Friends, just when you thought you'd heard everything, the Dems start raving about how the post office is plotting against them! Eek. To think that a once proud nation has been reduced to...this.
The post office imbroglio, and the lefty lunacy behind it, are the subjects of my most recent article. Check it out:
It's Official: The Dems Have Gone
Postal, and They May Never Recover
“Trump
Derangement Syndrome” is a malady that Republicans and
conservatives often speak of these days. The obsessive, venomous
quality of the Left's Trump-hatred is indeed remarkable, and for some
“progressives” genuinely psychologically
destabilizing,
but often, let's face it, references to TDS are made in jest.
Conservatives, understandably, are reluctant to admit that they are
vehemently hated, just as we are reluctant to admit that the “loyal
opposition” to President Trump may have lost its grip on reality
and become captive to its myopia and its rancor. Recent developments,
though, require us to take these notions with the utmost seriousness
— otherwise we may become guilty of the same willful blindness we
rightly condemn on the other side.
The
liberals' and the media's current fixation on the postal service is a
case in point. The Left claims that recent changes at post offices,
slowing down some forms of mail delivery to achieve cost savings, are
in point of fact an advanced form of Trumpian/fascist election fraud.
They claim that postal delays are an
intentional form of voter suppression,
and that the appointment of a Trump supporter to lead the USPS
validates their theory.
This is nonsense
on countless levels.
First,
the changes at the post office are long overdue and are necessitated
by the collapse
of its business model
over several generations, not just in the last few months. They are
also changes that began
to unfold during the Obama administration,
and therefore did not materialize overnight on Trump's whim. In fact,
the program of reform at the USPS reflects its independence
from political meddling,
not its servile Trumpism.
Second,
the leadership at the USPS did not try to conceal the changes to its
service delivery. On the contrary, it warned
various states
that, in effect, they would need to change the dates by which they
advised voters to mail in their ballots, to ensure that they would be
delivered on time and would be duly counted. This was not an attempt
by the USPS to “sabotage” anyone's vote, but to protect the
democratic rights of us all.
Third, the Left's
current argument flies in the face of its own master narrative about
elections: that we don't need to worry about “fraud”, because it
simply doesn't exist. According to Democrats, concerns about the
integrity of mail-in votes are silly and baseless. But somehow it is
not silly or baseless to imagine that the post office is now a
vehicle for the imposition of a fascist dictatorship on the American
people.
Fourth,
liberals and media pundits ignore the mounting evidence of problems
in the tabulation
and verification of mail-in votes
in previous elections held this year. In some contests, final results
took weeks to materialize, and in others a shockingly high percentage
of ballots were rejected. Is this not a more legitimate source of
worry than slight reductions in the speed of postal delivery?
Fifth,
any problems some voters experience with the voting process are
anomalies, insofar as voting has never been simpler in U.S. or world
history. Recent changes making it easier for people to vote by
absentee ballot and/or by mail or online, expanding the availability
of early voting, and streamlining the process for voter registration,
have led to large
increases in voting,
especially among minorities. The idea that the right to vote is
“under threat” flies in the face of all this clear evidence of
increased
voter participation.
What's
most distressing about the Left's claims of postal “sabotage” are
not their sheer
emptiness and absurdity,
however. It is the fact that leftists advance them not with a
conscious sense of irony or out of disingenuous opportunism. On the
contrary, they make such wild and inaccurate claims without the
slightest doubt entering into their (diseased) minds that they true.
They believe, implicitly, that Trump plans
to “steal” the 2020 election,
and that recent changes at the post office are a manifestation of his
evil stratagem.
The fact is,
therefore, that “Trump Derangement Syndrome” has ceased to be an
amusing catchphrase. It has become, rather, the religion of the Left.
To be a member in
good standing of the “progressive” movement, you now need to
check your rational, critical faculties at the door and forsake them
evermore. It is necessary instead for you to believe, without
questioning, any smear, no matter how fanciful, directed at people on
the Left's extensive enemies list. As conservatives, our guilt, after
all, can be assumed, based on our ideology, our party identification,
our faith, our race and/or our sex, the company we keep, or some
combination of these. Any investigation into the facts is secondary,
at best, and irrelevant, at worst. Just ask Brett Kavanaugh.
We
conservatives need, therefore, to start grappling with these awful
truths: our political opponents no
longer like us,
to be sure. They no longer respect us either. They no longer believe,
in all too many cases, that we are entitled
to the rights
of American citizenship, and some don't even regard us as worthy
of life itself.
All that is bad
enough, but what's worse is that leftists have burrowed themselves so
deeply in the black hole of their “progressive” and profoundly
negative monoculture that they are not even vaguely capable of
discerning fact from fiction, and nor are they able to perceive when
their own beliefs are contradictory.
Non
sequitur? “No
problem,” says the modern leftist. “I'll have a second helping,
if you please.”
There
are few things more dangerous in this world than a crazy person who
thinks that he is sane — or, to put it another way, an irrational
person who thinks that he is rational. And yet we conservatives must
come to terms with the fact that we live in a country where at least
40% of the voting population has lost
its collective marbles
and may, unless the media environment changes massively, never
recover them.
Meanwhile,
a considerable portion of the electorate, perhaps 10-15%, is caught
in the middle — not ideologically committed to the full slate of
leftist fantasies, but nonetheless heavily influenced by toxic and
maniacal left-leaning reportage (recently
shown to be 150 times harsher vis-a-vis President Trump versus Joe
Biden).
We had better find a way of reaching this American center, of
inoculating
it
against the insane ramblings of the Left, or America and its
democracy will be lost forever.
I realize it is
beyond scary — in fact, it is horrifying — to face the harsh
reality that our political opponents have hectored and self-isolated
their way into collective derangement, but it is necessary all the
same.
The first step to
curing America of the blight of leftist lunacy is to admit that we
have, as a country, contracted a mental illness. Only then can we
begin to devise an effective course of treatment.
Dr.
Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred
and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com.
He appears weekly on the Newsmaker Show on WLEA 1480/106.9.
