Hillary

In Which I Attempt to Deconstruct a Meme

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Writing this post is in some ways a self-indulgent waste of my time. Let me say right off the bat:

ALL MEMES ARE BY VERY DEFINITION THOUGHTLESS.

Why? Because they’re the equivalent of a pie in the face. Show me a thoughtful meme and I’ll . . . well, I don’t have to say that I’ll do because no one will be able to find such a thing. I’m reminded of the old joke about college lectures:

College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.

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First Intimations of Disaster

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How'd We Get Here?
How'd We Get Here?
First Intimations of Disaster
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This episode is the first in a series of perhaps 6-8 segments giving an overview of the 2016 election by a conservative Christian who is decidedly non-political and a non-pundit. It will pull together at least some of the threads that have led us to the Trump Presidency. Today I’m explaining how I came to the decision to vote for Donald Trump’s opponent, quoting along the way from some excellent sources, including the most excellent one of all, the Bible.

Sources quoted include:

“Why this election makes me hate the word ‘evangelical’” by Russell Moore, The Washington Post, February 29, 2016.

“I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton, the Devil We Know” by P. J. O’Rourke, Daily Beast, May 11, 2016.

“5 Most Sickening Parts of Trump’s Meeting with Evangelical Leaders” by Rebecca Cusey, The Federalist, June 23, 2016.

“Trump Is Not Hitler–He’s Marion Barry” by Rebecca Cusey, The Federalist, July 1, 2016.

Contact me at scheduling@debisimons.com if you’d like to schedule me to speak to your group in the Denver area.

 

What Led White Evangelicals to Vote for Trump?

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Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark Noll, originally published in 1994 by Wm. B. Eerdmans, now available in several formats, including audio. (If you follow the link and purchase the book I will receive a small commission at no additional cost to you.)

I am going to assume that you have already read or will read my review of this book over at my main site, Intentional Living. As I said there, this is a dense, challenging book that will reward readers who take it on.

For the purpose of this post, however, I want to concentrate specifically on some ideas that help explain why so many earnest, sincere Evangelical/ Fundamentalist Christians felt that they had to vote for a lying, cheating, adulterous playboy with a pro-choice Liberal Democratic background and a profane, vulgar vocabulary. Their votes reflected a failure of the mind in several different areas. I hope the following won’t sound too scathing, but we are in a predicament today that does not allow for mincing of words. America has elected an utterly unfit man to the Presidency, and Evangelicals helped to put him there. Why?

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Didn’t President Trump See “Hillary’s America”?

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So, on the Wednesday before the Inauguration (hereafter to be described as the “National Day of Patriotic Devotion”) at-that-point-still-President-Elect Trump and VP-Elect Mike Pence appeared somewhere, and Trump mentioned that admirers were telling him, “There hasn’t been anything like this since Andrew Jackson.” He has issued statements saying that Jackson was “an amazing figure in many ways.”

Wait, what? Wasn’t it just this summer that the great Dinesh D’Souza epic “Hillary’s America” hit the multiplexes, in which Andrew Jackson is portrayed as a total villain? As the founder of the . . . Democratic Party? I’m confused. So I took a look back at a review on that peerless purveyor of news, WND.com, in which Chuck Norris lays out the ten best things about the movie. One of them is: “The Democratic Party was the original pro-slavery and anti-minority party, and still is, when one understands its underlying motives and tactics. From Andrew Jackson’s suppression of slaves and slaughter of Indians . . .” (from July 31, 2016) So my memory isn’t playing tricks on me. That was Andrew Jackson in the film, whipping slaves (when he wasn’t coercing comely females ones into bed) and driving Native Americans off their lands.

So why isn’t Pres. Trump insulted that people are comparing him to Andrew Jackson? Beats me.
Could it be (this is just a suggestion) that American history lessons don’t figure bigly on cable news? Just askin’!

Praying Properly for President Trump.

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PictureI’m linking to an article below by the estimable Russell Moore, the president of the Southern Baptist Committee on Ethics and Religious Liberty, who refused to support Donald Trump during his candidacy and, like many other honorable and thoughtful conservatives (and in his case, also a Christian), has paid a personal and professional price for that refusal.

So when he says to pray for Donald Trump, now, as of noon today, President Trump, well, I guess I’d better listen. Even more important, I guess I’d better listen when Moore quotes Scripture. I’ve addressed this issue before in a couple of posts last year—one in November and one in December—but now that we truly do have a President Trump I guess I’d better do some more pondering about my responsibilities as a Christian citizen.

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How’d We Get Ourselves into This?

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Here it is the first weekday of the New Year, Jan. 2. Probably many of you are off from work today, but not me! I’m on the job, starting us out with an overview of how we’ve ended up with the inauguration of Donald Trump looming over us in 18 days. Nothing here is going to be anything new, as it’s all been written about exhaustively, but I haven’t seen anyone put the pieces together into a coherent narrative. All of this information is publicly available or a matter of taking that information and drawing some conclusions.

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The Folly of Making Donald Trump the Pro-Life Poster Boy

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​I’ve had the experience several times over the course of this election season of developing ideas of my own that I think are pretty good and then running into an article and admitting, “Wow—that’s so much better!” So I had realized that, absent my personal fear and distrust of a Trump presidency, I would actually have a much better time of it if he won than if she-who-must-not-be-named won, because then I could just sit back and watch the disaster unfold, knowing full well that I had done all that I could to prevent it. Then this article by Jonah Goldberg came along.

I had done some deep logical reasoning, I thought, on the whole you-have-to-vote-for-Trump-because-of-the-Supreme-Court issue, and then I ran across this excellent article by Ian Tuttle which went several orders of magnitude deeper.

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A Last-Ditch Effort.

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I would be thrilled to see Evan McMullin as our President, but that ain’t a-gonna happen.

So we’re back to the choice we had in the general election.

As Alexander Hamilton writes in “The Federalist Papers,” the Constitution is designed to ensure “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” The point of the Electoral College is to preserve “the sense of the people,” while at the same time ensuring that a president is chosen “by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.”

I know that many of my readers are going to be appalled that I’ve signed this petition. Hey, you can go online and find one that asks the electors to stay faithful, if you want to. It’s called freedom of choice.

“Electoral College: Make Hillary Clinton President.”


Support the Constitution!

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The Electoral College casts its votes on Monday, Dec. 19. This is the last chance we have to change the results of this election–as provided for in our Constitution. This is not some kind of rogue, rebellious movement. It is profoundly Constitutional.  Those of my readers who say that they are in favor of following the intentions of the Founding Fathers–then get with the program! I challenge you to read as many articles as you can this week, either here on this site or on sound, truthful, conservative websites. I’m going to be posting like crazy. Stay away from the Water Carriers for Trump. (This group includes, but is by no means limited to, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, The Gateway Pundit, WND.com, and Breitbart News. And, need I say this? InfoWars.com. Puh-leeze!)

You have a couple of options for signing a petition:

1.  What I did: Go to change.org and sign the petition asking the electors to change their votes to Hillary Clinton. While I have said repeatedly that my vote for Clinton does not mean support for many of her policies, I do support this movement. I would love to see someone such as Evan McMullin or John Kasich or Ben Sasse take office, but that’s a subject for 2020. Right now, we need to take the most direct route we can to stop Donald Trump from actually taking office.

2. You may say that you will not petition directly for the electors to vote for Clinton. Okay, fair enough. Then join the Hamilton Electors movement, which petitions the electors to vote their consciences.

Either way, we do not have to sit by and let this dreadful election stand. We can at least try to make a difference! The proposal has been made, the wedding venue has been reserved, and the marriage license is ready to be signed. But the bride hasn’t walked down the aisle yet.

Funny Money 101

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I am indebted to a commenter on my Facebook page for this post.

Usually my Facebook policy is “no response to comments,” as responding is pretty much a complete waste of time. I’ve relaxed that policy a little since the election, but I respond very rarely. Sometimes I will delete a comment and I’ve blocked exactly one person. (I wish now I’d kept up his final-straw post as a reminder of how obnoxious some people were about the Trump victory: it was a meme—I guess that’s what you call it—with a picture of a frat-boy-looking man yelling, “Say it! Say it! Trump won!” Woa. Or, maybe, Woe.)

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