In discussion (when the whining din of crybabies throwing temper tantrums was soft enough to have a discussion), I've mentioned six reasons to prefer Donald over Hillary in this last election, economics, racism, tyranny, anti-semitism, pseudo-science, and corruption. Let's explore these in a bit more detail.

     DEFINING THE RACE: Donald Trump versus the Clintons.

     First, as a strong-feeling libertarian, I was disappointed in Gary Johnson's run for President. He had the best chance of winning the White House of any Libertarian candidate and he had the hearts of tens of percent of the voters. He had to win their minds and he didn't do that. It wasn't just not knowing about Aleppo, it was his whole presentation. On "Sixty Minutes" he made himself look like a doofus.

I have to wonder about our news media. I'm sure they have always had some bias, but this is ridiculous. It's as if somebody mentioned red wounds on the battlefield and the news reporter attributed it to strawberry jam. If Hollywood actors want to be whiny crybabies throwing a temper tantrum over an election, then, well, it's their right. I suppose the news media have the same right, but they also have a responsibility to be more honest. • Misogyny in politics should make us think of the Clintons, Bill for treating women that way and Hillary for being complicit. Millions of women marched to protest a media-created illusion. Donald Trump has been in the public eye for decades with no suggestion that he forced any woman to do anything against her will. Being driven to expensive dates in nice cars isn't harassment. • Impeachment should make us think of a President allowing his Secretary of State to take hundreds of millions of dollars in personal bribes for state favors. • Russia should make us think of them paying more than $140 million to the Clinton Foundation for uranium and other under-the-table help. • Racism should make us think of an organization called "Black Lives Matter" that panders violently to the grossest anti-white urges, a follow-on to the Black Panthers who took the torch of hate from the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Donald Trump has been in the public eye for decades with no suggestion of racism. Only when he ran against the Democrats did that suddenly appear. • Non-disclosure should make us think not of tax returns but of a presidential candidate who refused to reveal his personal identification or even his birthplace. For eight years we had a President whose name we still don't know. • Anti-semitism and destruction of Jewish artifacts should make us think of the hate of the progressive left or religions vandals supported by the progressive left. They weren't right-wing Trump supporters who painted swastikas and destroyed Jewish cemeteries.

     Second, it wasn't Donald versus Hillary, it was Donald Trump versus the Clintons. Bill Clinton has been an active participant in United-States politics. (Wasn't he President himself a few years back?) His attitudes and behavior are important, more important than Michelle Obama or Laura Bush or Melenia Trump. The Clinton Foundation is a joint effort of William Jefferson and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

     DEFINING THE PLATFORMS: Republican versus Democrat

     I feel it's right to use the party histories and platforms unless the candidates have given us good reasons to think otherwise.

     I feel it's important to use the consequences of history when the platforms and policies are the same as that history. My analogy is a guy shoots into a crowd and kills somebody. The second guy who shoots into the same crowd may be legally absolved from the consequences of the first shooter, but I'm comfortable blaming him in some significant way for the bad consequences of shooting into crowds even if his particular bullet hasn't yet killed anybody. Democrats supported big governments and economic controls and "political correctness" in Russia in 1925, in Germany in 1935, in Cuba in 1950, in Venezuela in 1995, and in the United States in 2006 with terrible consequences. (Much of this history has disappeared down the "memory hole" of liberal progressives rewriting history, but the American left really supported all these causes at the time.) I'm comfortable associating the same support for the same values today with those terrible consequences even if the outcome of their politics in 2016 is not yet known.

     ECONOMICS:

     I have a buddy who was on the fence. He didn't like either candidate. He thought Trump was a wild man who might do anything and Hillary was at the conservative end of the Democrats in spite of the Democrats recent terrible economic history.

     Then Hillary came on the air with a commercial outlining her economic plan which was, essentially, You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet. She said that the bailouts and the stimulus packages that have so crippled our country were just the beginning, that she was going to have more and more and bigger and better expansion of government of New-Deal proportions.

     A short history: Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" expanded government enormously and prolonged the Great Depression eight years. Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" created a permanent, growing underclass of poverty. Jimmy Carter's expansion of government put the American economy into a terrible downward spiral. If we consider the three "Houses" of our federal government, Senate, Representatives, and White, my own observed correlation between Democrat majority and bad economics is very high. After twelve years of Republican majority (1995-2006) and relatively good times, Democrats got into power in 2007 and things went to hell. Stimulus packages and bailouts resulted in huge losses, the national debt more than doubled, and the median household net worth halved by 2014. More of the same isn't a good thing to look forward to.

     Let's look a little more closely at that economic decline 2007-2014. Liberals say that it's the rich who benefited in those good times and it's the poor people who benefited by the economic changes in Democrat-controlled times. The fraction of eligible Americans working declined substantially from 2006 to 2014 by about 25%. We went from two-thirds working to one-half working, give or take. When the median household net worth goes down by a factor of two, that means the poorer half of America is half as well off as they were eight years earlier. I don't oppose regulation so Bill Gates can live better, I oppose regulation so the 90% of America that goes to work, or wants to go to work, lives better.

     My buddy saw that commercial and realized Hillary Clinton wasn't an economic conservative at all but would continue and expand the terrible policies of the Democrats 2007-2014. He stopped there and decided to support Donald Trump, but I'm going to continue down the list of reasons.

     RACISM:

     Founded on racism in 1854 to extend slavery, the Democratic Party has continued its negative racial attitudes in many directions. In 1865 slavery gave way to Jim Crow laws which morphed into Affirmative-Action programs that marginalize and "infantalize" blacks by handing them jobs and promotions they haven't earned.

     The violence and hate of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan evolved into the same violence and hate in the Black Panthers and continued to exist in Black Lives Matter today. These were all Democratic-Party institutions of racial division. The important message here is not which race wins or loses but that the animosity and the hate continue. (Remember the "Star Trek" epsisode "Day of the Dove.")

     Most Democrats I know have forgotten (or were never taught) the racial history of their party. Others acknowledge it happened but suggest those were "different" Democrats back in those days. One tactic they use is to convince themselves there was a Big Switch where Democrats and Republicans exchanged roles and the racism that characterized Democrats up until 1954 suddenly became Republican. 1954 is when Democrat Governer George Wallace stood in the school doorway to keep black students Vivian Malone and James Hood from attending the University of Alabama. Nobody is quite sure when this alleged switch event happened or why almost all the folks who were Democrats in 1954 remained Democrats, some to the present day in 2017.

     Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) had some very-not-nice things to say about black Americans and he made sure the Civil Rights Act passed during his presidency was as watered down as he could make it. Democrats today preach an evangel of racial harmony while screaming "racist" at any criticism and fueling the hate with a group called "Black Lives Matter."

     The left-wing posters on Facebook say the American south is flipping to Republican to follow the racism. Many have noted that southerners became more Republican as it became less racist over the past fifty years. According to Internet sources, Martin Luther King wasn't openly Republican, but he was openly unhappy with the Democrats on race issues.

     Stories of racist attitudes from the Clintons are anecdotal, but there's no evidence of them standing against their party history of racial division going back to 1854. Hillary did voice her support of the historical legacy of Margaret Sanger and the racism she represented.

     Think of it this way. The Obama campaign came out of nowhere with a severely tainted history of corruption. The candidate never even told his name, his records remained sealed, yet Democrats switched "on a dime" from supporting Hillary to supporting Obama. Either they are so ovine that they blindly followed a racist multi-media campaign or they were so racist themselves thaty they supported a dark-skinned candidate with nothing what-so-ever to recommend him.

     TYRANNY

     The American progressive, left-wing Democrats supported Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Castro, and Mao in their times with opposition from the right. That historical tidbit has been lost somehow.

     If you're not sure, then look up Pete Seeger's biography. He had a large American-progressive following as he raised money directly for Stalin, Hitler, and Ho Chi Minh. I remember anecdotal stories from an older cousin raised in a liberal household. "Of course we supported Stalin because he was a communist and we supported Hitler because he allied with Stalin. When Russia turned bad, we continued to support Hitler because he opposed Stalin." If you're still not sure, look at the fawning eulogies from left-wing politicians and celebrities in 2016 for Fidel Castro.

     Closer to home, look at the tyranny of the New Deal and the Great Society, both Democrat programs that hugely expanded the role of government. Both prolonged poverty beyond even the most dedicated despot's vision. The first month of the Obama presidency saw the appointing of forty-some "czars" and another "stimulus" package to the tune of $831 billion. That's four percent of the American economy for a year just "woofed" into nowhere. When I pointed out that nobody I knew saw where that money stimulated anything, one liberal pointed out there were new buses and bike paths in Madison, Wisconsin. Assuming those would not have happened without the stimulus package, I don't know how many people those got to work who otherwise would not have been able to earn a living. Even if we figure it paid for similar programs in a few dozen cities, $831 billion sounds awfully expensive.

     I'll point out another anecdotal incident that hit me hard. The Capitol Steps have never been shy at poking fun at U.S. Presidents except once. Right after the 2008 election they had nothing to say about Obama. They had a white guy say, "I'm Barack Obama." After a pause he added, "I look different on television." That was it, no poking fun at his many campaign mis-statements or his checkered history as a senator. I think they were scared. That's a new thing in America when political satirists act scared and I don't like it.

     One of the first things tyrants do is control guns so only their own people have them. The Obama platform had a strong goal to remove guns from civilians and Hillary vowed to extend that policy, to make the Second Amendment a thing of the past.

     For all the tyrants the left supported, home or abroad, I'll give the right-wing conservative crowd credit for opposing them. I don't believe right-wing doofuses like Clive Bundy were smarter or more insightful than left-wing intellectuals like Paul Krugman. Instead, I think it was a set of values we have that they don't.

     ANTI-SEMITISM

     Here's a funny thing about the past decade. American Jews have traditionally been liberals. They were liberals when liberals supported the Ku Klux Klan and when liberals supported Stalin and Hitler and when liberals supported the Obama presidency. Somehow, recently, I'm seeing a growing community of Jewish conservatives converted from prior-liberal ways.

My left-wing friends are aghast that I think left-wing, progressive, liberal forces had anything to do with defacing Jewish cemeteries recently. Given the history of American left-wing, progressive support for lashings and lynchings, for gulags and gas chambers, for cross burnings and synagogue burnings, for Muslim attitudes and Sharia Law, and for the vandalism and hate of the Black Panthers and Black Lives Matter, is it all that surprising they would deface a Jewish cemetery or threaten to bomb a synagogue in 2017?

     The American left has been hostile to Israel over time, but it has become more visible recently. My Jewish-conservative-convert friends say that's the big issue, but I think there's more to it. After all, the National Socialists of the Third Reich in Germany were openly anti-Jewish and that didn't dilute Jewish-liberal support stateside.

     As Europe has become more progressive, it has become more openly anti-semitic, maybe coincidence, maybe causal, I don't know. Seeing both the same trends stateside 2007-2014 has not been reassuring.

     The Clintons haven't been especially hostile to Jews, even if they come from an especially gentile part of our country, but the Republicans lately have been openly friendly to Israel. Donald Trump has spent his whole life in New York City, an especially Jewish-themed place in the United States from colonial days to the mid-twentieth century and maybe beyond that. He even has Jewish family members.

     PSEUDO-SCIENCE

     Sometime around a century ago the notion that an idea was "scientific" was cause for its acceptance and even cause for beating that idea into those who didn't believe it. Religion has had that kind of acceptance for as long as anybody cares to remember, but having that kind of zeal around scientific principles is new. Cases like the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 show the struggle to get scientific reasoning into common education and, ultimately, into common thinking.

     The bad stuff happens when common thinking, whether religious or scientific, gets mixed with politics. On the religious side, the Spanish Inquisition started in 1492 and ran for one-third of a millennium until 1834. On the scientific side, the theory of eugenics was in vogue in the United States from 1880 through 1970 with support from Woodrow Wilson's White House. Forced sterilization was a kinder, gentler version of genocide.

     Seen from the vantage point of tyranny versus liberty, this was another example of government running amok. Eugenics had the support of liberal progressives at the time and was opposed by conservatives at the time.

     When the environmental movement had its Earth Day on 1970 April 22, the world changed. Environmentalism moved from a fringe movement to center stage. Americans became aware of environmental issues, a good thing mostly, but the politicians and pseudo-science power-mongers saw an opportunity far greater than eugenics, their pet issue. There were an impending ice age, acid rain, DDT, mercury in the tuna fish, and the ozone layer, one eco-scare after another. Finally the wheel stopped on global warming, which was renamed "climate change" when the warming stopped.

     I know some very smart people who believe the religion of climate change. They have done a marvelous job of fitting the data, but a lousy job of predicting the future. If it can't tell what is going to happen, or at least quantify the uncertainty, then it isn't good science. Understanding the difference betrween statistical fit and scientific understanding is hard, even for bright Ph.D.–level people. There are real ecological issues being pushed aside to put global warming center stage.

     For the first time in a long time we have a President who is not going to pander to the fear mongers, or so he says. I'm hopeful we can put this mythology behind us.

     CORRUPTION

     The Obama campaign promoted a person who was, then, the most corrupt candidate for President with hundreds of thousands in kickbacks. Most noteworthy in my observation was the $300-thousand, no-show job for Michelle from a hospital in Chicago. We had a candidate who didn't even tell us his name and he won a national election. He had some serious help at the voting polls in Philadelphia that I know of from anecdotal stories, kind of like Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago helping John F. Kennedy win in 1960.

     Now we had a candidate with $200 million in her bank account that had no legitimate source. Countries and companies all over the world paid protection money to the so-called charity of the Clinton Foundation. Selling favors of state for personal gain is a terrible form of treason and the sitting president who had to know about it should be held accountable.

     It has to be a cozy relationship with news and entertainment media when misogyny doesn't evoke images of Bill Clinton and mentioning Russia doesn't go straight to a shady uranium deal. I have no idea who paid whom, but the stench is everywhere.

     Nobody gets to the presidential level of American politics without some backroom deals, but the Clintons bring a whole new level of scam to it all.

     OTHER ISSUES

     So we've covered economics, racism, tyranny, anti-semitism, pseudo-science, and corruption, all of which point to favoring a Trump presidency over having the Clintons in the White House. On women's rights, we have what Donald Trump said once over a decade ago compared to how the Clintons treated women over a period of decades. There is also much to be said about health care programs, about the escalated cost and the inevitable poor performance of government health care. There are also moral reasons to support a conservative path in America and elsewhere.

     All of these are decisive and clear. As half the country supported a party and candidate that reject those half-dozen values, I have to wonder what they do consider good political motivations. I have speculated on my own web page on what kinds of people would steer away from the values that founded our country. I still wonder why people who so energetically reject those values would bother to come to this country, to stay here, and to try to change us to be like where they came from.

     Will Donald Trump deliver on his initial promise to push back the encroaching tide of government? I hope there's a better historical legacy for his administration than "Hillary would have been a lot worse." There are good things to do, bad things to be undone, and I hope he does them.