We are not living up to the words gracing our national symbol, E Pluribus Unum.  Out of many one.

You can be a wing nut left or right, middle of the road kill, anarchist, or even call yourself an independent.  Frankly, I don’t know any independents.  If a right-wing nut is surrounded by left wing nuts he or she suddenly transform into an independent.  They lack courage to stand their ground.   Independent is a good barrier to hide behind.  Then there are the intellectually deficient who agree what a great idea something is until they discover it comes from someone they’re ideologically conditioned to hate.  With all of this mess, is it any wonder that our political system, which many of us do not even understand, needs an enema.  When a group of overpaid and over-served people cannot agree that a good idea is a good idea then we are lost.  Doomed to spend the rest of our days trapped in in the pit of regressive ideological hell.  Two plus two once equaled four.  Give the problem to congress and they would debate this for months.  Have hearings and investigations.  Ask the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate.  And, in the end we’d have common core math where any answer is fine.  Then the Supreme Court would rule the Constitution supports that conclusion.

We have an ever-widening array of ideologies, culture conflicts and identity groups.  What is growing more difficult is finding are red, white, and blue Americans.  Those great melting pot people.  Then ones who left less than satisfactory lives for the American ideal of individual liberty.  They embraced exceptionalism became Americans.  A people who have their internal squabbles about one policy or another, but who would stand shoulder to shoulder defending our way of life.  People who believe in the founding principles of our country.  People who want to defend and be governed by our Constitution rather than some ideologically driven activist judge.  People who would never take a knee.

Where are those people?

They’re still here in overwhelming numbers I believe.  The discounted people.  The people who’ve felt the pain inflicted by politicians wholly owned by the donor class.  The people talked down to by condescending political and media types.   The people who work everyday to provide for their families should they be fortunate enough to have a job.  The people who fill the ranks of our military, police forces and fire departments.  They work in our factories, run small businesses, provide services. Fix our plumbing.  The great middle class.  The people politicians promise to help but never do. The forgotten people.

The Washington establishment, the media establishment, the people convinced they are decidedly smarter than everyone else believe they all had it figured out. Then they lost to a non-political outsider.  They hated one candidate and loved the other.  They overlooked the character flaws of one, but not the other.  They considered one an intellectual giant and the other an idiot. They could not conceive that one candidate could possibly win an election yet it happened.  They were left distraught and astounded because they were conditioned to think in a certain way.  Conditioned to draw a mental red line and automatically despise anyone that stands on the other side.  Conditioned to believe they were the smart people who knew what was best for the rest.  They built up pre-conceived notions about people and set about trying to prove those notions to themselves and everyone else.  Even if it meant ignoring, burying or misconstruing the truth.

Anyone who believes that voter fraud to some extent has not played a role in elections for the history of elections is rather naïve.  We have concocted every conceivable method of potential voter fraud.  Absentee ballots for most anyone, early voting, allowing non-citizens to register to vote in local elections, sanctuary cities, sanctuary states, automatically registering people to vote when they obtain a driver’s license when you don’t need to be a citizen to get a driver’s license, no voter identification laws.

When all else fails and the establishment’s favored candidate loses they promptly roll out the tired argument of doing away with the electoral college and have the president elected by popular vote.  If you look at the 2016 final election results you’ll see that minus the sanctuary state of California, the popular vote changes sides.  That is the brilliance of the electoral college.  It does not allow one population center to control the outcome of presidential elections.  It makes every vote count for something.

We are not living up to the words gracing our national symbol, E Pluribus Unum.  Out of many one.  We are devolving into ideological Balkanization.  We no longer embrace American Exceptionalism.  The world’s one country founded on the principle of individual freedom.  We are trying to take the exceptional one and turn it into a divided many.  Your culture, color, ethnicity, religion…. None of that matters.  What matters is are you an American?  One who embraces our Democratic Republic?  The time for choosing is upon us.  Out of many one or out of many nothing?


E-Mail JD Pendry: jd@jdpendry.com