What’s wrong with the Democratic Party? I am sure that you
have been wondering how a once proud political party could have lost as many
elections as it did over the past eight years. Even today, once proud Democrats
are tearing out their hair and gnashing their teeth over their failure to
defeat Donald J. Trump. If Trump is as bad as they say he was and if his
badness was so obvious that even a ferret could see it, how did it happen that
the marvelously qualified Hillary Clinton could not beat him?
Clearly, the question has been wracking the brain of the
superbly qualified and totally competent Hillary. Of course, saying that
Hillary was competent and qualified is like saying that women are just as
strong as men. Unless you believe in magical thinking you are fostering
an illusion.
Yesterday, Hillary Clinton showed why
she lost and why so many women hate her. In her commencement address to the new
graduates of her alma mater, Wellesley College, the Duchess of Chappaqua demonstrated, yet again, that she has no class. She also has no grace, no dignity and no decency. You see,
her Hillaryness used the occasion of what is normally a pep talk filled with
harmless bromides to act like an embittered crone. One suspects that the women who hated her knew this already.
She did not lose, she implied. She was cheated out of what
was rightfully hers. The Russians and James Comey destroyed her well-oiled
campaign machine, machine that did not even understand the workings of the
electoral college. Duh?
Better yet, as at least eight hundred commentators have
pointed out, Hillary made a full throated defense of facts and reason, just
before she declared that Richard Nixon had been impeached. In truth, Nixon was
never impeached, but Hillary’s husband was. That someone who was peddling
paranoid thinking about the vast right wing conspiracy could proclaim herself a
champion of facts and reason beggars belief. That someone whose husband
announced to the world that he never had sexual relations with “that woman”
could stand up as a champion of facts causes your brain cells to short circuit.
And let’s not forget the lies about Benghazi and so on and so on and so on.
Worse yet, what if the newly minted Wellesley graduates step
forth into the world and follow the advice of an embittered crone. (It gives new meaning to the term: croney capitalism.) Will the bad
attitudes that Hillary is promoting help their careers? Will the vitriol she
was handing out help them to have more satisfactory personal relations? Do they
want to grow up to have her marriage, or even her career?
After all, whose life
has been more of a lie than Hillary's? This champion of women’s rights rode her
husband’s coattails to every important job she ever had. And she failed at all
of them, of course. In the end she did not feel that she had to work to win the
presidency because she believed that the nation owed her the office,
considering all that she had put up with to give the nation Bill Clinton. The North Koreans owe her a debt of gratitude.
If you want to leave facts and reason aside try
pondering the thought that Hillary was the most qualified person ever to run
for the presidency. And then ask yourself how competent she showed herself to
be while Secretary of State? And let’s not forget the private email server and
the pass she got from James Comey in July. Note that the scrupulous Hillary rails against Comey's October surprise but has nothing to say about Comey's efforts to shut down the investigation in July.
At the very least, Hillary’s message to the Wellesley
graduates was an offer to drink from the same poisoned cup that had made her so embittered. It showed no class. It showed no respect. Any woman who takes
her message to heart will pay a price.
Anyway, our famous former president Barack Obama has a far
better sense of public decorum than Hillary. It is not a very high hurdle to
clear, but still. And yet, just in case you thought that Obama was all class, last week, in the midst of President Trump’s trip to the
Middle East, he showed up in Germany to meet with Angela Merkel. Why did he do it? Surely, he wanted to upstage his successor and to pretend that he had not been repudiated as roundly as he had been repudiated. Obama
behaves far better than most, yet his effort to undermine and cast some shade
on Donald Trump counts as the ultimate cheap shot.
At a time when Trump was working to undo the damage that
Obama had visited on the Middle East—and with some measure of success—Obama brought back his “citizen of the world” shtick and regaled an audience in
Germany with it, yet again. That the American people preferred Donald Trump to
the Obama shtick and had rejected as many Democratic politicians as they had
over the Obama years did not seem to register.
Obama could not resist yet another star turn. Like Hillary
he could not accept that he lost, that his legacy was being repudiated. If
anything, Trump’s Middle Eastern trip was a blanket repudiation of Obama’s
handling of the region. Perhaps he was not as much of a sore loser as Hillary.
He did not display the revolting lack of sportsmanship that Hillary showed at
Wellesley. But clearly, Obama cannot accept that center stage is no longer his.
One should also note that Obama was invited by German
Chancellor Angela Merkel. The two were palling around in Germany while Trump
was on his trip. Perhaps they were laughing about the terrorist attack in
Manchester. Perhaps they were joyfully chatting about the rising rates of immigrant crime in Germany. After all, no European leader—exception given for the Swedes—had so
openly embraced the Obama policy of opening borders to Muslim refugees. The horror
of what had transpired in Manchester, like the horror that had happened in
Berlin over Christmas, allowed the two leaders to pat each other on the back
and to yuck it up. Speaking of indecency, the blood was not yet dry in Manchester when they put on their pro-refugee lovefest.
Think about this. After receiving Obama in Berlin, Angela
Merkel went off to meet President Trump. Considering how classless her gesture
was would you expect that the American president would be reward her? As it
happened, Trump stuck to the message of his trip: the need to unite to fight
against Islamist terrorism. Weak-kneed European leaders, led by Merkel, are
more concerned with fighting climate change and Islamophobia. In that they echo
the priorities of one Barack Obama.
Naturally, Trump was roundly criticized for not making nice
with the all-too-nice European leaders, now led, not just by Merkel, but by boy
wonder Emmanuel Macron. For two days Donald Trump forced them to face the truth. As it
happened, this made them unhappy. Much of the American media declared that Trump had
been rude. And yet, when he told them to honor their commitments to NATO
and did not mention Article 5, he was telling them that they would do
better to fight than to whine. He was telling them that they should not lie
back and bask in the glow of their overly generous welfare states while
counting on the United States military to defend them. For the record, the last time a nation sought to invoke Article 5, it was France after the massacre at Bataclan. You will recall that Barack Obama rejected the call.
The strength of a democracy, even a democratic republic like
ours, lies in the ability of losers to accept defeat graciously, and to retire from
the public stage… for a time, at least. The legitimacy of a new government
depends on the old regime’s ability to recognize it. If Hillary is complaining that Trump is illegitimate and that she was cheated, she is
undermining democracy. If Obama is meeting with foreign leaders
and pretending that he is still president, he too is undermining democracy. He
has more grace and decorum, but the message is the same.
4 comments:
"Croney capitalism": My! You REALLY have a way with words!
"That the American people preferred Donald Trump to the Obama shtick and had rejected as many Democratic politicians as they had over the Obama years did not seem to register." We all know Obama ignores anything that casts a shadow on him.
"He has more grace and decorum, but the message is the same." His grace and decorum are mere facsimiles thereof. They are NOT real.
Klassi.
Partisan bickering is so tiresome.
If Hillary is a sore loser with no class, clearly Trump is a sore winner with no class, and he still can't deal with the fact that he lost the popular vote, and still asserts there are millions of illegal votes for Hillary, while the biggest cases of voter fraud was from Trump voters who voted twice because Trump convinced them their vote might not count.
I can't even imagine what would have happened if Clinton won the electoral college and Trump won the popular vote.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/opinion/trump-voter-fraud-commission.html
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So here it is: Voting fraud is extremely rare, and in-person fraud — the only kind that would be caught by voter ID laws — is essentially nonexistent, as study after study has shown. And as for those foreigners, a new survey of local election officials in 42 jurisdictions turned up a total of about 30 cases of suspected noncitizen voting last November — out of more than 23 million votes.
Meanwhile, voter ID and other suppression laws keep losing in court, where judges demand actual evidence in support of claims. On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to the decision of a federal appeals court last year striking down as unconstitutional North Carolina’s stunningly harsh anti-voter law, which required photo identification at the polls, cut early voting and eliminated same-day registration, among other measures. That decision found Republican state legislators had deliberately targeted “African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” A similarly severe Texas law was struck down by a federal judge, also for intentionally discriminating against minorities.
The purported purpose of Mr. Trump’s commission — to restore confidence in elections — is laughable, not only because Republicans have spent the past decade sowing seeds of doubt with hyped-up tales of fraud. In reality, voters’ confidence is mainly affected by whether their preferred candidate wins, not by the existence of voter ID or other laws.
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As unfortunate as it is to have a 46% president, with 40% approval rating, it seems Democracies need to test what single minority party rule looks like.
Meanwhile we have free speech for the rest of us classless people.
Linked at http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/30017-Monday-morning-links.html
this morning.
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