“Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled
people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and
intrusively invaded.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 
Just to be grossly generalistic, you can put half of the Trump haters into what I call the basket of detestables, right? Misandrists, anti-semites, welfare mothers, baby killers, cop killers, pedophiles, god haters, Russophobic, androphobic, Christophobic… you name it. They are beyond redemption and haters of America.

I wanted to skip the Dostoyevsky quote and go right into my mockery of Hillary’s slander, but recognizing the reality that sarcasm is often lost in print, I felt the need to preface those comments with an identifier. Truly, we are surrounded now with such outrageous nonsense that over the top sarcasm goes greatly unrecognized, with people just assuming that someone is saying something stupid again. It’s stupid to lump half of your ideological adversaries in with the few and worst representatives of their political preference. It’s stupid to then blame your loss on the bigoted voters who elected a black president, twice; on an FBI director who calls you out for your stupidity, on hackers and WikiLeaks for exposing the corruption of your campaign, or on “fake news” when it was the real and barely reported news that sunk your ship. It’s stupid to continue as a party on the road that has brought you only failure, but in the words of Forrest Gump’s mama, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

And so, in the face of devastating defeats over her tenure, Democrats choose to stick with Nancy Pelosi for Minority leader in the House; President Obama continues to exhibit voluntary blindness mistaking personal popularity for support for his misguided policies, blaming Fox News and Rush Limbaugh for the caricature he himself has drawn. The legacy media continues in its death throes to consume and regurgitate the poisonous bias that has brought them to the point of irrelevance. Elitist celebrities continue to act as though their political opinions should be worshipped, Trump haters refuse to recognize how unbecoming hatred is. After clamoring for pointless recounts, attempting to intimidate Trump electors (though transgendered gun control advocates are unsurprisingly not all that intimidating), and pointing to a popular vote statistic that has never been the basis for election; the haters have now turned their vitriol, as did their Queen, to the supporters of the President elect. They defend the boorish behavior of the couple who conspired to crudely harass Trump’s daughter on a plane in front of her children and their child because she supported her father’s presidency. They bully a blind tenor from singing at Trumps inauguration. They make crude jokes about the Rockettes keeping Trump occupied so he won’t molest the fifteen year old singing the inaugural national anthem. They use hateful invective, crude language, and cheap insults to impugn not only Trump, but those who voted for him as well. They use a vote for Trump as a basis for witholding employment, for discrimination in service, for boycotts, and yes for directed violence. In a Wal-mart parking lot in Ithaca NY a UPS driver was shot to death by a deranged gunman who thought the driver was Donald Trump. I’m not saying he represents all Trump haters, but hatred is contagious, and hyperbolic hysteria can trigger the psychologically fragile; bathing the nation in rage may start fires that will burn the innocent. Dissent is one of the checks and balances that has made our nation great, but hatred is stupid.

Having established to their own satisfaction the complete inadequacy of Trump for the office of President, Democrats were left with the dilemma of explaining how they were defeated by someone completely inadequate. After resorting to their default “America is stupid” response, they’ve since moved on to more sophisticated excuses. In language reminiscent of Hillary’s “vast right wing conspiracy” comments, Democrats have moved through a series of conspiracy theories to apparently finally settle on blaming her defeat on Russian hacking. Of course, if conservatives were progressives, we would warn the Democrats against labeling the hacking as “Russian”. After all, Russians are a good people, contributing to the rich tapestry of our own nation and the world in general. This Russophobic language could easily lead to unjustified discrimination against Russians in general. You have more chance of getting hit by a car than being hacked by a Russian, so by all means open that suspicious e-mail, accept that FaceBook friend request from the hot Russian girl; we can’t punish all Russians for a little non-indigenous computer interference… remember what we did to the Japanese in WWII; never again! The President’s own Russophobia is reckless,flying in the face of long established standards of diplomacy and risking conflict with a nuclear power to make a political justification of a lost election. Poking your finger in Vladimir’s eye would be like, well, taking a phone call from the President of Taiwan… yeah, more sarcasm.

IMHO: What appears to be stupidity and tone deafness in the democratic response to the disastrous election is actually an attempt to salvage their progressive dreams from the tides of public opinion. Where it would make sense to modify their extreme agenda to more closely align with the public at large, that is not who they are, and not who they wish to be. So instead of facing reality, they seek to impose their will, solidify their base, eliminate the electoral college, and legislatively create voters more easily manipulated. They double down on their base comments, double down on their atrocious behavior, double down on their elitist desire for control. They continue down the path wherein they were rejected, following in lockstep Paul Krugman, Lena Dunham, Michael Moore… the pied pipers who have led them to this place. President Obama finishes his presidency as he began it, with a ridiculous energy policy; standing down for Israel, proving he never “had their back”; and while Rome burns, he is on the golf course yet again. They seem unable to even pretend to be something other than what the nation rejected. Stuck on stupid.

 

“Ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crises with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.

William Faulkner

 

 
Well, it appears we’ve finally gotten to the bottom of the miraculous loss of the Democrats in the presidential election, and nearly every other election that occurred in November. As it works out, the Russians were the only followers of American politics to discern that Donald Trump had a chance to win the election, or so the theory goes, and took it into their computer grubbing paws to meddle in our election by doing the job of the American press in revealing the nature of the Democratic National Committee. Yes, apparently the indiscretions in the Podesta and Wasserman Schultz correspondences were the ice berg that sank the Clinton Titanic. Of course, Clinton’s candidacy was already vulnerable because of all those fake news stories, though I’m afraid I can’t recall any that I took seriously. They sprung up on-line, undermining our devotion to the well spring of inerrant truth, the mainstream media; and the gullible, the naive, and the moronic were obviously seduced from their natural abode, the Democratic party, to vote for the Trump juggernaut.

“Looky-here Ethel, says here that Hillary Clinton is really the secret girl child of MaoTse Tung! Says she’s gots kids chained in her basement, and wants to give Californy back to them Mexicans. We best change our votes to Republikans this go ’round… says here Trump gonna fix the ‘conomy and make us all rich… must be true, it’s on the intra-net!”

And so the supposed gullibility of the American voter (anywhere outside of the coastal meccas of the illuminated) was wooed by the lies of fake news, and then ravished by the truth exposed by the Russian hackers. In much the same way that an amateur video on You-Tube was the cause of the the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, and the taking of four American lives, we are now to accept that fake news and Russian hackers are the nefarious cause of the Trump victory, especially now that the re-counts seem to have come up empty on delegitimizing the rust-belt surprise.

It’s a tough sell. First we’re to believe that along with a basket of deplorables, there is also a gargantuan basket of gullibles swept away in their naivety by fake news on FaceBook and Twitter. Then, we are to accept that the Russians had some secret knowledge, that with a hacking operation showing the American public the truth, they could somehow do what every expert said could not be done, the election of Donald J. Trump. If the Russians were somehow involved, and by Russians I mean government operatives, not bored Ivan with a bottle of vodka in his mother’s basement; then I suspect their goal was just to keep Hillary from having a mandate by shaking things up a bit. If, as the CIA suspects, the GOP was hacked as well, then possibly the hackers were more interested in general mischief, or maybe Wiki-Leaks were the ones who discriminated against the Dems, or maybe the GOP emails just weren’t scandalous. But Chuck Schumer seems to think this is on the level of the Cuban missile crisis, that we should be “shaken to the core” over Russian meddling in our elections. Seriously, don’t they realize that we are the only nation allowed to meddle in other countries’ elections? Of course, we don’t want enemy nations to mess around with our elections, or violate our digital information banks; that’s something our Government should protect us from, the Government currently headed by Democrats. It would be poetically ironic if the Russians who Clinton and Obama poo-pooed in the last election were truly their undoing in this one. The truth is the hacking only served to confirm the things people already suspected. If your enemy shows your wife that you’re cheating on her, you can’t say that he broke up your marriage, you did that; whatever his motivation he only showed your wife what she already knew, that you don’t deserve her.

No, there’s been a revolution. The old paradigms no longer hold, and the Democrats can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The strangle hold the mainstream media had on information (read propaganda) is done, and fear mongering over “fake news” and veiled threats regarding censorship will not bring back the glory days for the liberal press. The next progressive idol to be torn down is education. The only way we retreat at all from this vector is if Mr. Trump brings us there by committing the error of spineless republicans and milquetoast men, trying to please those who cannot be pleased with anything short of your destruction. President Obama, after insisting that the election was a referendum on his policies, now insists that it was not. After all, he harkens to his high polling for popularity… yes, the same polling that said Trump couldn’t win… and translates that as support for his agenda. It’s like the hot girl in high school who thinks the boys appreciate her for her intelligence. Barack looks good in a suit, he’s got a good sense of humor, good oratorical style and timing, good family, no real scandals, was gracious at the beginning of his term, and now again at the end; he’s black, he plays basketball, knows Beyonce, and looks good in a bathing suit… he’s cool. That’s what people like. That’s what I like. Give the devil his due, but nothing more, it’s his persona that is popular, not his policies; wrap up his policies and stick them on Hillary Clinton, and they go down in flames.

IMHO: Democrats tried to move too far, too fast, and in the wrong direction. 2016 is when the voters, no longer encumbered by the likability of Barack Obama, said, “enough already”. Blaming the Russians or fake news sites is evading the truth… you would have been bad for America. Like the old Scooby-Doo cartoons always ended, so ended the Clinton/Obama legacy, “I’d a gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling Russians!”. Truth is, it was the truth that offended most Americans, not the lies, and more lies won’t fix anything.