With the Holidays once again upon us, we are being bombarded with the annual rebroadcasts of Frank Capra’s classic, It’s a Wonderful Life.  The picture is regarded as an uplifting message of hope.  “No man is poor who has friends.”  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike the movie, I have enjoyed it many times.  However, at first blush, you have to wonder just what’s so uplifting about it.  After all, look at the subjects the movie covers.  Death, bankruptcy, envy, frustration, embezzlement, clinical depression, and attempted suicide.  Holiday fun for the whole family.  In recent years, there was even talk of a sequel.  In the 1946 edition, the hero, George Bailey, endures continual adversity and comes out on top, but you have to wonder how things would be different if the incidents in the movie happened today.  George Bailey is the classic guy who never catches a break; we all know a George Bailey.  The Bailey family runs the Bailey Building & Loan, a business that builds low cost homes and provides financing to home buyers of modest means.  It is perpetually on the brink of insolvency.  Just as he’s about to leave for college, George’s father dies and he has to forego college to run the company.  George’s brother Harry and friend Sam Wainwright go to college and they become wealthy.  Bad luck for George.  A financial institution in the hands of a High School graduate?  Yeah, that could happen today.  George gets married to Mary.  The day he is to leave on his honeymoon, there’s a run on the bank, and he has to use his own vacation money to keep it from failing.  Bad luck for George.  George comes out with no honeymoon and $2 in his pocket.  He presses on.  Today, the Government would bail out the Building & Loan, then take it over, turning Bailey Park into Title VIII federal housing, complete with high-rise, and high-crime, housing projects.  In the depths of the Depression, George is making $45 a week ($2,300) a year.  Nasty Mr. Potter offers George $20,000 a year to go to work for him.  That’s the equivalent of $340,000 today.  George, the Schnook, turns Potter down.  Fast forward to today.  When Mary finds out George passed up his chance to enter the 1%, she divorces him and runs away with Sam Wainwright.  But in original movie, George presses on.  It all comes to a head on Christmas Eve 1945, when George’s Uncle Billy, a Building & Loan employee, manages to lose an $8,000 cash deposit by unwittingly handing it to Mr. Potter.  Just then, the bank examiner turns up and the missing funds are enough to bankrupt the Building & Loan and result in a prosecution for embezzlement.  In 1946, George takes the rap for his Uncle Billy, who everybody has always known is a bumbling, senile drunk.  In today’s world, things would be different.  George would throw Uncle Billy under the bus in a Seneca Falls, New York minute.   George would still be prosecuted, though, for permitting an incompetent to handle the firm’s money.  What about the missing $8,000?  Potter swears out a warrant against George for theft.  When George’s friends and neighbors raise the money and repay it, the warrant is torn up.  Maybe in Hollywood, but not in the real world.  If you rob the bank and your friends agree to repay the money, you’re still guilty of robbery, so you still get locked up.  Then, while George is locked up awaiting trial, Uncle Billy would sue George for failing to accommodate him under the ADA by sending him to rehab.  He then would testify against George at the trial.  On second thought, in today’s world, none of this would have happened.  A bank examiner, a government employee, working on Christmas Eve?  Not likely.   Anyhow, in the movie, faced with conviction for a crime he did not commit, and the embarrassment that would entail, George does what any reasonable, hard-working bank executive would do; he lashes out as his family, runs away, gets dead drunk, drives his car into a tree, and then attempts suicide.  Today things would be different.  First of all, embarrassment would not be a factor, as we have evolved (or is it devolved?)  into a society without morals or standards, and thus, without shame.  And $8,000?  What’s the big deal?  Michael Milkin got away with at least $400 million, and he’s redeemed himself.  Today, George Bailey’s bank shortage would be the least of his worries.  Nowadays, drunken driving, and leaving the scene of an accident with property damage is much more serious than a simple run of the mill embezzlement.  The Mother’s Against Drunk Driving would picket the Building & Loan.  Of course, once George reveals that Mr. Martini knew he was drunk and kept serving him drinks, and that he thinks he never was born and has been speaking to an angel, he’ll be well on his way to a successful defense of intoxication, diminished capacity, insanity, or all of the above.  Then he will sue Martini for serving him, thereby getting back the money he lost.  Now, you may consider my interpretation of It’s a Wonderful Life to be a bit cynical.  I cite you to the definition of a cynic from Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary.  According to Bierce, a cynic is “a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.”  I have always been so afflicted.  Merry Christmas to all.

We thought that when we voted on November 8, we settled the question of who is going to be the 45th President of the United States.  I remember the networks finally admitting that Trump had won, about 2:30 a.m. on November 9th.  I remember Hillary calling Trump to concede.  I remember Trump coming out after 3 a.m., with poor 10 year old Barron Trump valiantly trying to stay awake on the stage.  Then, later on November 9th, Hillary, Bill and her cohorts, all dressed in purple (the color of mourning) made an appearance so that Hillary could give a farewell to her heartbroken troops.  These events gave every indication that the election was, indeed, over.  Not so.  First, the Left whined about Hillary winning the popular vote.       Then, Jill Stein raised money for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.   Surprising no one, the recounts came to nothing, except, they did expose Democrat voter fraud in Detroit, where 37 districts reported more votes than the number of registered voters.  Can you guess who they were for?  Although they enjoy reality shows on TV, the liberals apparently have real problems with actual reality.  They simply could not and cannot accept the reality that they were rejected and Trump really won.  Witness their underhanded attempts to cultivate so-called “faithless electors” who might ignore the election results in their State.  You get that?  These nincompoops, who tell us it’s the popular vote that should count to elect the President, want electors to disregard the results of the popular vote in their States and vote for Hillary instead.  Oh, hypocrite, thy name is Liberal.  And now, still more leftist salvos against Trump.   Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich has warned that “a dark cloud of illegitimacy hangs over the Trump presidency.”  This is because the Russians “interfered” in the election by “favoring Trump over Hillary.”  How? They “exposed troves of secret, sometimes embarrassing, personal communication involving Clinton and internal planning by the Democratic National Committee.”   At the same time, they failed to expose any of Trump’s embarrassing emails.  Ah, several things.  First, if the Democrats lost because the truth about their myriad crimes, schemes and manipulations got out and turned off enough of their usual voters to give Trump a chance, why is that a bad thing?  The only shame is that it took a foreign country, instead of  so-called journalists to expose these scandals.  Secondly, maybe the Russians didn’t hack Trump’s emails because Trump never uses email.  Just a wild guess.  In any case, there’s no need to hack Trump to get embarrassing stuff because Trump regularly Tweets out plenty of embarrassing material on his own.  No matter how outrageous his rants, it didn’t matter.  But there’s no evidence that Russia did anything?   That’s just the point, they’re sneaky.  Anyway, we have indisputable evidence.  Hillary didn’t win.  Case closed.  The result of the election is the evidence.  I can prove it.  On October 19, Il Duce Obama said, “no serious person could rig an election in the U.S.  I’ve never seen in my lifetime or in modern political history any presidential candidate trying to discredit the elections and the election process before votes have even taken place.”  Trump should “get over it,” Obama advised.  Since the election, Obama has launched an investigation into Russian hacking of the election.  Exactly how one can “hack” an election is unclear, I suspect even to Obama.  A writer for the ultra-leftwing Huffington Post has even called for postponement of the Electoral College vote, scheduled for December 19.  Why?  Seth Abramson, Attorney; Assistant Professor at University of New Hampshire; Poet; Editor, Best American Experimental Writing; Editor, Metamodern Studies.  A Professor of Meta-what?  Metamoderna works towards a new kind of society.  A global government, a 30-hour working week (I thought Obamacare already gave us that), for 100% organic agriculture, and meat-free days.  Sounds like great fun, huh?  Abramson has three reasons:    1. Foreign governments should play no role in the outcome of American elections.  2. No person should ascend to the presidency due to the interference of a hostile foreign government.  3. We have absolutely no idea whether a foreign government played a role in the outcome of the recent general election, and therefore we have no idea whether a political candidate is about to ascend to the presidency due to the interference of a hostile foreign government.  I agree with points 1 and 2, and with the first clause of point 3.  We have absolutely no idea whether a foreign government played a role in the outcome of the recent general election because there’s nothing to see.  The Electors meet on December 19th under a law, passed in 1948, which sets the date on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December.  Congress could change it, right?  Sure.  So postpone it till when?  The Professor assures us that the White House has confirmed that an investigation into Russian hacking can be completed by January 20.  Right.  You know what?  If Jim Comey does it the same way he investigated Hillary’s 560,000 emails, it could be done before December 19th.  Then again, maybe we should just take heed of Obama’s pre-election wisdom, and the loony Left should just get over it.  But they can’t.  So stop the presses!  Why even have the Electoral College vote.  Don’t give me that Constitution crap again.  What are you, a purist?  Let’s just say that Hillary is the President and leave it at that.  Election?  We don’t need no stinking election!

Donald’s Trump’s election victory came almost a month ago and the Left remains seriously unhinged, and on the brink of insanity.  All I can say about that is, “Oh baby!  Is this great or what?” Throughout the campaign, Hillary and her left-wing PAC henchman (henchpersons?) spent millions on advertising, trashing Trump 24 hours a day.  Her campaign alone outspent Trump more that 2 to 1.  For its part, the Media took up the cudgel and beat Trump with it day after day.  He’s unqualified.  He’s too dangerous.  He’s a sexist.  He’s a bigot.  He’s a racist.  And he’s crazy too.  On October 21, 2016, even Peggy Noonan joined the chorus, writing a column which mused that “a sane Donald Trump” could have easily won the election which she that day predicted he would lose by a wide margin.  And then Donald Trump won.  Donald Trump, who the “experts” said had no ground game and no organization, and who spent less than half the amount spent by the Democrats.  After the fact, the Democrat website Politco complained that Trump was helped out by $2 billion in free airtime on television networks.  Picture that.  The same networks that bashed Trump all day, every day actually helped get him elected.  If Politico is right, then Trump got the last laugh.  The same Media A-holes who scoffed when Trump said he’d build a wall and make the Mexicans pay for it, actually elected him President, and he made them paid for it.  So Trump won and now the Democrats are on suicide watch.  They are delusional.  Democrats cry, “There can’t be anything wrong with us, so it must be the electoral system that’s wrong.”  What did you say?  The system is rigged?  Where have I heard that before?  When Trump said it, Hillary said he was nuts.  I guess she changed her mind.  To risk repeating myself, if Democrats didn’t stand for hypocrisy, they would stand for nothing at all.  On the same day Peggy Noonan was longing for a “sane Donald Trump,” Hillary was on the attack.  She told Ohio voters that Donald Trump is threatening America’s democracy by not promising to accept the results of the presidential election.  “We know, in our country, the difference between leadership and dictatorship.  And the peaceful transition of power is something that sets us apart.”  You get that?  Real, serious leaders accept the vote of the people and only dictators stand in the way of the peaceful transition of power.  So, having lost the election, what are Hillary and her fellow (or is is filly?) leftists doing?  They’re trying to stand in the way of the peaceful transition of power.  First, they’re complaining that Hillary won the popular vote, so the Electoral College is unfair.   Forgetting, or perhaps never having been taught that the States created the federal government, and not the other way around, they fail to comprehend that the essence of the federal government is, well, federalism.  That is, that the system is designed so that even the voters in small States are important.  Trump won 306 electoral votes to Hillary’s 232.  At last count, Hillary was some 2.5 million ahead of Trump, spurring leftist outrage.  Her plurality is, of course, meaningless, but if the leftists want to play, let’s play.  The votes of just two States, California and New York, gave Hillary a plurality of almost 5 million votes, so let’s just take those States out of the mix.  Subtracting all the votes for Hillary and Trump in those States, Trump won 30 of the remaining 48 States, had a plurality of 2.4 million votes, and 306 electoral votes to 148, or 67% of the votes.  The purpose of the Electoral College is to prevent the overwhelming votes of a few big States from thwarting the will of the voters in many smaller States.  It worked.  But not for Democrats.  The Party that blasted Trump as a crazy dictator is hard at work trying to convince Electors in a number of States to ignore the result of the elections in those States, and their oaths, and in some cases, the law, and elect Hillary instead.  They know it won’t work, but they need to weaken Trump before he becomes President.  Shameful hypocrites.  And then there are the recounts.  This is even wackier than the Electoral College ploy.  Jill Stein ran representing the Green Party.  She polled a whopping 1% of the vote, a little over 1 million nationwide.  Jill Stein raised only $2.5 million for her campaign in the year and a half before the election,  but in the last three weeks, she has now raised over $6.5 million from outraged leftists to finance vote recounts in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.  Trump’s victories in those States gave him 46 electoral votes and the presidency, so his victories in those States must be illegal.  Stein (and Hillary) say they have computer experts who claim the voting machines in those States can be hacked by computer hackers, who probably are Russians.  Now, mind you, there is absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing, and none of the voting machines are networked, so these tricky Russkies would have to gain access to each machine individually in the three States.  For leftists, of course, the absence of evidence itself is suspicious, and it proves that the scheme is all the more insidious.   No, this is not from John le Carre,’ they are serious.  So, to recap, Leftists gave $2.5 million for the election, but $6.5 million to overturn its results.  Now, that’s real leadership.  And for what?  In Pennsylvania, Stein got 48,912 votes, putting her just 2,864,029 votes behind Trump.  I read an article about the recount, written by someone from the National Constitution Center, explaining that Trump is “about 50,000 votes ahead of Hillary in Pennsylvania.”  “About” is a bit imprecise, as Trump actually is ahead by 68,000, so I hope the National Constitution Center won’t be doing that recount.  Stein finished behind Trump by 2,229,105 votes in Michigan and by 1,372,710 in Wisconsin.  So, once again, a recount for what?  For one purpose and one purpose only, to disrupt the peaceful transition of power and delegitimize the next President.  Hillary said only dictators did that.  She was right.

They say only the good die young, so it should come as no surprise that Fidel Castro made it to age 90 before he finally croaked.  Of course, his passing gave rise to torrents of praise from the Left.  Once again proving that, if they didn’t stand for hypocrisy, they’d stand for nothing at all, the same good Liberal comrades who call Donald Trump a fascist, a tyrant and a racist, heaped adulation on a totalitarian Communist dictator, who has murdered tens of thousands, imprisoned many more, forced his people into abject poverty, and whose policies have caused more than 10% of the Cuban population to flee the island nation.  But Leftists see none of this.  What does Cuba produce?  Cigars.  I thought Leftists were opposed to smoking.  The Pope likes to lecture the United States about social justice, but he referred to Fidel as a “deceased dignitary.”  Pope Francis apparently is unconcerned for the dignity of the thousands of political prisoners rotting in Castro’s cages, but I suppose Marxist birds of a feather must flock together.  The British Labour Party leader called Fidel “an internationalist, and champion of social justice.”  Castro was an internationalist.  He sent his henchman, Ernesto “Che” Guevara de la Serna throughout Latin America to sow the seeds of revolution.  Che even spread Fidel’s “social justice” to the Congo and Rwanda, where thousands more innocent people were brutally butchered by military dictators supported by Cuba.  Despite the best efforts of the CIA and U.S. Special Forces to see that Che remained a live failure, instead of a dead martyr, the Bolivian government had other ideas, so when they caught Che inciting revolution in their country in 1967, they shot the son of a bitch.  His death inspires T-shirt sales to this day.  But I digress.  True to form, the media fell all over itself praising Castro.  It’s strange that media people claim the right to tell us what is good and what is evil, yet they never take notice of the evils of Communism.  Journalists denounce American elections that don’t go their way, but find no fault in a man who abolished all elections in 1959, and who would throw each and every one of them in prison for the slightest criticism.  No wonder Il Duce Obama admired Fidel Castro so much.  The New York Times crowed that Castro had “transformed Cuba.”  There is truth in this.  When he seized power in 1959, Cuba was an admittedly imperfect capitalist nation, which, like every other nation on Earth, featured both rich and poor.  Cuba’s GDP in 1959 was greater than those of most other Latin American nations, and greater than the GDP’s of Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece.  But its former leader was Fulgencio Batista, a military dictator, and the Left welcomes only Communist dictators.  Enter Fidel Castro, a Communist military dictator who set out to “fundamentally transform” Cuba.  Does that sound familiar?  Cuba’s GDP today puts it behind every economy in Latin America save Haiti and Nicaragua, two other hellholes.   The workers were being oppressed by Batista right?  Wrong.  Before the Castro revolution, the average hourly wage of a Cuban worker exceeded that of workers in France and Germany.  In Fidel’s worker’s paradise, Cuba has achieved the income equality sought by American Leftists like Bernie Sanders.  Everyone in Cuba is equally destitute and miserable.  Cuba has free education, and there is no shortage of jobs for recent college graduates there.  They are forced to work for the government at $9 a month.  Canada’s Justin Trudeau praised Castro as a “legendary orator” and for “significantly improving healthcare.”  To that I say, Hitler was a legendary orator, and how did that turn out?  But there is great healthcare in Cuba, isn’t there? Well, not so much.   Cuban doctors are paid about $30 a month.  But the cost of living is lower, right?  No.  A gallon of milk is $7, and a pound of potatoes costs a day’s pay.  But they have free healthcare, right?  Not so much.  Cuba exports doctors and nurses to Venezuela in return for oil.  Good hospitals are reserved for the elites, and visiting foreigners who can pay in hard currency.  For the average Cuban, the hospitals lack the minimum requirements needed to take care of their patients.  Most of these facilities are filthy, and patients have to bring their own towels, bed sheets and pillows, or they would have to lay down on dirty bare mattresses stained with blood and other body fluids.  Antibiotics are among the least expensive drugs in America.  In Cuba, public pharmacies are nearly empty, and antibiotics are available only on the black market.  In short, Cuba is a society in which the people must do without basic consumer goods available almost everywhere else on Earth.  I’m tempted to say, at least Castro, like Mussolini, made the trains run on time, but due to shortages of spare parts and fuel, they don’t.  Cubans lack the basic human rights that Leftists try to tell us are lacking here in America.  Add to this a failed Communist economic system that even Cuba’s former sponsors, the Soviets, finally had to admit didn’t work, and you have the recipe for the disaster that is Cuba.  The only thing Cuba got from its association with the Soviet Union was more poverty, some military equipment, and a chance to set off a worldwide nuclear war, which they almost did in 1962.  Simply put, Cuba is North Korea with palm trees.  In the final analysis, you can judge conditions in a nation by whether people are flocking to it, or are fleeing from it.  Before Castro, Cuba was a place that attracted European immigrants.  After Castro, millions have fled, preferring the prospect of drowning on a leaky raft to continued life in Castro’s transformed Cuba.  As a result, I say, adios Fidel, you should burn in Hell.

Democrats and other fellow traveler leftists are still in the throes of grief and trauma following the election of Donald Trump.  Apparently, these people actually believed their own press releases.  That’s scary.  To paraphrase a Geico commercial, politicians lie; it’s what they do.  Responsible people understand this, and know enough to discount the lies.  Leftists, however,  are true believers.  So when Il Duce Obama told them, “you can keep your doctor,” they believed it, and even when it became apparent that this wasn’t true, they still believed the B.S.   That’s sad.  Eight years ago, when Obama was elected, he adopted the usual “tolerant” Democrat tone with Republicans.  When they told Obama they wanted input into the proposed health care law, Obama said, “Elections have consequences.  I won.  Go away and be quiet.”  Ah yes, the politics of inclusion.  So when commentators asked, after November 8, what should liberals do now that Donald Trump has been elected, my advice was simple, “You can do what you told me I had to do eight years ago,  shut the f*** up, and move along.”  But that wasn’t good enough for the disaffected leftists.  No.  These fragile little snowflakes have tender sensibilities.  They believed their own B.S.,  and of course, whatever a leftist believes is, by definition, the truth.  The “experts” assured the Left that the changing demographics of America made it almost impossible for a Republican to win the presidency.  The upper mid-West was a Democrat fire-wall which no Republican could breach.  Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan were safe Democrat States, and Iowa was leaning to the Democrats.  What’s more, Obama had won Ohio the past two cycles, and no Republican could win without Ohio.  All good Progressives understood that it was time for a female President, and it was time to get ready for Hillary.  After all, it was her “turn” right?  Wrong.  Enter Donald Trump.  He was all wrong for the “new America.”  The Republican “autopsy” report after the 2012 election taught us that no Republican could possibly be elected without pandering to illegal immigrants and treating all Hispanic voters as proponents of open borders.  Wrong.  Trump called Mexican immigrants criminals and he got 2% more Hispanic votes than Caspar Milquetoast Romney, who went out of his way not to offend any group.  Trump then won Iowa by 10% and Ohio by 9% and added Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, and thereby won 306 electoral votes and the presidency. (As I write this Trump is 13,000 votes ahead in Michigan with 100% of the vote counted but we’re told it’s still “too close to call”).  Leftists simply can’t accept Trump’s victory.  Hillary won the popular vote, didn’t she?  Well, yes, she’s 1.6 million ahead nationally.  Of course, she came out of California, where illegal aliens are allowed to vote, with a 3.4 million vote plurality.  But it’s not fair!  To that I say, read the Constitution!  Read the what?  It’s not fair.  We knew we should win, therefore we should win.  What is this Constitution of which you speak?  O.K., maybe Hillary should be named the Alcalde of California.  Hillary’s supporters are apoplectic, though.  “Say it isn’t so!”  It is so.  Fragile little snowflakes on college campuses are inconsolable.  Now this fits into the “you can’t make this shit up” category; colleges actually have cancelled the tests of students who are just too upset by the election to take a test.  College administrators have brought in grief counselors and therapy dogs to help students cope with the shocking prospect of a President Donald Trump.  One college even offered a Play-Dough therapy course for afflicted students.  And it’s not just the students.  At the University of Virginia, even some faculty members are protesting the University President’s use of a quote from Thomas Jefferson.  After all, he was a slave owner.  When they admit them to the school, don’t they tell the students who started the University?  I guess not.  Now I’m worried the students at Washington & Lee University may find out the “Lee” is Robert E. Lee.  Uh, oh.  But these pampered and privileged students just can’t seem to accept the results of the election.  “Oh, woe is us, the majority ruled.  That’s not supposed to happen.  Is it?”  Now, I’ve long said that if Democrats didn’t stand for hypocrisy, they’d stand for nothing at all, and they proved me right once again.  Some of these same fragile little snot-nosed college snowflakes, who have been so traumatized by democracy that they shouldn’t be expected to go to school are in the streets of many of our cities throwing rocks, and other solid objects, at police officers.  That’s right.  And it’s because they represent the interest of the poor, right?  Well, that’s wrong too.  These affluent, self-important, pampered little college shits think they know what’s good for the poor “working” people they claim to champion, but there’s one problem; they have never met one of them.  While protestors paid by George Soros march and burn, carrying “Not my President” signs, an African-American journalist actually went to Harlem and took the trouble to talk to some of its residents.  While none of these people admitted to voting for Trump, none of them rejected him him out of hand.  One man said, “Hillary was weak and she talked about other countries, and we live here.  Trump wants to help veterans and secure Medicare, if he does that, he’s my man.”  That certainly sounds reasonable, but it’s too reasonable for the Democrats.  The Democrat Party is teetering on the edge of madness.  The repugnant Chuck Schumer is vowing to block all Trump appointments and initiatives.  Elections have consequences, right?  Somebody better make sure Mitch McConnell knows this.  And the Democrat Party is about to double down on crazy by making Keith Ellison, a radical left-winger with ties to Hamas, its Party’s chairman.  That should sew up the votes of Midwest working men.  The Democrats are unwilling to accept that they lost because America has no use for their radical left-wing policies.  But don’t listen to me Democrats.  No matter how dark it gets, keep pulling down the shades.