George Rebane
[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary to be broadcast tonight. I am posting it early due to the heavy reader interest and related comments pertaining to yesterday’s election.]
Early this morning columnist David Brooks, NYT’s futile nod to political balance, opined that Trump’s victory was made possible by Americans who are so “morally numb” that they suffer from “an inability to be offended”. This view is now calcified in the liberal mind that remains blind to the bullet the country dodged by rejecting Hillary Clinton’s presidency. Yesterday history was made at the polls across the land as a bamboozled, lied to, and frustrated electorate sent an outsider to try something different in Washington.
Enough voters rejected the analyses, advice, exhortations, and warnings of the progressive elites, painfully poor pollsters, Hollywood heartthrobs, Silicon Valley corporatists, and lamestream media pundits to vote for someone who at least had some demonstrable accomplishments to his name; instead of, at best, for a demonstrated incompetent who promised nothing beyond continuing the downward spiral to socialism onto which her predecessor and former boss has executively ordered our country.
President Obama leaves President Trump a nation more divided ideologically and culturally than at any time since Abe Lincoln – yesterday’s popular vote tally is testimony to that. And his promised ‘fundamental transformation’ has left us in fiscal disarray with an increasing debt and unfunded obligations that are truly beyond our ken. To this economic non-recovery we add a foreign policy in shambles, with nations across the globe that view America at a level of contempt and disrespect, allowing all the world’s bad actors to make bold gains that portend open warfare between major powers.
Both political parties now have a lot of mending ahead of them. The Democrats need to purge their ranks of the corrupt gang of crooks, grafters, and incompetent confidence peddlers that surround and support Team Clinton and the lame duck Obama administration. With all the unresolved scandals and investigations that now define the Clinton legacy, we hope that Democrats will put paid to that family’s influence in public affairs, and instead seek to rebrand themselves more openly as the unabashed home of America’s socialists touting the policies and, perhaps, even under the lead of Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. That said, I don’t hold much hope for the party’s rescue from the Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and (inherited) Harry Reed schools of politics.
On the Republican side Donald Trump has to make good on his victory speech promise to reach out and welcome those many whose support of his candidacy was less than lukewarm. In this he needs to be Lincolnian going forward with “malice toward none” and “charity for all”. He must assemble a team of politically and technically astute people who can work together and work effectively with a Congress that again has Republican majorities in both houses. If the Trump administration is itching for a house cleaning, it should start with the top and middle managers of the executive branch departments and bureaucracies that have so punished America over the last decades, especially the years since 2006. Rolling back Obama’s executive orders and thousands of economy and liberty stifling regulations should be a first order of business. If President Trump wants to resolve the Clinton covens of criminality, then he should assign a special prosecutor to insulate his administration, and let subsequent justice be led by the evidence.
According to my lights, given the alternatives, yesterday the country was blessed with the best available outcome. But that in itself is no guarantee of a successful return to America’s greatness on a path that will again assimilate our fragmented cultural landscape, come to grips with a technology-driven, burgeoning systemic unemployment, and reestablish our global role as a strong and respected champion of liberalizing and commercially competing countries. However, such a hopeful future demands an electorate educated in the pros and cons of collectivism and free market capitalism.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[Addendum] On a more local note I see that Nevada County is now definitely neither red nor purple, but solidly blue. It has been tending blue for some years as witnessed by the way the county’s jurisdictions ‘welcome’ businesses and real estate development, and what strictures burden owners on the disposition of their homes and rental properties.
Perusing the results of yesterday’s election (here) we see that less than 44% of the votes were cast for Republican Donald Trump. Republican incumbent, Congressman LaMalfa, squeaked by with only a 1% margin, and Republican incumbent, Congressman McClintock, was soundly beaten in south county by an almost 2:1 margin. All the propositions passed and failed strictly along the ideological divide. Republicans did fare better in the state legislature as incumbents Ted Gaines and Brian Dahle retained their seats.
Nevada County has stagnated in population and socio-economic development over the last decades as the successfully retired and families with children find that jobs and appropriate living accommodations are no longer available in this region of the Sierra foothills which should be a mecca for both demographics. This follows the path of so many other rural counties across the land that have been devastated by progressive public policies. This decay in the hinterlands matches the decades long decay in large urban areas that have languished under Democrat city governments.
Today the blight of collectivism is visible across the nation wherever progressives gain a foothold. The only exceptions being the urban set-asides where the wealthy and high earning elites congregate, people whose financial situation makes them immune to the regulatory costs of residence no matter where they live.
[10nov16 update] Nationwide socialist protests. The leftwing’s effluent from our institutions of higher socialism have taken to the streets to declare their separation from those who disagree with them. These demonstrations of the Left’s hypocrisy have gone hyperbolic in their opposition to the outcome of the recent election with cries of ‘Not our President!’ etc, flag burnings, and the smashing of Trump image piñatas. When the Great Divide has been discussed in these pages, the local leftwing loonies scream ‘Treason!’ and attribute the very idea to a small unpatriotic group of the disaffected rightwing. But the truth is very distant from such assessments and actions which align perfectly with Alinsky’s Marxist teachings. The young know-nothings in the streets have been shaped in leftwing union dominated government schools to hate every bit of America that preceded their tender years. Their education has been abetted daily by the progressive lamestream media, and now they are shrieking against a reality that was not supposed to be. They have been promised a fundamental transformation of the country, and they intend to make it so.
The first order of business for civil America should include depolitizing the nation’s politically correct school systems. However, even if that is possible without the Great Divide, in the interval there will be more of the same from the progressive elites who already have planned, organized, and implemented demonstrations and more against America’s civil society and constitutional order.
[Later] The progress of the progressive pandemic across our dear land. Note Nevada County; we are now the minority.
rebanesruminations.com 
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