ldsuttonjr Loc: ShangriLa

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE
Some comments in the media on the recent and still officially unresolved election amount to expressions of relief that despite the bitter campaign, the demoralizing complexities of the coronavirus pandemic, and the widespread fatuous practice of deliberately misinterpreting President Trump’s assurances that he would not have the election stolen from him as a threat of civil violence, the election has come off smoothly and the country may pat itself on the back for casting over 150 million votes in a very close election without serious incident.

This must unfortunately be seen as the latest chapter in a very long and dismal sequence of almost uniform media misreporting of practically the entire Trump political phenomenon, from the historic descent of the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015 to the current lawsuits and recounts. As the false alarm of Trump’s inciting domestic violence lost its utility, it was discarded into the same dumpster as the endless promises of Russian interference in the election, the Pelosian ravings against the postmaster general for voter intimidation, the false polling projecting a Biden landslide, and the accompanying impure Democratic dreams of a decisive “repudiation” of Donald Trump and his program.

One aspect of the election result certainly is an expression of fatigue with the endless controversy of the Trump presidency, derived in competing measures from the president’s egotism and craving for constant attention and the almost unfathomably rabid hatred of his enemies. Thus were the Democratic television commentators (i.e. practically all of them) able to claim that the “peaceful protesting” that killed scores of people, injured more than 700 police officers, and did billions of dollars of damage during the summer in Democratic-governed cities across the country, but went miraculously unmentioned at the Democratic National Convention, was just an inevitable consequence of “Donald Trump’s America.” Now that there is an apparent election result, the Never Trumpers who have been hiding in their foxholes for the last three years, and elements of the tiny band of reasonably neutral national political-media commentators, believe that an all-clear has sounded and they may safely emerge from their Trump-neutral bomb shelters and express their relief that the dreadful meteor has passed.

Whatever façade of constitutional orderliness is painted onto this dubious election, the Democratic strategists (who, to do them justice, have accomplished a considerable feat in hanging the COVID-19 crisis around Trump’s neck and plucking the political cadaver of Joe Biden out of the snowbanks of New Hampshire and raising him to the exalted dignity of general recognition as president-elect) will have to consider the underlying facts. With 95 percent of the national political media almost dementedly hostile to Trump, who was outspent more than two to one, after three years wrestling with what amounted to an unfounded treason trial followed by a congressional smearfest falsely presented as an impeachment case, and finally deluged by tens of thousands of falsely harvested and cast election ballots, Donald Trump, at the very least, has come as close as Hillary Clinton did four years ago in an honest election — a margin of fewer than 40,000 well-placed votes — to winning this election. This falls far short of the “repudiation” hoped for, complacently expected, and even haltingly announced, by his enemies; taken with Republican congressional gains and legislative advances in many states, and even if the questionable presidential result survives, this election is, as Jefferson said of Missouri’s proposed admission as a slave state, “a fire-bell in the night.”

Every remotely knowledgeable observer is aware that the Democratic Party is now a rickety coalition of irreconcilable elements, ostensibly led by an unprepossessing and enervated legislative journeyman with no demonstrated aptitude or accrued moral authority to deal with such complicated political circumstances. The Republicans are likely to retain a Senate majority, and in accord with long-established custom, to retake the House of Representatives in two years, and the euphoria of the Trump-haters will soon have to give way to a sober assessment of the deteriorated condition of America’s political culture and institutions. The relevant facts include that former prominent IRS official Lois Lerner attacked conservative Republican political-action committees’ tax treatment illegally and was not prosecuted, and that former attorney general Eric Holder paid no penalty for illegally running guns across the Mexican border as part of a hare-brained intervention in Mexican gang wars. So far, no one has paid any legal price for the false and almost certainly at least partially fraudulent investigation of a purported relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia, for which there was never any significant evidence. Congressmen Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) and Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.) repeatedly lied about the information they had about collusion and about President Trump’s relations with the president of Ukraine and have paid no price whatever for that. At this point, there is a consensus that the horrifying vulnerability of American elections to ballot harvesting and stuffing was unjustifiable and was not exploited in this election despite a high likelihood that voting irregularities took place on a scale that would embarrass notorious regimes in much less well-developed countries. Conrad Black

JFlorio Loc: Seminole Florida

We are now living in an Oligarch society. The rich and powerful, including politicians do not live by the same rules they impose on the rest of us. We no longer have an independent media. We have a faux
state run media. We have politicians in some states telling us that certain segments of society can destroy your property and you can not do anything about it. Some groups, are signaled out and put under restrictions, such as church's while other groups are not. If the people do not rise up we might as well be United Soviet lite States of the world.