Don's Tuesday Column

                   THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   12/06/2016

                        Thank Obama for Trump

Here’s a little retrospection over positions and arguments I held over the election cycle—given the massive upset by Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton (Non-CA: T=51%, C=49%). It was almost a year ago that a former real estate friend approached me, bursting with exuberance about Trump. I was a bit reserved and somewhat cool, having been put off by Trump’s personal and braggadocios style. She professed that, absent a record, great things were coming.

Later in the ski season, an older broker in Oregon expressed over a cup of cocoa how impressed he was with Trump’s accomplishments and potential, to which I allowed that his experience would serve both him and this nation well—if he followed through with action. Upon hearing that Tea Party folks were fully on board, I hesitated to embrace their enthusiasm due to the thin resume of conservatism Trump offered.

When my barber waxed on, with elation, about Donald Trump, I had to insist that potential accomplishments depended on the reliability of the man. Politicians have plied us with the right positions and sound bites, only to “adjust to the reality” of Washington—which sounds more like simply breathing the liberal air and drinking the elite government-centric water. Trump seemed to viciously burn his bridges to the supporters of every other Republican candidate, reinforcing the “NeverTrump” arguments (which sounded like sour grapes to this writer).

My disgust over the way he dispatched my guy, Ted Cruz, mellowed to a conviction that, having won the nomination fair and square, Trump had to be supported, warts and all, if America was to be delivered from 1) the Clinton dynasty, 2) the potential corruption that was surely to follow her record as the most corrupt Secretary of State in modern history, 3) the expanded weapon-ization of the Executive branch, regulatory and judicial arms of that branch, and 4) perpetual Democrat dominance of elections as all attempts to purge voting rolls of fraud and illegal registrations get stymied by left-leaning judges and Democrat state Attorneys General.

I found some thoughts worth sharing in “Trump: The Hail Mary Pass That Connected” (thedeclination.com). “Folks, this was so close to the end, I could almost see the bottom. A 1% demographic shift would have delivered this whole thing to Hillary. I felt we were a hair’s breath from Kurt Schlicter’s  People’s Republic, where Civil War or Venezuelan-level corruptocracy were the only possibilities left for America.

“Love or hate Donald Trump, he saved us from that, at least. For a while, anyway. A lot of us on the Right didn’t like him. Many still don’t.  But that matters not. What does matter is that we have some time, and we need to use every second of it, because we won’t get another chance. This is it, the final chance to turn the Titanic around before the iceberg. The media came all out for Hillary in ways we’ve never seen before. We always knew they were biased, but now they came at us with their full strength. And we beat them.”

Lest readers (at least the solid majority on my side) become swayed by news media, I would suggest that you regard all news reporting as anti-Trump propaganda first, allowing for the kernels of objectivity they seed into their “opining-masquerading-as-reporting.” In doing so, you may have recognized that 1) the Trump transition, so bewailed by the media as disorganized, has actually been one of the smoothest, timeliest and impressive set of nominations we’ve seen, 2) the appointment of Marine Gen. Mattis is “a big start toward fixing the military that Obama turned from warriors into social-justice warriors and a big blow against the PC culture in general” (J. Fund).

3) The media’s sense of self-importance has been decimated by one man with a twitter and YouTube voice, and 4) Communist China’s diplomatic and regional lock on influence is now below and behind the message that “we’re not abandoning our allies on the Pacific Rim.”

Look up “5 Ways Donald Trump’s Victory Is Barack Obama’s Legacy—What most people haven’t realized yet is the extent to which Donald Trump’s election victory is the unintended legacy of President Obama” by Robert Tracinsky.

1) “Obama discouraged more electable alternatives to Hillary Clinton.” Obama, Clinton, Sanders—left, lefter and far left. The Democrats’ runner up, arguably the one that captured the soul of the party was a freaking socialist, for crying out loud.

2) “Obama’s mania for unpopular policies ran his party into the ground.” To pass his signature, named-after-him health insurance takeover, ObamaCare, he told Republicans to shut up, get out of the way while he sacrificed his Congressional majorities to pass it.

3) “Instead of transcending racial politics, Obama revived it.” Their theory of an “Emerging Democratic Majority” depended on a slavish (ironically) devotion to the most radical, race-centric, anti-cop grievance-mongering groups to be found in America. “We saw President Obama pass up every opportunity to be a calming and uniting figure in racial controversies from the Beer Summit to Trayvon Martin to Ferguson to Black Lives Matter. While he quietly demurred to the idea that all of his critics must be racists, he didn’t exactly go out of his way to discourage his supporters from making that argument.”

4) “Obama’s stagnant economy bred hopelessness.” Worst recovery ever; 95 million not working. Employers obsessed with keeping hiring and hours worked down—thanks, ObamaCare.

5) “Obama cultivated the sense of a diminished America.” Iraq: he cut and ran while ISIS grew. Libya: they unseated and killed Gaddafi while Islamist thugs murdered State Dept people. From the Middle East to Russia and Asia, their leaders think less of America—Obama’s legacy.