By DEXTER DUGGAN
Both the Republican and Democratic Parties were taking things on faith as November ended. But there’s a difference between a child’s faith that gifts from Santa appear under the tree after her parents buy them, and a bad boy’s expectation that gifts materialize from nowhere on a dead-end street after he runs away from home. Sometimes one expects just too much.
Republicans were learning to trust President-elect Donald Trump because he seemed to have a way of making results take root under the tree. Democrats seemed determined to keep going down the loser’s cul-de-sac by retaining failed leadership in power but hoping this would bring rewards.
After Trump picked some personnel that represented the sort of establishment he campaigned against, his incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus, was reported by the Washington Examiner on November 30 as saying Trump still was committed to ordinary people.
“Priebus said on MSNBC . . . that Trump’s appointments of Steven Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross, both billionaires who are enmeshed in Wall Street, to Treasury secretary and Commerce secretary respectively, are not signs he’s turning his back on the working class already,” the Examiner said, quoting Priebus:
“All the people President-elect Trump is bringing in have his same mindset and his same goals, and that’s what we’re going to try and work together to do. . . . They wouldn’t be offered a position if they didn’t follow through with the exact things Donald Trump wanted.”
Still eight weeks before his inauguration, Trump’s team announced he had an agreement with the Carrier Corp. in Indianapolis to save the majority of its jobs there, after Carrier announced earlier in the year that it was moving them to Monterrey, Mexico — which brought a blast from Trump on the campaign trail then.
“Whatever the terms of the deal turn out to be,” USA Today posted on November 29, “they will be better than the bleak exodus of jobs that Indianapolis had spent months preparing for.”
Speaking of an exodus of jobs, left-wing Nancy Pelosi was voted into an eighth term as the Democrats’ House leader by about two-thirds of her clueless party colleagues on November 30 despite Democrats’ drastic losses in seats under her command.
San Franciscan Pelosi beat back a challenge for her post from an Ohio congressman, Tim Ryan, who’s a social liberal, too, like most Dems, but who thinks her coastal elitism costs the party working-class votes.
Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, saying she was afraid Democrats might have learned from their losses, was among Republicans expressing glee they did not.
A cumbersome left-wing Democrat from the other coast, New Yorker Charles Schumer, is to take over as Senate minority leader after his party’s longtime mess-maker Harry Reid retired. But if Reid had wanted another leadership term to keep crippling Dem prospects, he probably could have had it.
A contributing columnist to the Washington Examiner, Lisa Boothe, noted on November 30 what Dems have done to themselves — more than one-third of all Dems in the new U.S. House will come from only three states in the nation, California, New York, and Massachusetts, and two-thirds of the total are from either the East or West Coast.
It’s simple why Democrats are in such a minority, Boothe said: “They care more about transgender bathrooms than they do about economic policies that will help hard-working families. They support movements across the country that burn down their own cities and set police cars on fire.”
As November had proceeded, many of Trump’s personnel selections left conservatives pleased or delighted, including notably pro-life Cong. Tom Price (R., Ga.), a strong foe of Obamacare and tax funding for Planned Parenthood, as secretary of the key Department of Health and Human Services.
Under Barack Obama, HHS was headed by pro-Obamacare pro-abortionists Kathleen Sebelius then Sylvia Mathews Burwell.
The UK Guardian, with typical left-wing alarm, emphasized on November 29 that Price’s opponents said he “would have dire consequences for abortion rights and contraceptive coverage for millions of U.S. women.”
The Guardian added, though, that national pro-life activist Marjorie Dannenfelser said Price “will play a key role in developing a robust health-care reform proposal that protects life and consciences, while promoting options for low-income individuals and families.”
Elaine Chao, named the same day to be secretary of Transportation, seemed to represent some careful preparation by Trump for future congressional battles. Chao is wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.).
Chao, formerly secretary of Labor in the George W. Bush administration, hardly was the fresh sort of face in the upper levels of government that Trump campaigned on.
However, perhaps the president-elect thought this appointment would help him call on a grateful McConnell’s aid for marshalling important Senate votes on issues that the majority leader might otherwise lack enthusiasm for.
National conservative radio talk host Mark Levin expressed unease on November 29 with some of Trump’s picks. Referring to Chao, Levin said, “This is not Trump draining the swamp. This is the swamp draining Trump.”
The talk host said he hadn’t seen decent appointments “at the senior level” since Trump named three national conservatives on November 18, including Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) as attorney general.
However, talk hosts Seth Leibsohn and Chris Buskirk, on the Phoenix-based Seth and Chris Show that highlights politics (KKNT, 960 AM), said Trump’s cabinet could end up more conservative than President Ronald Reagan’s.
Buskirk on November 29 said selections already announced are “any conservative’s wish list.”
Earlier announcements included pro-life reformers Betsy DeVos, a Republican philanthropist, for Education secretary and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, the daughter of Sikh Indian immigrants, as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Both education and international relations have been key areas where the enemies of traditional morality push their anti-family agendas.
After Trump was declared victor of the November 8 presidential election, many students at schools around the U.S. were reported to be weeping and emotionally distraught because Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton lost.
Although dominant media incessantly had portrayed Trump as a threatening oaf or worse, they downplayed or ignored Hillary’s appalling advocacy of evils like permissive abortion imposed internationally.
Thus, students who probably would say they oppose international colonialism had no idea that Hillary grimly was determined to impose her own colonialism on nations whose people wanted none of it — just as Obama’s administration had been doing through her work as secretary of state.
For instance, medical scientist Obianuju Ekeocha, founder of Culture of Life Africa (cultureoflifeafrica.com), warns against Western nations forcing their views on the continent where she was born.
In a front-page interview in the January 14, 2016, Wanderer, Ekeocha said, “Africa has been led through a path of destruction to a dangerous cultural precipice since the beginning of the Obama presidency, and I pray we don’t completely jump off by the end of this administration.
“So,” she added, “I implore Americans of goodwill to consider voting in a God-fearing, principled president in the upcoming elections, not just for the good of your country, but also for the protection of millions of people in developing countries across Africa.”
Another strong stand pushed by Hillary was open borders and continuing to bring multitudes of more people to live in the U.S. from Mideast nations teeming with terrorists. Again, dominant media gave her a pass on this troubling issue. Trump, on the other hand, said such newcomers must be very carefully vetted.
Individual Islamist terrorists have been popping up across the U.S. in an increasing number of incidents that leave a trail of dead and wounded.
The result of open-borders advocacy hit right in the heart of tens of thousands of students at Ohio State University, in Columbus, on November 28, when a young Somali-born refugee student intentionally drove his car into pedestrians then got out to attack them with a butcher knife, injuring 11, before a police officer shot him dead.
In an earlier photo, Abdul Razak Ali Artan looked like a pleasant young man who only wanted to be able to say his Muslim prayers in peace.
That’s just the kind of image that makes the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and Catholic Charities rejoice over “helping refugees.” Indeed, Catholic Charities reportedly welcomed Artan and his family to the U.S. in 2014.
However, an Islamist’s prayers to Allah may inspire growing rage against the “infidels” around him, as apparently was the case with Artan posting on Facebook that he had reached the “boiling point” against America.
By coincidence, The Wanderer’s “Online Daily” page had posted an article earlier the same day, November 28, about the USCCB affirming its broad policies to welcome “immigrants and refugees” despite the message of the November 8 elections.
The Wanderer article quoted a retired Arizona physician, James Asher, warning the USCCB: “It is easy to say we welcome them without sacrificing our security or core values, but millions of them, who are readily identifiable, have strong and ancient religious traditions that severely threaten our core values and could overwhelm our security measures should they become strong enough.”
Meanwhile, left-wing Democrats dug up one improbable excuse after another to try to explain away their continuing election losses, including the idea that Russian hacking handed the victory to Trump. Conservatives might reply to the Dems: “Fine with us. As long as you keep avoiding grappling with reality, the more you’ll lose.”
It used to be that left-wing Democrats had a big soft spot for the Soviet socialism of the 20th century. They had trouble seeing anything wrong with what had been indulgently described as “liberalism in a hurry,” so they were puzzled why other people disliked it.
When the Soviet Union fell, various U.S. left-wingers, still unable to grasp the realities, charged that conservatives would be upset, because they needed to hate a Communist Moscow. But conservatives were pleased the iron fist crumbled, and hoped for better days.
However, today U.S. left-wingers seem to see non-Communist Russia as their enemy that must be poked and hectored, and that Moscow is far worse than in its Stalinist days because it even steals elections for Trump and the GOP.
As for Democrats emphasizing that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 although Trump decisively triumphed in the electoral college, radio talk host Michael Medved posted this reality check at USA Today on November 29:
“In the last 50 years, over the course of 13 presidential elections, Barack Obama is the only Democratic nominee to reach a solid popular vote majority of 51 percent or more — and he did it twice. Going beyond Lyndon Johnson’s landslide against Barry Goldwater in 1964, you’d need to reach all the way back to Franklin D. Roosevelt to find another Democratic nominee who connected with an unmistakable majority of his fellow citizens. In the intervening 72 years since FDR’s last race in 1944, Republicans won decisive, majority victories seven times.”
Hillary’s percentage of 48, Medved wrote, was around the same as the losing Democratic presidential races of John Kerry and Al Gore, and even of winning husband Bill Clinton in 1996.
Medved concluded: “In the polls that count most — tallies of actual votes on election day — Republicans have been winning with unacknowledged consistency. Democrats can continue to ignore that pattern only at their extreme peril.”
Delay For Arpaio
A nationally known Republican who lost on November 8 after attacks by the Obama Justice Department and George Soros, Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio, may find events looking up.
Arpaio, an early Trump supporter, had been scheduled to go to trial for criminal contempt on December 6 for allegedly violating orders against racial profiling by a biased federal judge, G. Murray Snow. The trial could be viewed as a politically motivated prosecution.
(See the hard-copy Wanderer of November 24, p. 3, “Obama Attack On Arpaio: Sheriff’s Election Loss Not End Of Line For Dedicated Lawman.”)
However, in late November the start of Arpaio’s trial was delayed until April 4 to allow more time for preparation.
Phoenix-based KPNX-TV, Channel 12, reported this means the trial would take place entirely under Trump’s Justice Department.
It’s possible the charges could be dropped, the television station said — or, if Arpaio were convicted, Trump could pardon him.
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