Reflections on weeping over the US Presidential election

By James T. Carney

Boy, if I had recognized that Trump’s election would have caused all the weeping and gnashing of teeth that I see [some, for example, in yesterday’s post], I would have voted for him. However, it would make more sense for “liberals” to start dealing with reality and learn some lessons from this campaign.

Hillary Clinton was the worst individual since 1924 to be nominated for President on the Democratic ticket. Had the Democrats nominated Joe Biden, they would have won in a landslide. Hillary lies like a trooper, as evidenced by all her false statements to the FBI and the public about why she used her own, insecure email account for government business. (Not only was her account insecure but the recipients were idiots – hundreds of thousands of her emails ended up on a computer owned by a sexual pervert.)
    She is as mendacious as they come. Goldman Sachs was not paying her $625,000 per speech [the amount varies by source] because she was the greatest orator since Cicero. They were buying influence, as were some donors to the Clinton Foundation. Hillary’s main interest in life is to be the first female President – and after that to be a millionaire. She has succeeded in the last at least.

Do the people who talk about [the vast] right-wing conspiracy remember that this conspiracy theory was Hillary’s response to the revelations about Bill’s affair with an intern who was closer in age to his daughter than to him? Was this a right-wing conspiracy? How many of the people who now condemn Trump for his treatment of women said anything about Bill’s? The answer is: almost none of them. Hillary’s lack of support among younger voters reflects their repudiation of the double standard of those who always condoned Bill’s bimbo eruptions.

Despite all the claims that Hillary won the popular vote, you might note that the Republican Party has elected 31 of our states’ governors, and has a majority in the U.S. Senate. Neither of these results can reflect the gerrymandering that politicians of both parties engage in. Probably one of the most extreme examples of gerrymandering is the creation of a “black” district in North Carolina that wanders all over the state. Of course, some liberals (including my sister and brother-in-law) are in favor of this as giving “blacks” some representation.
    I view gerrymandering as the greatest defect of the present system because it facilitates the election of extreme candidates and the retention of incumbents. We will see few professional politicians seeking to end gerrymandering, although progress has been made in Arizona and California.

The Democratic Party has sold out the working class in the interests of “open borders and open trade” – a Hillary policy that she was willing to tell Goldman Sachs about but not the rest of us. (Of course, the Republicans have sold the working class out too with the voodoo economics of tax cuts for the rich.) The steel industry has been devastated by imports of subsidized foreign steel. No administration up to now – Democratic or Republican – has been willing to protect domestic industry from unfair competition. Trump may be different, which is why he carried traditionally Democratic states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Americans are not interested in adventures abroad. One of the two foreign policy disasters of the Obama administration was the Clinton-inspired intervention in Libya. If elected, she would have started intervention in Syria and possibly provoked clashes with the military. After eight years in office, Obama has us [still] involved in Iraq an Afghanistan. What we need to recognize is that we have no friends in the Middle East. We have temporary allies such as the Israelis and the Kurds, but they would all sell us for salt were it in their interest to do so. Witness, for example, Israel’s celebration of the arrival of Jonathan Pollard in Israel, where this traitor to the United States was seen as a hero to the Israelis. Trump stands for a less interventionist policy than Hillary did.

The Obama administration (which Hillary’s administration would have been a continuation of) has been a disaster for the wage-earning middle class. (Now, I myself have done well during this administration [Mr. Carney is an attorney-at-law], which is prima facie evidence that things are not right.) Wages are stagnant; many people are stuck working part-time when they want full-time jobs. What Obama needed to have done when he came into office was to enact the biggest public works legislation we have seen since the New Deal. The economy needs infrastructure improvements like no one’s business. The traditional – and economically sensible – Democratic approach to recession is spending on public works. Infrastructure spending would have increased the incomes of the working middle class.
    Obama, however, decided to use every inch of political capital to force through Obamacare – a bastardized piece of legislation that did nothing to deal with the real problems of health care – excessive administration expenses because there is no single payer; malpractice litigation resulting from a huge number of needless medical procedures; a piece-work system for paying for medical services; and government subsidization of drug companies.
    The ironic thing about the Republican victory is that it will result in the repeal of Obamacare, thus saving it from falling on its own as the costs of insurance keep rising because of adverse selection. [“Adverse selection” can be defined as strategic behavior by the more informed partner in a contract against the interest of the less informed partner(s). In the health insurance field, this manifests itself through healthy people choosing managed care and less healthy people choosing more generous plans.]

Illegal immigration, a major problem, is simply a subsidy for the rich. Illegal immigrants keep down wages for low-skilled work. If we did not have 11 million illegal immigrants, employers would have to raise wages to get employees to do back-breaking work that immigrants are willing to do for low wages. That development would do more to improve the incomes of the semi-working class than any change in the minimum wage will ever do. Of course, it would mean that all of us would pay higher prices for goods and services. So what?
    A fundamental demographic reality, which environmentalists understand, is that we do not need more people in this country. Our resources – particularly in the West – are being tapped out. Eighty percent of the world’s population would like to migrate to the U.S. We don’t need them and we cannot take them. That does not mean that they are criminals, rapists, etc. (although obviously some of them are). The real point is that we don’t need them, and the people in this country do not want them. Hence Trump.

One main problem of the elite is its focus on political correctness. Thus, the Obama administration refuses to use the term “radical Islamists” even though that is what we are dealing with. To use the term is to say that these people represent a minority of Muslims (they are “deplorables” in the Muslim population, if I may borrow a term from Hillary – a term that certainly epitomized her “eliteness” mentality). The reality is that treating Muslims as a disparate group (as is done in Europe) is simply to feed Islamic radicalism. The Paris bombers in Europe were able to hide out for months in the Muslim communities there. The New York City bomber here was found within a couple of days.
    Of course, one of the centers of political correctness is Yale University, which is starting to behave like the Russian Politburo in removing names because the individuals named are deemed to be in the wrong under today’s standards. My view is that if someone is so offended by the name of Calhoun College that he or she is humiliated, maybe that person should go elsewhere. [This residential college is named for US Vice President John C. Calhoun, an 1804 graduate of Yale College and an advocate of slave-holding and states’ rights. –Wikipedia]
    As Harry Truman said, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” Trump does not give a shit about political correctness, which is one of his traits that many people find appealing.

Copyright © 2016 by James T. Carney