminiscent of the coordinated Color campaigns that have taken place around the globe with one goal in mind – regime change.
It has been stunning to observe the outpouring of easily-led, well-meaning adolescents who continue to be betrayed by Bernie, the Senate’s new Outreach Chair as well as adult Dem-Libs convinced of their own superiority that they know best for every other American and who yet believe themselves to be tolerant and respectful of differences.
To understand that the street protests were coordinated, predetermined efforts rather than spontaneous, instinctive events is one thing (authentic taking-to-the-streets response are the backbone of democracy), but then to witness the emotional, cultural breakdown of a weeping, traumatized generation with an inability to cope with reality, their immediate environment or life’s vagaries is more than worrisome. The videos of students in need of play doh, arts and craft classes, group counseling, excused absence from class, coloring books and safe spaces are indicative of a coddled generation sheltered from the ‘real’ feelings of failure and pain and with little developed sense of self-reliance. Have we created a generation raised with an expectation that they earned a soccer trophy for losing and deserve the latest cd and the newest digital toy at their fingertips.
Will this be a generation with the fortitude, the intellect and the inner core of strength to some day take the reins of government or, in the meantime, to stand up in a powerful way against the established order or will they crumple when truly confronted with the brick-wall of opposition to their egalitarian ideals.
So far, from what we have seen, protest violence, albeit a minority, has been a response which begs the question of who is committing the violence? Is there an SDS off shoot on the horizon or is there an undercurrent of something more sinister?
To those who see Trump’s election as a dire misdirection for the country and that all he represents as objectionable (and yes, many of his Cabinet appointments are objectionable but then some of us elders felt the same about Obama’s cabinet), then man the barricades and dig in with some strategic thinking; preferably not at the knee of MoveOn or other oligarch funded ‘non-profits’ which have their own agenda to control a protest movement.
A Constitutional response is that this is what Election Day is all about and that, like it or not, Donald Trump is the democratically elected President and who can forget as HRC so eloquently put it that whoever does not accept election results is a “direct threat to our democracy.” Et tu, Hillary? As a refresher, we have an Electoral College process to protect the concept of “one person, one vote;” that is a vote in Los Angeles is no more important than a vote in Wood River, Illinois and the transparent efforts to delegitimize the Trump election with specious, frivolous claims of hacking represents a self-serving, inappropriate intrusion into our Constitutional democratic process. I don’t buy Stein’s assertions for a moment.
While ‘Deport Trump’ signs have been evident throughout the protests as a major objection to a Trump Presidency, my grasp of the President-elect’s immigration policy has been sketchy, encouraged some of my own research. Check this out:
“All Americans not only in the states most heavily affected by and in every place in this country are rightly disturbed by the large number of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefit to illegal aliens. In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the work place as recommended by the commission head by former Rep Barbara Jordan. We are a nation of immigrants but we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years and we must do more to stop it.”
Sounds like Trump right? Actually that was President Bill Clinton’s 1995 State of the Union Address to Congress for which he received a standing ovation. Needless to say, neither Obama who has deported two million illegals and Clinton were never accused of being racist but we now know that the Democrats have realized what a trove of potential registered Democrats the immigrant community represent.
And then there is the issue of Trump’s plan to register Muslims in a database from specific countries with a history of terrorism which has been criticized as further evidence of Trump’s racism. Trump’s proposal sounds similar to the Entry-Exit Registration System established by President GW Bush in 2001, the system later morphed into the Department of Homeland Security and was operational until 2011.
During the Iranian hostage crisis of 1980, President Jimmy Carter adopted a ban of Shiite Muslim immigrants from Iran entering into the US in an effort to ‘protect the country.” He ultimately deported 15,000 Iranian students. Carter’s ban “invalidated all visas issued to Iranian citizens for future entry into the United States.”
So if we accept that there is common ground amongst Presidents Clinton, GW Bush, Carter and President elect Trump that the impact of illegal immigration on our public school system and other social institutions is a legitimate concern for the nation, why the double standard? It is not just because Trump does not fit into the image of a sleek, urbane President; he is not a smooth, sugar coated talker like Obama while a rough-around-the-edges Trump may actually act on immigration reform.
On the campaign trail, the President-elect has been hyperbolic and straightforward, sometimes crude and discourteous and yet Trump has questioned the globalized economy and trade deals, the existence of NATO and the Fed Banks, a desire to get along with Russia and in his Cincinnati speech, establish a “new foreign policy that will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments. Our goal is stability; not chaos” and more recently in North Carolina to “reestablish the Rule of Law and defend the Constitution of the US.”
When was the last time a Democrat talked like that or are the peace-niks being conned? Who does that kind of language threaten?