Don's Tuesday Column

              THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   11/29/2016

                      Election hijinks and despotism

One can easily assemble a host of little-covered but crucially relevant election items: 1) The mainstream news media refined the political art of propaganda promulgation as a virtual adjunct of the Hillary/Democrat campaign. They have turned on a dime to advance the boutique and ironic assertion that “fake news” (marginally truthful things not advanced by the marginally truthful media elite) led voters astray to vote for Donald Trump. 2) But for the votes of a sizable minority of supposedly Democrat base groups—women, minorities and union households—Trump would likely have lost the states and votes that gave him his victory.

3) Late deciding voters (choosing the week, especially the weekend, before Election Day) swung dramatically for Trump. If the election had been held entirely on November 8, Trump’s share of the popular vote would have been a clear majority even with the millions of Hillary votes in reliably left-wing California. His win would have resembled Reagan’s win over Carter. As it was, the non-CA 49-states binary vote was Trump 50.8%, Clinton 49.2%.

4) When I crunched the vote data at electionatlas.org, Trump’s 2.5-million national vote deficit is dwarfed by the margin for Hillary in, not just California, but in Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay Area counties. Of the roughly 7 million votes in LA/SF counties, Clinton got about 5 million to Trump’s 1.5-million; that means advocates for popular vote winners getting the presidency really want LA and San Francisco area voters to have more sway than the entire rest of the country. Sorry, this writer will stick with the Electoral College our Founders created in their wisdom to prevent just that outsized sway for large population centers.

5) It became irrefutable after the Project Veritas videos and Wikileaks revelations that Democrat operatives and connected activists organized and illegally manufactured the violence that news media ignorantly attributed to Trump supporters in a slavish attempt to advance a violent right-wing narrative.

Headlines challenge liberal accepted wisdom: “White House denies that Russia hacked election for Donald Trump win,” “Democrats, not Trump, Racialize Our Politics,” “Democrat Party Operative Robert Creamer Used Terror to Wage War on Honesty,” “The snarling contempt behind the media’s ‘fake news’ hysteria,” “Illegal immigrants pose as families, tell tales of woe to gain entry to U.S.” “The Kremlin didn’t sink Hillary, Obama did,” “Teachers union leaders devastated that so many members voted Trump,” “5 Ways Trump’s victory is Obama’s legacy.”

Ideological corruption and hypocrisy has reared its ugly head among some Democrats and many leftists who have latched onto the Don Quixote-like fool’s errand of recounting selected states. What is their (Jill Stein/Hillary Clinton’s) hope? Denying Trump enough electors to…oh, that’s right, throw it to the House of Representatives which will take about 5 minutes to confirm Trump as President.

Liberals won’t see it this way but there is an established pattern of Democrats challenging elections that produce a Republican president. Al Gore infamously withdrew his phoned-in concession to George Bush—with news media complicity as they pronounced Florida for Gore, depriving Bush of nearly 10,000 Central Time Zone Florida Republican votes. Hillary has hypocritically asserted that Gore “won” that election despite those shenanigans.

Democrat supporters of John Kerry persisted in propagating myths about voting machine errors in Ohio and elsewhere. Stein and Clinton et al now pin their theory on similar myths. I don’t doubt the machines can be hacked, that votes can be changed; so far, we lack any proof.

Every one of the above items could be expanded to a column-length analysis; some may get that treatment yet. The following, however, requires my attention:

Within seconds of the announcement of the well-deserved death of Cuban tyrant Fidel Castro, I cheered and danced as the Cuban-Americans were doing in Miami. That despotic brutalizer and persecutor of Cubans of African descent, homosexuals, women, escapees-in-flimsy boats and citizens desirous of nothing more than political, personal and economic liberty—Castro would have been even more deserving of public trial for human rights atrocities than the German Nazi war criminals.

It occurred to me that this subject was among those I wrote about in my first year. Sure enough, my archive had the April 20, 2005 column. Following are my comments:

“Speaking of dictators, can you believe how tough the press and the Hollywood set are on that old softie, Fidel Castro? Perhaps that’s because they aren’t—Castro truly occupies a nearly revered place among the media and entertainment elites. It seems he’s treated practically like royalty any time he visits the bluest of the blue enclaves, like New York City…

“As author Humberto Fontova documents in his new book, ‘Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant’, Castro has imprisoned more people, as a percentage of the population, than either Hitler or Stalin. The next time you see one of those Che Guevara T-shirts, usually worn by some young idealistic kid taken with the ‘romance of revolution’, who could rattle off the supposed ‘evils’ of President Bush and capitalism, remember something.  Che Guevara preached the cold-blooded murder of anyone who stood in the way of the imposition of communism. He practiced what he preached in the thousands of Cubans that he sent to firing squads for just that reason.”

Leftists like Barack Obama, Canada’s PM Justin Trudeau, Green Party’s Jill Stein and other socialist-sympathizing fools have proven the soft-headed acceptance of the banality of evil in that despot, Fidel Castro. They’re not likely to ever realize the error of their ways.