One of the most remarkable things about this presidential
election is the amazing degree to which ideology has blinded the Democrats. They
lost the election for a number of fairly obvious reasons – a weak, scandal-ridden
candidate, the historical tendency of American voters to vote to change parties
after a two-term president, and their failure to pay attention to the economic plight
of their largest and most important base, the working class. A pragmatist would
simply say “Oops, I goofed” and get on with repairing the errors and getting
ready for the next election. But not the ideologues in the Democratic party.
Hillary’s team has joined Jill Stein’s expensive but meaningless
effort to get votes recounted in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, even though
(a) there is no evidence of any significant voter irregularities in any of
these states, (b) no past recount has ever found enough change to overcome the Trump
lead in any of these three states, and (c) a recount would have to change the
result in all three of these states for Trump to lose the Electoral College vote.
Stein’s motive may have been as a scam to raise money from gullible liberals
for one of her future campaigns, but what is Hillary’s motive?
The mainstream liberal press is rushing around trying to
find – or create - dirt on anyone Trump looks likely to pick as a cabinet
member. Did she 20 years ago make a sarcastic remark that can be stretched to
imply racism? Did he once own some stock in a coal company that was fined by
the EPA? Did a neo-Nazi nut once say in
public that he liked her? Does he have a third cousin twice removed who was
once arrested on a DWI? The liberal
press is so desperate to keep up the hysteria that they are ignoring the
question of whether these people are competent (most are) in favor of trying to
paint them as evil as possible. Of course all of this is satisfying to the
liberal base, because it feeds what they want to believe, but it keeps them
blinded to the hard truths they need to face if they are to regain power.
And of course the liberals keep harping on the fact that
Hillary won the popular vote. She did, but only because she won so many votes
in New York City and Los Angeles. Remove those two cities, and she lost the
popular vote across the rest of the nation by almost 2 million votes. But more
to the point, for very good reasons we elect presidents vie Electoral College
votes, not popular vote. That’s the system. If it makes liberals feel better
that she won the popular vote, so be it, but in fact it is irrelevant and
distracts liberals from the hard self-examination they need to recover their
fortunes.
Then there is this insane movement to try to get the
Electoral College delegates to vote against their pledges. If you think this
election was a popular revolt, imagine what sort of revolt would occur if 60+
million Americans, many of them armed and all of them furious, suddenly found
that their vote didn’t count because someone tampered with the system. We would
likely have civil war in the streets, and I wouldn’t blame them.
And finally there is the re-election of the Democratic Party
leadership, which looks like it will put back in place the very same people whose
flawed far-left ideology and stale message has resulted in the decimation of
the Democratic Party locally and nationally over the past decade.
There are many progressive causes that make sense and are worth
supporting, but they will not be represented effectively by people as
ideologically blinded as the current crop of liberal politicians and
journalists.
Posts
