conservatives not exactly enthralled by trump are a problem

Es­ti­mated reading time is 5 min­utes.

THIS ONE IS A DOOZY! The ques­tion on Quora was, “Would lib­erals be sur­prised to learn that con­ser­v­a­tives aren’t ex­actly en­thralled with Donald Trump ei­ther?” One must make some as­sump­tions when en­gaging other In­ter­ne­tally, so I as­sume that the person who posted this ques­tion is po­lit­i­cally con­ser­v­a­tive. I also as­sume that he as­sumes that asking it dis­plays his feel­ings and opinion about the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion as being reasonable.

But what­ever one’s pol­i­tics, we have all watched an ap­parent racist, misog­y­nistic, nar­cis­sist, and bully em­brace white su­prema­cists as a candidate.

My name is called Dis­tur­bance. I’ll shout and scream! I’ll kill the king! I’ll rail at all his servants!

We have watched him run amok for two years as the pres­i­dent, throwing what ap­pear to be temper tantrums via tweets (“tweet­rums”?) on a daily basis. We have read these tweets, which are often as gram­mat­i­cally chal­lenged as they are fac­tu­ally challenged.

Thinking that when you “aren’t ex­actly en­thralled” with Trump’s heinous be­havior you are somehow being rea­son­able . . . well, folks, that’s not ex­actly a rea­son­able response.

A rea­son­able re­sponse at this time might be to run amok your­self, yelling things like “My name is called Dis­tur­bance. I’ll shout and scream! I’ll kill the king! I’ll rail at all his ser­vants!” and “Off with his head!”

Need­less to say, I of­fered up an an­swer to the ques­tion,Would lib­erals be sur­prised to learn that con­ser­v­a­tives aren’t ex­actly en­thralled with Donald Trump ei­ther? You can read it below, in­dented be­tween the two car­toons (and both car­toons were brought to my at­ten­tion by Maryann Hymel).

 

Trump cartoon TwiceThePaperTowels Granlund 1000

Car­toon by Dave Granlund.

“Would liberals be surprised to learn
that conservatives aren’t exactly enthralled with Donald Trump either?”

The Anecdote

A number of years ago, I met a woman who worked for the lot­tery com­mis­sion of our state. I re­marked that it seemed back­ward to me that states would let in­di­vidual lot­teries build up until there were gi­gantic pots ex­ceeding $100,000,000.

I asked, “Why don’t the states just take their cut off the top of each week’s ticket sales, then di­vide what’s left into lots of $100,000 each and give a hun­dred res­i­dents a $100,000 pay-out in­stead of giving one res­i­dent a $10,000,000 pay-out?”

She smiled and said, “You’re not a gam­bler, are you?”

“No,” I replied. “Why?”

She said, “If you were, you’d un­der­stand: the bigger the prize, the more tickets we sell. The more tickets we sell, the more money the states make.”

“Huh,” I said.

“Gam­blers like to gamble,” she said, “and they’re the ones that spend all the money buying all the tickets.”

The Election

In the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, the vote tal­lies were:

Clinton:  65,844,610
Trump:   62,979,636

Clinton beat Trump with 48.2% of the votes to his 46.1% of the votes. (The other 5.7% of the votes were cast by those re­ally smart folk who like to make “state­ments” with their wasted votes.)

Nonethe­less, the elec­tors of the Elec­toral Col­lege gave Trump the win.

It would not be in­ac­cu­rate to say that it’s been chaotic since.

The Wager

That anec­dote above was to in­form you that not only am I not a gam­bling man, but I also don’t even un­der­stand gamblers.

That said, I’m pre­pared to make you a hy­po­thet­ical wager, and the data about the last elec­tion above was to give you facts about my wager.

Here is my wager: if a spe­cial re-election was held in No­vember 2018 with Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump, I will bet you that the same 62,979,636 people who voted for Trump in 2016 would vote for him again in 2018.

I will give you 10:1 (ten-to-one) odds and I’m willing to put up my last buck-three-eighty in the bet!

The Footnote

Of course, if such a spe­cial re-election was held, there would prob­ably be sev­eral mil­lion more votes cast. There were a lot of id­iots people who sat out the 2016 elec­tion be­cause of two major reasons:

1.  They didn’t see any dif­fer­ence be­tween the two parties.

2.  They were swal­lowed FBI head and life­long Rep*blican James Comey’s “Oc­tober sur­prise” an­nounce­ment about finding yet more mean­ing­less “Hillary emails,” an ac­tion he al­legedly re­gretted after it al­most cer­tainly cost Clinton mil­lions of votes.

It’s likely that a small por­tion of the first group would re­alize that—gasp!—there is a HUGE dif­fer­ence be­tween the two par­ties. These people could show up this time and vote for Clinton.

It’s also likely that a small por­tion of the second group would re­alize that Comey f*cked them over with his an­nounce­ment and that there never was any ev­i­dence of any kind of wrong­doing by Clinton. These people could show up this time and vote for Clinton.

Con­se­quently, Clinton could win a re-election by the 6,000,000-8,000,000 votes she should have won the 2016 elec­tion by. This would be too big a dif­fer­ence for the bas­tards at the Elec­toral Col­lege to overcome.

Be­cause I re­alize that for ei­ther of the above sce­narios to happen, sev­eral mil­lion people would have to ac­knowl­edge that they were wrong about some­thing and to act on it.

On this, I will not gamble . . .

 

Trump cartoon TremendouslyWet Ohman 1000

Car­toon by Jack Ohman.

Both sides do it

Fi­nally, give a read to the opinion piece “Trump De­range­ment Syn­drome Is a Myth” by David Leon­hardt on to­day’s New York Times web­site. The sub-heading is, “And the De­mo­c­ratic Party has not ac­tu­ally be­come a band of rad­ical left­ists.” Here are the opening paragraphs:

“Con­ven­tional wisdom says that the middle is dis­ap­pearing from Amer­ican pol­i­tics: The Re­pub­li­cans have moved far to the right, the De­moc­rats far to the left, and woe to any mod­erate voters looking for politi­cians to rep­re­sent their views.

Well, the con­ven­tional wisdom is wrong. The De­moc­rats have not ac­tu­ally be­come rad­ical left­ists, or any­thing close to it.

You keep hearing this story partly be­cause Re­pub­li­cans have an ob­vious in­terest in pro­moting it and partly be­cause large parts of the news media find it ir­re­sistible. It’s a ‘both sides do it’ angle that al­lows us jour­nal­ists to ap­pear tough, knowing and above the par­tisan scrum. We love that image. But the facts don’t sup­port the story in this case.”

Mil­lions of people have to ac­knowl­edge they were wrong about Trump and do some­thing about it and on this, I will not gamble. Click To Tweet

Trump Atlantic Autocracy 1000

FEA­TURED IMAGE: The image at the top of this page is a drawing by Jef­frey Smith that ac­com­pa­nied the ar­ticle “How to Build an Au­toc­racy” by David Frum on The At­lantic web­site. The sub-heading is, “The pre­con­di­tions are present in the U.S. today. Here’s the play­book Donald Trump could use to set the country down a path to­ward illiberalism.

 

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