The liberal “deplorables”

Since Donald Trump’s election, his twitter account has been swamped by death threats (which the posters will soon regret, since death threats to a president-elect are investigated by the FBI and Secret Service, who take them seriously), there have been riots in several cities, and several videos of Hillary supporters beating up Trump voters have gone viral.  All of which shows that there are a healthy number of “deplorables” among the liberals as well, so the liberals ought not to be so smug.

And the Clinton team and its press surrogates own responsibility for some of this, because they were the ones who demonized Trump so much, and did so much fear-mongering about what his presidency might be like.

In fact

a)      Trump is clearly smart, smarter apparently than the whole Washington establishment, Republican and Democrat alike, whom he soundly outsmarted in both the primaries and the general election, even though they did their level best to kill his campaign.

b)      In retrospect it is pretty hard to say he is anti-woman, as Hillary kept claiming, since his main campaign manager, whom he picked to manage the brilliant final phase of the campaign, is Kellyanne Conway, a woman. Not really surprising, since he has a number of bright, competent women among the top executives of his various businesses. My impression is that he is gender-neutral, picking the most competent irrespective of gender.

c)      He appears to be putting together a competent team. Liberals won’t like some of them, because (of course) they aren’t liberal and don’t support liberal points of view.  But realistically he is looking at a lot of pretty competent people, many of them outside the incestuous Washington “revolving door” insider group, which is healthy.

d)     Like all presidential candidates (like Obama did and and like Hillary would have done), he is already backing away from some of his more extreme election promises. For example, when Obamacare dies (either of its own accord or because the Republicans kill it), he apparently intends to keep the coverage of children up to age 26 on their parent’s policies, and the requirement to sell insurance to anyone, regardless of prior medical condition. I suspect that some of his other pledges, like improving immigration screening, will turn out in the end to be quite reasonable as implemented.

Once the hyperventilating on the web dies down and the crazies get off the streets, I expect this will begin to look like a perfectly normal presidential transition. Liberals will continue to kvetch, no doubt, but there is a fairly good chance that a Trump presidency will be no worse that the Obama presidency and even a reasonable chance that it will be better.

Doctoring Trump speeches

I have seen repeated claims that media outlets edited Trump's speeches to make him look bad.  I saw the media do that to Goldwater in the 1964 election (I actually attended a speech and then saw what the TV and news media did to it afterward to distort it), so I could believe it might happen.

River Entertainment posted a video on Facebook, just after the Orlando shooting, showing how Trump's comments had been cleverly edited by the media to make him look insensitive.  And then, guess what, Facebook took down the posting - guess they didn't like exposing the measures that were favoring their chosen candidate (so much for Facebook impartiality).

HOWEVER, you can still find the transcripts, and the videos, at the Daily Caller, in the article Watch How NowThis Doctors Video of Trump to Distort His Message.

It is an education, and will make you distrust the media from now on, if you don't do so already.

In retrospect

In retrospect I’m astounded by the hypocrisy of the Democrats in this last election.  It didn’t really come home to me until I began thinking about Trump’s win and Clinton’s loss. But the more I think about it the more obvious it becomes.

Hillary blasted Trump repeatedly for fear mongering, even while she and her surrogates in the press did everything they could think of to paint a Trump presidency as fearful and Trump as a nut who would be dangerous around the nuclear codes.

Hillary blasted Trump repeatedly for his “stupid” idea of building a wall across the US-Mexican border, conveniently forgetting to mention that the Obama administration has already built about 670 miles of it themselves. 

Hillary blasted Trump repeatedly for his proposal to deport illegal immigrants, conveniently omitting to mention that the Obama administration had already deported 2.5 million illegal immigrants, more than the combined total of all previous presidents.

Hillary blasted Trump repeatedly for derogatory labeling of groups, even while she and her surrogates in the media were labeling Trump voters as ignorant, sexist, racist, “deplorables”.

Funny how the (mostly #ImWithHer) press failed to notice this hypocrisy.

What goes around comes around

The Senate used to have a rule that it required a supermajority of 60 votes (out of 100 Senators) to end a filibuster and bring nomination to a vote, and 67 votes to make a change in the Senate rules. The principle behind this is that nominations, and Senate rules, are so important that they ought to require concurrence from most Senators.

The so-called “nuclear option” was proposed back in 2005, when the Republicans had a majority in the Senate. It involved changing the Senate rules so a simple majority could pass a nomination and change Senate rules. John McCain saw that this was a dangerous route, because while it would help the Republicans at that moment, it would set a precedent that could be used against them in the future. He organized a bipartisan “gang of 14” that killed this idea.

Fast forward to 2013 and Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid, faced with filibusters of judicial nominations from the Republicans , actually went ahead and exercised the “nuclear option” against the advice of many of his colleagues. It let the Democrats get a few nominations through over Republican objections. And just before election night, Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Kaine was boasting that when Hillary won they could use it again to get her Supreme Court nominations through.

Guess what? Hillary didn’t win, and now the Democrats are about to reap the whirlwind which they unwisely sowed, because they have set the precedent. As it stands now it does still take 60 votes to approve a Supreme Court nomination, but the Republicans can, if they wish, reduce it to a simple majority.  The Democrats will of course “be outraged” and make all sorts of hypocritical statements about such a move – but in fact they were the ones who did it first, set the precedent, and made it possible.    Dumb. Dumb. Dumb!

Recommended: The unbearable smugness of the press

Will Rahn of CBS News has a good piece today: The unbearable smugness of the press. The press was certainly not unbiased in this election, as some of the hacked emails posted on Wikileaks showed clearly. But it goes deeper than that.  The mainstream press has ceased to be an objective observer of the world (if it ever was) and become a propaganda corps for various causes, mostly but not entirely liberal. The problem is that they have been drinking their own Coolaid and believing their own propaganda, which is why they got it so wrong all through this election, right from the first primaries.

Rahn's assessment is right on the money. We will see if the press has learned anything from this, or if they simply can't overcome their smugness.

The Republican’s problem

One of the repeated cycles throughout history is the reaction to victory and defeat.  The victor generally fights the next war the way they fought the last (after all, it won last time), while the loser generally changes (after all, what they tried last time didn’t work).  After World War I the French, having won, prepared to fight another trench war with the Maginot Line, while the Germans, having lost, went back to the drawing board, rethought their approach and invented Blitzkrieg, and conquered France in 6 weeks in the next war.

This is the Republican’s problem now. The Democrats failed miserably in this election (as they should have, considering the candidate they picked), and are forced to go back to the drawing board and figure out what they did wrong. The Republicans, on the other hand, won, and are now busy figuring out what to do now that they have free run of the candy store. But in fact the Republican Party is every bit as dysfunctional, as out of touch, as in need of a thorough house cleaning as the Democratic Party – perhaps even more so. But having won, they have no incentive to do the rethinking, the house cleaning.

This is the danger lurking for the Republicans. Hillary was a very weak candidate, and her team in their arrogance made some serious mistakes. Even a candidate as problematic as Trump could beat that. But the next election Republicans probably won’t get such an easy opponent, and they won’t be ready for that.

The liberal’s worst nightmare

Hillary supporters thought their worst nightmare had come true on election night when Donald Trump won. But that might not turn out to be their worst nightmare.  Their worst nightmare might be a Trump presidency that is more successful than the eight Obama years, showing just how inept the Washington liberals have been since Obama came into power.

Impossible? Well, realistically it isn’t a very high bar. Trump doesn’t really have to do too much to be better than Obama.

He doesn’t have to completely solve the structural problems in the workplace that have put so many Rust Belt workers on unemployment – he just has to pay attention to their plight and do SOMETHING, ANYTHING, to help them rather than ignore them as part of the uninteresting “flyover country”.

He doesn’t have to perform an economic miracle with the economy – he just has to get growth going again instead of deciding, as the liberals did, that 2% growth is the “new normal” and we will be satisfied with it.

He doesn’t have to solve the Middle East mess – he just has to get us out of it and stop hemorrhaging American lives and money in a lost cause. (We have invested about $4 TRILLION and about 8000 American lives in these wars – the longest in America history -  and things are far, far worse throughout the entire Middle East than when we first went in to invade Iraq)

He doesn’t have to solve the problem of rising medical costs – he just has to put something workable in place to pick up the pieces as Obamacare fails.  He doesn’t even have to repeal Obamcare to get rid of it (though he may anyway) – it is failing of its own accord because it never was fiscally sustainable.

He doesn’t have to make Congress work well – he just has to make it work at all, to actually pass a budget on time, to actually get some legislature through.

My guess is that he may well achieve at least this much (and we all, liberal and conservative, Republican and Democrat alike, had better hope so!!), because this isn’t really a very high bar.  And if he does, he will look a lot better than the last eight years!

And that will be the liberal’s real nightmare.