Outrage Junkies

Is it my imagination, or does it seem like liberals are addicted to outrage? At least, they seem that way since President Trump was elected. I admit, I never blogged much about politics before (this was a spanking blog, after all) so I never had the chance to write about all the times something the President did or said or wore triggered the liberals into spasms of faux outrage. Even before he was ever elected or got the nomination, the liberals in the media just couldn't stand his behavior. Something a normal person would have passed off with a laugh or maybe just a "not a good look, Donald" in passing the liberal media spent hours reporting on. Little things like Trump not buttoning his suitcoat sent them scurrying to "experts" to report on why a man running for president doesn't know how to wear a suit properly; like they didn't know that Trump has spent most of his adult life in suits. He knows perfectly well that a gentleman is supposed to button the top button of a single breasted suitcoat. The man has been around elite snobs all his life. He knows which fork to use and that food plates are passed to the left. I'm pretty sure he knows that the top button gets buttoned. But maybe he was in a hurry and forgot? Or maybe, like most heavyset people, he finds it uncomfortable? Whatever the reason, the liberal media had a field day with it. It was probably at this point that Trump realized he could get the liberal media's goat just about any time he wanted to.

Or how about the way he drinks water? Or the fact that he drinks water at all? The press seemed obsessed with the President's consumption of eatables. During a speech, the President stopped to take a drink from a bottle of water he had handy. The liberal press went ballistic. "The President is not allowed to drink water during speeches because he once made fun of Marco Rubio for doing the same thing! He's a hypocrite if he drinks water during a speech!" Actually, that's not what happened. The President made a rather funny and immature comment on the campaign trail because Rubio didn't just drink from a bottle of water while he remained at the podium. He had to practically walk out of camera range to retrieve a bottle he kept on a little table about five feet away. It looked unprofessional. Rubio has given hundreds of speeches during his time in public life. He knows what looks bad. Whatever the reason, instead of focusing on why Rubio didn't have a bottle of water sitting next to him, they chose to focus on the fact that Trump commented on it. Later, after he had been elected President, Trump was giving a speech somewhere (I forget now) and had a bottle of Fuji water with him. When he went to drink from it, he used (gasp) both hands to hold it. The liberal media went bonkers. Why would a strong, healthy man like Trump need both hands to hold a simple bottle of water? The media began to spread rumors that perhaps the President had the beginning stages of MS or a tremor of some sort. But they forgot to mention that Fuji water comes in square bottles, which are hard to hold. I have scanned them at the supermarket where I work and they have slipped right out of my hand. They are just not made for human hands. If you went to the Facebook pages of liberal pundits or Hollywood stars, they would post silly stuff like "Guess who else drank water? Hitler!" 

They also questioned why a 70-year-old man might need to use the handrail when getting off an airplane on a windy day. I remember repeatedly seeing footage of Trump deplaning Air Force One using the handrail and the liberal media speculating on the President's fear of heights or of falling. They deliberately ran side-by-side footage of President Trump coming carefully down the steps and then-President Obama jogging down the steps. First of all, Obama was 25 years younger than Trump. Maybe he hasn't seen the footage of President Ford slipping and falling while getting of a plane (the incident that Chevy Chase used to get laughs on SNL for a year)? I hate to tell the folks over at CNN, but most 70-year-olds ARE afraid of falling. They're afraid of breaking a hip and losing their mobility and independence. Using a handrail while getting off a plane on a windy day is not as "highly unusual" as you all believe.

Remember how outraged the media was when, a week after the election, Trump took his family out for a steak dinner and didn't mention it to them? They were apoplectic with rage. One liberal media pundit (I forget who but it could have been Brian Williams, the valor stealer) said with a straight face that part of the media's job is to protect the President. Yes, he said that and so did others. Perhaps you people aren't aware that the president, even when his name is Trump, gets a Secret Service detail? So they aired their outrage by reporting (also with a straight face) that the President enjoys his steaks well done and with ketchup on it. And also, they apparently liked to keep tabs on how many scoops of ice cream he had after dinner and whether he got chocolate sauce while his guests had to make do with plain ice cream. You had to have been on another planet to have missed that bit of hard hitting reporting. They also turned into concern trolls over how many Diet Cokes the president was drinking every day. How are the President's eating habits even newsworthy? There were other things to report on.

Oh, and the President has small hands. Yes, that one got big laughs during the campaign the first time one of his opponents brought it up. Instead of getting defensive, Trump held up a hand at a campaign rally and announced "Look at that hand! Is that a small hand or what?" The press lost its mind. It was at this point where I got the idea that, no matter how Trump reacted to a situation, in the press's eyes it was going to be wrong. The truth is that, for a man who's 6'3", his hands are pretty small. But I never got the memo that, to be President, you had to have big hands. Surely, as small as his hands are, they're still bigger than Hillary's. I never heard anyone say anything about the size of HER hands. 

The outrage machine continued on unabated after the election. If anything, it got worse. Now the President's family was fair game, too. His older daughter, Ivanka's choice of a pink dress to attend an employment summit was derided as "too girly" and they accused the First Daughter of setting women back a hundred years. Yes, they said that over a pink dress. Or what about the time the President's youngest son, Barron was seen with a fidget spinner? The media began to speculate (meanly) that the 11-year-old must be autistic or have ADHD. Never mind that fidget spinners were a fad among young people at the time. Then there is the endless commentary about the First Lady's shoes. Everything from "Trump forces her to wear them" to "she wears those shoes to feel superior" was parroted by the liberal media. When she joined the President on a trip to Houston to inspect hurricane damage, the boarded Air Force One wearing her signature Loubaton's. The media scolded the First Lady, saying that those shoes were a bad choice for visiting poor people who had just had their city flattened by a hurricane. When she deplaned, she was wearing sneakers. But, again, the media had to have an opinion on that, too. Indeed, the First Lady's clothing has always been the subject of much media poison. I don't remember them every saying anything about the way Michelle Obama dressed when she was First Lady and many of her outfits were disasters. Melania Trump always looks elegant and chic and crisp in whatever she wears. As a former fashion model, she has a very good grasp of what looks good on her. Then there was Donald Jr's well-reported divorce from his wife, Vanessa. While Trump Jr and his ex-wife tried to shield their five children from the media glare, it was impossible. The media was at least partly to blame for the break up, in my opinion. The way the liberal media constantly hammered the entire family would have been enough to make anyone throw up their hands and say "I can't stand it anymore!" Even Tiffany, who grew up on the west coast following Trump's divorce from her mother, Marla Maples, wasn't spared. She didn't know her father that well, but did attend her father's alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, before heading off to (and graduating from) Georgetown law school. She had joined him on the campaign trail and got to know him better. Because she had been part of the plot to elect the outsider, she was fair game. Her weight and the way she spoke were all scrutinized. They called her "chunky" when there was nothing wrong with her weight. She looks like any other healthy young woman. But when it came to the women of the Trump family, the media saved its most hurtful barbs for the First Lady. Her accent was mocked, despite the fact that liberals claim to be for immigrants. Gidi Hadim famously mocked her on an award show and the video of it went viral. Many said she could not speak proper English, despite the fact that Melania speaks five languages, including French, fluently. She always showed beauty, grace and elegance on the world stage. She has made her point when she's needed to, however. When the late Peter Fonda said that Barron (then only ten years old) should be locked in a cage with a pedophile, she followed her husband's lead and responded on Twitter. In her own gentle yet forceful way, she let Peter Fonda know how she felt about his comments. Then the press slammed her for defending her minor child, which any normal parent would do. When some liberal talking head testified at her husband's impeachment hearing and tried to make a joke at Barron's expense, saying "Trump can name his child Barron, but he can't make him one", she again responded. She had been the one to name him Barron, not his father. Barron was a name she liked. Trump had wanted to name him Joseph. The liberal talking head (whose name has escaped me) made an apology, but it rang hollow as most apologies from liberals do.

The President got busy presidenting right after his inauguration. One of the first things he started doing was cutting back on the regulations that were strangulating small businesses. He cut two for every new one that was made. He understood that some regulation was necessary. But the ones instigated by the Obama administration had been punitive, intended to put small businesses out of business. Obama had been in the habit of picking winners and loser throughout his presidency. Since he hated middle America and the average citizens who ran bakeries, bars and boutiques out in Flyover Country, he took every pain to take them down. They weren't real people to him. Just nasty Tea Baggers (as the liberal media often referred to Tea Party members). The liberal press howled that Trump was deliberately attempting to undo Obama's legacy. Obama's legacy was great for foreigners, but very bad for actual Americans. The disastrous NAFTA agreement had shipped millions of American jobs overseas or to Mexico. In case no one knows this, NAFTA stands for National Free Trade Agreement. But there was nothing fair about it when it came to the way it favored foreign interests and penalized American workers. Signed during the Clinton administration, succeeding Presidents had chances to dismantle it, but chose not to. But Trump, ever the no-nonsense businessman, knew these deals were bad for us. He got right to work on a new trade deal, which included Mexico and Canada. It was much more fair to us. We never knew that Canada had placed a 200% tariff on dairy products we shipped to Canada. Trump took care of that. Justin Trudeau howled in protest, but he signed the new deal nevertheless, perhaps sensing that this President was cut from different cloth than Obama had been. Once that was done, he got us out of that horrible Paris Climate Accord. This was supposed to encourage participating countries to lower their emissions and shrink their carbon footprint over time. But when it was read, only America was held to the high standard. China and India, the two largest polluters on the planet, would each get a ten year buffer period, where their emissions could increase before they were held to the same standard as the US. Now, the air in China is filthy, as anyone who has been there can attest. The people walk around in face masks because the air is unbreathable. In fact, China's air is so dirty that fully one-third of the air pollution in San Francisco comes from China. China wants the profits from a manufacturing economy, but unlike other countries (including the US), they have made no effort to clean up their air. The liberal press, of course, spun the story that Trump wanted everyone to breathe dirty air and drink filthy water. They went on daily diatribes about how the earth wouldn't survive four years with Trump at the helm. Meanwhile, date began to trickle out about just how much America had lowered its emissions and shrunk its carbon footprint without having to be in any kind of climate agreement. Businesses were making the necessary changes voluntarily because Trump had given them the means to. "What?!" the liberal media shrieked, "the people will do things on their own without a mandate from the government? How is this possible?" Because most Americans want clean air and water. They just don't want government telling them how to do it. 

If the liberal media was chagrined about Trump pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Accords and doing away with NAFTA, they went completely off their rockers when he began respectful negotiations with North Korea to end their missile testing policies. Trump, ironically, was doing more than any peacenick to broker peace between North and South Korea. He was also vowing to bring our soldiers home from the pointless Iraq war. He said in one of the debates with Hillary that we should never have been in Iraq, that it was a pointless war. If he was disliked before, he was hated now by the Left. The Iraq war was sacred. You weren't allowed to criticize that. Then someone found some old footage from an appearance Trump made in 2002 on "The Howard Stern Show" where he said he would favor a strike on Iraq if we ever made it. "Ha!" the media crowed, "Here's proof that Trump is a hypocrite!" Actually, it was simply proof that, in almost fifteen years of seeing our soldiers blown to smithereens in a war for which there was no real goal, Trump had changed his view on the Iraq war. Many people did, they were just too afraid to say so. 

Trump, in many ways, went out of his way to trigger the liberals and their lapdogs in the media. He would say things or do things that he knew they would explode over and then laugh at how dumb they were. Trump never went to Harvard or Yale. He was considered by the media to be uncouth and uneducated (despite a degree in finance from the Wharton School of Business). Sure, he'd had some failures. Name one businessman who hasn't. But where Trump really shined, not only as a businessman but as President, was his willingness to take risks. America was used to Presidents who talked a good game, but were actually Casper Milquetoasts when it came to action. Trump, like most businessmen, likes to win. That in itself made liberals uncomfortable. When he first announced his intention to run for President, he was asked if he thought he could win, to which he replied "I'm not in it to lose, that's for sure." What was this? A president who wanted to win? Liberals acted like this was all new to them. Hillary Clinton had callously and deliberately undercut her only rival for the Democrat nomination, Bernie Sanders and  the liberal media didn't even mew about it. But Trump taking a risk by asking the black community "What the hell do you have lose?" by voting for him, made them lose their minds. Every liberal pundit of color went on TV or took to Twitter to lambaste the Republican nominee as a "racist" who preyed on the fear blacks had of the White Man. It would have been laughable if it hadn't been so sad. Trump had received awards from Jesse Jackson and others for his "tireless efforts on behalf of the black community". Now, as an outsider President, he was a vicious racist and white supremacist. One of his first acts as President was to issue a pardon to nineteenth century boxer Jack Johnson, a man who had been accused of ugly crimes against white women and who had served time in jail for them. The President's pardon of a man who had been a victim of the racism of his time was seen as "pandering", yet Hillary's comments to a black radio host about keeping hot sauce in her purse wasn't. 

I guess since the Democrats have probably succeeded in ousting Trump from office (something they have been trying to do since Day One) I guess they are going to get the last laugh. Now, we should do what the Democrats did to Trump. We should open spurious and expensive investigations on Biden and his family. We should call his every decision into question; that is, until Kamala Harris is inserted as de facto president. I'm going to look back on the Trump years as some of the best years America ever enjoyed. If Biden can get the GDP anywhere near 33% it will be a miracle. But that won't happen. They will go on being outraged, yet demand that conservatives and Republicans act civilly. The sad part is that we probably will. Like the English schoolboy of 70 years ago who shakes the hand of the prefect who just caned him, we will go back to making nice with them, thinking it will make the next four years easier for us. But believe me, the outrage junkies have no intention of making anything easier for us. It's very sad that our country, once described by President Reagan as a shining city on a hill, has been reduced to a Third World banana republic--a place who counts the votes is more important than who voted.