Crawling from the wreckage, crawling from the wreckage
You'd think by now at least
That half a brain would get the message
Crawling from the wreckage, crawling from the wreckage
Into a brand new car - Dave Edmunds

The 80's were indeed the finest decade. I say that as someone who graduated from high school in 1984. This is my wheelhouse. It was the decade of Reagan. The economy was rapidly improving. Music was great. Movies were great. But we didn't fully appreciate at the time how good things were until the 90's and Bill Clinton came calling. 

At the front edge of the 80's, musically speaking, was an album released by British rocker Dave Edmunds in 1979. One of the singles from it was Crawling Through the Wreckage, which is a good way to describe this period of time in the news we find ourselves - between the election a couple weeks ago and Thanksgiving coming up next week. 

In 2012, Barack Obama famously chided Mitt Romney at one of their presidential debates, when the GOP nominee claimed that Russia was the biggest global competitor and foe we faced, and the incumbent president, very condescendingly, replied, "The 80's called and want their foreign policy back." 

Well, largely on the votes cast by people who came of age in the 80's, Donald Trump is back. Democrats are scrambling to defend previous positions, shed others, point fingers everywhere they can, although a few honest lefties are pointing fingers at themselves. In short, the post-electoral national autopsy of the Democratic Party is well underway. 

The biggest failure of the liberals in this cycle, among dozens of failures, was their performance with men - all of them. A lot of strategists know this, and are desperately trying to convince anyone on the left who will listen to shed a lot of the social issues that did not resonate even a little bit, and rediscover what will attract the working-class males they've driven away. 

Peggy Noonan was on MSNBC's Morning Joe program, and in her inimitable way, cuts to the heart of the crisis in the Democratic Party.



Scott Jennings, The Republican Party's John the Baptist on CNN, dealt out the hard truth about what happened two weeks ago and why. 



When you trade away middle-class voters for niche identity groups, if working-class people all across the heartland are taken for granted in order to chase down the coveted transgender community, you know as a political party you've gone off the rails. But even this week, there are still some voices on the left who refuse to back down. Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas' 30th Congressional District, a state, by the way, which just voted for Donald Trump by 14 points, thinks white men in this country have nothing to complain about. 

 

Jasmine Crockett was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1981, a year not exactly known for open slavery and oppression. She attended the Mary Institute and St. Louis County Day School, a private independent study elite school for pre-K up. Crockett went to high school at Rosati-Kain, an all-girls Catholic institution. She got her Bachelor's at Tennessee's elite Rhodes College. She earned her law degree at the University of Houston. I'm not sensing a ton of oppression in her life. 

Meanwhile, PBS anchor Margaret Hoover appeared on CNN with Erin Burnett and made the case that the debate in Congress this week to prevent newly-elected Delaware Congressman Sarah McBride, born Tim, from using the women's restroom in the Capitol is the same prejudice we fought as a country through history regarding race and gender.



Of course, that's just nonsense. The women's movement that resulted in there being public women's restrooms in the first place a hundred years ago was done in order to make it easier for women to participate in open society. It was the right fight at the time, and it resulted in allowing women to have a private place of their own to do the business they uniquely need to do at times. That simply is not the case with Representative-Elect McBride. There is no unique biological need that would require the use of the women's restroom. This is also not an issue that 85% of the country or more care about. Doubling down on it is a loser of an issue. 

Another issue the Democratic Party misread severely is the immigration issue. And one legal case right at the heart of the border crisis came to its conclusion this week which encapsulates why the left got hammered on it. 22-year-old Laken Riley was jogging near the University of Georgia, like she had done dozens of times since enrolling as a nursing student at nearby Augusta University. An illegal alien in an apartment complex overlooking the path on which she frequently ran stalked her, pursued her, held her captive, and intended to rape her. The only reason he apparently didn't accomplish that goal was because he choked her to death and crushed her skull over the course of 18 minutes. He was convicted on all counts and was sentenced yesterday afternoon to life without parole. This killer was only in the country because of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' open border policies. Riley is one of thousands of victims of violent crime at the hands of illegal aliens who were not in the country four years ago. 

Tom Homan, the incoming Trump administration border czar, appeared on Fox News with Laura Ingraham and pleaded with people to go listen to the tape of Laken Riley that was used in the murder trial, and try to understand what she went through for the final moments of her life. 



Democrats largely were split between two strategies on illegal immigration - ignore it entirely, or claim that occurrences of violent crime by illegals were statistical anomalies or acceptable losses. Both positions were electoral disasters. 

Once the sentencing decision was handed down, ABC News went to their reporter covering the trial, Ike Ejiochi. 



Sure, Riley's killer technically shouldn't have been in the country, but the real takeaway for ABC News is blaming Donald Trump for seizing and pouncing on the issue all year. I'm guessing that's probably not the best way to show that regime media has learned their lesson of November 5th. 

An additional unfolding human tragedy as a direct result of the Biden-Harris immigration policy has been the disappearance of tens and hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors who were trafficked across the Southern Border into the interior of the United States. The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General released a report in August of this year that as many as 325,000 migrant children were missing, presumed to largely having been sold off into the sex trade black market. 

At a House hearing this week in the Health Committee, Secretary Xavier Becerra of Health and Human Services was asked by Wisconsin Rep. Tom Tiffany about all the unaccompanied minors. 



Notice how this weasel, Secretary Becerra, initially tried to slough off the question by saying immigration isn't his job. Rep. Tiffany was waiting for that answer and hit him back hard. Why? HHS was very much injected into the unaccompanied minors area of the larger illegal immigration crisis, tasked with taking these kids from the custody of DHS and placing them in the hands of U.S. sponsors. In the first two years of the Biden-Harris administration alone, HHS, on Secretary Becerra's watch, lost 85,000 illegal children they placed. 

Freedom of Information Act requests have been filed with Health and Human Services to follow up on the subsequent two years and what has been done to locate the missing kids, and Becerra has stonewalled every single request. Think about that. 325,000 children are gone. 

Consider these great American cities - Tampa, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Anaheim, Toledo, and Arlington, Texas. All of them are within the population range of 325,000. Pick any one of those cities, imagine it's populated entirely with the most vulnerable children on the planet, and having them just disappear over a four-year period, most likely into the underworld of global sexual depravity. Democrats have a lot of soul-searching to do and a lot of penance to make for the carnage on their watch.

Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers Union when she's not moonlighting as Center For Disease Control COVID policy guideline writer, put her finger on what Democrats did wrong - they didn't listen to teachers' unions enough. 



Finally, on a practical matter, the ground game advantage the Democrats thought they enjoyed turned out not to be there. Strategists on the left mocked what they believed was a crazy strategy employed by Donald Trump and the RNC, outsourcing the voter turnout to private groups and spend their resources on podcasts and alternative media. In actuality, part of the reason Democrats didn't turn out in numbers that were expected was not just because Kamala Harris was a horrific candidate, which of course, she was, but because the resources promised to county DNC headquarters across all seven swing states didn't materialize. 

You know who did materialize in places like Bucks County, Pennsylvania? Scott Presler, who ran a one-man voter registration drive and turnout model for Republicans that had a huge impact in that part of the Keystone State. After weeks of contesting, cheating, defying court orders to the contrary, and now contesting recounts, Presler showed up to the Bucks County Board of Supervisors and served notice. He's not going anywhere for the next three years. 



This was even better than Otter defending Delta House at the Faber College Student Council in Animal House, because Presler wasn't wearing a plaid sportcoat, and unlike Otter, Presler was sober. 

As Democrats wrestle with identity group supremacy in their coming years in the wilderness, regime media is already beginning their version of who's going to survive, and who won't. Comcast is apparently putting up their cable entities, including MSNBC and CNBC, on the block. Morning Joe's Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough tried to put a happy face on the prospects, admitting that they all might be out of a job in a year. 



I'm not sure I can withstand all this winning, but I promise to do my best for the next couple of years at least until the midterm elections. And I'm pretty sure that if I had to summon up the inner strength, I could steel myself for winning into 2028 and beyond. 

Fortunately, the Democratic Party, at least for now, is cementing in Republican winning every day they continue to hold onto all the issues that caused them to tank November 5th. I'll leave you with something you probably never thought you'd see in your lifetime - Bill Clinton recognizing that in all likelihood, the first woman president we'll see in this country is likely to be a Republican.



Oh, to be a fly on the wall in Chappaqua when Hillary came home. 

Update: Corrected an erroneous reference to China in the Romney-Obama debate. Romney identified Russia as the greatest geopolitical threat.