(Why certainly! Just like Hillary lost because everyone who voted for Trump — a racist, misogynist antisemite who hates women and Hispanics — is anti-feminist and anti-everything else good. Despite the vileness of Trump’s election, no Democrat would even consider demanding recounts or otherwise challenging the legitimacy of Trump’s terrible un-democratic election or erecting obstacles to his absurd agenda. — DM)
President Barack Obama during a U.S. counterterrorism strategy speech at MacDill Air Force Base Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016, in Tampa, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O’Meara)
A new CNN documentary about President Obama speculates that Republican opposition to the first black president’s big-government program was rooted in racial animus.
True to Mr. Obama’s legacy, “The Legacy of Barack Obama” finds plenty of time to bash Republicans.
“Did race play a role in the brick wall of Republican resistance to Barack Obama?” former Obama adviser and CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria asks at the outset of the documentary, which aired on Wednesday.
The two-hour primetime exposé, first reported by NewsBusters, features a who’s who of liberal pundits – many of them former Obama White House officials – who wholeheartedly agree that racism was a driving force behind Republican resistance to the president’s efforts to grow the size of government and centralize power in Washington, D.C.
After delving into Mr. Obama’s upbringing, the documentary cuts to a joyous scene at the president’s 2008 acceptance speech.
“It seemed like a fairy tale beginning but at precisely the moment the first couple began swaying on the dance floor, the central crisis of the Obama presidency was already taking shape,” Mr. Zakaria narrates.
“Within half a mile of where Obama and Michelle are dancing and celebrating their great victory, his Republican opponents are wining and dining and plotting his downfall,” says The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, adding that “15 of the most powerful Republicans in Washington made a pact that night” to undermine Mr. Obama at every turn.
“It’s indisputable that there was a ferocity to the opposition and a lack of respect to him that was a function of race,” says David Axelrod, a CNN political commentator and former chief strategist to the president.
And CNN political commentator Van Jones, a former top environmental official in the Obama administration, says he can’t think of a single thing congressional Republicans and Mr. Obama agreed on over eight years. But he can think of one thing – and only one thing – that explains the discord.
“You have to have an extraordinary explanation for this level of obstruction,” Mr. Jones says, evidently not referring to philosophical disagreement between liberalism and conservatism about the size and scope of government.
Although the documentary hints at racism around every corner of the bicameral legislature, it does not actually accuse any lawmakers of being racists.
“David Axelrod says, at least one powerful Republican was personally disrespectful to Obama,” Mr. Zakaria feebly alleges at one point.
Bringing the evening to a race-baiting crescendo, Mr. Zakaria recalls an incident in which Mr. Obama said a police officer “acted stupidly” by arresting a black Harvard professor who tried to force his way into his home after finding the door jammed.
The CNN anchor notes that the timing of the controversy coincided with fierce Republican opposition to Obamacare, which passed without a single GOP vote.
Suddenly, Mr. Zakaria remarks, “Rage over ObamaCare was turning to race.”
Trump’s victory means the left can’t jam its policies down on the whole nation—and gives it the incentive to develop policies acceptable not only to its own base but with voters among whom it fell agonizingly short this year.
********************
It’s been a tough decade for the political left. Eight years ago a Time magazine cover portrayed Barack Obama as Franklin Roosevelt, complete with cigarette and holder and a cover line proclaiming “The New New Deal.” A Newsweek cover announced “We Are All Socialists Now.”
Now the cover story is different. Time has just announced, inevitably though a bit begrudgingly, that its Person of the Year for 2016 is Donald Trump. No mention of New Deals or socialism.
It’s not surprising that newsmagazine editors expected a move to the left. The history they’d been taught by New Deal admirers, influenced by the doctrines of Karl Marx, was that economic distress moves voters to demand a larger and more active government.
There was some empirical evidence in that direction as well. The recession triggered by the financial crisis of 2007-08 was the deepest experienced by anyone not old enough to remember the 1930s. Barack Obama was elected with 53 percent of the popular vote—more than any candidate since the 1980s—and Democrats had won congressional elections with similar majorities in 2006 and 2008.
Things look different now, and not just because Donald Trump was elected president. It has been clear that most voters have been rejecting big government policies, and not just in the United States but in most democratic nations around the world.
Leftist politicians supposed that ordinary voters with modest incomes facing hard times would believe that regulation and redistribution would help them. Evidently most don’t.
The rejection was apparent in the 2010 and subsequent House elections; Republicans have now won House majorities in ten of the last 12 elections, leaving 2006 and 2008 as temporary aberrations. You didn’t hear Hillary Clinton campaign on the glories of Obamacare or the Iran nuclear deal, and her attack on “Trumped-up, trickle-down economics” didn’t strike any chords in the modest-income Midwest.
Republican success has been even greater in governor and state legislature elections, to the point that Democrats hold governorships and legislative control only in California, Hawaii, Delaware and Rhode Island. After eight years of the Obama presidency, Democrats hold fewer elective offices than at any time since the 1920s.
Things look similar abroad. Britain’s Conservatives, returned to government in 2010, are in a commanding position over a left-lurching Labour party. France’s Socialist president, with single-digit approval, declined to run for a second term. European social democratic parties have been hemorrhaging votes, and got walloped in Sunday’s Italian referendum. In Latin America and Asia, the left is declining or on the defensive.
Overall history is not bending toward happy acceptance of ever-larger government at home. Nor toward submersion of national powers and identities into large and inherently undemocratic international organizations. The nation-state remains the focus of most peoples’ loyalties, and in a time of economic and cultural diffusion, as Yuval Levin argues in his recent book The Fractured Republic, big government policies designed for an age of centralization have become increasingly dysfunctional.
Barack Obama doesn’t seem to have noticed this, at least until some time between nine and ten o’clock election night. Shrewder center-left politicians who have shown they know how to win elections have. Bill Clinton urged his wife’s campaign managers to put her out in rural areas speaking to voters’ concerns. The thirty-something geniuses she installed in her trendy Brooklyn headquarters knew better.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, speaking in Washington this week, said, “We have to pay attention to culture and identity,” and argued that in response to Islamist extremism, “Political correctness can’t get in the way.”
Such advice suggests that a sharp shift in current leftist strategy, which includes “identity politics” appeals to minorities at home and obeisance to the wisdom of supranational entities like the Paris climate changeconference and the European Union.
What’s missing in that is a concentration on the interests of one’s own citizenry. To the left that smacks of nationalism, which some seem to regard as only a baby step away from Nazism.
It’s not. The United States Constitution was designed to provide a framework in which rights are guaranteed and voters in states can choose policies in line with their different backgrounds and beliefs.
Trump’s victory means the left can’t jam its policies down on the whole nation—and gives it the incentive to develop policies acceptable not only to its own base but with voters among whom it fell agonizingly short this year.
(The views expressed in this article are those of Pajama Boy’s father and do not necessarily reflect my views, those of the other editors, or Warsclerotic. — DM)
This is a guest post by a well-known political commentator, the father of Pajama Boy. He is a true “Obama patriot,” whose views should matter little after mid-day on January 20th.
Here are the thoughts of President Reject Obama:
President Elect Donald Trump violated all known rules of common decency by accepting a telephone call from Taiwanese “President” Tsai Ing-wen without My permission. Indeed, Ms. Tsai did as well by placing the call without My permission. Obviously, I would not have granted permission because it was just a trick, intended to embarrass Me and My fundamentally transformed country.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Saturday the call between Taiwan’s president and Trump was “just a small trick by Taiwan,” according to Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV.
Both should be ashamed and both are on the wrong side of both history and herstory. I will continue to treat the renegade Chinese province of Taiwan as an outcast from the community of well-behaved nations, while reassuring Chinese President Xi Jinping of My continued fealty. He is My good friend, the powerful leader China — and indeed our entire climate change ravaged world — needs.
The call is widely believed to be the first between a U.S. president or president-elect and a leader of Taiwan since 1979, when diplomatic relations between the two were cut off. China regards Taiwan, a nearly 14,000 square-mile island off its coast, as a renegade province which should be returned to China ever since Gen. Chiang Kai-shek fled mainland China to Taiwan in 1949. [Emphasis added.]
The U.S. adopted a “One China” policy to help facilitate diplomacy with Beijing in 1972, and President Jimmy Carter formally recognized Beijing as the sole government of China in 1978. The U.S. embassy in Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, was closed in 1979. [Emphasis added.]
Since Ms. Tsai is merely the “president” of a rogue province of China not recognized by America, she is a make-believe president and a mere peon. It should be beneath the dignity of even a pitiful excuse for a President Elect like Trump even to consider talking with her.
Moreover, it is my understanding that Trump may well have attempted to harass her sexually, just as he does every female he encounters. Since they had “only” a telephone conversation and were probably separated by thousands of miles, it is possible that he did not attempt to grab her pussy, as he would have done had it been within reach.
Nevertheless, Trump doubtless lusted after her and “committed adultery” in what passes for his heart.
It is my sincere hope that, for as long as I am your President, America will continue to look up to, greatly admire and, in every other way possible, kowtow to the glorious People’s Republic of China, her generous leaders and her happy industrious workers. Our own workers should look up to and emulate them with great admiration, rather than childishly disparaging them and the products of their wholesome industry.
Editor’s comments
Since Taiwan is not a “real country” recognized by America, but is instead merely an estranged province of the People’s Republic of China, with no legitimate president other than Chinese President Xi Jinping, what’s the big deal? Had Trump accepted a phone call from (the ghost of) Homer Tomlinson, the self-proclaimed King of the World, would it have been seen as catastrophic?
Oh well.
President Elect Trump is committed to unraveling unfair trade deals with China and helping American businesses to compete fairly with Chinese businesses. China won’t like it, but as Pajama Boy’s father remarked a few years ago, “elections have consequences.” If that entails selling Taiwan more than we presently do, so be it.
Though the leaders of the U.S. and Taiwan in the last few decades have not been in contact, the U.S. has sold the island nation with weapons that the Chinese have perceived as an illegal act according to international law. In 2015, the U.S. sold $1.83 billion worth of weapons to Taiwan, which included anti-aircraft and anti-ship systems.
The more the merrier.
How about recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation, as we did until 1978 when President Carter withdrew recognition to appease China? Surely, Carter was not slighting the indigenous people of Taiwan. Was he?
“Taiwanese original inhabitants“) is the term commonly applied to the indigenous peoples of Taiwan, who number more than 530,000 and constitute nearly 2.3% of the island‘s population. Recent research suggests their ancestors may have been living on Taiwan for approximately 8,000 years before a major Hanimmigration began in the 17th century.[2]Taiwanese aborigines are Austronesian peoples, with linguistic and genetic ties to other Austronesian ethnic groups, which includes those of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Madagascar and Oceania.[3][4]The issue of an ethnic identity unconnected to the Asian mainland has become one thread in the discourse regarding the political status of Taiwan. [Emphasis added.]
For centuries, Taiwan’s aboriginal inhabitants experienced economic competition and military conflict with a series of colonizing newcomers. Centralized government policies designed to foster language shift and cultural assimilation, as well as continued contact with the colonizers through trade, intermarriage and other intercultural processes, have resulted in varying degrees of language death and loss of original cultural identity. For example, of the approximately 26 known languages of the Taiwanese aborigines (collectively referred to as the Formosan languages), at least ten are now extinct, five are moribund,[5] and several are to some degree endangered. These languages are of unique historical significance, since most historical linguists consider Taiwan to be the original homeland of the Austronesian language family.[2] [Emphasis added]
Taiwan’s Austronesian speakers were formerly distributed over much of the island’s rugged central mountain range and were concentrated in villages along the alluvial plains. The bulk of contemporary Taiwanese aborigines now live in the mountains and in cities.
The indigenous peoples of Taiwan face economic and social barriers, including a high unemployment rate and substandard education. Since the early 1980s, many aboriginal groups have been actively seeking a higher degree of political self-determination and economic development.[6] The revival of ethnic pride is expressed in many ways by aborigines, including the incorporation of elements of their culture into commercially successful pop music. Efforts are under way in indigenous communities to revive traditional cultural practices and preserve their traditional languages. The Austronesian Cultural Festival in Taitung City is one means by which tribe members promote aboriginal culture. In addition, several aboriginal tribes have become extensively involved in the tourism and ecotourism industries with the goal of achieving increased economic self-reliance and preserving their culture.[7] [Emphasis added]
China’s dominion over Taiwan, and therefore over her indigenous people, seems likely to hasten their cultural genocide. Might that be why “The issue of an ethnic identity unconnected to the Asian mainland has become one thread in the discourse regarding the political status of Taiwan?” Where are the leftists, who loudly and routinely bemoan the ill-treatment of indigenous peoples elsewhere — except, of course, the indigenous Jews of Israel whom they seek to replace with Arabian Palestinians who want to eliminate them as part of their final solution to the “Jewish problem?”
Being an ex-Soviet citizen, I naturally perceive the reality through the prism of my past Soviet experiences. That said, today’s political developments in America remind me of what happened in the USSR during Perestroika and Glasnost. The day Trump won the election I felt as elated as when the USSR officially collapsed.
I was lucky to have witnessed the fall of two evil empires from the inside. One was run by the monstrous Communist Party; the other by the well-greased Democratic party machine.
In the USSR, the Communist Party thrashed violently, obsessed with its own self-preservation without any regard to the crumbling Iron Curtain and the fact that nobody feared them any longer, nor believed a single word coming out of their mouths. And then it went down surprisingly fast. Disbanded without a whimper.
**************************
The biggest media topic of the day, apart from how president-elect Trump is Hitler, is how the Democratic party can dig its way out of the sinkhole in which it woke up on November 9th. In the meantime, perpetual panic attacks among Democratic elites result in uncontrollable anger, projections, verbal incontinence, hallucinations, and outright lunacy.
Amidst alarming reports that her own party is being consumed by crisis, chaos, and infighting, Elizabeth Warren all of a sudden decided to call Trump’s well-organized transition “chaotic” and demanded that a federal agency investigate this matter.
It was followed by the delusional idea of a ballot recount in three states at once. The debate is still open on who was more insane: those who brought it up a week after the expired deadline – or their supporters who donated over $5 million of their money for this crash and burn project.
Other widespread examples of lunacy, verbal incontinence, hallucinations, and projections include intrusive and repetitive thoughts about race, racism, and racists.
Who are we to argue? If the Democrat party wants to continue to run on affirmative action principles, let them. I also urge them to expand on the idea and hire affirmative action pilots for their jets and affirmative action doctors for their Botox injections.
Barack Obama was an affirmative action president. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Donna Brazile were affirmative action DNC chairs. Hillary was an affirmative action presidential nominee.
As a result, the Democratic party has lost the White House, Senate, House of Representatives, many governorships, state and local legislatures, as well as the ability to make Supreme Court appointments that will determine the direction of the Judiciary for a generation. The Democrat party today is the weakest it has been since the 1920s.
My only regret is that the Democrats hadn’t tested all of their half-baked ideas on their party first, before forcing them on the entire nation. Had they done that, their party would not have survived natural selection and today’s Republicans would have to compete with a lot more sensible group of people.
In spite of all the evidence, some Democratic hard-liners continue to believe their party lost the elections because it didn’t fully live up to its own principles.
Power to the hard-liners! If only they could force every rank and file Democrat to live exactly the way they want the rest of Americans to live, we’d see their ranks deflate to the size of the Communist Party USA faster than you can say “hypocrisy.”
Here’s a helpful to-do list:
Things the Democratic elites should do in order to live up to their party principles:
Relinquish all positions of power to the less fortunate, previously overlooked due to their lack of skills, intelligence, language proficiency, work ethics, felony record, hygiene, or another disability.
Balkanize the Democratic party by splitting it into a thousand factions based on race, gender, language, country of origin, ethnicity, culture, religion, sexual orientation, profession, education, or disability – and let them fight each other to the death for power.
Limit your own healthcare options so that the less fortunate can have more.
Surrender all firearms, get rid of bodyguards or Secret Service agents.
Tear down all walls and fences around you, remove your locks and throw away the keys.
Move all your offspring from private “academies” to inner city public schools.
Turn your luxury condos and mansions and into communal apartments for the homeless, or better yet, for the refugees from Syria, Somalia, and other troubled Third World countries.
Stop hiring tax accountants; donate all your income to the IRS because the government knows best how to use your money for the common good.
Redistribute the remaining personal wealth equally among fellow Democrats – stocks, bonds, real estate, yachts, bank accounts – to each according to their need.
Buy only overpriced, fair-trade, union-made, free-range, non-GMO, non-polluting, green-energy, locally grown, halal, organic, and otherwise regulated products.
Convert to the most progressive religion of Islam; then try to impose political correctness within its ranks and generally manage that organization as you’ve managed your own party.
Have mandatory consensual sex with each other regardless of gender, age, or body image – excluding any reproductive sis-gender relationships.
Help stop global warming and protect the environment by disconnecting from the power grid; replace shopping with dumpster-diving; establish quotas on toilet paper.
Save the planet and fight overpopulation by limiting your own lifespan.
Some of you may say, dude, don’t point out their errors, we don’t want them to smarten up. I say, we do want them to smarten up, dude. And right at this moment the best way to go about it is point out precisely how the use of their far-fetched leftist ideology has brought them to ruin.
With any luck, the least brainwashed of them will lose faith and stop pushing their hoary Utopian dogmas on the rest of us. There will be others, of course, who will stay the course and keep digging their way out of their hole until they surface in North Korea. Godspeed, comrades! Please dig faster and use bigger shovels.
Being an ex-Soviet citizen, I naturally perceive the reality through the prism of my past Soviet experiences. That said, today’s political developments in America remind me of what happened in the USSR during Perestroika and Glasnost. The day Trump won the election I felt as elated as when the USSR officially collapsed.
I was lucky to have witnessed the fall of two evil empires from the inside. One was run by the monstrous Communist Party; the other by the well-greased Democratic party machine.
In the USSR, the Communist Party thrashed violently, obsessed with its own self-preservation without any regard to the crumbling Iron Curtain and the fact that nobody feared them any longer, nor believed a single word coming out of their mouths. And then it went down surprisingly fast. Disbanded without a whimper.
In the U.S., hardly anyone believes the leftist media anymore, especially after it was exposed to be a cog in the Democratic propaganda machine. Ideologically driven Hollywood movies tank in the box office, and politically correct colleges are quickly becoming the butt of every joke.
Make no mistake, well-connected Soviet apparatchiks still held on to their power and money, retaining many key positions in the government. That largely explains the undying culture of corruption in ex-Soviet countries that had never purged their ex-Communist officials, which badly needed to be done for the same reason de-Nazification was done in post-World War II Europe. But at least the stifling ideology was gone and living standards began to improve by leaps and bounds.
The Trump administration would be wise to perform a thorough lustration of leftist ideologues in all government agencies, similar to how it was done in Poland and other former Eastern Bloc states that have successfully purged their communist past. I’m not calling for purges of all rank and file Democrats, but the more zealous ideologues in the government had better get ready to use their professional skills, if any, in the private sector.
The election was only a preview; the real fight is about to begin. We need to move fast while the Democratic party is wallowing in its crisis. In the words of their own apparatchik, you never let a serious crisis go to waste.
(I have two problems with the headline. 1. They are not “liberals” (at least in the old-fashioned sense of the word) and 2. “Losing their minds” assumes a fact not in evidence. –DM)
A couple days ago I wandered into the Berkeley Bowl Market, which is where upscale hippiedom of Berkeley shops for its fair-trade kale and such. Oh my! The experience does not disappoint. The people watching was even better than the Whole Foods in Boulder, which was the size of a Home Depot. One of these days I’ll take a hidden video camera for some candid shots. Maybe I’ll wear a “Make America Great Again” cap just to watch people clear out of the unsafe food space faster than a botulism scare.
Over at The Federalist, David Marcus relates the amazing story of what happened at a crunchy food co-op in Brooklyn when “Sweet Home Alabama” came on the store’s background music rotation:
After getting our Brazilian Arabica ground for drip (I know, I should really use a French Press), Libby and I walked towards the organic maple syrup. That’s when it started. I suppose there had been music playing in the store, but I hadn’t noticed until a familiar guitar lick pierced the air and a soft voice said, “Turn it up.”
Libby and I both stopped and looked at each other. “Seriously?” said my wife, a very disappointed Clinton supporter. She started gripping her soft Tomme Crayeuse a little too hard. By the time Ronnie Van Zant’s drawl started in with “Big wheels keep on turnin’,” everyone in the store was standing in shock. Brows were furrowed, people mumbled to each other. The song seemed to get louder as one of those New York moments happened, when everyone was thinking the exact the same thing.
A woman in her fifties, wearing a Love Trump Hates button, turned to her Brooklyn-bearded husband and said loudly, “This is unbelievable!” She found the nearest store clerk, a young woman in a green apron who was staring up at the ceiling, looking for the invisible speakers blaring this message from the other America. “This is so inappropriate,” the woman said. “Can we turn this off?”
Just wait until Trump has “Dueling Banjos” played at his inauguration.
A month ago, progressives were having a conniption fit over Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the election. So of course, now that Trump has won, they are rioting, vandalizing, staging “cry-ins,” ditching class, group-hugging, tweeting threats, calling names, seeking counseling, and doing everything in their power to make sure that their party declines even further. If this behavior continues, and if––a big “if” –– Trump governs the way he promised, we may be witnessing the start of the progressive disintegration.
Start with the melting snowflake millennials, all those “cocksure women and hensure men,” as D.H. Lawrence once described feminists of both sexes. These layabouts have become used to throwing tantrums whenever they don’t like something or they feel “unsafe.” Most of them are spoiled brats, the pampered detritus of the middle class. But don’t forget the Alinskyite activists who manipulate these juveniles and bus them in on George Soros’ dime. These two-bit Leninists are adept at using “useful idiots” in order to further their aim of destroying America’s political and social order. They’re skilled at manipulating empty slogans like “income inequality,” “fair share,” “social justice,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” and all the other bumper-sticker bromides in order to consolidate and increase their power and influence.
If the delicate millennial Eloi were really interested in reforming their team instead of indulging phony moral exhibitionism, they would start with the Democrat party. No true leftist would have sat still for the nomination of a candidate so obviously part of the fat-cat ruling class as Hillary Clinton. (And no, he wouldn’t be happy with Bernie Sanders either, a bumbling blowhard who thinks imitating Sweden’s “social democracy” ––which means an overregulated capitalism leavened with over-generous social welfare benefits––is somehow an epochal revolutionary change.) It was electoral malfeasance to choose a geriatric insider and establishment plutocrat with no charisma and a long record of abusing her privilege and power. So, kiddies, go protest against the DNC and Barack Obama. They’re the reason the Republican party is the strongest it’s been since 1928.
Next, look at yourselves. As Piers Morgan––no conservative he––said recently, “The tragic truth is that America’s millennials are a bunch of phone-addicted, selfie-obsessed, hashtagging, snapchatting, kale-munching, twerking, lazy, whining, ill-informed, politically correct, cossetted narcissists who find absolutely everything mortally offensive and believe there are 165 ways to sexually identify.” It follows that your politics are merely symbolic, expressions of your inflated self-regard, privileged life-style, and arrogant pretensions to sophistication and intelligence. Unsurprisingly, as Morgan points out, according to the National Institutes of Health, 40% of you think you should be promoted every two years despite performance, 77% of you can’t name a senator from your home state, and 80% of you think you’ll be richer than your parents, even as you pile up student debt earning junk “studies” degrees utterly useless for employment in the real world.
In contrast to symbolic politics, real politics is grubby hard work: knocking on doors, registering voters, and not just preaching to the choir, but converting new voters. Follow Obama’s advice to Republicans three years ago: “You don’t like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election” (HT Cal Thomas). By the way, you won’t win many elections by demonizing nearly half of voters as ignorant, racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and cisgendered “irredeemable deplorables.”
More important, you need to vote. Only half of your 24-million-strong cohort voted in this election. You also need to understand that not everybody between the ages of 18-29 thinks exactly like you. Thirty-seven percent of millennials voted for Donald Trump. Instead of crying and vandalizing and screaming question-begging epithets, you should figure out how to talk to your fellow millennials and make persuasive, fact-based arguments based on coherent principles. But of course, if you could do that, you wouldn’t be progressives.
Then there are the Dems. They long ago embraced a balkanizing identity politics based mainly on demonizing those white voters who pulled the lever for Trump. They pander incessantly to race hucksters and rich women and sleek “Hispanics,” most of whom never cut grapes or even speak Spanish. They embrace counter-factual nonsense like “white privilege,” when they of all people should know that the color of privilege in America is the currency shade of green. They and their wholly owned subsidiaries, the mainstream media and the educational industry, enforce a preposterous political correctness that is intellectually lazy and morally bankrupt. They trade in group-identities often based on stereotypes and generalizations that old-school Jim Crow segregationists relied on. The blatant hypocrisy of a political correctness that never protects Christians, poor whites, or conservatives finally angered enough voters to set aside their distaste for Trump and put him in office.
Yet despite that rebuke, after the election the Democrat elite indulged the same old nonsense. The tried to play the “sexist” card to explain Hillary’s defeat, posited a preposterous “whitelash” of racists, tarred the careerist James Comey as a Republican mole, whined about the Electoral College while trying to suborn Electors, conjured up sinister Klansmen and alt-right storm-troopers, insulted 49 million Americans as haters, and prophesized an imminent fascist coup engineered by Trump’s goose-stepping Goebbels, Steve Bannon. Rather than come up with new ideas, they’re doubling-down on the stale paradigm that demography guarantees them a permanent coalition comprising various identity-groups united by the promise of more set-asides and wealth redistribution, and bicoastal plutocrats who compensate for their privilege by catering to the minority masses they make sure never enter their gated compounds except to make the beds and mow the lawn. They don’t consider that Trump’s victory could make that plan obsolete if he follows through on his promise to tighten up on immigration.
Finally, instead of rethinking their exploded economic myths and abandoning a divisive identity politics, many Dems want to keep steaming full speed ahead toward the next electoral iceberg. Look at the two candidates touted as replacements for the tarnished DNC interim chair Donna Brazile. Howard “Screaming” Dean, erstwhile presidential candidate and governor of a state with fewer people than Fresno County, is a tax-and-spend, “fair share,” regulation-happy, identity politics tribune and radical egalitarian redistributionist of the kind whose policies have given us sluggish growth, job-killing regulations, and astronomical debt. The other choice is Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, a zealous Muslim convert by way of the ultra-racist Nation of Islam. He is tainted with anti-Semitism, apologetics for Iran and terrorists like Hamas, virulent hatred of Israel, wacky 9-11 conspiracy theories, and the usual progressive blame-America-first foreign policy and magical-thinking economics. No surprise that he has been endorsed by the Jacobin Cherokee Elizabeth Warren, and ex-Senator Harry Reid, Obama’s legislative Luca Brasi.
The few sane Democrats counseling a change of course are unlikely to halt the self-destruction of so many failed progressive gods. Only Trump can prevent that “consummation devoutly to be wished” by failing to keep his campaign promises.
In 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to use “some old fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming” against those whose exercise of free speech “we abhor.”
At the time, she had in mind specifically perpetrators of what the OIC, the Muslim Brotherhood, other Islamic supremacists and their enablers on the Left call “defamation of Islam.” But the same playbook – in the tradition of Mrs. Clinton’s mentor, Saul Alinsky – is now being followed with a vengeance against what is abhorred by the cabal best described as the Red-Green Axis.
Much in evidence among such “old-fashioned techniques” now being employed is what’s known as “the Big Lie.” It entails the endless repetition of outrageous falsehoods to defame, and ultimately silence, one’s political opponents.
Three good men Donald Trump has selected for key strategic and national security positions are currently getting the Big Lie treatment: his White House Counsel Steve Bannon, Attorney General-designate Senator Jeff Sessions, and incoming National Security Advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn. They are being relentlessly vilified as “racists,” “bigots” and “haters.”
I feel these able public servants’ pain. Indeed, I know what it’s like to be subjected to the Big Lie. For years, the Islamists and their allies on the hard Left – notably, the discredited (for example, here and here) Southern Poverty Law Center – have used character assassination and vitriol against me (for example, here, here and here) to protect what they otherwise cannot defend: the totalitarian program its adherents call Sharia. The false assertion last week that I had been asked to serve on the Trump transition team sent these rogues into fresh paroxysms of hateful denunciation, repeated like a mantra by their media echo chamber (for example, here, here, here and here).
I am hardly alone in being diagnosed by such charlatans with the made-up condition of “Islamophobia.” Indeed, I am proud to be included in the company of men and women being pilloried for what Islamic supremacists and their enablers would have us believe is “defamation of Islam.” In fact, it is simply informed, astute and courageous truth-telling about the global jihad movement and threat it poses. Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions and Mike Flynn are under assault for doing the same in this and other contexts.
It seems that critics are particularly unhinged by the clarity of these three men and the president they will serve about the fact that Islamic supremacism is not simply a menace overseas. The Red-Green types are determined to prevent Donald Trump from operationalizing the plan of action he described in a major address on the topic on August 15, 2016. Among its highlights are the following:
Our new approach, which must be shared by both parties in America, by our allies overseas, and by our friends in the Middle East, must be to halt the spread of Radical Islam. All actions should be oriented around this goal….Just as we won the Cold War, in part, by exposing the evils of communism and the virtues of free markets, so too must we take on the ideology of Radical Islam….
In the Cold War, we had an ideological screening test. The time is overdue to develop a new screening test for the threats we face today. In addition to screening out all members or sympathizers of terrorist groups, we must also screen out any who have hostile attitudes towards our country or its principles – or who believe that Sharia law should supplant American law. Those who do not believe in our Constitution, or who support bigotry and hatred, will not be admitted for immigration into the country….
Finally, we will pursue aggressive criminal or immigration charges against anyone who lends material support to terrorism. Similar to the effort to take down the mafia, this will be the understood mission of every federal investigator and prosecutor in the country. To accomplish a goal, you must state a mission: the support networks for Radical Islam in this country will be stripped out and removed one by one. Immigration officers will also have their powers restored: those who are guests in our country that are preaching hate will be asked to return home. (Emphasis added)
In short, the Red-Green Axis is having conniptions because the American people have now chosen to lead them a president and an administration that will not just be sensible about this threat. It is also determined to do the job Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and their minions have adamantly shirked: protecting us against, rather than accommodating, Sharia. So the Big Lie and “other techniques of shaming and peer pressure” are now being applied with abandon to outstanding public servants in the hope of reducing their effectiveness and that of the presidency they will serve.
The transparent falsity and political agenda being served by such lies should, instead, discredit their perpetrators. For that to happen, however, the so-called “mainstream press” will have to stop lionizing the Big Liars and uncritically promoting their handiwork.
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
Democrats, the lamebrain media (but I repeat myself), academics (Opps! I repeated myself again) and others who should know better are protesting — often violently — against Trump’s victory. Trump Derangement Syndrome is upon us.
Trump won fair and square. He did not rely on non-citizens or others who are barred from voting. As President, he intends, with the help of Congress, to make changes in U.S. policy. Horrors!
Reflections via Gilbert and Sullivan
Thank Zeus that Hillary won’t be the Monarch of the Sea President of the United States. The Monarch of the Seas, as depicted by G&S, certainly behaves and sounds like Hillary.
Here is Hillary on the day after her defeat.
Here’s how less-than-normally-judgmental Hillary supporters and Never Trumpers see Trump:
So much for Gilbert and Sullivan.
Here are Hillary’s supporters:
Here’s another meltdown. The linked article had a video, but YouTube says “This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.” I wonder why. Oh well. This is how Jonathan Turley describes it:
In an appearance on MSNBC (which seems at times to be moving through the stages of grieving of Kübler-Ross), McInstosh insisted that the problem was with sexist, self-hating women: “Internalized misogyny is a real thing and this is a thing we have to be talking about as we go through and see.” She added “We as a society react poorly to women seeking positions of power. We are uncomfortable about that and we seek to justify that uncomfortable feeling because it can’t possibly be because we don’t want to see a woman in that position of power. As we go through these numbers, as we figure out exactly what happened with turnout, it seems to be white college-educated women . . . We have work to do talking to those women about what happened this year and why we would vote against our self-interest.”
And then there are these no less delusional “feminists.”
#NotOurPresident on Twitter quickly gave way to riots in major cities. Democrats in the affected cities decided that the riots were a great idea even though it was their own police that were being attacked.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York City’s radical leftist boss, claimed that “more disruption… will change the trajectory of things”. Even though the only trajectory that the protests have changed thus far is New York City traffic. “The more people fight back, the more it takes away his power,” he insisted.
Wiser heads on the left recognized that messing up Manhattan traffic wouldn’t stop Trump from taking office. Instead they decided to abolish the Electoral College. Senator Boxer will introduce a bill to that effect. Bernie Sanders mumbled that it’s time to rethink it. Michael Dukakis fired off an angry email insisting that Hillary Clinton had won and that abolishing it should be a top Democratic priority.
Since Hillary lost, the Electoral College is, according to Slate, an “Instrument of White Supremacy—and Sexism”. And probably Islamophobic and Homophobic too. Time Magazine defaulted to the default lefty attack on anything by accusing the Electoral College of being racist. But if Hillary had won, then any attack on the Electoral College would be racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic and claustrophobic.
Rank and filers weren’t interested in waiting to abolish it tomorrow. They skipped right to trying to rig it today. Over 4 million people have signed a petition titled, “Electoral College: Make Hillary Clinton President on December 19”. Because that’s just how they think elections should work.
Efforts were made to contact Electors directly urging them to hijack the election. Idaho Secretary of State Lawerence Denney said that the Electors were being harassed with “insults”, “vulgar language” and “threats”. One Elector reported that his cell, home phone, email and Facebook were targeted.
“They’re just trying to steal this thing,” he said.
The Electoral College is undemocratic. Unless you’re a Democrat asking it to undemocratically hijack the results of a state election while depriving its voters of political representation.
Some Democrats despaired of stealing the election and tried to steal the Supreme Court instead. There were revived calls for a Supreme Court recess appointment. There’s a petition, a Saturday Night Live punch line and a bizarre effort by Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley to move the nomination forward.
Merkley claimed that Trump has “no right to fill” that seat and that the Supreme Court seat was stolen. “We need to do everything we possibly can to block it,” he insisted.
What does that mean? How about a permanently deadlocked Supreme Court?
A Slate writer urged that, “the only way to answer nihilism is with nihilism of our own.”
“Obstruct the nomination and seating of any Trump nominee to fill Scalia’s seat,” she urged. “We will lose. But that’s not the point now… If Democrats can muster the energy to fight about nothing else, it should be this.”
A permanently deadlocked Supreme Court doesn’t sound like much of a plan. But Trump Derangement Syndrome means embracing nihilism. And it’s downright rational compared to the celebrity meltdowns as TMZ’s finest cope with the blow to their egos of an election that showed they didn’t matter.
Lady Gaga has been yelling at Trump on and off Twitter. Constitutional scholar George Takei demanded that Obama just appoint Garland. Honorary feminist Joss Whedon declared, “This is simple: Trump cannot CANNOT be allowed a term in office. It’s not about 2018. It’s about RIGHT NOW.”
What does that mean? It’s a tantrum. It means that baby wants his power and he wants it now.
And it only gets crazier from there.
The outer reaches of Trump Derangement Syndrome include calls to boycott three brands of toilet paper because they’re allegedly made by the Koch Brothers. Never mind that the Koch Brothers weren’t supporting Trump. Facts, like democracy, only matter when they happen to be on your side.
Then there are the ritual burnings of New Balance sneakers on YouTube and Instagram. Not to mention support for the secession of California from the United States of America.
A man has sued Donald Trump for $1 billion for having inflicted “great emotional pain, fear and anxiety on Election Day and beyond.” Students at Cornell held a “cry-in” to mourn the results of the election. The University of Kansas offered students therapy dogs. At the University of Michigan’s multi-ethnic student affairs center students took comfort in regressing to childhood with coloring books and Play-Doh.
John Hopkins recommended a healing circle. Stanford urged students to “take care of yourselves and to give support to those who need it.” Vanderbilt encouraged them “to take advantage of the outstanding mental health support the university offers.”
At the University of Maryland, an astronomy test was canceled to help students cope with “a personally threatening election result.” A Yale economics professor made his test optional because students were “in shock” over losing an election. A dozen midterms were rescheduled at Columbia.
One student complained, “Instead of studying for my exam, I was glued to the election update. It’s not fair to have a test the following day when something so monumental is taking place, especially when this event is threatening so many groups of people in our country.”
Under all the outraged rhetoric is a narcissistic sense of entitlement. Frustrate it and tantrums happen.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is the tantrum that happens when that sense of entitlement bursts. It’s not a new phenomenon. We saw it with Bush and with previous Republican presidents before him. But as the left’s power has grown, its insular ivory towers have become unable to imagine ever losing it.
Obama maintained the illusion that the opposition didn’t matter by ruling unilaterally. Then in one election the illusion collapsed. The left wasn’t really in charge. There were millions of people across the country in places they had never visited or even heard of who got to decide on all these issues.
That warm comfortable safe space of John Oliver and Samantha Bee viral videos, Buzzfeed stories and social media feeds filled with carefully curated people who agreed with them wasn’t reality. It had been an illusion all along. It was an elitist island that had little in common with that vast geography of people who get their say through the Electoral College. After two terms of getting their way on everything, they woke to a world in which they didn’t matter and which was suddenly no longer catering to their whims.
They don’t really want to abolish the Electoral College, to put Garland on the Supreme Court or to burn New Balance sneakers. What they really want is to get rid of democracy and replace it with a dictatorship. Trump Derangement Syndrome is the tantrum of tyrants.
It’s a real threat to democracy. But that’s what the left has always been.
The hysteria of Trump Derangement Syndrome is the flip side of Obama worship. Both reject democracy and embrace power. They are the illiberal attitudes of a totalitarian movement at odds with America. [Emphasis added.]
“A world is collapsing before our eyes”, tweeted the French ambassador to the United States, Gerard Araud, as it became clear that Donald Trump had won the US presidential election. Although he later apparently deleted the tweet, the sentiment expressed in his tweet encapsulates the attitude of the majority of the European political establishment.
Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s international broadcaster, described the reaction to Trump’s victory across Germany’s political spectrum as “shock and uncertainty.” Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen described Trump’s win as a “heavy shock.” German Justice Minister Heiko Maas tweeted: “The world won’t end, but things will get more crazy”.
Green party leader Cem Özdemir called Trump’s election a “break with the tradition that the West stands for liberal values.”
“Trump is the trailblazer of a new authoritarian and chauvinist international movement. … They want a rollback to the bad old times in which women belonged by the stove or in bed, gays in jail and unions at best at the side table. And he who doesn’t keep his mouth shut gets publicly bashed.”
In a fine touch of irony, EU Commissioner Guenther Oettinger, who recently referred to the Chinese as “slanty eyed,” told Deutschlandfunk radio that the U.S. election was a “warning” for Germany: “Things are getting simplified, black or white, good or bad, right or wrong. You can ask simple questions, but one should not give simple answers.”
In France, the media reaction was summed up by the left-leaning newspaper, Libération:
“Trumpocalypse… Shock… The world’s leading power is from now on in the hands of the far-right. Fifty percent of Americans voted in all conscience for a racist, lying, sexist, vulgar, hateful candidate.”
Critics omitted, however, the runaway lawlessness, divisiveness and corruption that American voters declined to reinstate.
President François Hollande described Trump’s victory as marking the start of “a period of uncertainty.” Previously, Hollande had said that Trump made him “want to retch.”
On a very different, but related note, Nigel Farage speaks about the Trump and Brexit revolutions:
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a reformist Muslim, agrees with Trump’s much-maligned — and grossly distorted by the media — plans for deciding which Muslims will be allowed to enter the United States.
Conclusions
I engaged in a bit of Schadenfreude while writing this, but the problem has its serious aspects.
Many people wanted “feminist” Hillary to continue Obama’s feckless foreign and domestic policies; not enough to win the election for Hillary, but enough to make them believe that they should and would win hands-down. Since they didn’t, they concluded that something serious — they don’t know what, beyond the idiocy of American voters and a “corrupt” electoral system — must have caused “racist, antisemitic, misogynist bully” Trump to win.
Why? Academia — from kindergarten through graduate school — are one big part of the problem and the lamebrain media are another. Most of those placed in charge of them doubtless agree with Obama’s position that His world vision is right and that Populism is dangerous.
[I]nstead of laudatory songs that praise the new president, a sick new anti-Trump lesson plan that demonizes President-elect Trump and his supporters has already been offered to teachers in the San Francisco area. High school social studies teacher Fakhra Shah apparently drew up the lesson plan in a fit of spite and rage in the wee hours of the morning of November 9, right after Trump was elected. The school district reportedly has no problem with the plan, which characterizes the new president and his supporters as racist and sexist bigots.
. . . .
[Ms. Shah] warned teachers that some students may lash out at the new president using foul and obscene language. She even encouraged this because it is how kids living under white supremacy lift themselves up and fight oppression at school. Or something.
“I know that they might curse and swear, but you would too if you have suffered under the constructs of white supremacy or experienced sexism, or any isms or lack of privilege,” she wrote.
This is not “empowering” or “uplifting.” It is seriously deranged and destructive. The songs of Obama praise were disturbing and inappropriate, but this kind of propaganda is just plain evil. Instead of helping students deal with an election that maybe didn’t go the way they wanted, they are encouraging them to wallow in anger and self-pity and branding over 60 million Americans as racist and sexist bigots.
President Barack Obama during a U.S. counterterrorism strategy speech at MacDill Air Force Base Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016, in Tampa, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O’Meara)
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