New Year, Same Old Crap

Happy New Year!  To those of you who hoped that 2019 would bring a change to the status quo in Washington, D.C., time to think again.  While we may have just rung in a new year, get ready to experience the same old crap that has plagued the country for the past several years.

For one thing, the anti-Trump Republicans still won’t give up the fight.  While former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, the most prominent Never-Trumper, will no longer serve as a thorn in the President’s side, it looks like he may have found his successor to serve as a conscientious objector to the Trump administration. Utah Senator-elect Mitt Romney, who lost to President Obama in 2012, wrote a scathing op-ed for The Washington Post criticizing President Trump’s “character.”  For the record, I would have voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, had I met the Constitutional requirement set forth in the 26^th Amendment.  In my English class, I wrote a campaign speech for Romney; making myself one of a very small number of students to do so.  The rest of the class had Obama fever.  I considered sharing it on the blog but I ultimately decided not to; I can confidently say that my writing has come a long way since my senior year of high school.

Romney made some very good points during his Presidential campaign.  For one thing, he talked about how 47 percent of the country will never vote for him; citing the large number of people dependent on government.  In every Presidential Election since 1996, the Democratic candidate has always captured at least 48 percent of the popular vote. Keeping our immigration status quo will only cause that number to go up, not down; since our immigration policy favors immigrants dependent on government handouts.  By siding with the fake news-industrial complex, Romney has only given them more ammunition in their quest to take out President Trump. 

Anyway, Romney first emerged as a critic of President Trump in early March 2016, after President Trump had won the early primary states of New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada and captured the lion’s share of states on “Super Tuesday.”  President Trump had previously criticized Romney at the Iowa Freedom Summit in 2015 before he announced his run for President, claiming that he “choked” in the 2012 Presidential Election.

Prior to his speech declaring his unequivocal opposition to President Trump, Romney had previously dismissed the media’s questions to him about then-candidate Trump, saying he would never become the nominee.  Following Super Tuesday and Chris Christie’s endorsement of him, Mitt Romney did everything in his power to make sure that President Trump did not become the nominee.  He urged people to vote for Ted Cruz in the Arizona and Utah primaries, claiming that “a vote for Kasich is a vote for Trump.” 

Not surprisingly, the media has developed a newfound respect for Romney, whom they trashed mercilessly in 2012, as they helped to re-elect the anointed one, President Barack Obama.  Just as they did in 2018, the media will always run to the defense of any Republican who breaks Reagan’s 11^th Commandment, “thou shall not speak ill of any fellow Republican.”

Romney’s op-ed even drew criticism of his niece, Ronna Romney McDaniel, Chairwoman of the Republican Party, who correctly pointed out that “POTUS is attacked and obstructed by MSM media and Democrats 24/7. For an incoming Republican freshman senator to attack @realdonaldtrump as their first act feeds into what the Democrats and the media want and is disappointing and unproductive.” McDaniel faces the daunting task of trying to unite a party that includes two distinct groups: people passionately committed to implementing conservative principles and the Trump agenda and people who remain committed to the failed open borders policies of the past, in addition to preserving the foreign policy status quo. If Romney does not listen to his niece, he can at the very least listen to his 2012 running mate, Paul Ryan, who stressed the importance of Republicans going “full strength” into the 2016 election.  The same definitely applies to 2019. 

As for the Democrats, they remain steadfastly opposed to any funding for the border wall.  Nancy Pelosi made that perfectly clear during an interview with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie.  They also remain committed to impeaching the President despite Pelosi’s best efforts to downplay the threat of impeachment while not explicitly ruling it out.  Just hours after the swearing-in of the 116^th Congress, Congressmen Brad Sherman and Al Green introduced articles of impeachment against President Trump that they recycled from 2017. It looks like the dinosaurs on the impeachment bandwagon have found an enthusiastic partner in the much younger Rashida Tlaib, the newly-elected member of Congress from Michigan’s 13^th Congressional District, based in Detroit.  Channeling her inner Tom Perez and Maxine Waters, Tlaib promised to “impeach the motherf***er” just hours after taking her seat in the 116^th Congress.   

While many Americans remained hungover from drinking a little too much on New Year’s Eve, Democratic Congressman Hank Johnson of Georgia compared President Trump to Hitler at an NAACP conference.  Johnson appears to have a firm grasp on reality, after all, he once worried that too many troops on the island territory of Guam would cause it to capsize. Johnson has good company among his compadres in the mainstream media, who have all too happily compared President Trump to Hitler, much to the chagrin of Alan Dershowitz.

While the anti-Trump vitriol coming from the left and the media remains stronger than ever, so does the resolve of the American people; who remain committed to solving the problems that face the country, even as their leaders repeatedly fail them.  Two weeks ago, I wrote about a Go Fund Me page called “We The People Will Fund the Wall.”  Jimmy Kimmel mocked the people who contributed to the page, claiming that “these people are dipping into their meth money for this.”  Well, the joke is on him; the site has raised nearly $19 million.  In addition to asking for donations from brave American patriots with an ultimate goal of raising $1 billion, the site also contains a link to a petition asking to let the politicians know how badly the American people want the wall. The petition has received nearly four million signatures out of a goal of 100 million.  In addition, the Freedom Caucus has put together a petition of their own at borderwallnow.com that asks for a “grassroots army” to send the Democrats a message by asking them to abolish their mission of “playing politics instead of protecting Americans” by “standing in the way” of the border wall.  The Freedom Caucus’s petition has a much more modest goal of 100,000 signatures.  More than 26,000 Americans have lent their signatures to the petition; certainly a good start but more work remains.

Congressman Warren Davidson, who replaced the newfound marijuana enthusiast John Boehner, has introduced a bill that would transfer all of the money on the Go Fund Me page to the border wall.  The “Buy a Brick, Build the Wall Act” directs the US Treasury to “establish a fund allowing private contributions to fund and maintain border walls.”  Citing the success of the Go Fund Me campaign, Davidson pointed out that “millions of Americans agree and want to chip in to help secure our borders.” The Democrats should and would support this measure if their sole opposition to the wall had to do with their concerns about the cost and fiscal responsibility.  After all, since their refusal to fund the wall has led to the government shutdown, if they signed onto Davidson’s bill, the Senate could pass the piece of crap bill that the Democratic-controlled House just past Thursday night, which promised to end the shutdown while containing no money for the wall. But everyone should know by now that the Democrats could care less about the cost of the wall.  They have their eyes on a different wall: a blue wall that will extend from Texas all the way to the top of the Pacific coast and deliver them a permanent electoral majority for years to come.  Most, if not all Congressional Democrats, will vote against Davidson’s bill.  They don’t want a wall because it may prevent their dream of a permanent blue wall from becoming a reality.  Just ask Nancy Pelosi, who referred to the idea of building a wall and thereby preventing a permanent Democratic majority as “immoral.”    

While 2019 will likely contain much of the same old crap that the American people hate about politics and the media, it looks like one thing may have finally changed.  The Senate Republicans have grown a spine.  Well, some of them have.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated that he will refuse to get behind any bill that does not have the President’s support despite the fact that the Senate all too happily voted in favor of a bill that included absolutely no money for the wall just two weeks ago.  Unfortunately, not every Republican Senator shares McConnell’s passion for border security.  Senators Cory Gardner and Susan Collins, who have to run for re-election in 2020 in states won by Crooked Hillary, have indicated that they would vote for the House-passed bill that did not have any wall money.  Gardner will probably lose simply because immigration has turned Colorado from a competitive state into a blue state that forms a brick of the Democrats’ blue wall that they have created in the western United States.  Following the 2018 elections, the Democrats completely control state government in Colorado; they maintained control of the governorship for the fourth election in a row and picked up the Attorney General’s seat.  At the Federal level, the Democrats now control a majority of Colorado’s seven seats in the United States House of Representatives.  As for Collins, a pro-choice moderate from Maine, the Democrats finally think they have a chance to take her out because she dared to defy feminist orthodoxy by voting in favor of Brett Kavanaugh.  President Trump should definitely compete in Maine, which may in turn help Collins.  At the very least, President Trump should try to capture the electoral vote in Maine’s 2^nd Congressional District; which he did manage to do in 2016.  Even if President Trump wins Maine, the Democrat will likely walk away with the electoral vote in Maine’s 1^st Congressional District, home to the liberal enclave of Portland. 

So, Happy New Year!  While it looks like the American people will experience the same old crap in 2019 from liberals, the mainstream media, and Never-Trumpers.  Fortunately, plenty of sand remains in the hourglass of 2019; hopefully at least of some of these anti-Trump, and in many cases, anti-American forces, will eventually reconsider their #Resist strategy and work to make life better for the American people for a change.