Republicans are Wrong Saying “Keeping on Track about Economy” Will Keep Them on Top

I have a tendency to start what I think will be a brief Facebook post, and then my ideas cascade and it becomes “too much” for that venue, in more ways than one.  So I’m going to try not to do that and come here when such complete thoughts unfold.  In making that transition, I’m combining here a couple posts from the past day or two that should on this medium make for a reasonable article!  (It might even be kind of cool with the obvious “pauses” between the original posts.) To wit, cut-n-pasted with minor edits:

I understand that FB is not the best or most appropriate place for a treatise as fully fleshed out as what follows, that it’s way longer than most folks’ attention span will accommodate, and it “interferes” with those who, very understandably, would rather see fun stuff like music on here (not all that different from me not wanting to see protest stuff surrounding football and basketball games and athletes). Forewarning you that this is REALLY long, I am going to leave it here on FB this time for the more “serious” of my readers, but will also copy it to and post future things of like length to an actual blog site, something like iPatriot.com perhaps. I’ll try to edit in a link here at the end of this paragraph when I accomplish that.

I’d told my brother Richard 3 days ago that I had a follow-up post coming to something we were discussing, and here it is, with the intervening 3 days and Obama providing a stronger affirmation of the point I was about to and will now make, than I could ever have imagined.

My main tenet was to contradict the mainstream conservative mantra that for Republicans to succeed in coming elections, Trump simply needs to “stay on track” and just keep reiterating all the phenomenal successes he’s had in spite of 85% of media and 99% of Dem leadership saying the disastrously opposite would happen and not acknowledging that the successes HAVE indeed happened. In other words, quit fighting back and just keep broadcasting the litany of accomplishments. There are 2 major reasons for my diverging from the view that this would be a no-brainer path to success, despite the fact that it certainly SHOULD be based on his real-world results. One of those reasons is really very obvious and so recently reinforced in spades (ooh, some folks, even some past Presidents, would say that’s a racist comment, so I’m making a pre-disclosure that it is a colloquial expression long a part of our lexicon and not racial in any way, in fact, a reference to playing cards if Mr. Obama and every CNN commentator and other left Demagogues would care to investigate the etymology). The 2nd point is a bit more subtle, and I’ll address that one first.

I’m sensitive to and aware of this point going back to my years in the investment advisory business. Both points really are offshoots of the “where credit is due” question, but this one has a big rooting in a flaw of human nature. When the stock market took off meteorically in the 90s, most all of my investors did really, really well. When the market turned south after a decade of wonderful returns, some of those investors got burned really badly, in some cases losing half or even 2/3 of their portfolios. Those who lost did not do so because of MY advice, in fact in opposition to it, because they confused the effect of a rising market with their own “”investment genius.” In the same vein, many of those on the left who are participating in our splendid economic resurgence will not give due credit to Trump’s policies for their prosperity but instead think it’s a result of their hard work or intelligence (funny how those weren’t manifesting themselves successfully under the prior administration, but who could be perceptive enough to notice that difference?) or even random cyclicality finally turning things around. (Actually, Obama DID benefit from that, his most-meager-ever recovery is not due to HIS policies but the “dead cat bounce” off the Bush bottom, a dead cat bounce that Obama in fact INHIBITED to the worst recovery ever but still stayed barely positive… In order to describe that as the reason for TRUMP’S far more significant success rather than Trump’s policies, you’d have to be willing to say Obama had us bottomed out for a dead cat bounce like Bush had set for Obama, and none of those no-credit-to-Trumpers would EVER admit to THAT). Anyway, that’s a whole long diatribe explaining one big reason Trump touting his policy successes will not sway many not already his proponents: they erroneously think it’s their own genius/hard work/something else that has them doing well, instead of the truth of what Trump’s done for them.

That was so long, I’ll address the other point separately later. (Sorry, that’s not really the end, just the end of the FIRST post 😉 .)

Glad I held off on “point 2” of my post a couple days ago about why it’s not all that effective for Trump to “just stay on point” about his litany of successes, at least in terms of gaining any inroads on swaying the unaware and unthinking liberals who might (should) otherwise be making a party migration a la #walkaway. The main tenet of point #2 is that many Dem leaders and left-stream media spokespeople are so locked into their party rhetoric and somehow immune to seeing the world around them that they’re spewing, ridiculous as it is, that Trump’s successes are actually due to and a carryover of Obama’s policies.

In the meantime, Obama came out on the campaign trail, breaking with the longstanding tradition of the graciousness of former presidents not bashing or interfering with their successors, and tried to take credit for Trump’s unparalleled record of successes. Not all that surprising that somebody of Obama’s Guinness record book level of narcissism would try to defend his “legacy” in such a sad display, but to think he could do it with such a litany of lies shows 2 causal (and not mutually exclusive) possibilities. First, he’s simply delusional, highly likely and very explicatory in view of the failure of his policies when in office combined with an unwillingness to acknowledge them. Secondly, he’s simply willing to lie and play the smooth thespian that’s the only way anybody can believe anything from current Dem leadership (what Nancy Pelosi lacks but Obama and Booker excel at) and get a gullible base to swallow the misinformation. (Diversion: the thespian reference made me consider the natural causation of Hollywood’s near-unanimous support of failed left policies… what they do, day in/day out, on-screen and now politically off-screen as well, is make fiction believable to their followers… no surprise that they’re good at duping that audience — they do it for a living!)

Anyway, Obama proved my point by making multiple speeches the last few days echoing Dem leaders and lib pundits by taking credit for Trump’s successes (all he can do now, since even the most die-hard libs can no longer DENY those successes, so better just claim them as their own). But Obama’s claims of credit for this burgeoning economy are utterly preposterous, in fact, cannot be made without flat out lying. The scary thing is, people, cheered his lies, meaning people are ignorantly swallowing the BS!!! (Not unlike supporting Nike and a campaign that says, “Believe in something,” when inherent in that campaign is the fact that you’re supporting believing in a PROVEN LIE, (the hands up/don’t shoot fabrication that spawned, thanks to Obama and holder, the statistically totally false narrative that white cops attack black people at a rate higher than black people attack white cops…if you can’t make the distinction that believing in an LIE is not worse than believing in the truth, or even nothing, then you’re a danger to democracy.)

So yesterday I found myself nearly ecstatic when a guy I never heard of before but would now vote for President, Kevin Hassett, made a presentation at the mid-day White House press briefing. Hassett is the chairman of the Economic Advisory Council, not a politician but a statistician, an accountant/numbers geek kind of guy. That’s exactly what I am, a math-over-rhetoric guy who understands that numbers are facts, while rhetoric can be complete BS, so everything both he and I go with is completely backed by actual numbers and not some vague (or perhaps even totally erroneous) “philosophy.” He’s been begging Sarah Sanders to put up the REAL numbers at a press briefing for months, and while the timing was apparently coincidental, it couldn’t have been better for refuting Obama’s recent lies. (Another sideline… this guy is no politician, but he, like me, loves hard numbers so much that he was just grinning as he presented his charts (remember that pure joy from the successful logic of putting together a geometric “proof” in 5th-grade math? …although I suspect many liberals have no comprehension of such tangible, logical, reality-based joy . And another surprise was that Sarah Sanders is also a calculus geek… nothing better than brainy folks making calculus jokes, and at the same time making pretty clear the intellectual disparity between them and their rhetoric-based opposition.)

What fed my cheer at Hassett’s amazingly glib presentation of what many would see as drab numbers were his chart after chart after chart after chart showing virtually every economic metric from Obama’s two terms to Trump’s less than half a term. Almost every Obama economic metric showed starting from a fairly low point, even after he took over with the benefit of the Bush stimulus from which he should have been able to say “nowhere to go but up,” and then a trend during his two terms of down, down, and further down. A few of the Obama metrics were flat, and one or two were even SLIGHTLY positive, coming from the Bush lows. But whether it was from the majority of Obama’s trends that were downward or the flat ones or the rare slightly positive ones, at EVERY single one there was a sharp inflection to the STEEPLY positive immediately after Trump won, a diversion so pronounced that saying it was a continuation from Obama was GLARINGLY ludicrous. The Trump bump by mathematical proof is a Trump bump, not an Obama continuation, and in fact in most cases an Obama REVERSAL to success/prosperity.

Besides exposing Obama’s credit-taking lies for what they are/were with his charts, Hassett concluded with a corollary study. He went back and dug up the Economic Advisory Council’s PREDICTIONS from the beginning of the Trump presidency based on what Trump was going to do and compared them with the charts showed actually happened, and they were in complete lock-step! Most have actually exceeded the prediction by a modest amount, a few by a huge amount, and a scant few were under by virtually minuscule amounts. So, not only were they truthful in what they said they were going to do and carried out what they were elected for, but the results also matched what they said they would be! SUCH a stark contrast to the narcissistic Obama lies and failures to deliver. And, to pile on the lunacy of Obama’s current stumping, especially in light of 9/11, he’s out there further spouting that all the things the Republicans have blown the whistle on are “wild Republican conspiracies.” He mentioned specific things like Benghazi, to which I’d like to have asked him, “How many other ‘conspiracy theories’ have killed a handful of American patriots defending their country, including an Ambassador?”

It defies imagination that the group that’s been lying since they invented the internet, promised you Manhattan would be under water from global warming by 2016, then more recently assured you that if Trump got elected our stock market would immediately crash triggering a US recession that would grow into a global depression (undermining Obama’s wonderful recovery, LOL), that if Trump appointed John Bolton (and some others) it would be straight on to WWIII, on and on ad infinitum, gets ANY credibility whatsoever from ANYBODY. In other words, sometimes people are so completely wrong so often that if they say something, you would be well advised to assume the diametric opposite. And yet, frighteningly, there are people still swallowing that past and Obama et al’s continuing drivel, and media outlets that are broadcasting them to a non-discerning, ostrich-head-in-sand segment of the public as if they were truth and reality and predictions that are likely to happen, Probably SOME day they’ll “luck out” and and the country will experience something bad (which of course they’ll cheer, because it’s more important that they were finally vindicated than that something bad happened to “make America miserable again…” hmmm, I may have just stumbled upon an idea for a new campaign baseball cap!) making one of their gloom-and-doom assertions accurate. But to accept that every, in fact ANY, statement they make has truth behind it when so many past ones have been the complete opposite requires some kind of synaptic malfunction.