The Recount and Other Crazy Progressive Ideas About the Election

hanging_chad_thumb1When my mother died, I inherited a family friend who is very old, very lonely, and quite sweet. He is also a hard-core, unrepentant Leftist, who found the election shattering and is placing all his faith in the recount. Rather than picking a fight with a frail nonagenarian, I suggested that, as we can’t change what’s happening, we may as well sit back and enjoy the show. This round-up is about the marvelous spectacle of Leftist meltdown, which sees them swinging wildly between recount euphoria, anger and recriminations, and pink-hatted foolishness.

Is Hillary painting a target on her back? Many conservatives, myself included, were chagrined when Donald Trump intimated that he was willing to let Hillary’s illegalities go in the spirit of moving on from the election. As far as I could tell, the Progressives would spit on this gesture — as they would on anything from Trump — rather than seeing it as a peace offering.  Also, to the extent it’s manifest that Hillary committed real crimes, any investigation and indictment would not be about politics but about ensuring that the rule of law still means something in America. Nevertheless, Trump tried for the olive branch . . .

. . . And Hillary seems to be doing her darndest to ensure that she really does spend her last years in a jail cell. At least that’s what Roger L. Simon thinks:

Hillary has everything to lose.  I mean everything. And almost nothing to gain, considering the nearly insurmountable odds of the election being overturned. Three states are in play with voting differentials ranging from just over ten thousand to over seventy thousand.  She would have to win all three.  Al Gore couldn’t win one when the differential was a measly 572 votes.

[snip]

But, astoundingly, after receiving what many are calling a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, Clinton joined forces with Stein in her crusade. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dopier, more self-destructive example of “poking the lion,” especially since there are so many areas in which she could be liable from a mere obstruction of justice charge on to a full RICO investigation the could literally implicate dozens of members of her already-reeling political party.

Hillary has never struck me as being even half as smart as she and her followers think she is. Instead, she is the perfect combination of a mundane mind, a narrowly programmed fund of knowledge, and hubris.

Robert Reich is an idiot too when it comes to recounts — not to mention a hypocrite. You know, I never get tired of saying that, if the Lefties didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all.  Robert Reich is a perfect example.

Before I get to Reich, let me remind of you Hillary’s words when she thought she was going to win the election:

Somehow Hillary had a major attitude adjust in the weeks since then. Hmmm…..

Hillary merely did a volte face.  Reich did her one better, by holding two conflicting thoughts simultaneously. His current position is that it’s honorable for Hillary to challenge the election to prove she had even more popular votes than thought, but dishonorable for Trump to challenge the election to prove that thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of Hillary’s “popular” votes were fraudulently cast and, therefore, are meaningless. Don’t believe me? Here’s Reich:

The President-elect of the United States, soon to hold the highest office of the most powerful democracy in the world, is now making the most serious possible allegation about that democracy’s presidential election. Donald Trump claims “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire, and California” — three states that went for Hillary Clinton. Then, not content just to impugn the election outcomes in these states, he also casts doubt on the credibility of the media, asking “why isn’t the media reporting on this? Serious bias – big problem!”

There is, of course, no basis for his claims of voter fraud or of media bias. He’s just miffed that at least 2.2 million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for him, and that the votes in another three states – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – were so close that a recount has begun.

Proof again that Trump is a dangerous demagogue who poses a clear and present danger to our democracy. If the Electors who are to cast their ballots December 19 have any sense of who he is, they will not make him President of the United States. If they do, we must hope that he is impeached as quickly as possible. As long as he is president, we owe it to our country to peacefully resist all that this man will try to do.

What do you think?

What do I think, Reich? I think you’re a moron, a hypocrite, and that you exemplify everything that’s wrong with the modern Left. Worse, you’re a disease vector because you go around American campuses spreading this self-interested, divisive, unpatriotic, stupid, ill-informed, hypocritical rage-driven lunacy to America’s vulnerable students, making their nascent mush brains even worse.

Incidentally, despite the spate of headlines stating various newspapers’ unfounded opinions that Trump has lied about this or that (something the headline writers never did even when Obama and Hillary were caught red-handed), True the Vote believes that Trump is not exaggerating the number of illegal voters.

I’m not sure about millions of illegally cast votes, but I’d be willing to bet that there were hundreds of thousands, especially in states such as California, which is home to more than 2.5 million illegal aliens.  Coincidentally, Hillary is about 2 million votes ahead in California.

If Russia’s responsible for Hillary’s loss, Obama is to blame.  Thanks to all of you, I was able to return a coherent answer to the open-minded Progressive who questioned me about the latest election loss theory, which is that Russia is responsible. I disputed that on the grounds that all Russia did was reveal the truth, something that any hacker could have done (or worse, that any blackmailer could have hung on to), and that these truths mostly reaffirmed people’s beliefs about Hillary’s corruption and the DNC’s sleaziness. I also pointed out that the Obama administration was all over Putin giving him hugs and kisses, and that Hillary sold 20% of America’s uranium to Russia for the benefit of her personal charity.

John Schindler makes a different point, which is that the finger of blame really needs to point to Obama:

Like so many half-truths, this narrative contains its fair share of accurate claims. I know, because I was warning the public about Kremlin espionage and disinformation long before Democrats suddenly became passionately interested in the subject because it was hurting their candidate. After Vladimir Putin seized Crimea in early 2014 and began a war of aggression against Ukraine, Russian propaganda efforts aimed at the West went into overdrive.

[snip]

The Washington Post reported this week that Kremlin-backed websites pushed “fake news” regularly portraying Hillary and the Democrats in a negative light. There’s really nothing new here for anybody who’s followed Russian propaganda for any length of time. Kremlin agitprop aimed at the West—properly termed disinformation—contains an amalgam of fact and fiction, plus lots of gray information somewhere in between which can be difficult and time-consuming to refute.

[snip]

There were hardly any veterans of the Active Measures Working Group still on active service by 2014, however, so Washington quietly cobbled together a shoestring effort—no more than handful of experts—to start debunking Kremlin disinformation. Its mission was clear: track Russian lies aimed at the West, particularly falsehoods designed to harm the United States and its allies, then show how they are false.

However, that worthy effort never got off the ground and its website was shut before it went live. The counterpropaganda baby was strangled in the crib—by the White House.

Read the rest — not only is it fascinating, but you’ll want to drop it in conversations with weeping, paranoid Progressives.

The Electoral College — It’s a Good Thing. This election has shown that, as always, Leftists only support ancient institutions when they benefit from them. If those same institutions operate to their disadvantage, it’s “off with their heads.”

I’ve tried explaining to tear-sodden Progressives that the Electorial College ensures balanced federal representation across America and that they see it as a problem only because the federal government is too big and has too much power. I have not made headway with this argument. I’ve more recently tried to Ryan McMaken’s EU analogy, which I think is a good one, but my friends on Facebook refuse to read it:

The current confusion about the mechanics of the electoral college appear to be largely a function of the fact that it is now widely forgotten that the United States is intended to be collection of independent states, and not a unitary political unit.

For an illustration of why a system like the electoral college is so essential, we can look to the European Union. Consider, for example, if the European Union were to hold a union-wide election for a single chief executive. (The EU does not hold such an election, however, because the EU is controlled by appointees, and because there is no president in the conventional sense.)

If the EU were to do this, we would immediately notice that a small handful of large and populous member countries could dominate election and policy decisions union-wide. Without some sort of mechanism to even out these disparities, smaller states wold continually be at the mercy of the larger ones.

For instance, Germany, France, and Italy by themselves constitute 47 percent of the population of the European Union (not counting the UK). The member countries with interests at odds with the large dominant states would be at a lopsided disadvantage. Small countries like the Czech Republic, for example, contain a mere two to five percent of the EU population and would be largely irrelevant to building a majority coalition in any sort of majority-rule system.

Makes sense to me. But then again I’m a free thinker, not a Progressive.

Don’t insult the people you need to succeed. Back when I was in law school, one of my friends and I participated in a mock trial. The first thing we had to do was select jurors. The jurors were undergrads who were told that, when asked about their job, they should identify the job associated with their major.  When my friend and I sorted through the completed jury questionnaires, we saw that one of the students had identified himself as an accountant. In a stroke of real brilliance (not), my friend opened her talk with the jury by saying that she too had been an accountant, but had found the work so boring and depressing she quit and went to law school. Things went downhill from there.

After the mock trial ended, our faculty adviser gave us some very good advice:  “Never insult the jurors. You need them. They don’t need you.” Incidentally, my friend took that and all other good advice to heart, and went on to a very successful career as a trial attorney.

Sadly, despite having gone to a once-reputable law school and having spent almost 50 years in politics, Hillary never figured out that you don’t insult the people you need to succeed. This failing comes through loud and clear in a fascinating article about undecided voters. Diane Hessan worked for the Clinton campaign and had as her job interviewing undecided voters to find out what made them tick. She discovered that alleged Russian hacking wasn’t the issue. The issue was that the, just like Hillary’s Secret Service agents, thought she was an awful person:

There was one moment when I saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed, when voters began to speak differently about their choice. It wasn’t FBI Director James Comey, Part One or Part Two; it wasn’t Benghazi or the e-mails or Bill Clinton’s visit with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac. No, the conversation shifted the most during the weekend of Sept. 9, after Clinton said, “You can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”

All hell broke loose.

George told me that his neighborhood was outraged, that many of his hard-working, church-going, family-loving friends resented being called that name. He told me that he looked up the word in the dictionary, and that it meant something so bad that there is no hope, like the aftermath of a tsunami. You know, he said, Clinton ended up being the biggest bully of them all. Whereas Trump bullied her, she bullied Wilkes Barre.

Things were not the same after that, at least with my voters. I remember wondering whether that moment was like Romney’s 47 percent: a comment during a fund-raiser from which the candidate would never recover, proof that, like Romney, Clinton was an out-of-touch rich person who didn’t really get it. It struck me that many of the people who were considering Trump were just hard-working Americans who wanted better odds for a good life.

Hessan also says that the undecideds she interviewed, the ones that switched to Trump, understood that he wouldn’t necessarily make good on his promises. They just liked him more because he so obviously liked them and understood their dreams and frustrations.

A lack of listening will also lose you voters. Immediately after the election, Lord Ashcroft pointed out that winning isn’t just about respecting your voters. It’s also about listening to them:

The path to victory only begins with a proper understanding of why you lost. The longer Trump’s opponents stick to the theory that his voters were motivated by misogyny and racism (ignoring the fact that the states he flipped had elected and then re-elected Barack Obama), the longer they will be in the wilderness. They should also reflect on their own part in bringing about the result that so dismays them.

American voters were crying out for change, yet the Democrats offered its antithesis: the Washington establishment incarnate. People in states and counties the Democrats had come to take for granted worried about their jobs, their futures, prospects for their children, the ballooning cost of healthcare, the state of their roads and bridges, immigration, terrorism, the effect of trade deals on their industries, and America’s place in the world – and the Democratic candidate responded: did you hear what Donald Trump said about an ex-Miss Universe?

The Democrats thought everyone shared their assumptions. Having decided that no decent person could vote for Donald Trump – a candidate backed by a “basket of deplorables” – they seemed to argue that people had a moral responsibility to keep him out of office, irrespective of any other consideration: “our children are watching”, as her ads relentlessly reminded the TV audience.

What he’s saying seems obvious but, to Progressives, it’s quite obviously not.

Let the impeachments begin. Robert Avrech, like me, lives among the Progressives. Their anger, manipulation, and cheating are not going to stop anytime soon. Impeachment may be at least two years off, depending on how Congress does in the next two years, but the Progressives in his world are ready — and keep in mind that Trump hasn’t even taken office. Conservatives, on the other hand, started having impeachment fantasies only when Obama actually lied to the public to pass Obamacare and when he lied about Benghazi.

At least one Democrat finds the Progressives’ behavior unseemly. One Democrat is terribly unhappy by Jill Stein’s and Hillary’s attack on the fabric of our country:

Saturday, Hillary Clinton announced that she had joined a recount effort in at least three Midwestern states, questioning whether “an accurate vote” will be reported to the Electoral College. This comes on the heels of a concession speech where she told her supporters that, “We must accept this result… Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.

[snip]

It’s now clear that Clinton’s speech wasn’t genuine. According to her campaign, they’ve had lawyers, data scientists and analysts combing over election resultsstarting “the day after the election,” or the day of her otherwise thoughtful concession speech. Their goal:  find evidence that would suggest a hacked result, despite the president – and my former colleagues in the intelligence community – stating clearly that there are no signs of foreign tampering at the ballot box.

[snip]

As a Democrat, I am frustrated and ashamed. Unlike Clinton, I realize that America’s history was built not just on its gallant winners but also on its noble losers.

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With Clinton’s embrace of an electoral recount, it is clear that she cannot accept defeat with grace, nor does she hold our nation in the same regard as Tilden or Lee. That means my fellow Americans – and especially my fellow Democrats – must stand up to her hubris. We must make clear that we offer no excuses for our loss. We will not chase the ghosts of foreign hackers. We won’t be fooled by FBI conspiracies, blame bad campaign staff, whine about false Facebook posts, or blame mobs of deplorables.

No, we realize that we lost because the nation wanted change and our candidate was too flawed and untrustworthy to carry that mantle.

Reading Mr. Wright’s opinion piece, I see only one mistake. I don’t think he’s a Democrat. Once you start showing signs of actual principles, you’re well on your way to being a conservative.

It’s almost impressive to consider that, had Hillary won, she would have agreed with every word he said. When she lost, she didn’t even bother to explain her abandoned principles. Like all narcissists, her needs dictate her morality.

And lastly, I promised you pink hats. Lefties do love their imagery, especially when they can strip naked or attire themselves in clothes that represent genitals. So it is that one of the latest movements among women of the Left is to knit themselves “Pussyhats” — because there’s no better way to make a principled statement than to wear a stupid hat that you claim is symbolic of a vagina. That will get the voters on your side for sure!

The Women’s March on Washington D.C. is happening January 21, 2017! The Pussyhat Project launched this week! As of now, we have 54 days to knit 1.17 million pink pussyhats. Will you knit for the movement?

Armed with their pussyhats, these Leftists warriors indulge in triumphant dreams, like this one:

pussyhat-project

Once again, the Lefties have managed to make me embarrassed to be a woman.  Of course, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, and Jill Stein embarrass me too. The vagina hat women are just downstream effluvia from these famous and utterly unprincipled women.