In consolation

Republicans now have the presidency and both houses of Congress, so they can do whatever the hell they please, and the rest of us will just have to live with it. I find this is a hard row to hoe, but it would be a lot harder if I had been among those who trusted Clinton. Some thoughts…

I voted for Jill Stein, so I’m one of those people who are being blamed for Trump’s victory, the argument being that a vote for anyone but Clinton was a vote for Trump. Yet, this persistent demand that everyone vote for the lesser of two evils can only result in the country never having more than two major candidates, both of them on the side of Big Business. Besides, I mistrusted Clinton so much that I couldn’t even be sure but what she would be a worse president than Trump. For one thing a vote for her would have carried with it the certainty of war, war, and more war, it being well-known that she was much more militaristic than Obama.

As much as I deplore Trump and nearly all of his policies, I liked some of his stances. For example, I consider his idea of a “wall” on the Mexican border to be absurd, but I agree that illegal immigration is a serious problem, and I had every expectation that Clinton would encourage it rather than control it due to her emphasis on helping illegals rather than deporting them for being the criminals that they are.

I hate “political correctness,” and Trump represents a hard and well-deserved slap in its smug and mean-spirited totalitarian face. I’ll give an example based upon my last point. Thanks to PC, America went from using the term “illegal aliens,” to “illegal immigrants” to “non-documented workers,” and finally to “immigrants,” thus denying any distinction between someone who wades the Rio Grande in the middle of the night and someone who spends years working through America’s painstaking immigration process. Another example is that PC won’t engage in dialogue with those who don’t knuckle under to its values. It instead fires them from their jobs, hounds them from their schools, demands their public censure, and labels them, among other things, as racist, homophobic, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and that catch-all word hater. Even a devoutly PC person can get in trouble with PCers if he or she is found guilty of some “subconscious microaggression” with no defense being possible. PC’s worst nightmare will soon be its president, and, despite my own abhorrence of Trump, I can’t help but smile.

I finally gave up any thought of voting for Clinton when I heard her vilify a cop who had shot a black man the day before. Clinton couldn’t have known that the shooting was unjustified, yet she chose to pronounce that cop guilty without a trial and by so doing, she supported others in insuring that the cop couldn’t get a fair trial, the PC assumption being that when a cop shoots a black person, the shooting constitutes proof that the cop is a racist who probably joined the force so he or she could have a license to murder minorities. I hold people like Clinton partially responsible for the rising hatred of police and for cops being shot dead while sitting their cars.

Although I’m more liberal than conservative, I hate liberal smugness, and Clinton was the poster child for it. When I picture of Trump, I picture anger and intimidation. When I picture of Clinton, I picture insincerity and smugness.

I don’t want Moslem immigrants coming here because Islam inspires oppression and violence. Where Islam exists, the rights of women, gays, and non-Moslems are scorned. I don’t even care how wonderful a given Moslem is, he or she belongs to a religion that opposes human rights, and the more children that person parents in America, the greater America’s risk of Islamic violence and oppression.

If, through our membership in NATO, America is going to risk nuclear war with Russia while protecting some little Eastern European country that most Americans can’t find on a map—assuming the’ve even heard of it—then the very least that our NATO partners can do is to pay the share they pledged to pay for NATO membership. Millions of Europeans detest America for its militarism, yet American militarism is the only thing standing between them and Russia, and what do we gain for protecting these parasites? I agree with George’s Washington statement in his Final Address (the speech he gave upon retiring from public life): “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world…”

I agree with Trump that this country should come first, and I believe this means, for one thing, cutting off all foreign aid. If a person borrowed money to the point that he had no hope of ever repaying it, and he gave that money to poor people on the other side of the world while his own children were wearing rags, going without medical care, and sleeping under a leaking roof, I would consider that person an idiot, yet this is exactly what America does. I know we don’t do it simply because we care about the poor, but rather in order to buy the friendship of the leaders of the poor, but I say screw those leaders because if we minded our own business instead of trying to run the entire world to our satisfaction, we wouldn’t need their friendship.


I’m scared shitless to have Republicans running my country, but I would have felt unsafe if Clinton had won. When Peggy put the cats to bed last night at 1:00 a.m., she turned on the TV for a moment and saw that Trump had won. She went to bed but was too upset to sleep, so she got up at 3:00 and turned it on again in the hope that she had misunderstood. When she realized that Trump really had triumphed, she stayed up until 5:00 watching the election results and becoming ever more scared. Because what I would fear most—in the short-term—is nuclear war with Russia, I actually feel a little safer with Trump, at least in that regard. Why is that a country that is forever praising peace, forever saying that it is working for peace, and forever chastising others nations for going to war, is itself constantly at war? The ONLY president I would feel optimistic about would be one that got us out of these goddamned endless wars, each of which leaves us poorer and less safe than when we got into it. I’ve heard insanity defined as doing the same stupid thing with the magic expectation that it will yield a different result, and that pretty much defines America. A vote for either major candidate would have been a vote for war, and I can at least feel good that I didn’t vote for even more young Americans coming home lame or in body bags, their lives sacrificed for nothing.