Ok, so how you get elected President of the United States has been entirely been re-written. Turns out that you don’t need friendly media, lots of money, massive campaign infrastructure…but, you do need to be smart. Trump and his team was just that – where they needed to be on it, they were smart.
Trump does have some good policy proposals – we’ll see if he can get them done. He will have a GOP Congress. There is a chance for massive, genuine reform in America…and maybe Trump is the oddity who can break the log-jam? We’ll find out over the next year or so.
I hold nothing against anyone for how they voted this year – it was a very strange year and it wasn’t a cut-and-dried thing. Time to unify – everyone from all sides needs to come together and figure out what is best for the nation.
I’ll have more to say tomorrow – hope you all had a good day.
Blogs For Victory 
I finally went to bed around 2AM EST with Trump leading 254 to 209 and nursing narrow leads in PA and MI. As I drifted off to sleep I kept having visions of Democrats scurrying around in the shadows in Detroit and Philadelphia trying to find a car with a trunk full of absentee Clinton absentee ballots. I woke up a little after 4AM, and turned on the TV. Un-freakin’-believable.
HILLARY CLINTON CONCEDES. It Is Finished.
I wonder if we will ever hear from Bob again. Good night for the working class of America
Bob? He’s so clueless he probably thinks Hillary won. We tried to reason with him, tried to point out how stupid it was to have any kind of certainty in this election but nope, ‘ol Bob would have none of it. No siree, Hillary is our next president.
The elite Left (Hollywood, MSM, polsters, etc.) are in complete denial and shock this morning. I’m thinking it might be a nice gesture to take up a collection and buy them all one-way tickets to wherever they’d like to move. Speaking of polsters, never has there been so much collective egg on the faces of a group of “experts.”
The political experts, the career politicians, and the ivory tower class were strongly rebuked last night. It’s time to listen to the deplorables.
I brought up one of the streaming network news shows while waiting to see if Trump would finally win, and the newsreader said that the web site for emigration to Canada had crashed, so many people were looking at how they could move out of the US now that it looked like Trump was going to win.
Well, we have heard that before. How many of the Hollywood elites actually did move out of the country when Bush was elected? And many of us DID offer to buy their one-way tickets.
The funniest thing is, the same Open Borders people who decried Trump’s comments on Mexican criminals coming to the US never want to move to Mexico.
LOL – yep. And, actually, it would do all of them a lot of good to spend a week among the poor of Mexico, anyways…but they’ll never see it, and never care about it.
My Mrs threw up the sponge on waiting for it after I told her that PA was sure for Trump and thus his chances of losing was about 0.0001%…I stayed on, waiting…and was appalled when Hillary wouldn’t even come out and offer some words of comfort for her most devoted supporters. That, if nothing else, proved her unfit to be President. Those people gave it their all…and she couldn’t even come out in person to thank them that night.
My first thinking this morning is that, now, the GOP needs to spend the next four years trying to win CA…we’ve got to find a way to make CA like Texas…they have very similar demographics, so there’s no reason we can’t be competitive there. And by finally returning CA to it’s Reaganite roots, we can finish off the political power of Progressives for at least a generation.
We got it all, right now – but the risk, of course, is that we’ve got it all…we’ll own whatever happens and we will be made to pay a huge price if we screw it up. I hope that the reform bills come roaring through Congress right out the gate…it’s a short window of opportunity before the Congresscritters start getting worried about the 2018 mid-terms.
Those people gave it their all…and she couldn’t even come out in person to thank them that night.
She was probably too busy throwing ash trays and screaming obscenities at her staff. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in the room with her when they called Pennsylvania for Trump.
Yep – and it probably went on for a while. Looking it over, the race should have been called by about 12:30 am, Eastern…with Hillary massively underperforming in the Philly and Detroit metro areas, those States were sure to go to Trump…and in Normal Land, once Hillary got that word, she would have immediately conceded to Trump…but, she hung on and refused, just like Kerry refused in 2004. Small minded, petulant people, these Progressive leaders are…
She was probably drinking heavily. There are many indications that she tips the bottle a little more often than a president should.
How about a link to the go fund me page!
“I hold nothing against anyone for how they voted this year”
Well, I DO have a problem with people so driven by either hate or pettiness that they would actively choose a criminal to lead our country. Particularly a criminal who put national security at risk in her illegal pursuit of personal riches.
I think we NEED to let people know that decisions have consequences, and that if they are going to support and enable someone like this people will not respect them. Having said that, I don’t think we should sneer at them or bully them, but we do need to make it clear that voting is a serious matter, not a popularity contest, and that it demands commitment to what is best for the country.
The only ones I would give a pass to are, oddly, those who actually do have a coherent political philosophy, which is represented by the political system of Hillary Clinton, who vote ideology instead of blind hatred and/or Identity Politics. I don’t agree with them, I think they are wrong, but I respect that they know what they stand for.
And I do have a problem with abject stupidity. Anyone who can think that Donald Trump actually said all Mexicans are racist is truly, abjectly, profoundly stupid.
I just came into the office and told two of my Trump supporting agents to be low key today. No gloating.
On another topic, what’s the next move for NeverTrumpers? What now Bill Kristol? And I will remind everyone that Kristol was somewhat enthusiastically predicting a Hillary win yesterday.
Now we’ll see if Trump keeps his word on a Special Prosecutor – I’ve seen some people talking up the idea of either Obama or Trump offering a pardon to Hillary, et al in order to clean the slate…and the generous and merciful part of my nature says, “ok”; but the justice part of my nature says, “not so fast”. I really do believe there has been a systemic attempt to corrupt American political life by the Democrat leadership (joined by some GOPers, as well) and that should be brought to light…so the people will know, and the politicians will learn.
I think we may differ on the meaning of “generous and merciful”. I find it the opposite of “generous and merciful” to continue to perpetrate the sin of corruption in high places. We are supposedly a nation of laws, founded on the concept of equality under the law. We have slid away from that a little at a time until the Clinton era when this decline picked up velocity and, according to the election results, a lot of public approval—-at least a lot of people didn’t mind trying to elect a crook to the presidency.
Not to pick on you, Mark, but I find this attitude of not judging people for what they do, or being willing to make them suffer the consequences of their actions, to be quite, well, morally wishy-washy. For some reason a few words have been used so scornfully by the Left they have been accepted as pejoratives—–“opinionated” is one, “judgmental” is another. Yet we all have opinions, and I find those who lack the intellectual vigor to examine them and defend them to be pretty boring. And we HAVE to be judgmental. As the song title says, “If you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything”.
A law without a penalty is just like having no law at all. Blithely dismissing criminal activity because of some sense that this is what it means to be “generous” or “merciful” is, in my admittedly judgmental opinion, merely enabling the kind of behavior that harms those it victimizes, and in the case of Clinton malfeasance harms the nation, as well as contributing to the ongoing erosion of the very values upon which this nation was founded.
There are people, like the witless talking head on KOA Denver radio Monday, who think that failing to prosecute Hillary for her crimes is really exoneration for those crimes, a statement that they did not exist and she did nothing wrong. A pardon would make the same statement. And it would reinforce the perception, too often true, that we are no longer a nation of laws in which we are all equal under the law, but that we are in fact a burgeoning banana republic with different laws for different classes of people.
Perpetuating that decline is “generous” or “merciful”? I strongly disagree.
Well, as I said, my sense of justice informs me that there should be an investigation – and prosecution, if warranted (which is almost a sure-thing, given what we know).
I do hope that Trump instructs the DoJ to do a really full-blast investigation of voter fraud – we need to get our Democrats wary of doing it. They’ve gotten away with it forever simply because the GOP never calls them out on it when they do win.
What about Clinton fatigue? Sorry Ken Starr wherever you are. Grace does more for the grantor than the grantee. Grace means not having to spend the next year or two listening to the media drone forever on about, yet another Clinton scandal. Isn’t that priceless? Just what is that worth all by itself! I can’t quantify it.
We need to heal not enact vengeance on a former First Lady, Senator, SOS, and Presidential Candidate whom half the country just came out and supported for President. It rubbing salt in the wound, will tarnish the brand, it’s how liberals act, and does absolutely nothing to improve things save the pie-in-the-sky idea of serving as a deterrent to future political corruption. It won’t work. Let’s just move on.
There’s a bright future ahead let’s not look back. A conservative court, repeal of… let’s just say, the substantial roll back of the transformational power of corruption. Consider the loss of the following players, Obama, Clinton, Reid, Kerry… their bench is decimated. The court, if proper filled won’t be buying the living constitutional arguments much longer, so this is total victory unless we’re betrayed or Trump is fooled and appoints a Ginsburg instead of Scalia, as did Reagan. We can afford to be magnanimous and I’m sick of it.
We can never correct the trajectory of this nation until we get back to basics, and the most basic concept of our country as it was founded is that of equality under the law.
Walking away from serious crimes because we are just tired of hearing about the people who commit them makes us complicit in those crimes because we are at that point abandoning our civic duty to uphold the law and we are sending the message that wealth and power put some people above the law.
If you truly see enforcing the law and the pursuit of justice as mere petty vengeance, then there really isn’t anything more anyone can say to you. You call it “grace”. I call it “lazy” and “abandonment of duty.” Citizenship can be demanding. Fortunately, there are still some people who don’t crumple up and crawl away when it gets boring, or hard, and try to disguise their lack of will behind words like “grace” and “magnanimous”.
And please, if you just don’t feel up to the job, don’t hide behind the pious pretense that you are just acting out of “grace”. You go right ahead and decide not to report the guy who stole your car, because it makes you feel so noble, but don’t try to undermine the rule of law of the whole nation by pretending that being disinclined to do the right thing is really a mark of spiritual superiority.
Enforcing the law “….will tarnish the brand…”? Boy, that went right by me. If standing up for what is right is “tarnishing the brand”, it’s a pretty useless brand and not worth saving. I know I am not interested in a “brand” that has no moral compass or commitment to the rule of law. Fortunately, the Constitution I defend was written by strong and moral men who didn’t fret about “tarnishing the brand” and just fought for what was right. “…., it’s how liberals act…”…..except it is the opposite of how Liberals act. No, the way Liberals act is to redefine the law according to what they want to achieve at any given moment, and to have no objective allegiance to any value or ideal. Nothing could be farther from “how liberals act” than a serious, unemotional, objective evaluation of the facts regardless of the wealth, power, connections or political affiliation of a criminal. Nothing could be farther from “how liberals act” than holding people in power accountable for their actions.
Investigating serious crimes “… does absolutely nothing to improve things save the pie-in-the-sky idea of serving as a deterrent to future political corruption. ..”? That is ridiculous. If you think having penalties for breaking laws is just window dressing, just some flaky superficial pie in the sky ideal that has no real meaning, that says a lot about you. Maybe you ought to lobby for just getting those annoying, meaningless penalties for all laws taken off the books, if they are nothing but pie in the sky pretenses of seriousness.
As I have said, a law without a penalty is pretty much the same thing as no law at all. If we are not to descend into complete anarchy, we have to have structure in our society, and structure depends to a great extent on consistency and a legal system on which people can rely. Once we have a sham legal system where penalties for wrongdoing depend on whim, on boredom, on laziness, on apathy, on how someone happens to feel at any given time, we are lost.
I wonder just how one can possibly achieve a “… substantial roll back of the transformational power of corruption…” by giving said corruption tacit approval by ignoring it because you’re just not in the mood to deal with it.
OK Amazona, you go ahead and handle that you seem to have enough energy for both of us. I won’t lose any sleep over the color of her jumpsuit. As far as I’m concerned Joe Arpaio can be appointed warden of the prison where she’s housed. Out of politeness, I’ll try not to snicker watching Joe frog march her to her cell, but I can’t promise anything. Pragmatism is a form a laziness I suppose, but then by the same logic, so is using your brain to save your back. That’s always a good idea.
I’ll just take this opportunity to point out that your most recent post makes no sense at all. But I’ll bet it made you feel good to write it.
I thought you wanted to give Hillary a pass because of the spiritual benefits of granting grace, and the nobility of magnanimity, and the priceless benefit of not hearing about the Clintons any more, and now it’s just “pragmatism”.
Whatever.
My vote or anyone’s vote belongs to that person alone. They do not need to justify it at all. No one needs you to give them a pass in any way shape or form.
The fact that you or I disagree with the way they cast that vote has no import. Never again will I, or should they, ever cast a vote for someone we do not want to. I voted for Trump because I wanted to, not because anyone, other than myself, said it was the right thing to do.
In the immortal words of Senator Ted Cruz (R) Texas. Vote your conscious.
DJT 2016!
MAGA!
Well, Tim, as one of the most judgmental people to ever post on this blog, this is quite a change of attitude.
But just as you get to cast your vote any which way you want, I get to decide how I feel about people who support electing a criminal to the highest office in the land.
“No one needs you to give them a pass in any way shape or form.” You seem to take offense at the term “give a pass” but I assure you, that was just a way of describing my feelings, not suggesting that anyone needs my permission to do something.
Let me put it this way: I don’t think voting for a political system one understands and believes in is a moral failing, even if I strongly disagree with that system. Even if I feel the system itself is immoral, if the person does not recognize this immorality and simply believes it is a good system. I do find it a moral failing to try to elect a criminal, with a known history of putting the security of this nation at risk because of her greed. The former I can understand: The latter I cannot. I only vote for something I believe in, so I extend that to a belief that if someone votes for a criminal he or she is saying that honesty and following the law are not important, and once a person tells me that about him or her it has to affect my opinion of him or her. I don’t happen to like dishonest people and prefer people who feel the same way. I think less of people who don’t. Is that so hard to understand?
It may be tempting to spin my feelings as being offended by people voting for a different political party than mine, but that would be wrong. It has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with a belief that there is a big and very important difference between voting for a person because of a political conviction and voting in a way that implies approval of criminal activities and betrayal of national trust.
Turns out branding tens of millions of Americans irredeemably deplorable was not a wise campaign strategy. This is so sweet. Not only will Trump be in office but we can also close the door on the Clinton crime machine.
but we can also close the door on the Clinton crime machine.
Because they’re going to jail, or because they’re going straight?
Going straight! That’s a good one Spook. No doubt the Clintons will continue in their corrupt ways but they’ll do so from outside of the White House. My guess is that puts a damper on their speaking fees. To be sure, they have enough clout and contacts to keep their influence racket running but thank the electorate they’ll be doing it as private grifters, not public ones.
I wonder if Trump will pursue prosecution. I’m a bit agnostic on the matter.
As much as I detest Hillary and the Clinton’s, I hope Trump let’s it go. We have bigger issues to resolve.
Name a bigger issue than stabilizing our death spiral into banana republic territory where the wealthy and powerful have different laws, and the politically connected can act with impunity and never be held accountable.
Name a bigger issue than making it clear that in a nation founded upon the concept of equality UNDER THE LAW it is imperative to govern according to that principle.
Every coin has two sides, and a coin on which the rich and powerful, on one side, are above the law has another that says the poor and weak are not protected by the law.
Sadly, we have bought into the Left’s distortion that there is no such thing as justice, only vengeance. I sincerely hope we don’t get sucked farther down that rabbit hole and finally start standing up for what is right.
That was the most satisfactory part of it all – we still can’t be sure what Trump will actually do once in office. And even if he does what we like, we don’t know what external factors may yet bring it all down…but having the Clintons finished as a political factor is worth a lot.
Wall Street seems to have recovered from its knee-jerk reaction to the Trump win very quickly. When it appeared Trump was on the cusp of victory around 1 AM, the DOW futures were off over 700 points. By early this morning, they were still off 300. Now the DOW is up 175, and both the DOW and S&P 500 are closing in on all-time highs. Interesting times ahead.
Now that the dust has settled on a Trump victory, I think it’s worth noting that in my opinion, Trump is the only candidate that could have beaten Hillary and the Trumpbots DID get it right. Cruz would have lost, Rubio would have lost, etc., etc. only because they too come from inside the GOP party. Both Cruz and Rubio would have framed as opportunistic and their voting records and “obstructionism” would have been used against them at every opportunity. Cruz and Rubio would also have never brought out the “Reagan Democrats” in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin like Trump did.
So here we are – President elect Trump and the new American GOP “working class” Party. No more having to listen to the insufferable GOP elites telling us what we need to do to win. Isn’t that right Bill Kristol?
Sure, if we decide to cast Trump’s victory as a revolt against the Establishment that is a decent argument. But the snapshot of the campaign as it existed is totally dependent on the candidate who ran it. A different candidate would have had a different campaign.
A Rubio campaign would have stumbled at the gate because neither of his parents was an American citizen at the time of his birth, calling for a legal ruling in an effort to overturn existing precedent for the definition of “Natural Born Citizen”—–and true conservatives, who defend the Constitution even when it is inconvenient, would have had to support such a demand for clarification. Personally, I think he would have lost, and we would have had chaos.
Cruz would have had clear, concise, explanations for the problems of the nation, and clear concise plans for addressing them. He would have gone a lot farther than just calling Hillary “crooked” and would have connected the dots so even partisan hard liners could see the extent of her malfeasance and dishonesty. To this day most Americans don’t understand the significance of her decision to go 2000 miles from DC to find a server, or that it was run by someone with no security clearance. I think that a Cruz campaign of disciplined and precise communications, and his dismantling of Hillary in debates, along with his lack of Trump-like baggage, would have put her behind from the very beginning, instead of us having to go through this nail-biting white-knuckle ordeal of the last three or four months.
And to say Cruz came “…from inside the GOP party..” is simply silly. If he was a party insider, he would have been the nominee. He came into the Senate as a rebel against the GOP elites, he fought them tooth and nail, and they hated him for it and punished him for it.
Do you really think “obstructionist” would have been a bigger negative than “sexual predator” or “tax cheat”?
Trump defenders love to explain him. I have never heard anyone so constantly explained. I think the nation was fed up with the direction in which it had been going and was looking for something different, and that Hillary was so damaged that anyone could have beat her. If there is a miracle here, it is that Trump managed to do it, in spite of constantly trying to lose and in spite of his mountain of ugly, negative, and often sordid history.
I said that the Democrats would have “defined” Cruz to be just another GOP insider, and it may have worked. Also, there is NO WAY Cruz would have brought out the votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and probably North Carolina and Florida like Trump did. No Way. I also do not at all think that Trump is the “the one we have all been waiting for”.
Now let’s talk about being lectured to. The “Trumpbots” have been lectured to by you for the last year, and ALL Americans have been lectured to by the elite political and media class now for over 15 years, so if any one has the right to complain about being lectured to – it is the Trumpbots. The deplorables have spoken and now it is time that people like Bill Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, & Lindsey Graham just STFU and listen for a change.
Do you really think “obstructionist” would have been a bigger negative than “sexual predator” or “tax cheat”?
Yes I do. To the low information voter, an “obstructionist” is probably the worst of the worst because those are the evil doers who stopped Obama’s agenda. There never was any substance to the sexual predator charge, and Obama littered his administration with tax cheats so that again is a meaningless charge.
“The “Trumpbots” have been lectured to by you for the last year, and ALL Americans have been lectured to by the elite political and media class now for over 15 years, so if any one has the right to complain about being lectured to – it is the Trumpbots.”
Really? I have lectured whom, exactly, about what, exactly? Other than the need to understand and follow the Constitution, and actually have a coherent political philosophy that includes the understanding that every candidate represents a political system, I don’t know what “lectures” I may have been giving to these poor misunderstood previously voiceless Trumpbots.
What utter crap.
Yes, the GOP elites have been condescending to most Republicans. Yes, I get that. And BTW, I am one who insists that they be removed from their positions because of their lack of conservative political values. But “lectured to”? Hardly. Ignored is more like it.
I will correct myself. I did lecture, strenuously, about the folly of nominating someone whose entire history was littered with well documented episodes of lying about his accomplishments, sordid sexual escapades, serial adultery, vulgarity, claims of unethical business practices, documented use of illegal immigrant labor and so on. And I was right. The Left did use these things against him, and we can be thankful that Hillary is so much worse and that so much came out when it did or these defects AS A CANDIDATE would have lost us the election. Without the burden of her criminal past and her ineptitude in office, she would have won, because the Left was very successful in demonizing Trump USING HIS OWN WORDS AND ACTIONS. Not making stuff up. Not inventing stories. Not exaggerating what he said or did. Not having to do what they usually do. It was all real.
I’m glad he won. I’m glad he lost the race to the bottom. But to claim that only he could have given the message to the masses that they needed to hear is just plain silly, because no one else was given a chance to give any message to those masses. Their voices were drowned out in the most vicious cannibalistic interparty smear campaign I have ever seen, using bully-boy tactics and mob mentality, so please don’t act as if you know what any of them would have said or how it would have been received.
I happened to follow Cruz very closely, and know people who met with him. I have a very good idea of what he would have said to these masses, and no, I do not buy into the claim that only Donald J. Trump could have appealed to them. It is kind of insulting to these “working class” people you claim represent Trumpbots to say they could only respond to blatant appeals to emotion instead of an appeal to their intellect. Maybe that’s how you see them. I personally think every one of these Trumpbots could have, and would have, resonated to the message of Ted Cruz if Donald Trump had not poisoned that well and set a standard that appealed to them on a much more visceral. emotional, level.
Fine. It worked. Goody goody. But your arguments fall very short when they depend on claiming that I, one of the loudest voices objecting to the GOP elite and now demanding a purge of these dead weights, was “lecturing” the poor downtrodden in defense of the elites. I will point out that his appeal was never to a return to Constitutional governance. It was the exact same level of appeal the Left uses, just with a different script. Maybe I am delusional when I think we could have won this election appealing to reason and thought instead of raw emotion, but I don’t need to told, after the fact, that it was really reason and thought that motivated the Trumpbots. You as much as admit it yourself. They responded to the one who felt their pain.
Well you may not call it lecturing but I do. The numerous times you called out the Trumpbots for their WWE approach to politics, and their simplistic belief that “he tells it like it is” certainly had the feel of a lecture. And not that I am attacking you over it, because some of it had validity, I am just pointing it out. Well as it turns out, for all their bluster, the Trumpbots, aka “Reagan Democrats” had it right and these folks came out in big numbers in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina to win and in my opinion, no other GOP candidate would have motivated these folks like Trump did. If Cruz had difficulty motivating the disaffected Republican voter, I see little chance he motivates the disaffected Democrat voter.
“There never was any substance to the sexual predator charge, and Obama littered his administration with tax cheats so that again is a meaningless charge.”
Oh, come on. Are you really going to argue that “meaningless charges” don’t affect the way people think, feel and vote? How many of the charges against Romney were meaningless, yet they defeated him.
“Obstructionist” has a mental, intellectual appeal, and “sexual predator” hits people in their guts. No comparison.
Well you may not call it lecturing but I do.
You know I love you, Amazona, but it often DID come across as lecturing, even to me. That said, I didn’t disagree with what you said, but I think the length of the campaign season had all of us repeating the same things over and over.
During the primaries I thought there were at least a dozen individuals in the GOP field who would have made better candidates than Trump, but one of the talking heads on Fox yesterday morning said something that really resonated with me. “Can you imagine any of the other Republican candidates winning Youngtown, OH?” Aside from Kasich, I honestly can’t. Now personally I don’t think appealing to white working class men was the only reason Trump won. There just aren’t enough of them to counter the various and sundry classes that make up the Democrat Party. But Trump had a secret weapon that complimented his appeal to working class Americans, his running mate, Mike Pence, who traversed the country talking a lot of mainstream Republicans into setting aside their differences with and dislike for Trump and returning to the fold in time for the election.
There were a couple other factors that weren’t great for Trump, but didn’t end up being nearly as bad for him as they were originally projected. There was also a lot of talk late in the campaign that Trump would be lucky to get 5-10% of the Latino/Hispanic vote. He got 29%. There was also talk that 8 out of 10 women would vote against Trump. He ended up losing the woman vote about 55 – 45. So it looks like a lot of women must have heeded Amazona’s statement that she didn’t want to date him, just hire him to run the country.
Cluster and Spook, I see what you mean, and I agree. As a matter of fact, I already admitted to “lecturing” when I said “I will correct myself. I did lecture, strenuously, about the folly of nominating someone whose entire history was littered with well documented episodes of lying about his accomplishments, sordid sexual escapades, serial adultery, vulgarity, claims of unethical business practices, documented use of illegal immigrant labor and so on.”
I think we are talking about slightly different things, here. I took Cluster’s comments about the Trump supporters being “lectured” in the context of what he said about being lectured by the GOP elites about what we should tolerate from them, and I resented being lumped in with them because I have never been a defender of the GOP Establishment. I also argued that the Establishment didn’t “lecture” us so much as simply pretend we were not there, or didn’t matter.
I do stand by my assertion that much if not all of the support as Candidate Trump was based on Personality Politics and Identity Politics because, as I often pointed out (“lectured”) many of the reasons given (“he tells it like it is”) were insufficient, to my mind, because the things he said that they liked had already been changed. I thought then and I think now that a great deal of his initial support was based on simply liking HIM, as the reasons given never seemed solid enough to explain anything other than simple personal attraction to him as a person, and I thought then and think now that this is not enough when we talk about who we want to lead the country.
It was kind of like having someone argue, with great passion, that Telluride is the only place for a skier to live because you can ski there, ignoring all the other ski areas that have advantages such as ease of access, longer ski seasons, better amenities, etc. and then being lectured that I just don’t understand that Telluride has SNOW. After a few weeks of exasperated Telluride boosters insisting that I simply lack the ability to grasp the fact that Telluride has SNOW, being outshouted when I try to point out that lots of other areas not only have snow but have other attributes as well, I get tired of basically being told I am just too damned stupid to understand what they are yelling at me. And because they are so fixated on the idea that they understand something I don’t, I just get fed up with them, because it’s not that I don’t get it, it’s that there are legitimate areas of discussion that are being ignored because of blind passion for this one single place, above all others.
Remember, this was during the PRIMARIES. This was when Trumpbots were rabidly supporting him, to the extent of rabidly attacking people like Cruz, who was being savaged in a vicious smear campaign. This was when I was baffled by the claims that ONLY Trump was saying what they wanted to hear, when so many others were saying much the same thing. Once he was the nominee, I supported him and his candidacy.
As for the hypothetical, such as whether anyone else would have taken the vote in, say, Youngstown Ohio, that is kind of like saying who would win in a battle, pirates or ninjas. We simply do not know, because no one else had a chance to appeal to those voters. We never saw Cruz, for example, sitting down and talking with these people and explaining his positions and what he wanted to do as president, to see how they would respond. There are people convinced that only something about Trump The Man made the difference, and I think it was Trump The Message—–and that the same message would have resonated with the same people. And I might be wrong, because maybe those people would only have responded to Trump The Man. I don’t know. No one knows.
I also suggest the strong possibility that even losing the steelworkers in Youngstown might have been balanced by not losing so many HIspanics and women and Dems who really didn’t want to have to vote for Hillary but who were freaked out by Trump The Man. I suggest that a candidate up against Hillary Clinton, the most unappealing unattractive and unsupportable person the Left has ever put up for the presidency in the history of our nation, who was not a lightning rod for opposition votes the way Trump was, would have had a big advantage, whereas Trump had to overcome the fear and distaste the Clinton campaign was able to create using his own words and history.
But the thing is, it is over. We rolled the dice, and somehow we won. And as I also said repeatedly, I have no problems with a President Trump. I think he has the potential to do great things. I merely argue that a great deal of his appeal was based on an emotional attraction to him more than on objective analysis of him and his positions, and that I am now seeing retroactive rewriting of the entire campaign to make his supporters appear more analytical and pragmatic than the hyper-emotional fan club we saw for so many months.
But that’s OK. Now that he won, it doesn’t matter how or why. My only concern now is that this same approach might be the new standard for Republican politics—the bullying, the mob mentality, the vicious smearing of all opposition to silence it.
And I agree about Pence. I think Pence might have been the one thing that put him over the top. But that does lead to the inevitable question—-what if Pence had been the candidate? The thing is, we can’t credit Pence for being Trump’s secret weapon without tacitly acknowledging that Pence’s appeal overcame a lot of negative response to Trump, And that brings us back to the concept that someone like Pence would not have had the obstacles that Trump had to overcome.
As you know, Spook, being from Indiana, I have been asking you about Pence, about your opinion of him, about how he was doing as governor, etc. for years now. Since 2010, to be exact, since I saw him speak at CPAC and thought he should run for the presidency.
But let’s not forget that Trump CHOSE Pence, which I think speaks to Trump’s history of surrounding himself with high quality competent people. I will also remind you that Pence CHOSE not to run for POTUS, probably to avoid the media onslaught, which Trump was willing to withstand.
Good for him. You act as if I have denied that Trump has any redeeming qualities.
But since you brought it up, there is a big difference between choosing the right people and listening to what they have to say. Trump’s campaign people fought valiantly to rein him in and keep him from self destructing, and it appears he just refused to listen to them. I wasn’t in the room, but I seriously doubt that any competent campaign manager would have encouraged Trump to spend three valuable weeks in a Twitter campaign against a former Miss Universe.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
Personally, I am tired of the whole back and forth about Trump. I don’t retract or apologize for a single thing I said about him, because it was all true, and all valid, and could have easily sunk the campaign. The tactics he used to get the nomination were despicable, I seem to remember YOU, Cluster, being upset about the GOP “cannibalizing” itself, and Trump took this to a whole new level, in the direction of the gutter. One thing that I notice, and dislike immensely, is the attitude that all is fair in a campaign, that dirty tricks don’t mean dirty people, and that anything goes. I hope that these Trump tactics during the primaries will not become the de facto GOP strategy from now on.
I want to get past the old criticisms of Trump and give him a chance to redeem himself, but I can’t just pretend that the past, with the mob tactics and bullying, did not happen. I’m willing to draw a line in the sand and move on beyond it, but I don’t appreciate efforts to go back and sanitize it. I am a believer in redemption and that is what I am hoping for.
Oh yes. When NRO preemptively struck out against Trump I was livid, and I wasn’t even a Trump supporter at the time. Despite Trump’s personal failings, he pales in comparison to the damage the Democrats have done to this country and I felt NRO was not only premature, but seriously misguided in their attacks.
I agree that we let bygones be bygones and start fresh and I sincerely hope that Trump does well. I would love to see him appoint Ted Cruz to the Supreme Court.
And let’s not put words in Pence’s mouth, OK? We don’t know why he decided not to run. You have your opinion, but it’s just your opinion. It’s just as possible that he looked at Trump and decided he didn’t want to be in the sights of such a smear campaign scorched-earth dirty politics opponent. It’s just as possible that he evaluated the situation and realized that once Trump got finished with those in the field seeking the nomination he would have poisoned the well for all of them, and the best way to stay viable in politics right now is to avoid being in Trump’s crosshairs because he fights dirty, nasty and underhanded and doesn’t care who he takes down in the process.
And then he decided to be his Vice President?
Why not? Surely you can see the difference between being a Trump opponent and part of Team Trump.
And that was my hope from the beginning. I always did see Trump as a force and that it would be to all conservatives benefit to harness his movement and steer it the right way, rather than oppose it to the detriment of the party and our country. The surprising thing is that Trump brought the down ballot along with him.
I thought that fighting for the best candidate during the primary season was legitimate, and even more, something of a civic duty. I saw nothing at all wrong with pointing out things I truly thought would make a prospective candidate a bad choice.
But once the die was cast, and the nominee was named, it was time to support that nominee because the entire landscape of political differences had changed. And after that point, I had nothing but contempt for those who continued to try to get Trump defeated. As far as I am concerned, support for Hillary, either overt or by default by not supporting Trump, is exactly the same thing as resigning from the conservative movement, having proved yourself to be a fraud.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Trump will be, at worst, an adequate president, and at best will get more accomplished than anyone in recent history. I have said all along that I didn’t fear his presidency, just his candidacy. If he is truly focused on being a great president, and on getting problems solved, he ought to be quite effective, as he seems to get a lot done when he can overcome his ADD and Tourette’s and other quirks and get down to business.
I am just tired of being lectured about how he is the only one who could have won, or who can solve these problems. He has landed in a turning point in American history, where any of several could have had an equal or more often a better chance of success, in which it would have taken a lot to fail. He is lucky to have landed in a situation where decisiveness might be more effective than skill.
I cringe at the Right’s version of “The One We Have All Been Waiting For”.
Wow! What an awesome victory! Congratulations President-Elect Donald J. Trump! Thank you for running such a courageous battle! You are Truly a warrior, and now you will be the Commander!
Thank You So Much to the American People! To be honest, I did not have much faith in you, but you came through, and you did the right thing! God’s Grace is truly shining down on you from heaven, today!
Me we now embark on a new journey, a journey of hope, a journey of kindness, and a journey of unity, as One Nation Under God, indivisible, with liberty, and justice for all!
God bless America!
An overarching theme in this election is that “hate” won out over “love”, minorities are scared and white men are safe. Don’t let reality get in the way of your perceptions, prigs:
http://www.mediaite.com/online/watch-man-gets-beaten-up-by-chicago-group-yelling-dont-vote-trump/
I mean “progs”
Heart warming
Has anyone heard from Bob?
Last I heard he was heading to Canada.
Maybe he and Alec Baldwin can share a ride. Didn’t Alec
threatenpromise to leave in 2000 and again in 2004, when Bush was elected? Along with Babs and Cher? Yet they are still here.The one I’d like to see go is Miley, the little skank and adorer of Hillary.
On the other hand, after seeing more than a million Coloradans say they wanted a criminal in the White House I think it might be time to move back to Wyoming.
The only thing worse than a loser is a SORE LOSER.
I especially love these two sentences:
“This most undemocratic of our institutions” – LOL!! Whoever wrote that must be of the mistaken impression that we are a democracy. And, if you don’t like the Electoral College, amend the Constitution. I realize that’s not the way Democrats do things. If they don’t like rules they just break them. And THAT’S WHY HILLARY LOST!
Let me remind our Democrat
friendsadversaries. In the 2010 and 2014 midterms you lost over 1,600 seats nationwide between the U.S. House, U.S. Senate, Governorships and state and local offices. Your ideas have been completely and utterly repudiated, and this election was about repudiating most, if not all of the Executive policies of the last 8 years. YOU LOST, and until you come up with better ideas besides just free stuff and race, gender and sexual/gender identity division, you’re going to continue to lose.We go through this every time a Republican wins the White House. This is what happens when people are ignorant of the Constitution, and when they think that throwing temper tantrums will let them get their own way.
Maybe we should just give them all Participation Trophies and gift certificates for new onesies.
OTOH, if Electors are not really bound to the votes of their states, this seems like a glaring omission i the law. Can you think of any reason this would be a good idea? In primary races and party conventions, it is a different matter—these are private enterprises, and can make their own rules. The Electoral College is part of the Constitution. (No wonder the Dems hate it.) But if the law is so loosely written that a few rogue Electors could overturn the outcome, that seems like a pretty foolish loophole.
To give you an idea of the impact of third party voting: In Colorado, Trump lost by 74,754 votes. That is not a very big margin. Gary Johnson got 129,451 votes. I’m not saying that if Johnson were not in the race all of those people would have voted for Trump, but surely a lot would have, given the Democrat position on anti-libertarian issues. And who knows how many of those votes were from anti-Trump Republicans?
As it turned out, Trump didn’t need Colorado to win, but it might have been closer. And it is on thin margins like this that elections are won and lost.
Speaking of margins. If the Democrats wonder why they lost, they need to look no further than the protests in Oakland, CA. Those are the people that have marginalized the Democrat party and are the reason for the electoral losses.