George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 8 February 2017.]

A lot has happened on both sides of the aisle in the last couple of weeks.  President Trump is off to a determined if not bumpy start to deliver on his campaign promises, and the Democrats …?  Well, they’re off to an even bumpier start which raises the real question – where are they going?  No one seems to know.  Their only objective is to don the ‘Party of No’ mantle and protest everything until the cows come home.  As a political party, don’t you have to do a bit more than that to have a hope in the 2018 elections; don’t you have to tell the voters what objectives you want to achieve other than throw sand in the gears of the Trump administration?

Right off the top the Democrats have no top, no next generation leaders with ideas that make sense to a country which their old and existing leaders have managed to put into what feels like permanent doldrums cranking along with a screwed up foreign policy, and with even worse domestic policies.  They don’t seem to remember why they lost the last election, starting with the presidency and plunging wholesale into the states and counties.  It is clear that people wanted something different, something that might have a chance of working besides a rehash of the same ol’ same ol’ by the same old crew.

Most Americans don’t want a brave new world created under the government gun that forces us to accept porous borders, or pauper ourselves to nurture those who hate us and our way of life, or even allow 50-year-old transgendered men to share a bathroom with little kindergarten girls.  Instead, other cultures that send us their emigrants should rest easy that when these new Americans assimilate to our ways, they will inevitably change us a bit to adopt some of their ways.  That is how American culture has evolved since the days of the Pilgrims, the Dutch, the French, and the Germans.  Those who came afterwards always assimilated first and then gently showed the rest of us how to accept some of their cultural gifts.  I know, I am one of those who arrived here as a young refugee from Europe, and whose rapid assimilation invited all the blessings of this land to fulfil my American dream.

But these days our globalist neighbors have brought about new rules to control us.  Today we are told to accept newcomers from strange lands who establish themselves among us in insular communities that by law we then have to respect and support.  It is we Americans who must in our own land adapt to the stranger, and change our lifestyles so as not to somehow violate the newcomers’ sensitivities – even unto not displaying our flag, not wearing the visible symbols of our faith and fathers, and forego celebrating our history in the public forum as we have done for generations.

This is what the politically corrupt Democrat Party has established in our land in the eyes of at least half of those who still proudly call themselves Americans.  Is that the implied platform of our political Left?  Is it on that basis that they hope to convert or coerce the rest of us?  Hopefully, this will not work, for there are too many of us on both sides who will resist to the point of an eventual break-up as the Left today demonstrates with their Calexit.

Europeans have taught their immigrants and now migrants to become irredeemably aggressive, and to make outlandish demands on their host cultures.  And we Americans are publicly bludgeoned on moral and humanitarian grounds, stretched beyond recognition, to emulate the mistakes that Europe acknowledges, and for which it can find no remedy save belatedly building fences to stem the hordes of unvetted migrants.  In our streets today Democrats carry signs demanding that we ‘Open Our Borders’ and ‘Welcome All Who Want to Come’.  The Democratic leadership maintains a public silence as their surreptitiously directed, augmented, and funded base continues to alienate more and more Americans in the middle.

Until Democrats come up with a viable leadership and platform for their future, the rest of us should let them go on digging their hole, while making sure that in the hysteria we don’t follow Europe’s footsteps as counseled daily by current Democrat elites.

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]  Locally the Democrat desperation matches if not exceeds its national froth; after all we live in the nascent Socialist State of California.  A land where the overwhelming majority believes or at least dutifully accepts that more and bigger government is better, and that human enterprise is not affected by such esoteria as tax rates and ever burgeoning regulations.  Whatever they can do, we can do better.

The national "sharp left turn by the Democrat Party" (here) is illuminated locally by auto-incandescent moral lighthouses like Ms Hilary Hodge and sharp intellects like Mr George Boardman, regular columnists of our beloved Union which has now declared its leftward lean, a tilt that was already apparent to discerning readers.  For a semblance of balance the newspaper’s editorial board does harbor a conservative or two whose voices in print draw howls of repudiation and demands from the Left that they be forthwith silenced for their manifold heresies.  Mr Norm Sauer’s recent column (here) juxtaposed with Ms Hodge’s contribution (here) illustrates this situation.

For the last ten years RR has served in the introduction of ideas, notions, and concepts about which our light-reading local Left has been ignorant.  To make clear their limited purview of what is out there, they have for years reliably and predictably accused me of originating and harboring these heresies as a lone wolf up here in the hills, even when the citations and links I provided have inevitably made them out to be the sheltered fools in these parts.  Such exposures always draw a response from their cricket corps, which, after a spell, they return to once more accuse me of the very same ‘infractions’ when next they are exposed to something 'new'.  I remind my readers of this because they currently are shielded from the latest climate change hysteria dupings (here), and, germane to points raised in my above commentary, to other conservative voices which join my longtime proposition that ‘The United States cannot Survive as Presently Constituted’.

None of this revelation is intended to dissuade our leftwingers from contending the ideas that I and mine (e.g. as cited) have put forth.  By all means, marshal your resources and have at them.

[10feb17 update]  Well, the acid test of whether America in the aggregate is as butt stupid as the indivisible leftwing protesters, rioters, and disrupters make us out to be will be decided sooner than later.  It is beyond my comprehension as to what their leading lights think they will accomplish by shouting down Republican MoCs in their public meetings, denying the new SecEd entrance to a school, …, and generating more fake news stories per hour than there is media time to disseminate them.  The most prominent of the latter being that President Trump has initiated a Muslim ban on immigrants making a religious test into a prerequisite for entering the country.

These people are very well funded and now have published a how to disrupt instructions as they organize their grassroots core.  Here’s a first in the memory of all of us who have been following American politics since the Eisenhower days – an actual manual published for the country to oppose its duly elected president – ‘Indivisible: A practical guide for resisting the Trump agenda’.  In there you can read instructions on how to repeat what Congressman Tom McClintock suffered in Roseville last week, here’s an example –

Be prepared to interrupt and insist on your right to be heard. Since you won’t get the mic at an event like this, you have to attract attention to yourself and your message. Agree beforehand with your group on a simple message focused on a current or upcoming issue. Coordinate with each other to chant this message during any public remarks that your MoC makes. This can be difficult and a bit uncomfortable. But it sends a powerful message to your MoC that they won’t be able to get press for other events until they address your concerns.

If the Republicans (including the prez) keep their cool, 2018 should be a banner year because it is now clear that the know-nothing protesters have a hot button that is readily available to the GOP.  Pushing it in an uncountable number of ways will bring out the double dummies in force, and let more and more folks in TV land say to themselves, ‘I’m not like that.’

And then we come to the progressives’ understanding of the Constitution which is really a separate topic that deserves its own focus.  Let me just say here that the Left is doing everything it can to redirect and rearrange the constitutional functions of government, now using the judiciary as the only remaining arm that is still theirs, to determine policy, constructively legislate, and then implement the new rules they impose on us both individually and as a nation.

The time to the ascension of Associate Justice Gorsuch will seem like an eternity.