Donald – Please stop with the tweets …

Yes, Jill Stein is a jerk.  Yes, her recounts are not going to change anything. Yes, Hillary chastised you in a debate for not agreeing to accept whatever outcome from the election.  Yes, Hillary’s people are now supporting Stein’s request for recounts, despite Hillary already conceding the election.

So what?

You’re on the path to being sworn in as President in January. They aren’t. 

All you have to do is keep on keepin’ on. A wonderful Arab saying to keep in mind is this:  As the caravan passes, the dogs bark. 

Right now the dogs are barking. The left-leaners in the media are desperate to keep the recent election on the front burner – not the part where they slavishly promoted Hillary as the second coming, but the continuing attack on your fitness and temperament to be President.  They are grasping at anything, anything they can use against you. 

And you appear ready to give them the ammunition with your tweets. 

There’s a time to respond to unfair stuff, but there’s also a time to STFU.  In case you haven’t gotten the message, it’s STFU time. 

Keep on filling your cabinet and going forward with the transition. Ignore the small stuff.  The press is never going to give you a fair shake no matter what you do.  So surround yourself with good, competent people and do the job without the drama. 

After all the trashing you’ve already taken from the media and political pundits, the bar for you is practically on the floor.  If you don’t start a nuclear war, set up concentration camps, or nominate David Duke for the Supreme Court, you’re pretty much home free. 

You see, that’s been the problem the left and the media have created.  In their efforts to paint you as a complete monster – the ultimate boogeyman – almost anything you do that doesn’t involve drowning puppies and kittens for fun, breaking down doors to grab up illegal immigrants, legalizing rape, and restoring slavery will be anti-climactic.

You have a golden opportunity.  If you act even moderately responsible, if you stop losing it over every little affront, if you just tone it down a tad, you’ll look like a champ. When our media has been telling everyone you’ll be a dictator, with racist and sexist tendencies, and it turns out you actually aren’t they won’t ever admit they were wrong, but the public will know.   

The public – not the media – elected you. Don’t ever forget that.

Will the media eventually warm up to you? Nope. Will the Eurocrats stop looking down their collective noses at you? Nope again.  But that doesn’t mean you need to feed them.

You won because people wanted change. You won by bypassing the media, the major parties, and the political establishment to talk directly to the public. 

Once you’re inaugurated you’ll have more opportunities to address the public directly again, but as President of the most powerful nation on Earth.

Then you can propose a national identity card which will solve most of the issues associated with illegal immigration, voter fraud, and entitlements fraud in one fell swoop.

Be cool, Donald. You’re almost there

They still don’t get it …

The election’s been over for a couple of weeks.  Trump won. 

That result seems to be lost on many people.  Nobody they know, nobody they hold in high esteem, voted for him. So how could he have possibly won?  

The mayors and newspapers of the major cities were all against him.  Celebrities such as Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Jay-Z and Beyoncé came out against him.  So did actors such as Robert De Niro. Civil rights groups opposed him. Immigrant-rights groups opposed him.  President Obama and Michelle campaigned against him, repeatedly calling him unfit.   

How on Earth could he get elected?  Every right-thinking person was against him.  It wasn’t just Democrats – the Bush family opposed him, as did Mitt Romney, John McCain and a wide range of other prominent members of the Republican establishment. 

And now that Trump will be President, they fear that all the progress their country’s made over the past decade could be wiped out. 

Let me share something they clearly don’t get:  very few Americans outside their cultural bubble give a rat’s ass what they think. In fact, it’s the “progress” liberals think they’ve made that drove so many Americans to vote for Trump – they wanted that “progress” to stop.  To most voting Americans outside of the major cities, liberals had gone way too far at their expense.

While liberals railed against the rich and said they felt for the working man and woman, the reality on the ground was much different. Liberal policies in recent years actually made the rich richer, illegal immigrants more emboldened, and the poor so gifted with entitlements there was now a disincentive for many to get a job and lose those benefits.

To many Trump voters the country had gone from a hard-working nation that manufactured things to a food-stamp nation that instead manufactured more benefits for people who chose not to work, or didn’t have any legal right to be here.  

Democrat and Republican establishment politicians, instead of focusing on rewarding work, bringing back jobs, and creating new good-paying jobs, fought over things Trump voters didn’t care about one way or another.  Like same-sex marriage.  Funding Planned Parenthood.  Transgender rights.  Climate change. Hate speech and safe zones.  Protecting illegal immigrants from deportation.    

None of these things really mattered as much to many Americans as rebuilding the economy.  Only the chattering class and the media talking heads thought these did. But because our news media are concentrated in major cities – where political correctness is created and worshipped – ordinary folks outside those cities were fed a steady diet of what mattered more to the media and politicians than to people worried about keeping or getting a job to feed their families.   

Trump voters saw America as a house on fire. Putting the fire out was the only thing that mattered.  All the rest was simply background noise – solutions to problems that didn’t matter nearly as much. Wasting time on whether some business could refuse to make a wedding cake for someone, or if some church should be required to provide birth control, or taking down the 10 Commandments from government property seemed a luxury the country could ill afford when it had more pressing problems like terrorist attacks, joblessness, declining incomes, and skyrocketing deficits.  

They wanted their government to do something – something real, not just symbolic. They had been trying to send this message for at least three election cycles.  They elected Obama because he promised change.  When that didn’t happen – and instead they got ObamaCare – they elected a Republican majority in the House and Senate.  Still nothing changed with either party, so they voted for Trump in the primaries – against the wishes of the Republican establishment and to the horror of Democrats – and then voted Trump into the Oval Office.    

Frankly, voters were tired of being told what to do, what to think, and what to believe shoved down their throats by people apparently more focused on which bathroom kids should use than whether those same kids could read and write.  Or whether gun violence was caused by guns or the people using those guns.  Or whether “undocumented” was the politically correct way to describe people who have entered our country illegally. 

The people in power and the media obsessed over these things and couldn’t see what was really happening outside their narrow frame of reference.  Finally, enough people were pissed enough to come out and vote to overturn the status quo.  They never saw it coming. 

Voters rebelled against policies and endless regulations that cost them jobs, reduced their incomes, and raised their healthcare costs. They saw what liberals believed was “progress” as a continuing erosion of the values they held dear – mainly having a steady job, minding your own business, paying your bills, and being responsible for yourself and your family. 

More to the point, they rebelled against being ignored and taken for granted.

After all the hand-wringing by the media and Democrats over the election, and the protests and riots by disgruntled activists, and the blame game over who was really responsible for such an unexpected outcome, the media and the left still don’t get it.

That’s how out of touch they were, and sadly still are. 

Trump won the Electoral College vote by a wide margin.  Republicans increased their seats in the House, retained their majority in the Senate, and increased the number of Republican-held governorships and state houses.  That’s what’s known as a change election, not a fluke. 

The left, cultural elites and the media apparently can’t fathom that. They still think they can call the shots because they have the real power in America.  They don’t.  And they don’t realize that whatever power and influence they thought they had was in truth only with each other.   

They cheered when VP-Elect Mike Pence recently went to a Broadway show and many audience members booed him. At the end of the same show one of the actors came out and lectured Pence on what the cast expected Pence and Trump to do for them.  The media was enthralled.  Then the New York media breathlessly reported that New York fashion designers were refusing to design clothes for Melania Trump, as if that was a real blow to the Trumps.

Seriously? 

What planet are these people on? 

Their arrogance and condescension cost them this election. They still don’t get it.  

Let the fun begin …

The last time the Democrats had control of the Senate they passed ObamaCare without a single Republican vote. They also used a parliamentary trick to enact the “nuclear option” so they could push through appointments to Federal courts with a simple majority vote. 

When the Republicans then regained control of the Senate, Democrats were quick to demand that Republicans needed to reach across the aisle to Democrats. This from the same people who never even considered what Republicans wanted when Democrats held the Senate.  And lest we forget, these were the same Democrats who gleefully declared every proposal from the Republican House DOA when Democrats controlled the Senate.    

Then when faced with a Republican-controlled House and Senate, Obama didn’t even bother trying to “reach across the aisle.”  Instead, he used a series of Executive Orders to enact new regulations bypassing Congress entirely on a variety of issues.

Some legal scholars warned that Obama and the Democrats were setting dangerous – and often Constitutionally questionable – precedents they might one day regret.

That day has arrived. 

I guess they never expected Republicans to win control of the House, Senate and White House at the same time ever again. It simply wasn’t possible. 

The Republican Party establishment was equally delusional. Despite their best efforts, the ultimate Republican nominee – against their wishes – won the White House. 

Party poohbahs and traditional donors had put their money and resources on the type of candidates they traditionally field.  When these were crushed one-by-one in the primaries they joined together to mount a fierce battle to defeat the one candidate they all hated – Donald Trump. Mitt Romney even did commercials telling Republicans not to vote for Trump.   

John Kasich, who I voted for in the primaries, refused to go to the Republican Convention, even though it was in Ohio where he was the governor. The Bush family also refused to go, as did Mitt Romney, John McCain and a host of other Republican “leaders.”  Most of the Republican contenders who during the debates pledged to support whoever the Republican nominee was broke their pledges, with some going on record as opposing Trump up until the election. 

Trump won anyway.

Trump destroyed two political dynasties – the Bushes and the Clintons – as well as the Republican and Democrat Parties, and gravely wounded the mainstream media that night. 

Trump won. They lost. Elections have consequences.   

That’s why I find it fascinating that the losers think they are somehow entitled to have a say in what Trump does now.

Democrats are telling Republicans and Trump they have an obligation to support the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.  At the same time they are telling Trump they intend to block the nominations of just about anyone he suggests.

Democrats are also demanding he pledge to the American people he won’t fulfill many of his campaign promises. They want him to publicly pledge not to overturn Obama’s Executive Orders.  They want him to renounce building a wall on our southern border, pulling Federal funding from sanctuary cities, and opposing the climate change treaty, among other things. 

Disgruntled supporters of Hillary or Bernie are rioting in the streets, vandalizing property, looting and attacking police as well as bystanders, which many celebrities and Democrats are urging on. 

But Pelosi and other Democrats are calling on Trump to tell his supporters to stop harassing Muslims, blacks, Hispanics, the LGBTQ community, and others – of which there’s scant evidence his supporters are involved.  If anything, it appears that most of the reported incidents of harassment by “Trump supporters” have been manufactured by those opposed to Trump; in contrast, virtually all the violence and mayhem after the election is from Trump-haters. 

The hypocrisy doesn’t stop there.      

Lindsey Graham and other Republicans who demonized Trump right up until election day – even some who publicly stated that they would either not vote, or would vote for Hillary – are telling Trump who he should appoint to his cabinet and who they want to see in key positions in his administration. Some of these people are putting forth Ted Cruz – a never-Trump guy almost up to the very end – for the Supreme Court vacancy.

In a way, all this is sad.  In another way it’s downright silly.

It seems everyone wants to force Trump into their expectation of a traditional politician. They want him to forgive and forget and become one of them. They seem intent on browbeating him into submission – which, by now, they should realize isn’t that likely.

All they have to do is review the recent election.  

Democrats need to take a hard look at what they and Obama have done, the precedents they’ve set, over the past seven and a half years.  Establishment Republicans need to take an equally hard look at why a flawed outsider, with no political experience at all and little actual campaign spending, was able to defeat their hand-picked candidates.   

I don’t know exactly what Trump is going to do. I doubt he does either. 

But it’s going to be fun to watch.

He won. They lost. Elections have consequences. 

That Pauline Kael moment …

When Nixon won in 1972, Pauline Kael of the New Yorker famously said she couldn’t understand how he won since virtually nobody she knew voted for him. 

If you now wonder how the media, the pollsters, the pundits and the Democrats could have been so wrong on this election, remember Pauline Kael. She summed up back then why so many in the political and media establishments didn’t see the Trump victory coming.

Nobody they know – nobody they associate with – was voting for Trump. Or at least acknowledged that they were voting for Trump. People they polled who were actually planning to vote for Trump either blew them off and refused to answer, or lied to them.  

So everybody was sure Hillary had this in the bag. All their friends were for her.  All their colleagues were in her camp.  The people who eagerly answered their polling questions said they were for her. The political establishment knew Hillary had the big money, big stars, big ground game, big campaign consultants and the Obama Coalition which in their world were all certain precursors of a win.

Plus, she’d take millennials, the African-Americans, Latinos and of course women.   

Some predicted she might win in a landslide, maybe even over 300 Electoral College votes.  They cast this as a result of the shifting demographics of a changing nation – where increases in the numbers of the young and Hispanics, and the gender gap, all favored Hillary. 

They forgot to really talk to people outside their insular world.

Like the working class men and women of all races and ethnicity many of whom had lost their jobs and incomes through jobs moving to other countries.  They forgot to listen to the small business owners and their employees getting hammered by ObamaCare’s skyrocketing premiums and exorbitant deductibles. They forgot the middle class men and women who dropped out of the workforce, were underemployed, or whose wages hadn’t increased in a decade.  They forgot those whose household income had actually declined over that time. 

Sure, the media and political elites saw the numbers, but hey … they themselves were doing very well.  Big salaries, nice vacations, dinners at fine restaurants, hobnobbing with the rich and famous, first-class travel and treatment wherever they went.  

In a world like that – their world, with private schools, economically segregated neighborhoods, nannies and housekeepers, first-class train and plane tickets – there’s little chance of mixing with people outside their social or economic circles.  

And they didn’t.    

Since they never really talked to – much less tried to understand – the millions of people already increasingly angry about the direction of the country politically, economically and culturally, they believed everything was just fine. None of the people they knew had these concerns. 

When they saw the Trump rallies, they laughed at the people there.  When they saw signs protesting illegal immigration, they dismissed the holders as bigots and racists.  When they saw people waving American flags they snickered. 

When their New York-based TV shows mocked Trump and his supporters as bozos, rubes, and ignorant hicks, they laughed and laughed and laughed. 

They never realized there was a whole world – another America – outside of the world they knew.  In that other world, people were actually offended by the antics of the cultural and political elites.  The people the elites mocked didn’t find the jokes at their expense to be funny at all, especially when they were constantly portrayed as know-nothing clowns. 

The arrogance of the cultural and political elites cost them the election.  The other America – the one they laughed at – came out and voted. 

And stunned the powers that be.  Or now, were. 

Clinton promised another four years of Obama policies. Her friends in the media and the financial and entertainment industries couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to continue forward with more of the same; everybody they knew agreed.

The people they didn’t know didn’t agree. 

On Tuesday, the people they didn’t know upset the world they thought they knew. 

I was struck by the maps on election night showing which counties voted for Trump or for Clinton.  In state after state, if became clear that most states were almost entirely red (for Trump) with only a few blue spots (for Clinton) concentrated almost exclusively in the big cities. 

Obama promised to transform America.  Clinton promised to continue and increase that transformation even more.  People in most states – enough to win the Electoral College vote by a wide margin – decided to put a stop to it. So they did. That’s democracy in action.   

Liberals and mainstream media talking heads are still aghast at what happened.  Precious little snowflakes on college campuses across the country are having meltdowns. They simply cannot understand how this could happen.      

Remember Pauline Kael.  

Giving the finger to the establishment …

Yep. I’m that guy. The one Tucker Carlson described.

The one who is fed up with the political games in Washington. The one who doesn’t trust the media to tell the truth. The one who believes our government operates to protect its own first, the rich and the powerful next, and treats the rest of us as cattle to be milked. 

I’m tired of special interests deciding who gets what. I’m sick of the out-of-control spending on useless projects and programs to appease one group or another. 

And I’m disheartened to realize that our nation founded on such lofty principles has devolved into a selfish, self-centered society where celebrity trumps competence and gaming the system gives you greater status than working hard to earn an honest living.

Even more disturbing is how we’ve allowed our country to go from nation of laws, not man, to one where who you are and who you know changes how the law is applied. 

It’s been said the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow, but exceedingly fine. Now, it appears, that depends entirely on who is doing the grinding. If it’s the Justice Department, or even the FBI, and you’re a high-ranking government appointee, or perhaps just a lower-level bureaucrat, you could commit any number of crimes and skate while retaining your full pension.  At worst you might have to resign – but again you’ll retain your full pension.  But if you’re a regular citizen – or perhaps a soldier or a general in our military – you face fines and imprisonment for doing far less. 

How does that comport with “equal justice under the law” you might ask. 

It’s also been said that justice delayed is justice denied; however, more and more it seems that justice delayed means justice may never be rendered. 

How else can you explain why illegal immigrants – and yes, they have crossed our borders illegally which by any definition makes them criminals – are treated so differently from other criminals.

If a bank robber held up a sign bragging about a crime they just committed they’d be arrested. But if an illegal immigrant holds up a sign bragging about their illegal status they are treated as heroes.  If those same immigrants brought their children here illegally those children are not considered “fruit of the poisonous tree” – derivative of an illegal act – but “dreamers” entitled to special treatment and consideration according to many politicians.   

This is just nuts. Even more nuts is the idea that if you evade ICE long enough you might just get amnesty, bypassing all those other wannabe citizens trying to immigrate here legally. When did that become acceptable? 

I’d like to blame Congress.  But Congress is just a reflection of the people who elect them.  Enough self-centered, selfish people have elected people just like them.      

Our Congress doesn’t represent the rest of us as much as themselves. Most spend the majority of their time in office trying to raise money for their re-election by doing favors – at our expanse – for deep-pocketed campaign contributors. When they aren’t doing that, they busy themselves fighting with each other over ridiculous stuff for political advantage, or getting the government – and our money – involved in things they have absolutely no business being a part of. 

Federal money shouldn’t be funding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, get-out-the-vote programs, Planned Parenthood, after-school basketball programs, school lunches, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, or any of the other thousands of sacred cows now ensconced in our Federal budget.

The worst of these – government-funded get-out-the-vote programs – shouldn’t even exist. Why should we pay people to convince other people to register and vote?  If they don’t care enough to get off their asses and register and vote on their own then they shouldn’t.

And if you don’t know these are programs largely designed to get more Democrats elected you shouldn’t be allowed to vote, either. You’re too stupid.  

Planned Parenthood should be funded entirely by private contributions. However meritorious their services may or may not be, the idea of government outsourcing healthcare and contraception to a quasi-private organization with armies of lobbyists is just wrong. When an organization needs hired lobbyists to keep the Federal funding flowing, something’s amiss.

The school lunch programs should be handled entirely by the states. The after-school basketball programs wouldn’t be needed if parents did their jobs. 

The Department of Energy and the Department of Education are entirely unnecessary.  The former is a garbage pit of half-assed ideas run by zealots continually trying to defy the immutable laws of supply and demand; the latter is a shill for the teachers’ unions.  Both are self-serving entities that spend our money on promoting hare-brained theories that sound great in a college classroom but fail miserably in the real world.        

Billions are wasted every day on these and too many commissions, bureaus and boards for this, that and the other – such as the Export Import Bank, the African Development Foundation, Agricultural Marketing Service, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, and countless hundreds of other mini and major bureaucracies. 

Honestly, we don’t need all this crap.

Let’s be candid here: most government programs and bureaucracies are a waste of money. The only thing they accomplish is padding the government payroll and kissing the butts of one special interest group or another.

Worse yet, there’s almost no way to get rid of them. Elected politicians can be voted out of office – and, sadly, too rarely are – but bureaucrats are virtually bulletproof. 

Remember Lois Lerner.  John Koskinen.  The heads of the Veterans Administration. The list goes on and on, and there’s nothing anyone seems to be able to do about these weasels.    

The Department of Justice has become a bad joke.  When the Attorney General – an appointee of a Obama – meets privately with Bill Clinton while his wife Hillary is under FBI investigation you don’t need to be a genius to realize what’s happening. When Lynch claims they were only talking about golf and grandkids for 30 minutes on a private plane parked on an airport tarmac without any other witnesses present, it’s insulting to anyone with half a brain.

So when a madman like Trump – and at times he seems one – says he wants to drain the swamp Washington has become, stop illegal immigration and deport illegal immigrants, push for term limits, and yes, put investigating corruption at all levels of our political system on the front burner, well, guess what: I’m willing to put up with all his other baggage to get those things.

The fact that the media hate him, the Republican establishment hates him, liberals hate him, Hollywood types hate him, and government bureaucrats hate him just makes him more attractive to people like me. And I believe there are a lot more of us than most imagine.

I fervently hope he wins if for no other reason than to just to send a message.   

As Michael Moore said recently: electing Trump would be the biggest “fuck you” to the political establishment in American history.

I’m okay with that. It’s long overdue.