Donald Trump won the election. Left-wing pollsters are embarrassed, Europeans are appalled, and American liberals are aghast. "How could this happen?" "Why us?" "This is so terrible." There are angry mobs in the streets.

     How do you think we conservatives felt in 2008?

     In 2008 the American left elected Obama, a total unknown. Without telling his name, birthplace, or background and with a commitment to continuing bad economic policies, he won the election (with maybe a little help from voter fraud and other hijinks in Pennsylvania and Florida). Democrats also won both houses of Congress so the triplet of President-House-Senate was D-D-D. The last D-D-D was Bill Clinton's first congress and before that Jimmy Carter, both devastating economic and political times for America.

     The liberals were insufferable. "We won fair-and-square, you lost, now live with it," was all over the Internet.

     Conservatives were scared. The Democrats had awful economic policies with awful results going back as far as my history classes could remember. They were also appallingly corrupt as corporatism was a flagship feature of the Democrats by then with bailouts and stimulus packages that didn't bail anybody out and didn't stimulate anything. Michelle Obama even had a $300,000/year no-show job, one of the most-corrupt moments of a presidential candidate. Whatever level of politically-correct enforcement there was in colleges and corporations was likely to expand enormously with strong liberal control and a racially-sensitive president. The candidate himself referred to "fifty-seven states" of America, not a nice slip-up for Jews to hear in a rising tide of left-wing anti-semitism. Just think how scary that was for conservatives.

     What was our political response? There were no riots. There were character assaults on the new president but mostly it was about what awful stuff was going to happen and what we should do about it. The Republicans worked aggressively within the same system that created the Obama presidency to prevent as much of the damage as they could. They didn't throw a temper tantrum.

     Conservatives were scared, and were right to be scared. The first Obama congress was D-D-D and it was devastating. I have anecdotal stories to match the horrifying economic changes and job-market contraction. Even the Capitol Steps said nothing bad or funny about Obama. (They claim it was lack of material rather than fear, but I don't believe it.) Forty-five "czars" were appointed to replace elected officials and federal power expanded insanely. In spite of the Tenth Amendment prohibition, programs appeared for government-supported healthcare, mortgage supplements for financially-wayward homeowners, and even Michelle's "healthy" school lunches enforced by fines. That this government expansion violated both spirit and letter of our Constitution got totally lost in the political melee.

DENIAL ANGER BARGAINING DEPRESSION ACCEPTANCE

     In 1975 I realized that big government wasn't good for people and by 1980 I realized there was an ideological connection between American progressives and nasty, genocidal despots like Stalin and Hitler, but I treated those as likeness of mind rather than actual communicative collaboration. When Pete Seeger died in 2014 I learned he actually raised money for Stalin, Hitler, and Ho Chi Min. This wasn't just sympathy, this was out-and-out support. I talked to formerly-liberal folks older than I am and found out that, sure, "everybody [liberal] supported Stalin as a communist, they supported Hitler as a supporter of Stalin, and then Stalin turned bad and they supported Hilter to defeat him." They didn't see evil, they saw hope and change and unity. The progressive-Democrat history is pro-slavery, pro-Jim-Crow, pro-Ku-Klux-Klan, and pro-a-lot-of-other-bad-stuff going right up to the present. (Democrats familiar with their history talk of some kind of D-R switch where the racist-segregation people became Republicans and the good guys became the Democrats of today, but I haven't seen any switching of visible spokes-people. Joan Baez was a Democrat and Pete Seeger fan in Woodstock days (1969 August) and she was still both of those when I saw her in 2016 November. Other famous liberal-Democrats from 1966 haven't switched sides either.) So the Democrats who won in 2008 were the Democrats who supported segregation, tyranny, and economic failure against Republican opposition. (Check out "Hillary's America to see a biased-but-factual exposition of some of this history.) Imagine what it was like to see the Clinton campaign unfold knowing the terrible history of the party likely to win.

Where did this notion of Trump and misogyny or racism come from? Donald Trump has been a denizen of the New-York-City melting pot for seventy years and dealt successfully with people, something that doesn't happen without accepting them. How anybody can look at the Clintons' treatment of women without disgust boggles me. Trump isn't the problem here. I'm still anti-racism and pro-gay-marriage as I have been for decades. No matter who is in office, I'll continue to work to keep the government out of our lives in those areas. Here's the cool bit. Mitt Romney was up against the same Democrats and the same news and entertainment media as Donald Trump. Romney was clearly a better candidate than Trump. So what does that tell us? It tells us that Hillary was an awful candidate and was widely perceived as an awful candidate. That their pollsters were so blind-sided by the actual election tells us something is really wrong with our news media.

     Surprise! The Democrats didn't win. The Republican party got full control in 2016, President-House-Senate. The last R-R-R period was George W. Bush's middle two congresses and things were pretty good then. The defeated Clintons had around $200M in their "Widows and Orphans" bribe fund and had a nasty habit of having opponents killed. (The Clinton fund is hundreds of times more corrupt in sheer magnitude than any previous corruption in a presidential candidate.) The candidate who won, Donald Trump, was a long-time businessman, not necessarily a nice person, but somebody who had been in the public eye for decades. Even without his party's support, he managed to wangle the nomination during the primaries and then to win the election. Prospects for economic and political recovery aren't perfect, but they're pretty good, Trump has the appeal that he's from outside the corrupt circle of political kickbacks, and he's rich enough not to need the money.

     The party of abolitionism and Civil Rights got into power. The party of Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln, and Susan B. Anthony got into power. The party that stood against the hateful racism of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and Black Lives Matter got into power. The party that resisted the tyranny of Hitler, Mao, and Arafat got into power. The party that fought the economic devastation of communism and socialism got into power. A platform that threatens to remove the assaults on livelihood and life (taxes and Obamacare) and to stop pandering to pseudo-science got into power.

     What is the political response this time around? First is a flood of character assaults on Trump, more of the media fantasy of Trump the evil-doer. There are riots and demonstrations, a full-blown temper tantrum. Clearly working within the system isn't acceptable when liberals aren't winning.

     Liberals smugly and santimoneously stuck conservatives in 2008 with a foreboding administration that lived down to expectations. Fine, we get it, they won and we lost. This time we conservatives won. Now we have an administration clearly better than theirs with some likelihood of real economic and political recovery. Is "sucking it up" too much to ask of liberals?