Posted on 11/20/2016 9:51:40 AM PST by Kaslin
There is a lesson in every defeat, if you’re not too pigheaded to learn it. When it comes to the shellacking Democrats have taken in the last few elections, pigheaded doesn’t begin to cover their reaction.
With the exception of President Obama’s re-election in 2012, Democrats have been on a severe losing streak since 2010. It couldn’t happen to a nicer, more deserving group of people.
Americans had a large plate full of unfettered progressive rule in 2009 and 2010, and they did not like it. Ever since, they’ve been rejecting Democrats like a transplant patient rejects a bad kidney.
With the exception of Barack Obama.
The cult of personality surrounding the president is disturbing, but less so over time as it became clear it was not contagious. Every candidate he personally pushed for went down in flames. Every time he put himself on the line for someone or something other than himself, he lost.
One shining example came when Martha Coakley lost to Scott Brown, a Republican in the blue state of San Francisco, er, Massachusetts, in a crucial Senate race. The only issue was the president’s health care bill, and it lost.
He is personally popular, but what he stands for is ants at a picnic. People have separated the two with him but married the policies and the party for everyone else.
Barack Obama is the best thing to ever happen to Republican get-out-the-vote efforts. The GOP realizes this, but Democrats are in denial.
You hear it all the time – MSNBC and CNN hosts and pundits can’t fathom the concept of their policies being unwanted any more than they can accept that they don’t work. Their losses have to be caused by other factors.
Since the election, Democrats have blamed everything but a comet, a plague and the death of Prince for the GOP winning the White House and holding Congress. A couple more appearances by Howard Dean on TV, and you probably will start to hear about comets and plagues.
That’s the problem for Democrats – they don’t like looking into the mirror any more than the American people like looking at them.
I get that one of the stages of grief is denial. In fact, it’s the first one. Since having their posteriors handed to them in 2010, Democrats haven’t moved past stage one.
They blame the voters for being duped, self-destructive, even stupid. This year, with the rejection of Hillary Clinton, we’ve gone from being a racist nation that twice elected a black man to being a racist and sexist nation for twice not electing a woman – and for electing Trump. Oddly, the black man who beat her the first time avoided the sexist label because the left manufactures the labels. In the ultimate fit of irony, leftists even have taken to blaming media bias for their losses.
Missing from Democrats’ blame game is anything having to do with Democrats. It’s not that Clinton was a horrible candidate running to continue unpopular policies that have brought about economic stagnation; it’s that all of us who voted against her are a bunch of misogynists.
It’s not that Hillary’s corruptions were something the people did not want to reward; it was the media for reporting on them too much. It wasn’t Clinton’s decision to obfuscate disclosure rules and put national security at risk for reasons no one can believably explain; it was a letter the FBI Director sent so he wouldn’t have been found to contradict his sworn congressional testimony.
It’s always something else, never Democrats.
The last week and a half have demonstrated the power of denial and just how addicted the left is to it. They’re being rejected at every level of government. In many cases, Republicans won simply because they were running against Democrats.
Given the names being floated to head the Democratic National Committee – the rehash of Dean and radical Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota – Democrats have shown they will not take that long, sobering look into a reflective surface anytime soon. They have learned nothing from the Obama years. Good.
But Republicans clearly haven’t either.
That the first thing they did after winning the White House and narrowly maintaining control of Congress was to attempt to reinstate earmarks shows this. How arrogant and self-destructive can they be? Wait, don’t answer that. Thankfully Speaker Paul Ryan killed that idea for now. But we have confirmation, as if we needed it, that Republicans are as obtuse as we feared and have learned nothing.
They say the job of parents of young kids is simply to keep the kids from killing themselves. It’s not that they're suicidal. It’s that they don’t know any better, and curiosity forms before the rational brain.
With politicians, the rational brain works, but the arrogance of power overrides it.
Thomas Jefferson said, “Eternal vigilance is the price we pay for liberty.” With the clowns we have in Washington, both in the minority and majority, we can’t afford complacency.
If Democrats somehow regain power, they will push the same policies, with the same arrogance, and the people will continue to reject it as if it were a compulsion. If Republicans go unchecked, they will turn into Democrats.
Each of the elections in the 21st century have sent clear messages to politicians about what the American people want and what we will accept, with each message louder than the last. The old way of doing things is unacceptable.
People want their liberty protected from government as much as they want it protected by government. It remains to be seen which way President-Elect Trump will slide on the scale, but Democrats and Republicans already have started to slide into their old habits.
If you thought electing Trump and retaining Republican control of government was the end of the fight, sorry to wake you; Democrats are out there ready to strike, and Republicans are ready to be Republicans again. This election was a game-changer with important lessons to learn. And there’s every reason to believe elected officials from both parties didn’t learn a damn thing.
Democrats got pounded in 94 losing the congress and that didn’t slow them down one bit or change their goals
Democrats didn’t start murdering babies just to get votes. They won’t give up murdering babies just because they lose some votes.
Besides, we didn’t get baby murder through the electoral process, anyway.
In the end, it was Democrat voters that stopped Hillary twice; first in the 2008 primaries when they selected Otoken instead, and recently when they either stayed home or voted for Trump in states she needed to win.
Hillary didn’t lose because Texas went for Trump (though kudos to them for their part in it!)...
Hillary was a very flawed candidate. But they didn’t see it; to paraphrase Hillary, why wasn’t she 50 points ahead??? To the liberals, the prospect of a Trump presidency should have been enough to make people vote for Hillary by default.
One of them is this (it looks like two, but it's really just one):
You can learn a lot from failure, and the more painful the failure, the more you can learn.You can learn a lot from success too, but the problem with success is that it's too easy to spin; it's human nature to tend to amplify your role in success, and ignore the role of other factors and other contributors.
BTW, I used the word "can" when I stated my lesson very deliberately. You can learn a lot from failure, if you try. There is no guarantee that a particular person will learn anything from failure. If you don't want to learn from your failures, you won't. And you will keep failing.
So if you adhere to a philosophy — an ideology — that teaches that you are singled out by society for unfair treatment because of something you were born with, the only thing you will learn from failure is to cling to your failure ideology more tenaciously.
Apparently many Democrats DID see it, and either voted against her or not at all.
Many of the people that voted for her did so BECAUSE of her flaws; they often represented the special interests that were bribing her. A Democrat could be convicted of child rape and still carry the teachers’ union votes...
Reality sucks...
Perseverance is such an endearing virtue - if it is still tempered with some semblance of good sense. But where does perseverance end and plain stubbornness set in? And at what point does it descend into madness?
Insanity, it is said, is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. This kind of ingrained obsessive-compulsive behavior, uncontrollable recurring thoughts and behaviors, and the urge to repeat the actions over and over, leads to almost complete isolation from the human race, and a seriously dysfunctional situation.
It is one thing when an individual does this, another entirely when a sizable part of the population falls into the grips of this state of near paranoia.
Question - do we intervene, and risk the undying wrath of somebody, or some demographic, that does not WANT to change, or do we allow them to continue in their folly, in the hopes they shall at some future time regain a modicum of relatively disentangled thinking?
IOW,Term Limits Forever.Congress should consist of people who are there to serve, not to be served. They should have lavish housing and expense allowances because they have to live in Washington D.C. temporarily. Washington must not be their home, and legislating must not be their profession.The minimum age of 35 should apply to Congressmen; for presidents the minimum should be 45.
I think they have learned but they are incapable of changing. They will continue to try to force the country to change in the name of "progress".
There's a lesson that we need to learn here too though. In every election, the American people are presented with a choice between two parties and if you have failed them, they will FU and that's what the Dems will be waiting for. They won't change, they'll just wait.
Democrats on a severe losing streak since 2010?
Yeah, tell me about it.
Federal spending? Up every year.
Federal debt? Up every year.
Federal regulations? Up every year.
Cultural and moral collapse? Ongoing, and picking up speed.
Massive legal and illegal immigration? Ongoing, and picking up speed.
GOP presidential candidates who got at least 51% of the Popular Vote since 1988?
No GOP candidate has received 51% since 1988. Trump will get a smaller share of the Popular Vote than Mitt Romney.
The author is talking about election wise
It is difficult to understand how the national GOP won so much with the likes of McConnell, Ryan, Corker, etc. It can only be as Hunter writes,
“In many cases, Republicans won simply because they were running against Democrats.”
It is even more difficult to understand Hunter’s statement about Obama:
“He is personally popular, but what he stands for is ants at a picnic.”
The statement is true and the description apt. I have seen liberals around me comment recently “I still think he’s a great guy”; what?
Obama is a ‘smooth operator’.
> “If you thought electing Trump and retaining Republican control of government was the end of the fight, sorry to wake you; Democrats are out there ready to strike, and Republicans are ready to be Republicans again. This election was a game-changer with important lessons to learn. And there’s every reason to believe elected officials from both parties didn’t learn a damn thing.”
Hence, the timely deliverance of Donald Trump’s call to pass a Constitutional Amendment for Term Limits (which is only possible via my tagline).
Bears repeating.
[Democrats got pounded in 94 losing the congress and that didn’t slow them down one bit or change their goals]
Especially after the GOP almost immediately began backtracking under withering attacks from the Mainstream pressholes and became the new big government party.
This actually was the founding of the Uniparty we see today.
Gop now has a president and majorities in house, senate, governors and state legislatures from day 1. Reagan’s landslide didn’t matter as much because he still had to deal with Tip O’Neill on everything
Yup. I doubt that either side learned much of anything. Especially our side. You can rest assured that the damned fools running the GOP will be looking to get us involved in some other foreign war within a few years. For children.
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