Saturday, November 12, 2016

You know, you could do worse

So we have the bad, instead of the worse.  That is only a bit of a relief.  In truth, I really have no idea how Mr. Trump is going to govern.  His current overview/summary is at www.greatagain.gov is largely heartening, and it deserves its own post.  He may actually deeply love America with an agape love, as he has said many times over the years.  But given his failures of Christian charity that the Clinton campaign was so at pains to show us, and his lack of Christian humility, this is not a man who deserves our unqualified support.  His actual policies will bear close scrutiny, and I expect a number of them will merit fierce opposition.

While it's possible that his governance will be even worse than what we could have reasonably expected from Mrs. Clinton, I regard that as unlikely, just because her predecessor set the bar so low, and every indication suggests that she would have been Progressively worse.

If there's anything I really hope the Clinton supporters take away from this election, it would be that they notice and remember how wildly the mainstream network news shows and mainstream news networks lied to promote their candidate and demonize her opponent, and how hard the social network sites like Google, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, and Twitter worked to suppress the voices of Trump supporters and interfere with their ability to collaborate.  They are nothing like objective, fair, or balanced.  They are in the tank for their side, and they are more than willing to resort to propaganda and lies, because they have no standards.

If there's anything I hope that Republicans take away from this, it is that they have to go a lot further from the Democrat party's platform than they have been of late (for that matter, since I've been old enough to vote).  Trump did a LOT better with traditionally Democrat voters like Blacks, Hispanics, and the poor than Mitt Romney did (see this video), and probably better than any of the others he faced in the Republican primaries would have.  He didn't win majorities of any of these groups, but well enough that they swung a lot of battlefield states to Republican red instead of Democrat blue.  This ability to appeal to groups that are regarded as solidly Democrat is something he shared with Ronald Reagan.

I am not particularly surprised that Mr. Trump went after the Deplorable vote, in addition to the Pro-Life vote.  We will see which group(s) he decides to throw under the bus.  While we Pro-Lifers are probably on the short list, Trump's sudden abandonment of his "Prosecute Crooked Hillary" rhetoric suggests that the Hillary Derangement Syndrome Voters are already there, and so too, perhaps, the Deplorables.

The very funniest thing I've seen, and it made me laugh out loud, was an item on David Warren's antiblogue:  "I will hope he [Trump] is sufficiently Machiavellian to nominate Ted Cruz for the Scalia vacancy on the Supreme Court."

Oh, what a BRILLIANT maneuver that would be!  Cruz is an actual constitutional scholar, a man who has a collegial relationship with the rest of the Senate, the man to present the largest number of oral arguments to the SCOTUS, and it takes him out of the running for President in all future elections!!