Don’t forget to use the neo Amazon portal…
…for your holiday gifts.
Sorry to be a nag—but I’m a gentle nag, aren’t I? Is that an oxymoron?
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
…for your holiday gifts.
Sorry to be a nag—but I’m a gentle nag, aren’t I? Is that an oxymoron?
No, not a nag. I gave a few weeks (?) ago, directly via paypal, at your asking for support. (I don’t shop at Amazon.) And I will donate again on New Year’s Eve. It would be useful for regular readers to know how much it takes to support the blog. (I do not think the blog is based upon a desire to profit, although seeking profit is not a sin.)
So let us know what your out of pocket expenses are and how much beyond you can afford to keep the blog running. A quarterly financing need would tell me, and others, what I/we need to pony up to support your efforts, efforts regular readers and commenters enjoy so much.
Ive used the portal to purchase a pack of pressboard file folders. The experience was a bit of a letdown as the portal took me directly to Amazon without any special kind of Neoneocon fanfare. No music. No flashing neoneocon woman with apple photo, no nothing. 😛
The Democratic Party is showing signs of Alzheimers Disease.
I went to my dentist the other day, and heard a conversation between another patient and the secretary-receptionist. The patient was behaving as if the election of Trump to the presidency represented the destruction of our country. Vicious racists and monsters were going to take over everything and systematically create a dictatorship rivaling that of Hitler or Stalin or both combined.
The demand for recounts by a candidate who won about 1 percent of the vote in three states, all of which would have to switch their votes in order for Trump to have less than a majority in the electoral college, seemed like a hopeless effort; but it was supported by the press and by Mrs. Clinton. It was accompanied by a deluge of messages to Trump electors demanding that they switch their votes to Mrs. Clinton, accompanied, apparently, with death threats. And then a campaign of innuendo claiming that it was the President of Russia who was somehow behind the Trump victory, that justified in the minds of many Democrats that the election should be reversed or done over, so as to prevent a Republican victory.
The logic for that seems to be as follows. Wikileaks somehow got hold of emails of members of the Democratic National Committee, and of John Podesta and published them. These showed things embarrassing to the Clinton campaign. In particular, it showed concern by some in that campaign about the lack of message by Mrs. Clinton, and the support she received from the DNC against her primary opponent. Also it showed that she had actually favored Trump winning the Republican nomination because she felt he would be the weakest candidate the Republicans could nominate. Further she apparently encouraged her allies in the press to help him get nominated by constantly mentioning him and his wild statements, and his insults to other Republican candidates.
Given this, the Democrats assert that the Russians were behind the espionage leading to these leaks, and that they must have similarly spied on the RNC but did not leak any derogatory information about what they had found there. Thus the Russian government must have favored Trump and such favoritism was an outrageous interference in our election, so outrageous that it justified nullifying the outcome.
The reactions by the Democrats, anti-election riots, supporting silly recounts (whose timing seemed aimed at having the results from those three states withheld when the electoral college is to meet thereby requiring determination of the winner by Congress), launching a campaign to influence Trump electors to switch their votes to Clinton, and denouncing the election as illegitimate because of Russian favoritism together represent a rare unwillingness of the loser to accept the result of a Presidential election.
This happened in 1800, and again in 1860, and the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876 had something similar, but nothing like it has happened now for 140 years. That the Democrats have done these things is surprising even more from the fact that one of the main talking points against Trump was his stated unwillingness to accept the outcome of the election if he thought it was caused by illegal voting.
The strange thing is that no group of people worked harder than the press did, under pressure from the Democratic candidate herself, to get Trump nominated by the Republicans. They had far more influence in this direction than Wikileaks or Russian agents, who had little comment at all about the Republican primaries. Trump’s name was trumpeted on the news broadcasts and it was mentioned at least ten times more often than the names of all his many rivals put together.
There are several assumptions in the accusation that the Russian government favored Trump that are questionable, as follows.
First, while Americans have some knowledge of what is going on in this country from their own experiences, foreigners tend to learn about such matters mainly from the press. The same thing is true about any country. This often leads to ridiculous misconceptions. The main problem is that the press tends to feature man bites dog events over dog bites man ones, because the former are rare and curious while the latter are so common as to be uninteresting to all but those involved.
We see this even with murders. Far more young black men have been murdered by other young black men just in the city of Chicago this year than three times the number that have died at the hands of police throughout the entire country in the same time period. But the Chicago murders are too common to be newsworthy while each police incident is subject to weeks of publicity, some of which is inflammatory and false. A foreign observer of our press naturally comes to believe that police incidents are a big problem in this country while black on black murder is non-existent.
In considering our election, the press and pollsters were almost unanimous in stating that Trump had only a very small probability of winning the election, and that is what most foreign observers including the Russians undoubtedly believed. This attitude of the press was furthered by the fact that Trump did not campaign to any great extent in New York, or the Washington area and Maryland or California or in most of New England, where the most influential press and most foreign diplomats here are located. Much of the press and foreign governments assumed that he was hardly campaigning at all anywhere.
Thus, I believe Putin, along with most other foreign leaders, assumed that Mrs. Clinton would win the election in a landslide, as she did in New York and Washington and Maryland and California and New England, (but in very few other places.)
Similarly, the press in Britain was nearly unanimous in announcing that Brexit was going to lose, so our President actively intervened in that election, forcefully and openly campaigning against Brexit. One can accuse him of attempting to do what the Democrats accuse Putin of doing, but in the process humiliating himself by failing.
If Putin and the Russian government believed that Mrs. Clinton would win, and if they enjoy and hope to profit by humiliating our government, as they seem to do, it would make sense to encourage publication of leaks embarrassing to her, which might weaken our country. Embarrassing Trump, an obvious loser, on the other hand, would be a waste of effort.
Furthermore, if they wanted to put down Trump, it is dubious that the Russians could find anything in RNC emails, if they read them, that would embarrass Trump more than what the Clinton campaign was already saying about him. I have to wonder: what communications could Putin have released that might have harmed his campaign?
Still another reason for doubting whether penetrating the emails of the RNC, if they were penetrated, could have damaged the Trump campaign is that the RNC was not an ardent supporter of Trump at all, and mainly worked on the campaigns for state and congressional candidates.
No doubt the leaked emails embarrassed the Clinton campaign to those who were playing close attention to such matters. However these leaks were played down by the press, 97% or more of whose members loathed Trump. Podesta’s and the others’ communications allowed Republicans to smirk and made Democrats angry at Wikileaks, but they did not have the weight to sway people who were not political junkies, but were worried about supreme court nominations, or about the decline they see in their own way of life. The notion that these leaks are what caused Mrs. Clinton to lose the election is bizarre. That they outweighed the Obamacare fiasco, the Libyan debacles, the Syrian catastrophe, the Iran nonsense, and so on, is ludicrous.
So did Putin intervene in our election, by not finding anything mean to say about Trump enough to annul its results?
Had Brexit failed, would Obama’s open intervention and threats against Brexit have voided the Brexit election? The idea is comic.
The democrats had a dream. They would take over the Supreme Court, They would use that to allow illegal immigrants, zombies and felons to vote early and often, open our borders, form a coalition of immigrants felons blacks and Hispanics along with academics, celebrities, the press, government, and unions that would assure their staying in power and getting their way forever. They were so close, but they failed.
And this has disturbed their equilibrium. It isn’t really Trump that bugs them. It is the shattering of their dream. It was like finding that the millions of dollars that some Nigerian sent you got irrevocably lost in the post office.
During the election the voters had to compare the bad things that Trump said with the bad things that Mrs. Clinton had done. Now the democrats are acting out the very bad things that Trump only threatened. Do they suppose this will cover themselves with glory toanyone but themselves?
Artfldgr,
Bt any name, you smell like Artfldgr.