Well, guys, here we go. The election is over and we have done the unthinkable: we have elected Donald Trump.
I have to say this. Hillary sealed her own fate by sheer hubris. She just assumed herself to be the candidate, and the people clearly did not agree. She thought, since she had lost the last one, this one was hers, that she would be a shoo-in, that the presidency was her right and her legacy. She expected a coronation. None of that was true. The country had moved on. We didn't want her, and voted in droves to say otherwise. Debbie Wasserman Shultz and the DNC gang decided those of us who didn't want Hillary were a bunch of kooks not to be considered, and they bulldozed through the primaries, doing what they had to do to throw the vote to Hillary. If anyone doubted they threw the primaries, reading their emails showed that was exactly what they did. Some of us held our noses and voted for her; a great many more, apparently, didn't.
We didn't believe the 30 years of Republican lies about her, and we didn't think her being a woman was a handicap to doing the job. We simply didn't think she was the best candidate. All through the primaries, polls showed that Trump could beat her, but could not even come close to beating Bernie. The pollsters are still saying "Bernie was never going to win." Wrong. Without the manipulations of the DNC, he would have won. They kept saying "but she has the popular vote." She didn't, actually, because they did not count the votes cast in the caucuses, where Bernie won by landslides. Both primaries and caucuses counted the same in choosing a candidate, but the DNC would have you believe the caucuses didn't count. Caucuses are simply a different way of doing the same thing: choosing a candidate.
The media went all out to make Bernie look like an idiot, a loser, a wild-eyed radical, a fool, but he was none of those things. He had real vision, real promise and offered a chance at something different. Hillary offered more of the same center right politics. We wanted a turn to the left. We wanted to return the Democratic party to it's previous compassion and commitment to social justice. We wanted serious change in economics. The enthusiasm to vote for her was not there, because she was not at all what we hoped for. Her day had passed, and she and the DNC could not see it. They kept pushing her as the only viable candidate.
The results are the election of a fascist who has a 200 word vocabulary, a massive, grandiose and easily bruised ego and no ability to use self-control. People who do not have much in the way of critical thinking skills simply saw "different" but did not scrutinize what kind of "different." They don't see around corners to visualize the consequences of their short-sightedness. They believed what he said without ever taking a look at how that actually compared to his past actions. We all have our work cut out for us now, to see that we don't have a resurgence of 1938, to see that people's lives are not destroyed in the keeping of campaign promises, to see that children are not frightened or harmed.
Fortunately for us, few presidents have bothered to keep campaign promises. Maybe the gravity of the job will change the rhetoric and the behavior. meanwhile, bullying is on the rise in schools and the alt right has been empowered. The idea that if you tell a lie over and over again it becomes the truth has prevailed in ways I never thought possible. Be forewarned.
It's up to us to keep the faith.
