Last night Mike Pence went to see Hamilton (or, as I like to call it, the musical that’s been crammed down my throat by Google News daily for the last 9 months).   I don’t know why he chose to do that.  Maybe he wanted to learn something.  Maybe he was trying to show support for the diversity of the country.  Maybe it was some kind of attempt to bring the country together.  Maybe he just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.  But he’s a human being who wanted to see a play, so he went to see it.  Please note, I wasn’t there, I am simply reporting on what I have read in articles and on Twitter.

Mike Pence is just about everything I loathe about Republicans.  As a libertarian, I don’t have a ton in common with Mike Pence except for fiscal conservatism and hopefully a great mutual love of the Constitution.   I’m pro-gay rights, I support amnesty and love immigrants and diversity and am (vehemently) opposed to any kind of registry for anyone ever.  I do not support the idea of America as a Christian nation and have fought against the notion for over 25 years.  But.  The way Mike Pence, human, was treated at that theater was really, really awful.  First, he was booed by nearly the whole crowd – so much so, and so threateningly, that he felt like he needed to leave.  Then he was called out by a cast member of the show and basically prevented from leaving.  Physically, I’m sure he could have left, but they kind of painted him into a corner where he really couldn’t.  Politically and personally, it would have reflected badly upon him had he left at that point.

Then, over the course of the next few hours, he was jeered and booed by the crowd to such extent that the actors had to stop several times.  At the end of the play the cast read what I felt to be a very nice message (got no problem with that) and then Pence went outside where he was surrounded by a crowd of over 100 people in the street and jeered some more.  Donald Trump apparently issued a tweet about the whole thing later, in his usual obnoxious, abrasive style.

This is apparently what happened according to people who were actually there and who took videos on their phones to prove it.  90% of media is reporting on this as “Mike Pence Saw Hamilton.  The Cast Had Something to Say.”  or “Donald Demands Apology.”  Most articles do not mention or minimize the bullying on the part of the crowd and the people outside the theater, and then paste Trump’s tweet on the end making it look like Trump was taking exception to the very nice statement the cast made, and not the hours of boos, jeers, and threatening behavior that Mike Pence, human, endured.  Which I’m sure Donald probably was, a little bit, but it was in the greater context of the evening’s events.  The crowd’s behavior set the tone – that very nice statement given by the cast comes over a little bit differently when you know that it was given after a human being had just been verbally abused for 3 or 4 hours straight on the basis of their political and religious beliefs.

This is not how you win people over, Blue Tribers.  This is mob-rule behavior.  Can you not see that?   It is deeply troubling to me, a person who voted for Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, that you cannot see that.  That you are not troubled by this and in fact feel fully entitled to treat people in this fashion because they’re not on your team.  This is scary even to people like me – who mostly agree with you, guys –  the ‘grab yer torches and pitchforks’ thinking and then the media spinning it to use the whole thing to make bullies into heroes (if you are in a theater full of people who completely agree with you and you’re all booing one person, you are not “courageously standing up to Mike Pence”) and Donald Trump look insane (he really doesn’t need your help with that, please just be HONEST, media, so I can trust what you are reporting to me).

You know why I’m saying this??  It’s not because I’m a Trump apologist.  It is because I am deeply concerned with the mob mentality of those on the left side of the aisle, and this constant spinning of reality to fit the social justice narrative.  I saw this happening years before Donald Trump was running for president and have been saying so, only to have my “friends” turn their vitriol on me.  People I’d known my entire life turned on me over the very suggestion that the progressive movement might need to tone down their divisive rhetoric and give people a chance to catch up.

Donald Trump and Mike Pence are easy to hate, that’s for sure.  But I cannot help but think there is a deeper problem here.   I for one think this narrative would have been happening even if a milquetoast like Romney or Jeb Bush had won the election.  I think it would have continued even if Hillary Clinton had won.  Not towards her, of course, but millions of American people who self-ID as conservatives or Christians.  I think we all should be very, very concerned by it.   I don’t want to live in a world where people of particular viewpoints and beliefs – ANY of them – are singled out for ridicule.

 

 

 

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage, basically call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really critical…”  Jonathan Gruber, architect of Obamacare

I just want to preface this essay by mentioning that I voted for Obama in 2008 and Gary Johnson in 2012.  I’ve never voted Republican for president and do not consider myself a Republican.  This is not a partisan thing.

A couple days ago President Obama gave a speech about the election.  In it he mentioned his pride at being one of the few administrations that had never had a scandal.  And I was like wha….???  because I remember several pretty serious ones.   They were as big or bigger than anything that had happened in previous administrations.  The thing that I found different about the Obama administration was that the press simply chose not to report on them.   (this was not partisan, either – the Clintons had many scandals that were similar to Obama’s and they were reported upon ad nauseum.)

The press is NOT reporting on President Obama and they haven’t been for a while.  This is not open for debate, it is a fact.  Any rational person who has lived during any other administration can see it.   That is why it seems like he’s not doing anything most of the time.  Because we never hear about it.  We have US troops deployed in 150 countries and we never hear about it.  Obamacare is crumbling before our eyes and we never hear about it.  I have 17 stories in my Google News feed about the Kardashians every day, and the media is not reporting on the controversial policies and failures thereof, of our sitting president.  This is not something to be proud of, it’s something to be ashamed of.

I’m going to list some of them just to refresh memories in light of the recent undeniable reveal of the mainstream press as being completely in cahoots with the Democrats.  For Obama to have said he’s had no scandals in his administration, with a straight face, is deception on an epic level and that not a single mainstream media source called him out on it, just goes to show how far their standards have fallen.

1)The complete failure of the bailout to prevent rising unemployment.  According to Nate Silver’s book The Signal and the Noise Obama sold the stimulus package at least in part because according to their predictions, it would prevent unemployment from rising as much as it would have otherwise.  Their predictions were completely wrong and it ended up appearing (according to their OWN data) that America would have recovered from the recession quicker without the stimulus package.

2)American Jobs Act and the admitted failure of the ‘shovel ready jobs’ notion.  Obama himself confessed that this hadn’t worked out – “turns out shovel ready wasn’t as shovel ready as we thought”.  This has not been addressed once by mainstream media that I’ve heard, at least not in this election cycle.  http://www.cagw.org/media/wastewatcher/shovel-ready-jobs-swindle When Obama was elected my husband was a supervisor at a manufacturing plant and made over 50k a year plus benefits.   He was laid off in 2012 and now makes 1700 dollars a month at a garbage dump (still has benefits, but we are lucky).  Mine is not a unique story.

3)Skyrocketing health care costs and just general overall failure of Obamacare.  Starting from the moment that an Obama crony was put in charge of creating the Obamacare website, it’s been a disaster.  My family had it for a short while when my husband was unemployed and I couldn’t get a dentist to accept our dental insurance without driving 2 hours away.  One of my adult sons had a potentially cancerous lump and we could not get him in to see a doctor for over 6 weeks (no one was taking new patients in a city of 500,000 people)  until we finally gave up and went to the emergency room – where he was examined right away at a much higher cost to the taxpayers.   Again, not a unique story.

4)Quagmire in Middle East – I’m no expert, but it sure seems like things are worse than ever to me.  Leon Panetta and Robert Gates have both criticized Obama’s leadership and decisions in the Middle East.  And I believe that when those two agree it may be a sign of the apocalypse LOL.  Very few serious mainstream media reports that I have heard.

5)The Romeike family.  A homeschooling family from Germany seeking asylum in the US.  The Obama administration fought to have them deported based on the argument that there is no fundamental right to homeschool ones’ children.  This, at the same time they are seeking amnesty for somewhere between 10-30 million illegal immigrants (and I personally agree with amnesty, just saying).  The Obama adminstration won their legal battle – and then reversed their decision on having the family deported and allowed them to stay.  Some believe this was all a ploy to establish that there is no right to homeschool.  I don’t know if that’s true but it’s utterly bizarre to waste taxpayer resources on this legal fight while simultaneously pushing to let many illegal immigrants remain here.

6)The IRS deliberately targeted conservative and Tea Party groups, and to a lesser extent Occupy Wall Street supporters for political purposes.  The Obama administration did not take this revelation with any seriousness and investigated it with the urgency of molasses on a cold day.  This one was at least given a passing glance by the media.  Even uber-liberals took exception to it.  Jon Stewart said this cast doubts on Obama’s “managerial competence” and Chuck Todd said “This is outrageous no matter what party you are.”

7)Secret Service scandals.  Getting drunk and getting hookers, crashing cars, possibly putting the President and First Lady into danger, possibly allowing questionable people into places where they could have accessed state secrets.  This was the kind of story that the press usually loves to cover because it involves sex and embarrassing law enforcement, but they kept mostly mum about it, possibly because some of the Secret Service agents have dirt on Obama (this has been hinted at by reputable sources).  Ordinarily this is the kind of conspiracy theory I roll my eyes at, but I have seen the media ignoring too many legit stories involving Obama to not at least wonder if there is something to it.

8)Bengazi.  This alone would have brought down just about any other President and Secretary of State but somehow Obama and Clinton came through it unscathed (well, maybe not so much Clinton) and somehow still claiming publicly there had been no scandals in the Obama administration.   As an example, Ronald Reagan was held up for scrutiny by political opponents (and still is – Hillary Clinton invoked his name in her own self-defense) following a 1983 bombing in Lebanon that had far, far less to do with his administration’s failings than Bengazi did Obama’s, given the historical context.  Organized terrorism was just so much less of a thing in 1983 than 2013 that it seems silly for Clinton to hold Reagan to anywhere near the same standard as she should have been held to.  This did get some coverage largely because the Republicans kept bringing it up, but I believe it was and is being minimized to protect Hillary’s presidential ambitions.

9)NSA abuses.  Before Obama was elected he railed against the Patriot Act, but once he took office, he signed its renewal anyway.  During this time, it was revealed that the NSA had created a global surveillance system amassing large amounts of data from phones and email.  Obama defended this, then ignored it, then said that it would have been better if the American people had never known about it.

10)Ruling by executive fiat.  While technically speaking Obama did not make that many executive orders overall, he did an end run around that by churning out tons of new mandates and new regulations.  So, so, very many.   Some say that other presidents made more.  This is no defense.  At some point logic would dictate that every president adding more and more regulations and executive orders and presidential mandates onto us would yield a system of laws so Byzantine that only the lawyers could ever profit from untangling them, and logic would also dictate that we’re already far beyond that point.

11)Mishandling of Ebola issue.  Ignored CDC warnings about the seriousness of emerging diseases and need for more training of medical professionals, which led to two nurses to fall ill due to lack of information, and exposed dozens if not hundreds of people in Dallas to the disease when “Patient Zero” was misdiagnosed and wrongfully discharged from the hospital.  Spent a massive amount of money on public health issues with no oversight for its use, and even the recipients of the money agreed it had been misspent (including 1.75 million dollars given to a “Hollywood liason”.) Assigned a person with no medical experience to deal with Ebola, allowed people who had been exposed to Ebola to enter the country freely and without quarantine, to fly on planes and bowl.  Allowed the CDC to play around with Ebola samples when they had recently mishandled several other samples including anthrax.   Did not insist on quarantines for those entering the country from affected areas, or possibly stopping incoming flights temporarily.  We now know that ebola remains contagious a lot longer than once thought and can be transmitted sexually up to a year after exposure, and also that as many as 1/4 of people who get it are asymptomatic.  I believe we were VERY lucky that this wasn’t way worse than it was.    Even Saturday Night Live agrees that this issue was completely mishandled http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/videos/1.622993

12)Operation Fast and Furious.  During the Obama administration, the ATF allowed the sales of illegal guns in order to track their distribution.   This ill advised idea quickly spun out of their control, and these guns ended up in Mexico where some were later recovered from the murder site of a US Border Patrol agent.  Members of the administration up to and including Attorney General Eric Holder were demonstrated to have lied and covered up their involvement about it.  Eric Holder was the first Attorney General to ever be held in Contempt of Congress.  Obama exercised executive privilege to prevent Holder and others from being prosecuted.  In the end, while some participants were punished, many believe they were mostly lower level scapegoats while the movers and shakers behind the program went free.  Most of the guns were never recovered.

This are just a few of the scandals that occurred under Obama’s watch.

Media, you had ONE job…

 

You know who complains that they can’t win because the game is rigged?  Losers.  – Frederik deBoer

If only we lived on Earth Prime, Hillary totally would have won.

If only she had won these three counties, these four states, if they hadn’t released those darn emails, if only people didn’t hate pantsuits so much, if only we lived in another dimension where Donald Trump had an evil goatee or a magical universe where unicorns had the right to vote, Hillary would have won.

If only we didn’t have an Electoral College, Hillary would have won.  Oh yeah.  Totally. That.  It is SO wrong and SO crooked, that Electoral College.  It was based on protecting SLAVE STATES!!  Abolish it right away!!!

This chain of thought takes magical thinking to a whole new level.

Firstly because this parallel universe we are envisioning assumes that things remain precisely the same up until election night, which they wouldn’tve.  The candidates would have run different campaigns, focused on different states, the voter breakdown would have been completely different.  People who didn’t turn out to vote may have, and others may have stayed home.  People who voted 3rd party or Harambe may not have done that.   It’s like losing a baseball game and then blaming it on not following the rules of cricket.  The assumption that Hillary would have won if not for the Electoral College is unproven and unverifiable and it is the pipe dream of silly people who watch too much Black Mirror (and if you know what that is, you probably voted for Hillary.)

But let’s set that aside to talk about the Electoral College vs. the popular vote.  A helpful breakdown of how the popular presidential vote broke down is here. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/16/us/politics/the-two-americas-of-2016.html   Do you notice how overwhelmingly divided this is and how geographically minuscule the pockets of Democratic voters truly were?  Does it seem right that people in New York City (and not all of NYC, please check out this breakdown demonstrating that parts of NYC went completely the other way https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/numbers/clinton-trump-president-vice-president-every-neighborhood-map-election-results-voting-general-primary-nyc ) is setting public policy for people in Billings and Cheyenne and a lot of neighborhoods in New York City and pretty much all of rural America?

Actually, I think it does seem right to them.  That’s the concerning thing.  The number of people who look at that map and think it is just and right that those enclaves are put in charge of everything all the time, because they are better and wiser than the rest of the nation.  That these same people are also unironically posting Hunger Games memes right now is a subject for consideration at a later time, perhaps.

These Blue Tribers prefer a very top heavy form of centralized Federal power in which their candidate becomes president and then hopefully with the help of a unified Congress and Supreme Court, enacts their grand vision of progressivism across the entire US.  But the rest of the country does.not.want.that.obviously.duh and just rejected the idea pretty overwhelmingly – regardless of population, geographically speaking, most of the country does not accept Clinton-style progressivism as the desirable policy of the United States and was willing to vote for a fucking lunatic to avoid it.

Whether or not you think this is right, it did happen, and the fact that it happened indicates that it’s going to be difficult to do away with the Electoral College.  It would require amending the US Constitution, first by proposals in Congress (unlikely for now), and then by approval by 3/4 of the states.   It is very, very, very unlikely that 3/4 of the states are going to do that, not only because it just kinda worked for them, but because it would negate a very important check and balance that the states hold and will ensure that the votes of the people of those states would no longer count.

But wait – they would still count, right?  In a popular vote, those votes would still be counted?  So it’s all fair.  In a way, yes, they would, but in another, much more accurate way, they wouldn’t.  I live in Washington State, and everything here is controlled by the large liberal population of Seattle.  My vote here in the Great Sagebrush Empire is meaningless.  I may as well not even bother to cast it for a Republican because the Democrats always win.  It’s useless.  I have little say over who my governor is, who my senators are, and over a lot of really bad referendums that get passed that make my state a worse place to live.  It’s taxation without representation all over again.

People who are calling for the electoral college to be dismantled, what you are really asking for is the disenfranchisement of a huge part of the country.   And you’re doing it at the same time as you push for a super strong Federal government that will enact your personal pet policies at the expense of the areas that you plan to disenfranchise.  It’s a dick move, ok??   You’re suggesting that rich people in Manhattan and the Los Angeles suburbs decide how someone in rural North Dakota or urban Detroit lives their life, giving them no say in who the President of the United States is.   Simply because there are more of you.

It isn’t right.  If you believe your own rhetoric at all, you have to admit it is not right.

But beyond all that, it’s stupid for you too.

You see, it very much remains to be seen if this is a last hurrah for American conservatism or the complete implosion of the left.  The demographics are shifting, it’s true, but the millennials will grow up, the Republicans may stop to decide catering to the Stoopidz and start making coherent pro-liberty arguments again, and the dogmatism and hypocrisy of the Democratic party may end up driving a lot of minority voters to the right (which in many cases, based on their values, is their natural home).   You lost because a LOT of people hate you – not only your policies but actually kind of you, personally – the arrogant, entitled people who think Lena Dunham’s tears mean anything at all whatsoever to like 98% of voters, very much including black, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Hispanic voters.  It is entirely possible that in the future, this tide of changing demographics you are relying on is indeed going to shift, and it’s going to shift against you.

In that case, the electoral college could be your only hope of ever regaining political power. The electoral college is a check and balance that prevents the the majority from stripping away from the minority.  Sometimes, yeah, it means that Wyoming seems to have a disproportional say in an election.  But another time it could mean that Vermont does.

Fun fact about the Electoral College – it has virtually always led to a transition of power instead of a consolidation of power.   It has NEVER kept an incumbent in office.  It’s not a tool of oppression, it’s not a tool of the party in power to stay in power indefinitely, it is a way for people who are possibly underrepresented in the population to still have some say in the direction the country is headed.  To want to flush that because your team didn’t win – it’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

 

 

Michael Moore claims, and I mostly agree with him, that Donald Trump never had any real intention to become president.  I have even contemplated (very seriously) the idea that he was deliberately being outrageous to throw the election.  I think he maybe just wanted a place in the history books, a name that people will remember through the ages (if fuzzily) like Eugene V. Debs or Adlai Stevenson.  Maybe he wanted to grow his brand or fuck some shit up, or maybe even just have some fun.  When I’m feeling more kindly disposed to Donald, I second guess this.  I have seen some old interviews on Youtube that indicated that he’d thought of running for president many ages ago and his political viewpoints were pretty consistent over the years.  Maybe he’s legit.  Couldn’t tell ya.

What I can tell you, I think, is the reason why he said some of the absolutely shocking and awful things that he said during the election.  I believe that Donald Trump if, he did in fact, want to become president (or, if he was just in this to fuck shit up) correctly identified people’s frustration with political correctness, the unholy alliance between the Blue Tribe and the media, and the utter failure of the Republican Party to answer it.

And he was the only one who did.  The rest of them tiptoed around and acted ashamed and apologetic for having seemingly unpopular opinions (not so unpopular as we’ve been led to believe, tho, are they), or gloated over a victory that they assumed was just a foregone conclusion.  They wrang their hands and scraped and groveled and begged people to clap for them like Jeb Bush, or pushed a rapping Lena Dunham (srlsly?) in our faces like Hillary Clinton. Both parties and the media demonstrated a fundamental inability to understand the depths of what a lot of regular everyday Americans of all races, classes, and genders were thinking and feeling.

I believe Donald Trump tailored those statements he made not out of a desire for divisiveness or inability to control his tongue, not out of a quest to tap into some secret underbelly of white hate or whatever spin the media is putting onto this to absolve themselves of the huge amount of culpability that they have for the outcome of this election.  Donald Trump made those statements as a calculated ploy to prove to the people that despite his wealth and fame, that he was a man of the people, and not one of THEM – not of the political establishment, and not a creation of the media.

By running his mouth and refusing to observe the niceties, he demonstrated that he was a self-made man, an individual with free will and not a puppet of the parties or the press.  That was what people wanted, at the core of it all.  That is what connected with voters.  His individuality, courage, and the concept that he was an independent thinker who doesn’t play by the rules.  He may be rich, he may be an utter bastard, but at least he wasn’t crapped out in exchange for political favors by one of the two parties both of which have utterly failed America.  He wasn’t fawned over by the media that’s been complicit in it.  And he wasn’t scared of them.  He proved it every time he opened his mouth.

If he did that on purpose, then the guy is a genius and all props to him.  If he did it on accident, then he’s the luckiest SOB ever.  Because it was pitch perfect for the way a lot of people are feeling.  It would have been super awesome if it could have come in a prettier package, but maybe that was too much to ask for.  Maybe to play the part of an iconoclast, you have to actually BE an iconoclast.

At times it felt to me like Donald Trump was trolling the media and the two parties.  It was a troll that we, the great unwashed, were in on.  It was a joke between Trump and half of America on the folks who have just run it into the ditch.  Republicans are so out of touch they don’t even know what trolling is, and Democrats don’t understand trolling, that’s why they think Pepe the Frog is a hate symbol.  The media fell for the troll hook, line, and sinker and reported all this stuff as fact because they thought it helped their side.

Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Pay Pal and Trump supporter, said that the Blue Tribe did not take Trump seriously but took him literally.  Whereas the rest of the voters (those who voted for him and those who simply refused to vote for Hillary and stayed home or voted Harambe) took him seriously, but did not take him literally.  I don’t think most Trump supporters believe much of anything he says, but they take him seriously.  If nothing else, as a ballsy individual that is in no one’s pocket.  He proved it by saying stuff that no establishment candidate ever could and surviving things that no establishment candidate could ever have survived.  His dishonesty actually came off weirdly honest, at least to me.

Did he lie, yeah, I don’t think anyone thinks otherwise.  But the media and Hillary were lying constantly and flagrantly and anyone who’s paid any attention over the last 25 years knows it.  Did he say stuff on the campaign trail he had no intention of doing?  Let’s hope so!!  Then again, every candidate does (Obama and 800,000 shovel ready jobs, I’m looking at you here.  Still waiting on those).  But in a battle between someone who’s lying outrageously to your face with a wink and a nod and a joke you’re both in on, and a battle between someone who’s lying to your face and refuses to admit they’re lying even as they’re positioning the knife they’re gonna stab into your back, who seems more honest?

The main reason why people are so pissed right now appears to me to be that they lost.    Losing is never fun, and losing when you think you’re for sure gonna win really sucks (trust me on that, I’m a Seahawks fan.)  They have reasons, but I don’t think those are REALLY really the reasons.  I think they’re assigning noble words to nasty emotions and the main nasty emotion they’re having right now is pissed-offedness that they lost.

My question to Hillary supporters is not why are you angry that you lost, but why do you think you get to win on every front all the time with no opposition??  Why is the only win acceptable to you, the unconditional surrender and eradication of the other side while you stand over their bodies and scream victory at the sky?

I know that most on the left do not know what I’m talking about right now.  I’m speaking Greek to them.  Because they believe that their way is the only way because it’s the only RIGHT way.  It’s self-evident and everyone all around them also believes it is self-evident.  Our team is totally right, we have the moral high ground, and thus we should always win, because we are totally right and we have the moral high ground.  But the funny thing about moral high grounds is that standing righteously upon them can make you see everyone else not on that high ground as not only wrong, but immoral.

But here’s the thing.  You may have lost an election, but you’re still winning the war.   Why do you have to win EVERYTHING?

After 8 years of an African-American president, the nearly successful presidential candidacy of a woman, the legalization of gay marriage, and your apparent total control of the media, why are so many people not jumping for joy right now??  Why are they screaming for blood??   Guys, YOU’RE WINNING.  Why can you not accept that a lot of people just didn’t like Hillary, and some people just aren’t liberals, and gee whiz guys, let’s do better next time?  Let’s think about how we can woo and persuade, how we connect with voters instead of demonize them, how we can change hearts and minds.  That’s how rational people come back after a setback.  Burning people in effigy and destroying the city in America that most represents your values, is not.

While I hate invoking other countries to describe the anomaly that is America, a lot of other countries have some political parties that are in direct opposition to each other.  Conservatives and Labour, in the UK, for example.   Sometimes the Conservatives win, sometimes Labour wins.  And that’s ok.  In most countries, neither side has the expectation of totally winning on every front, every election, every issue, all the time.  In a world full of diversity, no one should expect that.   Some countries even have several parties all representing different subsections of the populace and they are quibbling about this or that.  None of them expect to come out victorious over their enemies, not really.

In the US until very recently, neither side ever had the expectation of totally winning on every front.  I think that the Republicans still do not have that expectation.  That’s why they’ve been so passive about everything.  Their supporters have been typically patient and reasonable.  That’s why they send us Jeb Bush as a presidential candidate.  Because they still think this is business as usual and that “ya win some, ya lose some” and that is why they look so flat-footed next to the Democrats who are on a clear mission.

Why is the default mindset for so many on the left over the last decade or so, a scorched earth policy in which your opinion is the only one that is allowed to be voiced and the rest of America needs to, oh, I don’t know, crawl off somewhere and die?

It is because this has become a moral issue.  Democrats good, Republicans bad. Conservatives, bad.  Libertarians, bad, and kind of weird.  Christians, very, very bad.  The wicked shall not be unpunished, but the seed of the righteous shall be delivered.   And the method of that punishment shall be social media.  It’s not enough for progressives to win, most everything, most of the time.  They have to grab their torches and pitchforks and chase those Frankenstein’s Monsters that live in Flyover Country and those weird neighborhoods in New York City that no one cool ever goes into, down and stab them a few times.  And then burn whatever remains, with sick burns on Twitter.

The wicked shall not be unpunished.

And it is NOT Donald Trump, don’t tell me that it is, because I saw this trend rising long before this latest election cycle.  Donald Trump is not a conservative or a Christian and he’s really not even a Republican.  Donald Trump is irrelevant to this conversation.  He’s just what people threw at you to try and stop this insanity.

It is not right or normal to expect your personal moral views to become the law of the land with no room for compromise or dissent or the simultaneous existence of anyone else’s morality.  That is how the Taliban thinks.  That’s how ISIS thinks.  They may call it religion instead of social justice, but the upshot is the same.  It’s theocracy.

 

 

If you start whining before the game is even over, if whenever things are going badly for you, and you lose you start blaming someone else, then you don’t have what it takes to do this job.   – President Barack Obama

The analysis is in, the soul searching is done.  And apparently, Hillary Clinton truly believes she was just trounced by the worst candidate in, like, ever, because of the FBI.  The email thing, I guess, or something.  I may be only one voter, but I can tell you, the reason I voted for Gary Johnson instead of Hillary Clinton has nothing to do with the FBI.

I’m not trying to kick the woman when she’s down, I’m really not.   Just trying to record the truth as I see it for the sake of accuracy because the media is out to lunch and the rank and file Hillary supporters love their narrative too much.  The FBI was not the reason why I didn’t vote Hillary.  Not even a little.   They did their job, cleared her before the election.  No worries.

So, I had my kids pick a number between one and 50 because I thought I could probably come up with at least 50 reasons that were much more important reasons to me than the last minute email revelations.  Hillary-specific reasons, not the cultural stuff.  This is just the stuff that Hillary herself has responsibility for.  They picked 38.  Here they are in no particular order.

1)The fact that the emails ever existed to begin with and whatever happened between the FBI and Loretta Lynch that triggered their release.

2)The fact that you destroyed a whole bunch of them and expect us to take your word that they were personal

3)Bengazi

4)Clinton crime bill

5)Dismissive, manipulative email regarding Black Lives Matter and how to use them politically in light of Clinton crime bill

6)Obamacare is a joke, websites never work

7)Used to believe gay marriage was wrong less than 10 years ago (or at least that’s what you said) but everyone conveniently forgot that

8)Both Clintons and Obama administration misusing IRS against political enemies

9)That bullshit where the Clinton staffers trashed the White House and pried all the W’s off of the computers when George W was taking office and caused $15,000 of damage

10)All the times you said crappy things about other women like “trailer trash” and “narcissistic loony tune” and “bimbo” and threatened to destroy and crucify them

11)Auctioning off spending the night in the Lincoln Bedroom and a bunch of other stuff more important than that, that I can’t remember, in exchange for campaign contributions

12)The Clinton Foundation

13)Defended a dude who raped a 12 year old (ok, that was your job, I get that) but then laughed about it and got all the evidence dismissed on a technicality

14)Kept FBI files on your enemies when Bill was in office (she who lives by the sword, dies by the sword, I guess)

15)Bill’s issues and the fact that you had the arrogance to play the “Donald groped women” card despite that

16)That the reason why you had the arrogance to do so was because the press never mentioned the irony of all that

17)That the reason why the press never mentioned the irony of that was because we have emails that prove you were actively colluding with them

18)Donna and the debate questions (and I love Donna, I wish she had been running)

19)That despite racial tensions being very high, people in your campaign sent paid operatives to Trump rallies to incite violence and pretend to be Trump supporters

20)That that is probably still going on

21)That neither you nor Obama have said anything to stop the protests breaking out across the US even though you easily could – if it was me I’d be moving heaven and earth to stop them.  (ok this is a little retroactive, but still, speaks to character)

22)Hired all your cronies for Bill’s administration

23)That Bill has been pal-ling around with Jeffrey Epstein and flying on Epstein’s jet a whole bunch of times and the media has said nothing

24)Said you landed under sniper fire in Bosnia when you didn’t

25)Marc Rich and other questionable pardons for cash that went to your brothers

26)Randy Weaver and the Branch Davidians

27)Dirty tricks on both Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama and your campaign actually invented the birther idea

28)Common core is dumb

29)Gun control

30)The Supreme Court

31) I believe the media manipulated the Republican elections by giving Donald and fellow wackadoo Ben Carson (I actually like Ben tho) tons of free press and making the legitimate candidates into nobodies, because they thought you’d be better able to beat him/them

32)Said mean things about coal miners

33)Clinton fatigue

34)Donald Trump may not have released his tax returns, but you did not release your secret speeches.  Seems weird.

35)Government bailout to your big money pals on Wall Street

36)A lot of really shitty stuff that happened under the Obama administration that we did not hear but barely a word about because the media is under your guys’ control.  Had you won, this media blackout would have continued without question.  Not a doubt.

37)Those gross Planned Parenthood videos

38)It’s the economy, stupid.

She’s the ocean.

My kids were sad when Hillary lost.  They wanted a girl president, because “because why can’t we have a girl president”.

I want a woman president too, someday, and hopefully soon.  But “because” is not a reason to vote for someone.  It is a child’s reason to vote for someone.   “Because my kids are sad the next day” is not a reason to vote for someone.  “Because elderly women wanted to live to see a female president” is not a reason to vote for someone.  “Because I want to check off an item on my bucket list” is not a reason to vote for someone.

Hillary really didn’t give me any reason TO vote for her.  Gary Johnson did, and so I voted for him.  I expect that’s how most people felt.  They considered the options, and selected the alternative that feels right to them.  Some people voted for Jill Stein, some people voted for Donald Trump, some people voted for nobody and left the slot blank.  Some did a write in vote for Harambe.  A lot of other people just stayed home.   This is not the voter’s fault.  Hillary did not connect – not with me, and not with many others.  The only thing she had to tell me was the names of the celebrities that were voting for her.

She also gave me a pretty large and unignorable number of reasons NOT to vote for her. Starting with the fact that she’s a political operative who has been in the government for decades.   During this time, she’s done some questionable stuff that any rational person might have a problem with.  She also hasn’t done some important things that any rational person might have a problem with her not doing.  This idea that she’s this innocent underdog fighting against the system…I’m sorry, it’s just not true.  She was the First Lady, a senator, and the Secretary of State.  She’s the system.  She is the ocean.

Hillary Clinton has had every opportunity to prove herself to me for 25 years – her voting record, her honesty, her successes and her failures…and when it came down to it, I couldn’t close the deal.  I couldn’t make myself vote for her.  Not even to defeat a pretty yucky person. That’s how strongly I felt.  She does not represent my viewpoints and I don’t trust her at all.   That’s on her, not me.

Too many people are trying to make this election about pantsuits and haircuts and sexism.  None of that was true for me.  I thought Hillary looked like a million bucks (and if Hillary’s hair was an issue, have you seen Donald’s) and I’m a woman.  I would love to have a female president.  But I don’t like where the country is headed and she has to be at least somewhat accountable for that.   I have serious concerns about her record, her honesty, the behavior of her campaign and the agenda of her supporters.  I feel she’s really power hungry and all this is some longtime plan that she and Bill hatched ages ago, that she cares nothing about any of us and just wanted the office for her own self-aggrandizement.   Now maybe that’s true for all presidential candidates…but it doesn’t endear someone to me, that’s for sure.  This is legit, guys, that’s what people are trying to explain to you.  I had very legitimate concerns about Hillary Clinton.   Invoking Beyonce and Jay Z’s names are not enough to answer them.   Again, that is on her.

Was I supposed to ignore all those tummy rumblings I was having…the fact that she gave me no tangible reason to vote for her, myriad reasons to vote against her, her ambition, her record, that it would be 4 more years of the same economic policies that aren’t working for me and my family, the secret speeches she didn’t want anyone to hear, the dubious behavior of her campaign and her supporters, her fake Southern accent that came and went with the wind…I would be the worst person ever if I ignored all that stuff just because I wanted to see a female president within my lifetime.  I would be the worst person ever if I ignored that stuff because celebrities told me to or because I was embarrassed when people called me names.  That WOULD make me a uniformed voter that made a bad choice on a whim.  That would make me, as Amy Schumer recently called those who did not support Clinton, weak.  I really would be a weak person if I voted for a candidate that I did not believe in, because of my personal desires or social pressures.

People voted for the person that they thought was gonna do the best job, or they voted for nobody because they really hated both candidates and didn’t connect with a 3rd party, or Harambe.  That’s what cost Hillary the election. She was running against probably the most unlikable candidate, if not person, ever, and she dropped the ball (and not singlehandedly, either, because the media was entirely complicit in this).  Hillary and her campaign and her supporters failed to connect with a significant chunk of people – not only Trump voters, but 3rd party voters, those who refused to vote at all for president or wrote someone else in, and those who stayed home.  I think that Democrats have some very hard questions to ask themselves.  As does the media.

Or, they could blame the voters instead.

I didn’t want Donald Trump to be our president, and didn’t vote for him.  I just find it hilarious that he is.   Enjoying the beautiful irony of millions of assholish, mean spirited, closeminded people whose biggest problem in life is whether to shop at Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, who’ve just spent the last 10 years accusing everyone who disagrees with them of suffering from cognitive dissonance, experiencing it en masse.

Let’s go back in time a few months.  One of the things that I found incredibly disturbing is how all the celebrities were in this seemingly organized movement to promote Hillary.  At that point in time I was fully ready to vote for Hillary to prevent a Trump presidency.  But the celebrities!!!!  They just never fucking shut up.  I’ve been watching elections since Reagan vs. Mondale and I don’t remember stars coming out so vehemently, so brazenly, so overwhelmingly in support of a candidate.  They may have gone to fundraisers now and then but it was nothing like this past 18 months has been.  It was non-stop all the time, and it was coming from the top down – it wasn’t that celebrities were supporting Hillary, it was that they were apparently this organized force trying to take over on her behalf.   The media, the celebrities, and Hillary.  Go team.

Even celebs that am pretty big fans of, like Louis CK and Patton Oswalt (seriously, get that KoolAid away from Patton, somebody, he’s had way too much) and Jennifer Lawrence and Stephen Colbert were in on this.  I like them, a lot, but I didn’t like the feeling that they were looking down their noses at my neighbors and my Christian and/or conservative friends and making fun of them.  I didn’t like that they could just ignore the fact that Hillary the Candidate has some pretty big flaws and negatives.  I didn’t like that when anybody expressed concern about those flaws, or another troubling thing emerged – like the HRC campaign paying people to pretend to be Trump supporters and incite violence – that’s kind of a big deal, right??  they were shouted down or the story was printed once and never mentioned again.  That they were just so smug, and superior, and thought they were so much better than everyone else.   That they were the ruling class, and we were about to witness the coronation of the rightful queen after the pretenders to the throne were removed from power and hopefully eradicated.  It was really quite offputting.

And that doesn’t even go into the celebrities that I DON’T like.  Lena Dunham, Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer (I used to like you, Amy, you’re a funny girl, but you don’t get to kick people out of your shows because they disagree with you…that’s ugly) Seth McFarlane…you guys, you have no clue how that played out here in the real world.   After hearing nothing but lies and negativity and these stupid conspiracy theories out of the mouths of pretty much every celebrity and pundit on the Planet Earth it felt like, after hearing Hillary invoke the names Beyonce and Jay-Z roughly 10 million times over the week before the election and acting like that was supposed to make me DO something like it was some sort of mantra or a magic spell…honestly, if Donald Trump had ridden down on a spaceship from Mars and ripped off a rubber mask revealing himself to be a little green man, I’m not sure I could have dragged my ass to the polls to vote for HRC.

It made me start thinking about a lot of things.  It revealed to me that these people really are one unit, that’s not a misconception on my part.  They think alike, and one of the things they think, is that due to their clear mental superiority, because they’re famous and we aren’t, that they deserve to rule over us.  Well guess what, guys, you don’t.

Congratulate yourself, celebrities, members of the media, because YOU elected President Trump.  Donald Trump would have NEVER won this election without your insufferable, intolerable arrogance and your bloated senses of entitlement pissing off people like me.  And the more you bitch and moan and post your little memes and tweets about how stupidity and racism and sexism and hate are at the core of this, all you do is show to me that I was completely right not to vote Hillary.  It’s not racism, misogyny, stupidity, homophobia.  It’s that we don’t think you get to decide for us the way the world is gonna go on the basis of you happening to have won this weird American lottery we call fame.   So keep talking, you’re not winning any friends.