Monday, November 28, 2016

The Double Standard; IOKIYAR !








When you really sit back and look at everything Donald Trump has said and done, if he were a Democrat, there's absolutely no way in hell Republicans would have said any of this was okay.

Conservatives threw a fit when President Obama saluted Marines with a cup of coffee in his hand. Imagine if he had mocked POWs or attacked Gold Star parents.

Well, there are two huge things Republicans would be losing their minds over right now had they happened after Hillary Clinton (or any Democrat, for that matter) had just won a presidential election.

1. For the second time in the last five elections - and for only the second time since 1888 - this nation is going to elect a Republican president who lost the popular vote: When this happened in 2000, it was a big deal, but Al Gore only won the popular vote by 0.5% or just around 500,000 votes. While that's still a decent amount of votes, and it was fairly controversial at the time, it wasn't an emphatic popular vote victory.

But that's not the case this election.

With estimates of around 3-7 million more votes left to count (most coming from California, New York and California), Clinton's overall lead in the popular vote is over 2 million votes and is expected to grow fairly substantially by the time all the votes are counted.

We're looking at a situation where a presidential candidate may win the popular vote by a margin close to what President Obama won it with in 2012 (4-5 million/4-5%) - but lose the election.

Donald Trump and many his supporters were already on the verge of calling for an all-out revolution if he didn't win this election. Now imagine what their reaction would have been if he lost the election, yet received around 4-5 million more overall votes than Clinton.

It wouldn't have just been Trump and his supporters - the entire Republican party would be losing their minds. They would have lost 2 of the last 5 presidential election even though their candidate had won the popular vote each of those times. Especially this year considering how much Clinton will win the popular vote by, yet isn't going to become our next president.

I think it's time we realize that the electoral college needs to go. When the candidates for 40% of your presidential elections over the last 16 years became president despite not receiving the most overall votes - that's a problem.

Let's not pretend like there's nothing wrong with a system that hands a "win" to a candidate who actually lost to his opponent by several million votes, when that's happened for 2 of our last 3 presidents.

2. He just settled a fraud lawsuit for $25 million where he was accused of conning people out of tens of thousands of dollars: Throughout most of his campaign, the "Trump U" fraud lawsuit was an issue that lingered around Donald Trump. As expected, he proclaimed his innocence the entire time and insisted he'd never settle the lawsuit. He also falsely said that he never settles lawsuits, when he has many times.

He can say he settled just to "focus on being president," but that's ridiculous. To settle for that much money is a clear indication that there was plenty of damning evidence he knew was going to be made public and he certainly didn't want to be found guilty of fraud after he had taken his Oath of Office.

For a moment, think about what Trump and the GOP would be saying if Clinton had been facing a lawsuit where she was accused of defrauding people out of tens of thousands of dollars, declared her innocence up until after she won the election… then settled a fraud lawsuit for $25 million.

They would be losing their damn minds.

These are two examples where, if reversed, Donald Trump and the Republican party would be having an absolute meltdown. They'd accuse Clinton of setting up deals behind closed doors that would only be made public after she won. Meanwhile, I'm almost certain we'd be seeing a very… very dangerous situation in this country if she was declared our next president, yet Trump was on his way to winning the popular vote by around 4-5 million votes.

Yet here we are, weeks away from swearing in a president who's going to receive a few million votes less than his opponent and just settled a lawsuit for $25 million where he was accused of defrauding people out of tens of thousands of dollars by setting up a fake school where he conned them into believing it was a legitimate university.

I'm really glad so many folks couldn't get over a woman who repeatedly admitted making a mistake in how she handled her emails over four years ago. It's much better that we're going to have a man with a history of exploiting people for his own benefit, who basically just admitted to setting up a fake university to steal money from people.

Along with all these other horrific things he's done.

Donald Trump's entire campaign was basically an elaborate version of "Trump U." Only this time, over 60 million people were conned into believing his bullshit.