As we approach the four-month anniversary of the election, I’ve realized that along with screwing up the economy, foreign policy, health care and being able to declare a Best Picture winner at the Oscars, the left has also screwed up the stages of grief.
I was a young man when I first heard of the Kubler-Ross grief cycle. I was riding a lousy little Yamaha 400 then, with aspirations to move up to a Harley, but you can imagine my excitement that I could end up on a Kubler-Ross! I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but it had to be German. And a “grief cycle!?” Can you imagine the reactions of the young women in my small Midwestern town when I cruised by in a leather jacket on one of those? I sure could. I figured I’d put some loud pipes on mine, and paint some flames on the gas tank.
Imagine my disappointment when I found out that Kubler-Ross was an academic, and the cycle of grief had to do with how we deal with loss. You know the process: first denial, then anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.
Not that I was thinking about any of that on election night. I went into the evening thinking that Hillary would win, mostly because my fellow citizens had broken my heart in 2012 when they re-elected Obama. (I could see voting for him in ’08, when he was young and new and biracial, and McCain was old and cranky and bipartisan. But after those 4 years, and $6 trillion in new debt with nothing to show for it, and against the manifestly decent and competent Mittster? Ugh.)
But then the glass ceiling fell on Hillary like the house falling on the Wicked Witch of the East, and I shifted into the Simpson-Bailey giddiness cycle.
Named after me and Jimmy Stewart’s character in It’s a Wonderful Life, the stages are as follows:
1. scotch
2. dawning euphoria,
3. running through downtown in the snow screaming maniacally (“Yeah! Merry Christmas movie house! Merry Christmas red states! Yyyeeeaaahhhh!”)
4. Conan’s “What is best in life?” meditation (“To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, to hear the lamentations of their metrosexuals in the Javits Center.”), and then
5. a schadenfreude-induced reaction about which you are supposed to call your doctor if it lasts more than 4 hours.
Good times.
Anyway, that night I saw the Dems head into their cycle. Their denial lasted for days, after which even the most die-hard, true believers had to admit that the Trump-ocalypse was upon them. Then their strong suit: anger. All Trump voters are racists, the electoral college is an abomination, break out the vaginal headgear and let slip the dogs of war, etc.
Then bargaining: a dozen empty-headed celebrities make a video pleading with the electoral college members to go faithless, and vote for Hillary. Depression was there too, but was hard to detect, since it is pretty much a default setting for many leftists. (If you believed that the climate is going to kill you, and so are guns, and so is our health care system, and free market capitalism and red meat and Steve Bannon and micro-aggressions and almost literally everything else… You’d be depressed too.)
But here’s where the Dems get stuck: they never get to acceptance. They keep spinning their wheels in the anger phase, and that’s not good for anyone except professional politicians (who make their living and perpetually fund raise off of it).
I was initially inclined to cut my Democrat and leftist friends a lot of slack when it comes to their Trump hatred, because I think he ran as an unusually acerbic and insulting candidate. His tweets often sound like something from a high schooler, he speaks without a filter more than any president should, he’s almost as narcissistic as Obama or Hillary, etc.
But as I’ve watched Trump make some good decisions and good appointments and a great SCOTUS nomination, and the Dems go into an ever-escalating cycle of anger since the election, I realized something I should have always known: it doesn’t matter who the Republican/conservative is. The left is going to smear and attack and spew bile at any conservative who runs for office, and any decision he or she makes. Their anger has nothing to do with its object.
Consider that they’ve not just tried to eviscerate more abrasive conservatives like Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich or Ted Cruz; they’ve reacted the same way toward mushy moderates like John McCain and Jeb Bush. They’ve driven the Hitler comparison into the ground, applying it to every Republican president and presidential candidate in my lifetime. (Another pet peeve of mine: Hitler heads a socialist workers party, creates an all-powerful government and exalts the collective, and the left calls him a right-winger! See Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism for a detailed run-down of how idiotic that smear is.) They ran tv ads showing a Paul Ryan imitator pushing a grandma off a cliff in a wheelchair!
In 2012, Joe Biden warned black Americans that Mitt Romney’s Republicans “probably want to put ya’ll back in chains.” Mitt Romney! Maybe the best example was their pre-printed signs before Trump picked Gorsuch for SCOTUS. If you’re holding a sign that says “I oppose” with a blank after it, into which you are going to print whichever name Trump chooses, you’ve lost your mind.
That’s how I think of the professional protesting left: they’re like Will Farrell’s dimwitted anchorman. They’ll say anything that comes across their teleprompter. If the Koch brothers were anything like they are cracked up to be, they could have hacked into a DNC conference call with instructions, and a small army of far-left dopes would have been standing on the steps outside the Supreme Court holding signs over their heads which read, “Go f**k yourself, San Diego!”
I don’t think the left realizes how self-defeating their knee-jerk smears and fury are, and how much they turn off all but the farthest left fringe. On the other hand, maybe they do – but they’re just so darned angry that they can’t help themselves.
Either way, they’ve got to get a handle on their emotions, or it’s going to be an even longer four years for them. And if they keep up this level of outrage every day from now until November of 2020, the predictable result will be their worst nightmare — Trump II: the re-Trumpening.
Martin Simpson 