And here we go........

I knocked off commenting on the U. S. Presidential Election when it turned into one side trying to talk issues and the other jumping up and down screaming: "My opponent is evil, evil evil, and I'm not him!" Farce is cute, but not when the fate of the Republic is going to be affected.

Now the election is, for the most part, over. And you'd think the party whose candidate did not win would start getting behind the president-elect. After all, we're all pretty much in the same boat. Some people are in the penthouse suites and others are in steerage, but if it sinks, it takes us all down. So why is it that the loonies of the Right have started blaming everything wrong with the country, the economy, and possibly the weather on the president-elect? Why is it that these people can't notice that the Republic has one President at a time? I'm just waiting for the new guy to get blamed for the Chicago Fire, the San Francisco Earthquake, and the death of the last passenger pigeon.

The legal powers of the president-elect are, not to put too fine a point on it, zip. Nada. Bupkis. I can sympathize with the desire to blame everything on the new person, but dinging him for not fixing all the insanity of the past eight years before taking office shows two things. First, these people have no grasp of the Constitution. That's not a surprise, given their frequent attempts to circumvent that document. Second, with a wondrous disregard for the intelligence of their followers, the putative leaders and opinion-makers of this group keep up the "evil, evil, evil!" rhetoric. Last week, I was driving from Oregon down to Southern California, and hit that part of Central Valley where your radio options are limited to a couple scratchy Country statiopns, a dozen preachers, and the odd "pundit" telling us all what we should think. Come to think of it, most of the preachers seemed to have the same message. Anyway, in the hour or so I was in that area, I heard the president-elect called socialist, fascist, communist, marxist, and (apparently the worst, since they said it so often) a liberal and a card-carrying member of the ACLU.

So we can look forward to the same wonderful bipartisan dialog we've had for the past two years.

Wonderful.