Year End Reflections, Part II

Soon to be former First Lady Michelle Obama recently said this: "We are feeling what not having hope feels like." The left just can not believe that Trump won the election. In fact, right up to the last minute they have been trying to persuade/pressure the Republican members of the Electoral College to break their commitments to Trump and vote for anyone else. They will not succeed. As for the First Lady, I imagine that most of her life - other than the eight years her husband was President - has been and will continue to be a huge disappointment. After all, this was her sentiment back in 2008: "People in this country are ready for change and hungry for a different kind of politics and...for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback."

Soon to be former Secretary-General of the United Nations recently made this stunning, albeit hardly surprising, factual admission: "Decades of political maneuverings have created a disproportionate volume of resolutions, reports and conferences criticizing Israel." In reply, Israel's ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, said: "The Secretary-General admitted the clear truth, the UN's hypocrisy towards Israel has broken records over the past decades...During this time the UN passed 223 resolutions condemning Israel while (passing) only eight resolutions condemning the Syrian regime as it has massacred its citizens over the past six years. This is absurd."

The Trump website has this: "The bond between Israel and the United States runs deep, and I will ensure there is no daylight between us when I'm president." Trump has nominated attorney and longtime adviser David Friedman to be the US ambassador to Israel. Friedman: "We trust Israel...We think it is doing an excellent job of balancing its respect for human rights and its security needs in a very difficult neighborhood. Israel is a partner with the US in the global war against terrorism."

Friedman has also said what has always been obvious to this writer: "It is inconceivable there would be mass evacuations (of the over 300,000 Jews from the West Bank) on that magnitude, in the unlikely event that there was an otherwise comprehensive peace agreement...It makes no sense for Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) to be Judenrein (free of Jews) any more than it makes sense for Israel to be Arabrein (free of Arabs). It's not fair." Under Obama and Kerry we have yet to hear any objections to Abbas' repeated assertions that no Jew may live in a new Palestinian state.

Following Clinton's loss of the electoral vote, but large popular vote victory, many on the left now want to eliminate the electoral college. In an Op-Ed in the 12/15/16 New York Times, Columbia Law School professor David Pozen referred to the electoral college as being "fundamentally undemocratic." I wonder if the professor believes that the US Senate is also "fundamentally undemocratic." After all, a state with under one million people gets the same number of senators as the State of California, which is nearing 40 million people. How is that fair? Would the professor argue for the abolition of the Senate? Would the professor push for a unicameral federal legislative body, based on proportionate representation for each state, as the House is currently constituted? Or, is the Senate yet another one of those checks and balances put into the Constitution by our Founders? The Senate tends to lend some stability to government, whereas the House - with members up for election every two years - is more likely to reflect popular sentiment of the time.

As noted by George Will in his 12/18/16 column in the Ventura County Star, Bill Clinton won the 1992 election with only 43% of the popular vote. While he did get more votes than George H. W. Bush, that was the year Ross Perot ran and got a whopping 19,743,821 votes. Together, Bush and Perot had over 56% of the votes. A large majority of the people clearly did not want Clinton to be president. But Clinton won easily with 370 electoral votes to 168 for Bush. Perot was unable to get any electoral votes.

Will explained the genius of our Founders: "So the Electoral College shapes the character of majorities by helping to generate those that are neither geographically nor ideologically narrow, and that depict, more than the popular vote does, national decisiveness." But the left wants to perpetuate both geographic (Northeast and West Coast) majorities and ideological (left-wing) majorities. The left wants to abolish the Electoral College on the assumption that their side can generate enough votes in the Northeast and West Coast - two liberal voting blocs - to maintain permanent control of the presidency.

I would love to have seen a poll asking how many on the left would have agreed that Obama should have cancelled the election if it was known to a near certainty that Trump was going to win. With all of the pressure that has been placed on the electors, I suspect that such a poll number would not be that small.