Former Green Party candidate for president Jill Stein’s renewed claim to her fifteen minutes has taken the form of a demand for a recount of the popular vote in three states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. She has already managed to raise funds from enough sore losers to initiate recounts in the first two states.
Ultimately, this will turn out to be a fool’s errand for Stein and the throwing of good money after bad to those who have ponied up their hard-earned cash.
As to where the Left should be investing its energies at this point, one is tempted to quote the then-proud liberal collective voice back in 2008 and an in-your-face bumper sticker they went to the trouble of printing up:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Clearly, however, the Left isn’t about to end its tantrum. It is now receiving some urging from its punditocracy to stop whining, but the alternatives being proposed reveal that liberals remain as clueless as ever about why Hillary Clinton — in reality, a surrogate for Barack Obama — lost and why Donald Trump won.
Take as a case in point an article from The New Republic. In the interests of making his case, the author, Eric Sasson, coins a new term: outrage porn. “The outrage over Donald Trump’s election,” he writes, “has continued unabated on social media for more than two weeks now. It has been a useful and necessary exercise, allowing many on the left to voice their concerns, fears, and anger about the results.”
In describing the scope of the problem, he ntoes:
Several prominent newspapers abandoned their long-held impartiality to declare him [Trump] unfit for office. It didn’t work. The people who supported Trump knew the things he had said and done and were aware of his temperament — and still chose him to be leader of the free world.
You might reasonably wonder which prominent newspapers he is referring to since anyone who has followed the political scene at all in recent decades would be hard-pressed to name one major daily that has been historically impartial.
Nevertheless, after outlining the problem of indulging in political porn, Sasson offers what he imagines to be a practical solution for fighting the scourge that is a Trump administration. Never mind that those who spoke of opposing Barack Obama’s electon promise in 2008 to fundamentally transform America were branded traitors, racists, or both. Oblivious to the blatant hypocrisy of then versus now, Sasson presses on:
Better if we defeat Trump on the issues. Force him to defend his ideas and policies. The less attention paid to his Twitter feed, the better. We don’t have to reiterate to ourselves or to the rest of the world why Trump is unacceptable. Far better if we stand up to him by defending our values of decency, honesty, and equality. Far better, when his policy proposals seem at odds with his promises and will likely betray the very people who voted for him, that we point out these inconsistencies vociferously. We have to make the positive case for change from here forward.
A couple of interesting notions are packaged into that prescription. One is the belief that decency, honesty, and equality — as those virtues are processed by the liberal mind — are going to have any more relevance or “teeth” now than they did during the election. The other is Sasson’s “positive case for change.” He is apparently unaware that the election that just ended was a referundum on the “change” that Obama delivered in the past eight years.
If Sasson’s argument is the best that liberal thinkers can come up, they may as well all join the masses in their outrage porn.
