Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Election 2016 Part 5: Left-Wing Self-Examination

by Leave a Comment

In the most recent installment of this series, I discussed the massive and vocal cadre of sore losers and sour grapes on the left.

[Again, I voted for neither Trump nor the Clintons, and as such, stand independent of partisanship here; indeed, in an earlier post, I condemned a sore-winner element in the ranks of so-called conservatives.]

In fairness, however, not all left-wingers were such bad sports about the fact American democracy worked as designed. Other liberals admirably took to self-analysis and introspection, looking inward and at themselves and one another, collectively, in the search for what went wrong, instead of reflexively and emotionally blaming the omnipresent other. These leftists I respect and uphold as aware and analytic thinkers, even as I disagree vehemently with their opinions on issues. To wit…

LATTE PARTY
The rise of someone as outwardly onerous as Trump rightly compels the left do so some soul-searching in many ways. One is with the direction of the Democrat Party, where a leftist analog to the Tea Party, rooted in the far-left/socialist, more ideologically pure Sanders/Warren wing, already is gaining groundswell support against the Goldman Sachs wing that dominates the party. For laughs I’ll call this insurrection the Latte Party.

Do you expect the same leftists who decried the rise of the Tea Party on the Republican side to behave similarly toward the Latte Party revolt in their own ranks? I doubt it, except for those few who truly buy fully into the corporate/globalist model of neoliberal leftism, which really is an ideological self-contradiction if ever there was. At least the Latte Party nee Sanders socialists are genuine in their ideals, instead of sellouts to the system like Obama, the Clintons, and their political sycophants.

I actually support the Latte Party ideal in principle, even as I disagree with damn-near everything they stand for issues-wise, because they do agree with Trump’s campaign talk on one of the few substantial ways I also do: the swamp needs to be drained. The globalist Bilderberg puppets and one-world-governance sellouts need to go — from Republican and Democrat parties alike.

THE INTROSPECTIVE LEFT
Finally! It took long enough. The best thing the left wing can do is what too few already are: looking inward and blaming themselves for their own bigotry and intolerance toward the right, and toward the ignored minority of working-class Rust Belters who ultimately made the difference in tilting just the right states Trump’s way. Unsolicited advice: for your own sake, liberals, listen to those few who have a clue what really went wrong and what to do about it.

For starters, you can find no clearer voice than Nicholas Kristof in this remarkably introspective and brilliant column. Take note, too, it may be the only time I ever compliment Kristof on anything. Then take heed and understand what he is trying to tell you! The fact that a majority of left-wing academics in one peer-reviewed study would engage in overt religious discrimination in hiring (a Federal crime, violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964!) should go against everything for which “progressivism” has struggled; yet there is the cancer, right in liberalism’s own gut.
When just one single Princeton faculty member and a janitor contributed to the Romney campaign in 2012. So much for “diversity” on campus. Is it any wonder the “intellectual elite” is seen as distant, detached, unrealistic, insular, ivory-tower, and (ironically) ignorant? Complain about that perception all you want, but it exists for a reason. Fix that reason.

Then given the often ferocious pro-Hillary partisanship involved, the condescension, dismissiveness, and glib invalidation of others’ concerns are but a mild terms for how the media behaved leading up to this election! This column, also from the left, offers motivation to return to balance, impartiality and treating opponents like they are worth hearing. As the author rightly alludes, the left has been masterful at preaching empathy but wretched at practicing it with regard to the right, evangelical Christians, and poor whites. Fair-use excerpt:

    Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid. It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. … We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. … That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line.

Clearly the Trump voters (and again, I was not one) did not react as desired by the left when told to shut up and get in line. Instead they turned out en masse, motivated as never before, to install a President even less qualified than Barack Obama (something I thought impossible eight years ago).


These ladies have a point. Remember, I did not vote for Trump. Yet I sympathize with the plight of the great majority of those who did, who are non-racist, non-sexist, who just want to have a better life, who don’t want government interference in their personal and business issues, nor Federal theft of their hard-earned wages to subsidize sinful causes and waste and bureaucratic inefficiencies. I don’t think Trump will provide that, but after the last eight years of a failed radical-left-wing Presidential experiment, the most extreme leftism this nation has known in the White House, I don’t blame Trump voters for their desperation.

For all of these corrective behaviors and nuggets of wisdom directed by a minority of seeing leftists toward their foaming brethren, my expectations that they have turned a leaf and will seek compromise with the right are low, given life experience and given the deep-seated core of anti-conservative resentment simmering or boiling (see above) from so much off the blue side of the sociopolitical spectrum. This includes the anti-conservative bigotry that motivates false-flag crimes and hate-crime hoaxes framed to look like they came from the “right”.

An election was won or lost, depending on your perspective — or mine from the third-party view, where we lost regardless. Yet life does go on. Get over it. Grow a thicker skin. Acquire a sense of humor. Enjoy the entertainment as your favorite pundits trample all over Trump and his surrogates for their buffoonery, tomfoolery and general ineptitude. Most importantly, get about improving your nation and loving your neighbor (even if it means tough love). Don’t just say stuff on social media, actually spend a chunk of your life to serve your society and country in some way.

The final chapter of this series of essays will cover select state (Oklahoma) and local (Norman-area) ballot selections and their implications.

Backlash to a Backlash to a Backlash…

by Leave a Comment

For those who have been exiled in wilderness tents for the past two weeks, Republicans won big victories in Congressional “mid-term” elections this cycle and already are starting to assert themselves accordingly. A virtual mirror image of this phenomenon happened in 2006. Neither pendulum swing was an isolated event; tracking of national partisan results for President and Congress since the late 1800s shows that power is fleeting for either side.

Given such a track record, neither party should get too smug after a big election win, because as history has shown (over and over and over), that winning side hallucinates a massive mandate that doesn’t really exist, assumes too much of the electorate supports all of its favorite policies, abuses its power, then suffers a “shocking” defeat when the inevitable blowback occurs against its behavior the previous few years. That begs the question, why do these swings always seem so shocking when they are inevitable?

Partly, the surprise at such swings comes from shortsightedness and ignorance, both by politicians and the public. After all, we live in an era of flavor-of-the-year fads and ten-second attention spans, combined with an utterly wretched academic knowledge of history and civics among most of the populace. The tawdry misadventures of Justin Beiber and the Kardashian women are more important than the national debt or Middle East policy for far too many people, and that’s just pathetic! Part of the problem is that each hapless-ignoramus vote, from some schlub or ditz who can’t even name the three branches of government, counts the same as each vote from those of us who can name every member of the Supreme Court and who actually study the issues.

Politicians of both–yes, both–sides pander shamelessly to that ignorance, and the fear that they can fuel as a result. Those evil bad guys are going to take away your welfare check (left), religious freedom (right), bedroom behavior (left), guns (right), clean air (left), kids’ education (both), privacy (both), money (both)! And there are just enough nuggets of worst-case scenario truth and slippery-slope potential in such fear-mongering to make it somewhat believable. Don’t think this isn’t by design either; elections have proven to be won that way for generations. The Republicrat monolith that spawned NSA domestic spying and quantitative easing (corporate welfare if there ever was) then plays both leftists, and conservatives like me, for the sucker, because of a lack of alternatives.

Does this mean a continual mandate for compromise? Perhaps, on some issues that are not binary and where compromise is possible–usually economic ones where budgeting lines can be drawn in between partisan preferences. Both sides have a history of offering profuse lip service to compromise until it means they actually have to give up something. For example, compromise can be done on social squabbles like so-called “gay marriage”–and here’s how. Civil unions are a middle ground between zero recognition and full advocacy. The middle is always best, right?–or so the few true centrists claim. [I obviously do not agree, and neither do my mirror images on the left.] However, the left flatly refuses to compromise on that issue, revealing itself as hypocritical when complaining that the right refuses to compromise on any issue. And so the no-recognition and full-“marriage” sides dig in because neither want to accept that middle solution.

[As an aside, yes, I put “gay marriage” in quotes deliberately and without apology, because marriage by definition cannot be anything but man-woman; yet somehow I am just centrist enough on this specific issue to support legal recognition of civil unions for those who are seeking benefits related thereto. In fact, there is a very solid Libertarian argument, rooted in a literal reading of the Constitution, for no Federal involvement or recognition of any sort of marriage.]

Speaking of Republicrats: Secondarily, but importantly, we have no large, self-sustaining, third-party choices; as such, the electorate keeps being presented with a ceaseless somewhat-right R vs. far-left D target when what it often claims to want is the middle. I’m not sure a third party is much of a solution, however, because for every Tea Party that might rise up, so might a Green Party, and the republican democracy gets even more fragmented and fractious. As has happened in Europe, the Greens would siphon off votes for prevailing leftist party. The Tea Party (where I most closely fit) would siphon conservatives from Republican ranks. The Libertarians would siphon both. Good luck getting a majority on much of anything under that model, outside the occasional Green-Democrat or Tea-Republican coalition, and what does that yield? The same stinking dichotomy we have now anyway!

Personally, I tend not to advocate the middle ground most of the time. I am staunchly conservative and freely state this, with no reservation. Calling me a “right winger” is not just a compliment but a badge of honor. I won’t even pretend to be centrist on most matters, because I am not pretentious. I freely admit that I don’t want compromise on a lot of issues–because it only means taking this nation halfway to hell instead of all the way. If middle-road compromise is always the best solution, all the time, no exceptions, then…I am part of the problem, and moreover, am glad of it. [Now you be honest and ask yourself, is the middle unfailingly the best path, every time, all the time?] If more of my left-wing friends would quit falsely claiming to be centrists and compromise-seeking, and instead, be brutally honest and admit a mirror image of my own unwillingness to yield on many issues, we’d at least understand each other better in our endless disparity! We won’t agree anyway, so what’s the point of play-acting like we ever could?

That said, I also admit that compromise (as malodorous and “sellout” as it seems to me in many cases) is a time-honored part of solving some problems facing this country. It can be beneficial in the net to make compromises that neither side fully likes, on some (not all) issues. There sometimes is merit to the old adage that you’re doing something right if you manage to enrage both sides.

However, there often is no middle ground on more contentious, generally yes/no topics like abortion legality, a choice of starting military action in a specific conflict area, or Federal funding for (abortion, birth control, condoms, or any other private-bedroom issue). When the left controls the presidency and Congress simultaneously, a slew of edicts and even laws flow forth favoring their side. Ditto with the right. Then the pendulum swings with the electorate, disgusted with absolute power, voting in enough of the opposite side to stop the bleeding.

Therein lies the Founders’ pure genius in setting up this representative democratic-republican system (lower-case “d” and “r”): the voters get to tell the side that has gotten cocky and overly self-assured in power: “Enough! Stop it!” This means a halting to what one side or the other deems as “progress” and the invariable sore-loser whining by that side (which I fully admit to as a conservative ’06 and ’08, even as leftists refuse to admit now and in ’04). Yet the system works. Sometimes the car of “progress” need to stop, lest it drives us over a cliff.

In the most recent midterm elections, that “Enough, stop it!” message was directed at a Democrat-ruled Senate and administration whose actions (including those carried over from previous Rs and then made worse, like NSA/FBI snooping and the growing national debt) overflowed with arrogance, hubris, and contempt for the rule of law. I hold that much of the voters’ emplacement of Republicans in 2014, and of Democrats in 2006, was not out of a mandate for the favored party’s platforms (proactive voting), but instead a backlash (reactive voting), in order to check and balance the runaway presumptuousness and abuses of the other side.

Pendulums that are constantly pushed will continue to swing. And so it will be, back and forth, this and that, Republican and Democrat, tick, tock, tick, tock. Despite highly dubious predictions by Democrats, there will be another Republican President who, at some point, partly overlaps an R-dominant Congress. Those Rs will go overboard and compel a Democrat President and Congress, who will desperately do everything they can to push that agenda as far as possible before the next backlash throws them out. And so forth, and so on…

To deny this is to deny historic truth. Since complaints without solutions are worthless, what’s my solution? I advocate complete elimination of all partisan elections. No Rs, Ds, or other letters after any candidate’s name. Let every election be decided solely on the basis of issues, not letters or parties. This ideal forces politicians to be accountable not to parties but to voters (and unfortunately, lobbyists…something we can’t prohibit constitutionally under freedom of speech and association). At least this does remove rigid party-platform politics and the problem of a candidate being stuck at the mercy of his/her national party’s platform and money machine.

Is a party-free politic realistic? Not any time soon, but I see no realistic solutions…none. As such, we’re stuck with partisanship and division, like it or not. Get used to it. Deal with it. We’ve had to for two centuries.

The lesson is simple, the truth independent of liberalism or conservatism as ideals. Human nature is that power corrupts. This ain’t changing, at least not before the Second Coming. The pendulum will not stop, and each side will swap out control of government at irregular intervals until the very implosion of society and government itself.

“You Didn’t Build That.” Like Hell I Didn’t!

by Leave a Comment

Last Friday, Barack Obama revealed his cluelessness about how businesses works by arrogantly crediting government with the success of any entrepreneur. It was a classic case of open-mouth, insert-foot:

    “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”

Say what? That statement is presumptuous, misleading, naive, arrogant, inaccurate, patronizing, and wholly insulting–not only to everyone who runs a business, but to the very core ideal of the American Dream. Only someone of deep misunderstanding about entrepreneurship, who never has run a private enterprise, and who understands essentially nothing about what it takes to build and operate a successful business, would say something so inane, and actually mean it. If it weren’t for Obama’s sycophantic marionettes in the mass media, an utterance that asinine and condescending would doom his chances for re-election (as it may anyway).

For every bit that any entrepreneur may benefit from governmental opportunities that he/she chooses to grab, the same person has to overcome massive heaps of burdensome governmental regulation, paperwork and taxes–the latter on a yearly basis through a gelatinous maze of ever-changing forms and accounting rules. Government giveth, and government taketh away! My wife runs a small business, and through that, I know of these things first hand. Obama’s business background? Hmm…crickets chirp while we search in futility for that.

Now let’s look at the larger quote:

    “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Well of course everybody has had some help. That’s an irrelevant straw-man. Who would be foolish enough to turn down any beneficial circumstance that may arise? Certainly not any successful entrepreneur–who by the very nature of the word will take advantage of opportunities to make their own success! And therein lies the embarrassing fallacy in his argument–one that is well illustrated by this image that has been floating about the Internet:

The spider web is a splendid metaphor for business or personal success.

Let me guess. The spider sat on her lazy butt and watched the web build itself? Or did the government build that web for her? No, and hell no!

Whether or not the government helped to provide the tree or post on which to construct the web, or some of the prey she ate with which she manufactured the silk, is completely immaterial. If she doesn’t build the web there, she goes elsewhere and still does it anyway. Maybe it’s harder, or there’s less prey, but she still does it. Either that, or she neglects to seize initiative and take advantage of her opportunities, no matter from where they arose, and she fails. It’s a life-or-death matter for the spider, and for any business.

Statements like Obama’s, and similar ones from Elizabeth Warren and other politicians-nee-academics on the left, represent an ivory-tower mentality of facile genuflection at the altar of the welfare state, born of the long-discredited Marxist notion that the proletariat is a hapless victim of The Man. I don’t know how else to explain how such otherwise book-smart people can be so clueless about reality!

Given my own personal circumstances, such presumptuous bullcrap is insulting and demeaning. It’s well known among friends and associates that I grew up in the inner city, in a household now often referred to as “working poor”–that is, when there was work to be had for my dad. [My mom was a visually impaired homemaker.] Yes, she arranged for us to have food stamps and unemployment benefits on a few occasions–over the sometimes extremely angry and profane objections of my dad, who was intensely ashamed of it and did everything he could to get off the public dole as fast as possible. Being ashamed of welfare is the right attitude to have. It is supposed to be a temporary safety net, not a lifestyle!

My childhood household had no car, no air conditioning (yes, in Dallas’ urban heat-island summers). Drugs, gangs, welfare dependencies, and other chances for failure swirled all around. Rare was the July or August night that I didn’t hear sirens or popping noises over the fan propped in an open bedside window. Those circumstances posed far more opportunities for failure than for success! Yet I decided not to follow those paths; nobody else made the choice for me.

Yes, I’ve had great teachers, benefactors and mentors, public and private, who offered sound advice and beneficial knowledge, and in the case of college, partial financial assistance. For them I’m forever grateful, and I’ve told them so. Nonetheless (…and here’s a key concept…) I firmly believe I would have found a way otherwise, somehow, through determination and work ethic. I think each of the folks who have contributed to me would agree.

The truth is that I had the choice whether to make something of that advice and those chances, through diligence and effort, or to sit around and waste it. I chose the former. And it is a choice…for each of us, no matter our backgrounds.

Yes, God gave me the talent, ability…and the free will to choose success or failure! We all have capabilities and talents. We all have a chance to succeed, no matter from where we arise. Of course it’s harder when climbing up from the bottom–but that makes the success more rewarding and better appreciated. And I personally resent those who would disparage my success by claiming I had nothing to do with it.

And I’m nothing special in this regard…if I can rise from poverty and take advantage of all opportunities, no matter the source, anyone can! Therefore, I don’t suffer fools, entertain excuses, or subscribe to the insidious left-wing cultivation of victimhood, dependency and public entitlement.

Success and failure are parts of life. Circumstances out of your control can and do occur. What you do with them is your choice and yours alone. If you want it to happen, by God, make it happen! You honor yourself and your creator by striving for excellence and accomplishment in whatever aspirations you have. No matter the hurdles…do it!

As for Obama’s misguided bloviation: nevermind anything else he has or hasn’t done. By that statement alone, he is proven unfit for executive office. Nobody that naive should be President. Please vote accordingly. And if you are a business owner who votes for Obama, knowing now how irrelevant he sees you in your own success, you are shooting yourself in the foot.