Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
As I slowly munched on a lovely roast crow in a liberal’s tears reduction sauce with oeuf à visage while reading the interwebs yesterday, I must say I was astonished. I mean, I get it; I sure as hell didn’t see Trump winning the election as an even remote possibility, ergo, I wasn’t really prepared mentally when it happened. So, as the night unfolded, I had to take a moment, step back and say, “Well now, that’s really something,” and then move on. Others had similar reactions, like when MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow let loose an “isn’t that a bitch,” when North Carolina was called for Trump and the guaranteed Clinton victory began to slip away, taking with it the rest of Maddow’s composure. Clinton herself needed a moment to process the event; so much so that she stood up an auditorium full of supporters on Election Night and couldn’t bring herself to speak to them until 11:30 a.m. the following morning.
Others didn’t take it so well. Like, at all. Playing around on Facebook yesterday brought me face-to-face with some of the most bizarrely out-of-proportion reactions to this or any other event I’ve ever seen outside of fans rioting because their team won a championship. Speaking of which, riots broke out in Chicago, Oakland, and Los Angeles with crazed morons blocking streets and protesting democracy – the last of which in and of itself being a laudable endeavor, but not in the context of being butthurt because your side lost. Democracy is mob rule; apparently these people have never been in the unpopular mob before. Poor bastards, the unpopular mobs tend to have better music and beer.
At least as bizarre as the rioters are the ones who couldn’t have summoned the energy to throw a brick through a police car window if they tried; they were too wrung out from hysterical bouts of red-faced crying all day yesterday. This would have been a sad enough occurrence, but for some reason, many of these snowflakes took to You Tube, Twitter and Facebook to scream their self-righteous indignation at the world. Those who mercifully didn’t have a webcam, or were too decent a person to use it, banged out their apoplexy on keyboards in a series of all-caps rants against all the evils in the world that are somehow manifested in the president elect, his supporters, and everyone who isn’t suicidal over the fact he won the election. The local NPR station here near Columbus, Ohio had a psychologist on to discuss the stress the election caused individuals and couples and to offer coping techniques for the aftermath of the vote – not making this up.
I’m 40 years old. I distinctly remember the first election I was aware of being Ronald Reagan’s re-election bid and the first one I paid attention to being the epic Dukakis / Bush tilt of 1988. Ever since, I’ve been watching these things every four years and at no point do I ever remember the butthurt on the losing side being this hysterical or violent. Not even in 2000, when the left went nuts crying that the Supreme Court handed the presidency to George W. Bush was the outrage this pronounced. I don’t recall much in the way of rioting in the aftermath.
So, why the hell is half the nation so irrationally outraged and/or sad at the outcome of this vote? My only theory is that this madness is a careful blend of uncritical minds meeting the mainstream media. For neigh on two years, the media has covered the impending coronation of Hillary Clinton as a foregone conclusion. For over a year now, the same mainstream media lavished more attention on candidate Trump than any of the other 16 men and women vying for the nomination; once that nomination was secured, his every breath was scrutinized. Meanwhile, the talking heads of the MSM and their even-more-reprehensible counterparts online and in the blogosphere, continued to create this narrative that this election itself was of towering, almost religious importance and the outcome must be that Clinton wins or all hope for humanity is lost. It was cast repeatedly at a battle between good, tolerant and noble virtues, which Clinton somehow became the embodiment of, against the backward, bigoted, racist, misogynist, homophobic, Islamophobic, redneck and of course mostly white evil people in the USA, for which Donald Trump is their literal avatar. Week after week, the hysterics being pumped out by sources like HuffPo, Salon, Mother Jones and the like got more and more hyperbolic. The idiots who sought out this “coverage” and ate it uncritically then internalized the same unfounded apocalyptic importance of Clinton winning. And then, when she didn’t, well, let the histrionics begin; and begin they did, dear readers, and are likely still ongoing.
It would be helpful if the mainstream media took their jobs and attendant responsibility seriously and reported facts as they are, objectively and fairly – the way they were theoretically trained to do in college. Of course, the MSM is really in the “infotainment” business, and a 24-hour news cycle leaves a lot of time to fill on a 24-hour “news” network. Granted, there is more than enough important shit going on all over the globe to fill a 24-hour newscast with important stories and without much repetition; but, to many Americans, most of those important things going on outside the USA (and within, for that matter) aren’t terribly interesting. So, the MSM doesn’t cover them. Instead, it fills time slots with “news analysis” shows like Morning Joe and The O’Reilly Factor. There, “news personalities” like O’Reilly and the aforementioned Maddow gain fame, notoriety and worst of all, an outsized degree of influence over their viewers while injecting their own whacked-out views into the news of the day – in turn, leading their viewers to adopt similarly whacked-out views. Ergo, this wasn’t just another election, it was The Most Important Election in the History of the World, Ever – a true clash of good and evil.
Of course, in reality, this election wasn’t a clash of good versus evil of near biblical proportions; far from it. If we insist on using such terms, it was merely a clash between evil and eviler; I’ll leave who won up to your interpretation. Clinton represented the status quo, which isn’t working for most Americans, but isolated government elites aren’t in touch with most Americans. Trump represented “change.” Turns out, “change,” is a winning thing to represent if the incumbent party held the White House for eight years. Remember, “change” is what Obama promised after eight years of George W. Bush, and the electorate couldn’t get enough of it – particularly when the GOP ran two uninspiring candidates against him.
Eight years later, how much “change” does anyone notice; other than the fact many of us aren’t doing as well as we once did financially? Did Obummer close Gitmo? Nope. Did he end the war in Iraq? Nope, he just implemented an intermission. Did he get the troops out of Afghanistan? Nope, instead he opened fronts in Yemen, Syria and Libya. Did he bring affordable health care to all Americans? Not even close. Why? Because Obama is just the president, and the President of the United States, while having far and away too much power, doesn’t really have that much when it comes to affecting the sweeping changes they promise as candidates. Such has always been the case, and so it will be with Trump.
So, to all the little snowflakes who in no way, shape, or form even read this blog, along with 99.99999% of internet users for that matter, relax. Not much is going to happen as a result of a Trump presidency, just like nothing much happened as a result of the Obama presidency. We’ll still have a government, and therefore, life will suck harder than it should for productive people, just as it always has where productive people live under a government.
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