Still Angry After All This Time

Not too many years ago, I would not have considered myself to be a “political person” at all. I voted and I did my homework first, although not to the extent I do these days. I studied the candidates, the issues and I claimed no allegiance to either party. My personal leanings were very liberal, but I always listened to the conservative views and for many years did not disagree with them in many instances. I never took the elections too seriously, because talking politics was pretty much forbidden and because I knew that whoever won, whichever side won, there would be another election in two or four years and there are lots of checks and balances within the system.

This election was different. The results are different. The campaigns were different and the outlook is very different. All standards have been kicked aside. The campaign was mean and ugly and distorted by misinformation, creating more confusion and division than ever before. Trump seemed to break every rule and never had to answer for it. He solicited campaign money from foreign countries. It was reported by offended foreign nationalists. Nothing happened.

He lied incessantly and denied it and got caught in the denial and his people didn’t care and the media let it ride. He lied and made shattering missteps so often they couldn’t be adequately checked out before the next headline loomed. He refused to show his tax returns. His health certification was a bad joke. His business ventures are all over the world and will be heavily influenced by his presidency. No one seemed to care. Nor did they care that he has no experience of the kind we need the president to have.

Some voted for him solely because they want to see abortion outlawed. Some because they believe white skin makes some people superior to others and they feel that Trumps agenda fits their needs. Others believed he was going to create a job for them. The employees at Carrier in Indiana are now living with the reality of that myth. Some believed he would save Social Security and Medicare. Apparently not. Don’t even look for him to say he’s sorry either. I can’t fault those who voted for him thinking he is going to help them in some way. Too much bad information was always in the way and most people do not have enough time to dig through every item.

Like always, I started out listening to every campaign speech of every candidate, and I was proud of the Democrat’s campaign. We had good compassionate people with good ideas who pretty much kept to the issues and out of the mud.

The Republican campaign was mired in sewage from the start and issues were buried beneath the stinking pile of hate filled rhetoric and diversionary talk and lie after lie after lie. I know this because I checked everything out that I could. He employed with aplomb the mind control tactic of “gaslighting” that the republican party seems to have adopted as their primary strategy.  Lie, deny, distract, confuse.

When the party nominees were selected the race really got nasty. Trump enlisted David Bossy, of Citizens United who has been waging a war against the Clintons for twenty years. I researched his accusations. I had already been a fan of Hillary and had raked through years of information on her. Her accomplishments filled pages and so did the accusations against her. As I looked back over all of them again, I found almost all the accusations were groundless and those that got any traction at all were investigated and proven false. Like the years of investigation into her handling of Benghazi and her email server, they seemed to be made up out of thin air and to hold her to a completely different standard than anyone else in her position.

While Trump could issue loud, ugly, bold lies and have those lies exposed, even though he would refuse to acknowledge them, no one seemed to care, but if Hillary made a small error she was held to excruciating hounding and recalling.

While he was whining about the media picking on him and not treating him fairly, he was getting more free airtime because of his unorthodox and insulting actions than all the other candidates put together, and distracting us from his failings. His accusations were ridiculous because he accused the media of misquoting him when they quoted him exactly and played the video to prove it, but his followers believed him. They believed what he said that they wanted to hear and completely discounted the blow back the next day.

While he was accusing Hillary of cheating, he was calling on Russia to hack into the Democrat’s computers. The republicans were as always trying to suppress voting from certain groups of people. Trump was calling on his supports to “Keep and eye on other people at the polls”, he was inciting violence, he was lying and doubling down on the lies about Hillary when he was called on them. His followers did not care.

So against all odds and all predictions, he won the electoral votes necessary to become the President of the United States. I was angry, disappointed and terrified when Donald Trump was declared the winner of the Presidential election. The reasons were numerous then and they are growing more numerous with each day. Did I mention insulted? Now I am also extremely insulted.

We have allowed someone to be elected to lead our country who ran on a platform of lies, cheating and being outrageous. He has the temperament of an over-indulged nine-year old and is currently more interested in pandering to his fragile ego than in attending daily security briefings. He threatens the constitution, he intends to subvert the law, he encourages white supremacy (even though he has been forced to denounce it) and is populating his cabinet with people who are unqualified, or publicly adverse to the agency they are charged with, have close ties with Russia and Vladimer Putin, are temperamentally unfit for the position, or simply stroke his ego.

Now we know that 17 security agencies have concluded that not only did Russia hack US computers, and share the information with Wikileaks, but that they did it (and who knows what else) to insure that Trump win the election. There are questions about ballot counts, about practices at the polls. The FBI released a questionable statement about possible emails not sent by Hillary and found on someone else’s laptop that might have possibly include a secure email document in them 11 days before the election. Could anyone be any more obscure? Just a suggestion of a possible, but not even probable situation thrown out to the public who is desperately trying to pick a leader. Oh none were found of course and now there is a question about the warrant for that computer. Who knows how many people voted with the possibility of another scary email hanging over them. This was a complete smoke screen.

 Fake news sites were reporting fiction as fact and people were believing it. Some still believe Hillary had an FBI agent killed and that she is part of a child sex ring. They believe what pleases them.

I am angry. Our country has been hijacked. This was not a fair election. A con-artist was put in place by a foreign government and a good woman was attacked in the process. Our people were not given the information they needed. Hillary has been in the public eye for her entire adult life. Some people like her and some don’t for real reasons. That’s the way humans are. But if anyone dislikes her solely because of something they were told or read about her and they didn’t bother to check it out, it’s probably not the truth. Even with her mistakes, her errors of judgement failures, she is still a good woman. Donald Trump may or may not be evil, but the entities pulling his strings area definitely evil.