Mourning In America - News With Views

By Joan Swirsky

When my husband Steve was almost 13, his grandfather died––just a few months before the old man he loved and respected had tutored him for his Bar Mitzvah. To this day, Steve remembers the burial ceremony vividly.

When the rabbi had finished the prayers at the outdoor burial site and his grandfather’s son and daughters and grandchildren were wiping the tears from their eyes, Steve told me that “my grandmother let out a blood-curdling scream and jumped into the grave––literally––right on top of the wooden coffin! And I remember three or four men had to reach in and jump in after her to lift her out.”

This is certainly not a typical reaction to loss, but it’s not unheard of. Especially if the loss is unanticipated and therefore traumatic.

It’s harder to wrap your mind around hearing that a generally healthy man drops dead on a tennis court than if another man suffers a lingering death. The first is traumatic; the second may even be a relief.

And the relevance?

LIBERAL GRAVE JUMPERS

Not long after the November 2016 presidential election, I was at a luncheon surrounded by a large group of powerful, sophisticated, and formidably wealthy women, actually full-bore capitalists––dripping in diamonds and wearing pricey designer outfits––who all voted for the Socialist Hillary for president and twice for the Marxist poseur “president” Barack Obama.

At casual glance, you would think this gathering was a lavishly catered fundraiser for a good cause, with gorgeous flowers on display and wine flowing. But in truth it more resembled a wake.

“It’s not fair,” one woman lamented, echoing the age-old mantra of the left, and completely oblivious to the fact that most Hillary voters would consider it “not fair” to be wearing a seven-carat diamond ring and driving to a fancy luncheon in a Bentley when this privileged woman could––progressives believe actually should––be “sharing her wealth” with the deserving masses!

“Everything we worked for is lost,” another diva announced––“what will happen to choice?”––again referring to the Holy Grail of the left, i.e. ending the lives of living fetuses who simply need a few more months of in-utero development to become vibrant human beings, babies who would be adored by millions of would-be adoptive parents throughout the world.

Significantly, none of the leftist women I encountered at the luncheon has defected to Cuba or Russia or China to prove how ideologically pure they are or how genuine their belief is in socialism or communism. Au contraire…all of them keep living the high life while they keep telling the rest of us not to wear fur coats, not to drive gas-guzzling cars, not to send our kids to private schools, on and on, while, to a person, they do exactly the opposite of what they pretend to stand for!

This luncheon was held a couple of weeks before the National Day of Mourning on January 21, 2017––also known as the Women’s March on Washington––in which thousands of women gathered to express their shock and fury at Hillary’s loss of the presidency.

It was at both the luncheon and while watching the March on TV that I got my first glimpses of what would become a full year of out-of-control, grave-jumping hysteria.

THIS TOO SHALL PASS

Most Americans had seen these leftist protests during the presidential campaign and misguidedly thought that the frenzied demonstrations, bizarre behavior, and adolescent displays of unhinged hatred toward the new president would peter out, that the insanity would pass. Naively, they failed to realize that this was equal to believing quack doctors who tell gullible patients that their Alzheimer’s disease or diabetes will pass.

Indeed, to liberals, leftists, progressives––whatever they’re calling themselves today––Hillary’s loss was worse than death; it was the utter destruction of everything they stood for, believed in, adhered to, taught their children, voted for, donated money to, based their entire identities upon!

To this day, never-say-die leftist billionaires are paying for the protests and for leftist candidates to run for the Congress and the Senate, for leftist newscasters to stick to their anti-Trump scripts, and for leftist women to accuse the Commander in Chief of the kind of sexual harassment that we now know, with rare exceptions, seems to be the exclusive domain of predatory perverts and abuse-of-power leftists in the media, industry, Hollywood, sports, on and on.

THE IDENTITY THING

Let’s say you love the home you live in, that you chose everything about the décor––the blue and green color scheme, big-pillow couches, hanging plants, lamps instead of overhead spotlights, traditional paintings, a few candles, small picture frames, et al.

But you come home one day and your entire home is in neon orange and yellow, with stark angular furniture, harsh lighting, impenetrable modern art, no sign of a plant or photo, and a distinctly barren atmosphere. And you can’t do a damned thing about it.

You feel nauseated, then despairing, angry, furious, boiling, insane with rage!

But that is not all.

You suddenly realize that everything you fervently believed in:

The benefits of high taxation,
The necessity of increased regulation,
The belief in open borders,
The validity of global warming,
The fairness of socialized medicine,
The wisdom of socialized education,
The brilliance of leading from behind and striking a billion-dollar nuke deal with Iran…

All of them gone!

But that is not all.

You also realize that:

Every newspaper you read, every pollster you believed, every TV personality you trusted––all your sources of information were wrong! Day after day, week after week, month after month on end they predicted that Hillary would win. And then kaput! Your entire identity, utterly gone.

Like the essentially unadaptable species the left represents, you couldn’t cope––any more than the snowflake children you raised can cope with even minor adversity. Any more than the professional meltdown infants of the media left––CNN’s joyless Joy Reid and ABC’s joyless Joy Behar come immediately to mind––can cope.

So hair-on-fire hysterical were the leftist losers of the 2016 presidential campaign that–– essentially children that they are––they engaged in a full two-year temper tantrum––the year Mr. Trump was a candidate and his first year in the presidency.

“RACISM” GRAVE JUMPERS

The minute candidate Trump said his solution to keeping illegal aliens, terrorists, and drug dealers from entering our country through our southern border was to “build a wall” and “have Mexico pay for it,” the compassionate liberals (whose forebears created the Ku Klux Klan, the Jim Crow laws, et al) cried “racist.”

The decibel level only increased after U.S. citizen Rizwan Farook and his Pakistani wife Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 people in San Bernardino on December 2, 2015, and candidate Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” He later refined the plan to include extreme vetting.

Of course, critics ignored the fact that for over five decades, Mr. Trump had hired hundreds if not thousands of non-Caucasian employees, many on an executive level, and that racism was the last adjective people who know him would ever use to describe him.

The public clearly got that message and elected him President of the United States!

Note: Relevant to mention here that according to the Associated Press, the unemployment rate for African-Americans today is at its lowest level in records dating to 1972.

MEDIA GRAVE JUMPERS

In a September article, “Media Whores,” I cited journalist Ashley Lutz’s report for Business Insider, which said that in 1983 there were 50 media companies, but today only six organizations are responsible for 90 percent of all the “news” we read, watch and listen to! Five of the CEOs of these multibillion-dollar businesses are leftist globalists, and the sixth, the only conservative, is Rupert Murdoch (Fox, Wall St. Journal, NY Post, et al) who recently gave control of his empire to his leftist sons Lachlan and James, hence the distinctly leftward tilt of Fox and the WSJ.

For decades, these business titans have made massive investments in the global economy, thanks largely to the leftist con men and women—the Clintons and Obama & Co.; the communists, tin-pot dictators and America-haters of the United Nations; the leftist billionaires who thrive on and denounce capitalism at the same time—who convinced them that America was on the decline and that the open-borders, one-world-government crowd was in imminent ascendance.

Then Donald Trump happened and all that one-world baloney vanished overnight.

Since then, the globalists have done two things: they have continued to invest heavily in our economy, hence the rocket-like ascendance of the Stock Market, while at the same time telling their media shills to keep up the drumbeat of negativity about President Trump. Why? Because the ratings for their devolving shows spiked with his election, as did the money that lined their pockets!

The always astute Daniel Greenfield elaborates on this phenomenon:

“The media spent eight years declining into irrelevance under Obama. Even before Trump, Obama had bypassed the media for social media. The big stories were fed to the press by Obama Inc. cronies like Ben Rhodes or hidden-hand political smear shops like Fusion GPS.

“Trump revived the media…[his] end year remarks to the NY York Times acerbically summed up his relationship with the media. `I’m going to win another four years… because newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there.’ The answering outburst of rage and contempt from the media burned all the hotter because the statement was not only intentionally provocative; it was also true.

“Trump’s greatest trick was forcing [the media] to get in the ring with him. That’s always been his trick for defeating his opponents.

“The media’s Trump rage ended Hillary’s career, put a Republican in the White House, pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accords, brought in the Muslim travel ban, recognized Jerusalem and did all the other things the media wails about every second of the day. And the media helped make them happen.”

Personally, I wonder how all these “media whores” will feel when they realize that they’ve been played not only by President Trump, but by their bosses as well!

CONSPIRACY-THEORIST GRAVE JUMPERS

For a year since the November 2016 presidential election––and no doubt plotted and planned for months before the election when the Democrats’ internal polling told them that Sir Edmund Hillary’s namesake could lose––the meme that the “Steele dossier” proved that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to win the election has been the 24-7 non-stop theme of every leftist broadcast in America.

The mission, of course, was to prove collusion, conspiracy, even sedition, and then to impeach President Trump and ultimately to return to the Communist paradise the faux “president” Barack Obama tried mightily to inflict on the land of the free and the home of the brave.

But according to author and journalist Paul Sperry, “now that Hillary Clinton has been revealed as [the Steele dossier’s] paymaster and a Hillary-friendly FBI is under investigation for possibly launching the Trump-Russia `collusion’ probe under false pretenses, they are suddenly in full retreat from it. Their credibility is in tatters along with the discredited document.”

“Democrats’ new mission,” Sperry adds, “is to bury the dossier, and the media are providing them the shovel.” Democrats “got everyone lathered up over a false conspiracy theory, and now they’re realizing they overreached and are running for the exits, revising history, recasting narratives, covering their keisters. They led the nation on a wild goose chase, and now they fear the reckoning.”

Indeed. As Russian-American blogger Gary Gindler wonders: “Are Soros, Obama, and Clinton so naïve that they sincerely believed that Trump would accept their rules of engagement and just idly sit by? Did they seriously expect that an investigation into something that doesn’t exist would trigger no answer from Trump? None of these neo-Marxists with allegedly high IQs bothered to consider a strategy to forestall Trump just in case he turned out not to be guilty of anything.”

Gindler suggests what that the president’s “counterstrike strategy” might be: “The events of the past month give every reason to believe that Trump is aiming at the full-scale bankruptcy of his political opponents. This bankruptcy refers not only to financial, but also political, legal, and moral bankruptcy of the Democratic [Party] and its allies in the disinformation media.”

HARASSMENT-HORDE GRAVE JUMPERS

It started in 2016, when the co-host of the Today Show, Billy Bush, aired a tape of an interview he had done with business mogul Trump in 2005––a tape in which both men chortled when discussing women in typical locker-room talk. Guy talk. Sex talk. OMG!

Pounce! “Sexist,” “misogynist,” “woman hater,” shrieked the same women who stood faithfully by not only Bill Clinton through eight years of philandering and de facto wife abuse, et al., but also behind all the predatory males in Hollywood and the TV and literary and sports worlds without ever murmuring a word of protest.

In October, the sexual-harassment brouhaha erupted when movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was accused of vulgar behavior toward women, going back decades. Those of us who know how liberals think knew that (1) this was a desperate ploy, given that all the things mentioned above hadn’t worked to depose or impeach President Trump, (2) that they had to choose an executive, a powerful mogul like Weinstein, to then make their accusations against the POTUS stick––sauce for the goose and all that, and (3) everyone and anyone was dispensable to actualize their goals.

Last November, even leftist Newsweek published an updated list of the men accused of sexual harassment––overwhelmingly Democrat liberals! Surprise surprise!

MENTAL-FITNESS GRAVE JUMPERS

As long as leftist billionaires pay their way, the leftists among us will keep up their anti-Trump drumbeat. Now we have the hilarious theory that the president is mentally unfit for office.

A few days ago, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told CNN that Congress has a “constitutional duty” to…declare President Donald Trump unfit to serve in the Oval Office due to his psychological state. A lawyer, Cong. Raskin didn’t mention his credentials in diagnosing medical conditions that threaten our national security.

However, he told the interviewer that last month he and [more than a dozen] other lawmakers met with Yale University psychiatry professor Dr. Bandy X. Lee, who, in violation of professional ethics, said that the president exhibited signs he would “unravel,” according to Politico.

Apparently, Dr. Lee has a problem with the president’s tweeting. But according to writer Renee Hayes, ”Lee’s got a stake in the mental demise of President Trump with a book she edited called, `The Dangerous case of Donald Trump.’ The book…was apparently read by many of the lawmakers who attended last month’s meeting.”

In a powerful indictment of Pres. Trump’s predecessor, writer Jack Hellner says that “the people who actually need their heads examined are Obama and all the journalists and Democrats who supported him. Obama was paranoid, delusional, and a power-hungry autocrat who didn’t care about equal justice, his oath to enforce laws, the Constitution, economic opportunity for all, or the safety of the people. I will gladly take a president who leads from ahead, who follows laws that Congress has passed, and who is striving to give the power and purse back to the people as fast as he can. His mental capacity to produce results appears to be spectacular.”

WOLFF-BOOK GRAVE JUMPERS

Leftists quite effectively time events to distract from President Trump’s quite spectacular accomplishments and then use the leftist media to keep their hate-Trump obsession going.

The latest spectacle has been the publication of an anti-Trump book by fabricator Michael Wolff, which features bizarre and scurrilous accusations toward the Commander in Chief and his family by Steve Bannon, a former advisor to the president and executive chairman of Breitbart News.

Unfortunately for a clearly bitter and angry Bannon, suffering it appears from a jilted-lover syndrome (a result of being summarily dismissed by the White House), the book is already suffering from the all-important credibility factor. And the former advisor has now offered President Trump an extravagant apology ––“My support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda…”––which suggests that Mr. Wolff should have reserved his psychiatric diagnosis for Mr. Bannon.

As NY radio host Mark Simone tweeted: “Only in America can a lazy tabloid writer who turns out a book every 5 years, call a billionaire, who builds 100 story skyscrapers in his sleep, runs dozens of companies, has 10,000 employees, an unfocused child.”

At this point it appears that except for leftist “elites” on both coasts and a media whose credibility now hovers close to zero, no one is buying this fiction. As writer Kurt Schlicter, so aptly puts it, “The elite keeps losing to the guy they tell us is dumb. The elite keeps losing to the guy they tell us is a clown. He just refuses to lose. He just refuses to submit. He just refuses to give a damn about what they say or what they think. And that infuriates them. He won’t take a knee, but he will offer them a finger.”

[BIO: JOAN SWIRSKY, the recipient of numerous Long Island Press Awards, wrote health, science and feature articles for The New York Times Long Island section for over 20 years, as well as for many regional and national publications. A former obstetrical nurse, Lamaze teacher, and psychotherapist, Joan is the book-and-lyric writer of four musicals, one of which, “Oh Baby!” – about three couples facing parenthood – was produced in New York City in 1983.

For eight years, starting in 1985, Joan was a science writer for The Women’s Record on Long Island, during which time she wrote over 175 articles on the issue of breast cancer on Long Island – its clinical, psychological, political, environmental, and social implications. She has been publicly acknowledged as being responsible for two redesigns of the New York State Study on breast cancer and as being the first journalist in America to put the breast cancer-environment relationship “on the map” of public consciousness.

Joan is a clinical nurse specialist (R.N., M.S., C.S., C.E.) and NY-State-certified psychotherapist. She was awarded a Nurse of Distinction Award by the New York State Legislature in 1991, received the Master’s Faculty Leadership Award from Adelphi University, and is a member of Sigma Theta Tau Nursing Honor Society.]

E-Mail Joan Swirsky: joanswirsky@gmail.com

Website: www.joanswirsky.com