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Can Biden resist the extremists?

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump demonstrated during his term as president an inability to resist the demands of those on the far right wing of the Republican Party.

As an aside, I’ll resist referring to the GOP as “his” party because I consider Trump to be a Republican In Name Only.

No such qualifier is required of President-elect Joe Biden, a center-left Democrat with years of credentials to illustrate the point.

So, the question of the day is this: Will the new president be able or is he willing to resist the tug from those on the far left wing of his own party? 

I am just a single voter, but I’ll offer this: I hope he can and does. I voted for a “good government” presidential candidate, which is what I see in President-elect Biden. By “good government,” I favor a federal government that is prepared to step up and help when needed, but is not willing to capture all the duties and responsibilities assigned to state and local governments, or the private sector.

I sense the president-elect is of the same ilk as yours truly. If that proves out to be the case, then I will be happy.

Meanwhile, the president-elect will have to steel himself for the onslaught of pressure he no doubt will feel from the “democratic socialist” wing of the Democratic Party. To be candid, I still am not sure what a democratic socialist is, other than perhaps being someone who doesn’t want the government to assume control of every aspect of our lives.

Still, I sense in Joe Biden a reluctance to avoid the socialist label, despite what Donald Trump and the GOP sought to attach to him. Trump accused Biden of being “anti-God,” of wanting to take guns away from Americans — while destroying the Second Amendment to the Constitution, of disarming the military, of taxing us into oblivion.

I have looked at Biden’s record and to be honest I don’t see evidence of any of that during his 44 years as a U.S. senator and vice president.

The man is a mainstream Democrat. I want him to govern that way. I am going to hold out hope that he will do as I wish. If not, then he will hear from me. Hey, if he does govern the way I want him to govern, he might still hear from me.

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He no longer matters

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The 2020 presidential election has affirmed what I have thought now for years.

It is that Donald John Trump’s lies no longer matter. He is soon to be gone from the scene. A new president, Joe Biden, will take over on Jan. 20.

Yes, it is clear that Trump remains president until Joe Biden takes the presidential oath. He will be vested with all the power of the office. I merely pray as we watch the clock tick away the final moments of his tenure that he doesn’t do anything foolish. I have no need to explain what such foolishness might entail; I am certain that you get my drift.

As for Trump’s lies, well, I quit listening to them long ago. I accept nothing he says. I do not believe anything that flies out of his lying mouth.

And so we are left with a lame-duck president who is doing nothing to curb the killer virus that is raging across the country; he does nothing to re-engage Congress on a stimulus package to help families stricken by the virus; he does not a single thing to advance our alliances abroad.

Instead, he will foment the phony lie about a rigged election, about “widespread voter fraud” and will continue to insist that he actually “won” the presidential when he actually lost it by the same Electoral College total he won in 2016. Oh, and remember when he called his victory over Hillary Clinton a “landslide”?

Donald Trump is history. For that I am grateful that democracy has worked its magic on a system that cried out for help.

The voters have delivered it.

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Waiting for this spin

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I am waiting with bated breath for Donald Trump or someone from his gang of thieves to assert the following …

That the 5.6 million-vote gap between Trump and the winner of the 2020 election, President-elect Joe Biden, comes almost exclusively from California, where Biden is leading Trump by roughly 5.5 million votes.

So here is how it might go: If you take out California’s total, Donald Trump actually won the vote among Americans.

Get it? It would remind me of the time the late Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry said that “if you don’t count the murders” in D.C., the crime rate in his city “isn’t so bad.”

national news

How can this election be corrupt?

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

All this yammering and blathering from Donald J. Trump about a “rigged election” and “rampant voter fraud” keeps bringing me back to a single question.

Which is this: How in the name of national security, after all this nation endured with Russian hacking of our electoral system in 2016, could there possibly be a more secure election than the one we have just had?

Donald Trump lost his re-election bid to President-elect Joe Biden. His insistence that Biden won only because the election was “rigged” to produce that outcome is far more than laughable on its face. It is dangerous and demeaning.

Trump’s refusal to concede the results of the election is dangerous because it gives comfort to despots around the world who run nations hostile to ours comfort. It well might embolden them to do things that could undermine our national confidence even further. We are taking our eyes off the threats abroad, concerning ourselves with phony allegations of voter fraud.

His refusal also is demeaning to the thousands of state and local election officials who are charged with conducting these elections. They hold the responsibility of protecting our electoral system against “rigging” or other forms of corruption that the president of the United States — our head of state for God’s sake! — keeps suggesting has occurred.

President-elect Biden has a difficult enough task ahead  of him without the idiocy being fomented by his immediate presidential predecessor. That is what this is. It is idiocy of the lowest order.

As President Obama said on “60 Minutes” Sunday night, a president must always put the nation’s interests ahead of his own ego. Donald Trump is being ruled by his fragile sense of self-worth and in the process is putting our entire system of government in potentially dire peril.

And to what end?

If there was any reason to have confidence in the integrity of this election, the foolishness that erupted in 2016 provided it in spades.

Dear folks, we are watching the cultivation by Donald Trump of fake news in real time.

International news

Lift the Muslim ban, Mr. POTUS-elect

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

On the night he declared victory in the 2020 presidential election, Joseph Biden’s team announced plans for the new president to sign a series of executive orders on Day One of his administration.

One of them would be to life a ban on entry into the United States by travelers from certain Muslim-majority nations. Donald Trump issued that order early in his presidential term.

The new president wants to revoke that order. To which I say … yes!

FBI Director Christopher Wray has told us a stark truth about the nature of terrorist threats to this country. It is that the biggest threat comes from home-grown, corn-fed white supremacists and not from Muslim nations.

The new president realizes what the nation’s top cop, the FBI director, has asserted.

I don’t mean to suggest that this nation’s security team should just shrug and look the other way at any terrorist threat that comes from abroad. I do mean to suggest that Donald Trump issued an informal declaration of war against Islam, a point that Presidents George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama sought assiduously to avoid when they were in office.

President Biden intends to revoke the Trump overstated declaration that Muslim countries pose a hideous threat. If we have learned anything since 9/11 I would presume we have learned how to detect and deal with international terrorist threats, especially from Muslim nations … which renders a ban on travelers from those nations to just an unnecessary show of presidential bravado.

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Biden’s unity pitch hits roadblock … from Trump!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I always knew that President-elect Biden’s promise to unify the country after four years of Donald Trump’s tenure as president would be a heavy lift.

What I didn’t know,  until just recently, was that Trump himself would be piling on the weights to make that effort even more difficult.

Donald Trump keeps insisting that Biden’s victory is the result of a “rigged election.” It is no such thing. The problem for the president-elect, though, is that so many millions of Trumpkins have bought into the clap trap that Trump is offering, not to mention the vast majority of Republican members of both congressional chambers.

Therefore, you have a situation with a Democrat– that being Biden — scoring a significant vote-count and Electoral College victory over the Republican incumbent, but with Trump’s “base” of sycophantic voters and politicians buying into the phony charge of “widespread election fraud.”

Call me a cynic, but Donald Trump has zero interest in uniting the country. He has not a scintilla of care for the damage he is doing by fomenting yet another lie. He blathers about “fake news media” endorsing Biden while at the same time offering his own fake news by suggesting voter fraud where none exists.

I have harbored some glimmer of hope that Trump eventually will concede in some fashion to the president-elect; my sense is that it won’t be a traditional concession … if it comes.

The longer this ridiculous game goes on, the harder it might get for Donald Trump to say publicly what the rest of us know already.

Which is that he has been drummed out of office!

I now worry about the worsening of the difficulty of the task of unification that awaits President Biden. What’s more, I am enraged that the future former president is putting his own narcissism in front of the nation’s future.

So help me, Hanna. Donald Trump is a dangerous man.

national news

Outrage set to persist?

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

It appears the outrage that Donald Trump is fomenting is going to persist until the bitter end of this man’s hideous tenure as president of the United States.

He continues to say he won’t concede he lost to President-elect Biden. He continues to resist providing the president-elect’s team with the intelligence briefings they need to prepare to protect us from hostile powers. It is not known whether he will do the right thing and stop insisting the loss he suffered was because of a “rigged” election.

Oh, no. You can’t make this stuff up.

Trump lost in a free and fair election. It is arguably the most secure election in U.S. history. I mean, the shenanigans that occurred in 2016 set in motion safeguards that states and counties enacted to protect the sanctity of our democratic process.

Trump, though, continues to insist the election is “rigged.” It is nothing of the sort.

I am left simply to wish for Jan. 20 to come and go and for the new president to take the oath and begin the task that Trump is maliciously making more difficult: to unify a deeply divided nation.

Donald Trump is providing all the disgraceful examples we need to see of a man who was patently unfit for the office he now is about to surrender. Thank goodness for the democratic process.

national news

Trump poses existential threat to our security

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Forgive me for thrashing that so-called “dead horse,” but Donald Trump’s threat to our national security is being played out in real time during this transition to the Joe Biden administration.

Trump’s refusal to (a) acknowledge that he lost the election and (b) refuse to grant President-elect Biden’s team with intelligence briefings poses a potentially serious and dire threat to our national security.

Now we hear from a growing list of Republican politicians and former Trump aides clamoring for Trump to do the right thing. That would be to acknowledge the obvious, that Biden won the election and to start briefing Biden’s national security team on the key issues that threaten our beloved nation.

How does a president who ran for office on the pledge to “put America first” actually do this to a nation he says he loves?

Oh, I know the answer. It’s because this president loves the nation far less than he loves himself. He cherishes his own ego more than anything — or anyone — else on Earth. Of that I am absolutely convinced. That appears to be the driving force behind Trump’s gambit to deny his presidential successor access to the knowledge that all presidents traditionally have handed over to those who succeed them in office.

President Obama did so when he turned the office over to Trump in 2017. President Bush did the same thing for President-elect Obama in 2009. On and on it has gone.

Until now. That means that the president of the United States, the guy who pledged to protect Americans, has become our greatest threat.

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How would Trump cope with being stiffed by his predecessor?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Ladies and gentlemen, I am happy to inform you that we all are witnessing in real time why prior government experience matters during a presidential transition.

President-elect Joe Biden is assembling a government without an ounce of help from the man he defeated, Donald J. Trump. Has that stymied Biden’s effort to form a team he wants to take off from a dead stop when he assumes the office on Jan. 20? Hah! Not even …

I am wondering out loud how Donald Trump’s team would have fared had President Obama had sought to stiff the new president’s transition effort. Trump had zero government or public service experience when he won the 2016 election. He brought not a hint of understanding of politics and public policy when he took on the most powerful public office on Earth. Would he have proceeded the way Biden and his team have done? Hardly.

Joe Biden’s vast government experience, including his vast network of contacts, sources, friends, allies, partners gives him a huge advantage as he seeks to craft a government team.

Yes, folks, we are watching in real time the value that prior government and public service experience brings to an endeavor as huge as the one that Biden is undertaking.

I don’t expect it to go seamlessly without any help or assistance from the outgoing president’s team. Indeed, there’s still time for Donald Trump to snap to the reality that reportedly is dawning on his closest advisers … which is that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.

And that it is time for the outgoing president to make way for the new team.

national news

Don’t ditch Electoral College

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Call me a fuddy-duddy if you wish, or old-fashioned, or even a “strict constitutional constructionist.”

I am not going to climb aboard the  vessel that seeks to throw out the Electoral College.

You see, I happen to like the way we elect presidents. It’s the method concocted by the nation’s founders. Their intent was to create a more equitable distribution among the states. They intended to give more sparsely populated states a greater voice in selecting the president.

Has it worked perfectly? Well, no. It hasn’t. However, name any government policy that works perfectly and I’ll be willing to consider buying that bridge you’re offering to sell me.

I traveled to Greece in November 2000. You’ll recall how that election was hung up in the courts for weeks after Election Day. The Supreme Court ended up settling it with a 5-4 vote. Al Gore had more actual votes than George W. Bush, but Bush became president.

I had the challenge in 2000 of trying to explain to my Greek friends — most of whom are highly sophisticated government-watchers — how someone can collect more votes than the other guy but lose the election. I sought to explain as best I could the founders’ vision of what the Electoral College was intended to do. I think I made my point then.

Still, the debate rages on, even after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in both the actual vote and the Electoral College.

OK, the system ain’t perfect. In 2016, Hillary Clinton collected nearly 3 million more votes than Trump, but she lost. We have the Bush-Gore election of 2000. Grover Cleveland outpolled Benjamin Harrison, but lost the 1888 election. Samuel Tilden lost the presidency in 1876 to Rutherford B. Hayes in the same fashion.

By and large, though, the system works as the founders intended.

Consider that Nevada became a battleground this time around; it was just as critical to Biden winning as, say, Pennsylvania.

I am just not ready to toss the Electoral College system on its ear because of an occasional hiccup.

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