That Hillary "won" the popular vote by almost 3 million and that the election was as close as it was says to me that the Rubicon was crossed and the days of us remaining even a Republic In Name Only are numbered. Given the comments by a horde of Republicans and people we thought were Conservatives who have proven they are just liberals or populists who vote R, I surmise that Conservatives are a minority constituency and shrinking in number.
Principles and character do not matter anymore to most people who see them as offensive or a liability. Politics is just another team sporting event for most of Joe and Jane Sixpack to rah rah and feel good about their team "winning" even if nothing actually changes in terms of governance.
Being Conservative is seen as a liability. If you are a decadent individual (and a leftist) you can send images of your self all over and it is considered 'normal', but if you once stand on the concept of morality, having lunch with a co worker will be distorted into a sordid affair.
Unfortunately, the facts do not matter in the tabloid mind of the populace, who have been conditioned since Watergate to respond to the mention of any noun followed by "-gate" as a heinous scandal. These same organs of the media, in full display of bias have an incredible rogues gallery of 'nothingburger' stories which should have outshone Teapot Dome as political scandals but never made it above the fold because they control the very layout of the newspapers.
Unfortunately, along with this, fiscal responsibility, adherence to old fashioned ideas like the sanctity of 'life, liberty and property' and moral decency have all been summarily abandoned in a rush to decadence, partly because it is easier to not learn and conform to the rules, but because it is more lucrative to control what is and isn't considered permissible, something which is only malleable in the absence of fixed standards.
Therefore, those who call for adhering to fixed standards, for the supremacy of and rule of law, are pushed to the side, originally courted because our numbers were significant enough that there would be no electoral survival, but increasingly marginalized because the case could be made that those who landed anywhere near the airfield were preferable to those who would be in the next state. We were told the perfect is the enemy of the good, and then we were told that increasingamounts of bad were "good", because, after all the only alternative was worse.
That was the top of the slippery slope, and we have been accelerating downwards since.
In the media of my youth you would not have seen a:
Naked butt
an exposed breast
two women kiss
two men kiss
graphic and bloody violence
graphic depictions of rape
or murder
or the call for the specific assassination of a sitting president.
Much was left to the imagination, and no, those images were not necessary in order to evoke feelings of horror or dread. Alfred Hitchcock proved that with
Psycho. BUt in the name of titillation, of 'entertainment' we were 'treated' to increasingly lurid imagery, and increasingly base moral character until the violence and bloodshed found in 'entertainment' had so desensitized a population that the unthinkable became reality.
Instead of having competition shooting teams, we had school shootings.
Instead of the horrorshow of Jack the Ripper, we had John Wayne Gacy and Jeffery Dahmer, Kliebold and Harris, Jim Jones and others.
Giving us liberals as candidates via crooked rules and political machinery while threatening us to vote for their shit sandwich so they can 'win' and stop the worser evil, is tired and boring. I'm done being the battered wife and done practicing insanity. Some of us have dumped the GOP for third parties where at least we can vote FOR someone who lives by the standards we expect and shares the philosophies and principles we are governed by.
Already there. I would not engage the services of a contractor I knew would screw me in hopes that maybe this once they might do the work and not rip me off (again). I'm not doing that politically, either. I'm sick of the lies, sick of getting the middle finger even before the hand goes up to swear the oath of office, through the recantation of and reneging on every campaign promise, without so much as a theatrical attempt to make good on it.
That is declared to be an automatic loser by the majority - and all that tells me is that any hope for any semblance of Conservatism or respect and adherence to the Constitution is as void as outer space.
As long as people run around and rant that they want the guy who will bend them over for his own pleasure (and perhaps theirs) as soon as the votes are in, that's what they will get. Out of cowardice they will refuse to stand for the perfect, proclaiming loudly that it stands in the way of the good.
No, all that stands in the way of the perfect is the mindset that it cannot be had, and the capitulation to the lesser evil, an evil that is pervasive and degenerative, and cumulative, but just another incremental step to the greater evil.
