Some observations on the national scene and then it’s back to broccoli
Published 5:38 pm Friday, January 20, 2017
I hope you will forgive me but I am going against my better judgment today and sound like one of those inch-wide, inch-deep political pundits and blah-blah bloggers who can be more boring than a tree stump.
If I don’t provide some meaningful commentary on national events from time-to-time, I am afraid the editors will think I am not relevant and will replace me with some pseudo-know-it-all, like that guy on MSNBC who looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy and whose fanny Zell Miller once threatened to whip on national television, shocking the 11 people who regularly watch MSNBC.
I’m walking a fine line here. The editors are already cranky with me because I don’t know where commas go. That makes them have to do additional work at no additional pay. Plus, I run the risk of riling Zell Miller. I have done that in the past and it is not a pretty thing.
First, in case you haven’t heard already, we have a new president. His name is Donald Trump. He joins John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush as one of five people elected president by winning a majority of the votes in the Electoral College, while losing the popular vote.
I really don’t have a problem with that. It is spelled out in the U.S. Constitution that this is the way it will be done. For all those people whining that the election should have been based only on the popular vote, get over it. Remember that Jimmy Carter won the popular vote in 1976 and we all know how that turned out.
The national Democrats did not take their loss well. They seemed to consider the presidential election as more of a coronation of their royal family, the Clintons. Unfortunately for them, a bunch of “deplorables” decided it was time to send Hillary and Bill out to pasture where they will join two other washed-up royal families, the Kennedys and the Bushes. They forgot that We the Unwashed are the ones that decide who will hold the nation’s highest office, not a bunch of political insiders who couldn’t find Hahira if you gave them a week.
The great American philosopher Will Rogers once declared, “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” Will would love this bunch today. The Democrats have shown an innate ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Both Houses of Congress have Republican majorities. The number of Republican governors has risen to 33, the most in nearly a century and the GOP controls both chambers in 32 state legislatures, including Georgia. The Democrats’ reaction? Take a hard left at the next political intersection.
One CNN commentator, a former press secretary to out-of-touch-with-reality presidential candidate Bernie Sanders declared, “We don’t need white people leading the Democratic Party right now.”
A lot of news reports declare that the leading candidate to head up the National Democratic Party is Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, a black Muslim with past ties to Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam and who sits so far out on the far-left fringe of the party that he makes Bernie Sanders look like Gomer Pyle.
My own sources tell me that Ellison has emerged as the consensus choice because Democrats have been unable to identify an atheist transvestite who entered the country illegally. Good help is hard to find these days.
I’m not sure what the Democrats are smoking (I have a good idea), but going as far left as they seem to be headed is not going to bring mainstream Americans into the fold. Their decision should serve as a cautionary tale for Republicans, who run the risk of going too far to the right and being perceived as just a bunch of angry white guys. If they do, we’ll boot them out just like we did the Democrats. Most of us are stationed somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum and we don’t like extremists on either side. Both parties seem unable to grasp this simple fact of political life because they are too busy kowtowing to the extremists.
OK, enough of this stuff. The inch-wide and inch-deep political pundits and blah-blah bloggers can take it from here. I am going back to the burning issues of the day, like how broccoli can give you a serious case of runny nose and why banana pudding is the only known cure. Try reading that in the New York Times.