The Official (…or maybe not so…) Unlikely Predictions for 2017, and Beyond…

A year ago today, we posted a decidedly satirical and sardonic list of unlikely predictions for 2016 ( http://www.drewnickell.com/?p=445 ). Oddly enough, on close inspection, much of the content within many of these predictions actually came true, in one way or another. So this year, we thought we might offer our perhaps-not-so-unlikely predictions for next year, and the extended near future beyond…

• In September of 2017, Barron Trump, having been recently enrolled in a prestigious and elite preparatory school located in Washington D.C., will enter the school on his first day, amid a ton of media coverage, wearing a navy blue blazer with the school’s crest on its pocket, and a necktie striped in the school’s colors. The videos broadcast that morning prompt a frenzy of pre-teen and early teen-aged girls who have suddenly developed a crush on him, and that leads to his being designated as the next teen idol, as noted in teen-targeted magazines.
• Also in September, 2017, former President Barack Obama publishes his first post-election book, a memoir of his years in the White House. The book, entitled “The Perils of Perfection- the Presidency of Barack Obama,” and by year’s end, surprisingly becomes listed in the New York Times best-seller list, but in the fiction category- the first for a book pretending to be non-fiction.
• Dateline October, 2017- In a narrow 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court rules against the findings of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, on a suit by Hillary Clinton which attempted to overturn the results of the 2016 election, based on the premise that it was the Russians who set up her private server without her knowledge, and who fabricated all of the e-mails her lawyers had deleted in the first place, and which prompted the FBI investigation which she further alleges cost her the election. In their dissent, Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagen and Breyer, note that exceptions should be made for former first ladies who otherwise “deserve to be president.”
• Also, in October of 2017, Wal-Mart announces the closure of one-fifth of its stores, nationwide, as the result of price increases on Chinese imports, caused by first-time tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, at the same percentage that China has imposed on U.S. imports, for decades.
• In December of 2017, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady announces that this season will be his last and hopes to play out the end of his career in Super Bowl LII.
• By the end of 2017, it is noted that only one of the many celebrities who threatened to leave the United States and move to Canada if Donald Trump was elected, actually moved to Canada. It is suspected that Miley Cyrus did so, to avoid charges in District Court, stemming from her giving the finger to a judge who fined her for failure to stop at a red light on Hollywood Boulevard.
• The end of 2017 also brings on the announcement that Hillary Rodham Clinton is legally separating from her husband, William Jefferson Clinton. In the early months of 2018, she files for divorce when it is revealed that the former president is now an expectant father, along with his girlfriend Lindsay Lohan.
• The 2019 Major League Baseball Season begins with the announcement that Cal Ripken, Jr. has purchased the Baltimore Orioles from Attorney Peter Angelos. Promising to return the Orioles to post season play, Ripken announces that former manager Buck Showalter will be named general manager, and that Miguel Tejada will be named manager. Brother Billy Ripken will direct the Orioles’ farm organization.
• In July, 2019, former first lady Michelle Obama announces on “the View” that she is running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, to the delight and tearful pleasure of Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg. Later that year, it is reported that she made the announcement against the wishes of her own immediate family, who wants to remain “chillin’” in Hawaii.
• In the run-up to Donald Trump’s re-election bid in 2020, the most popular prime-time show on cable and satellite television is “Being Barron,” starring Barron Trump, himself, and featuring his teen-aged and teasing take on living in the White House. Young Barron proves to be a comic genius in the cadence and timing of his monologues, and he reads some of his fan mail (mostly from girls) in a segment of the weekly show. At the end of each episode, the signature send-off shows Barron rolling his eyes, at the sound of his mother Melania (unseen), telling him that it’s time to turn off the TV and to get ready for bed. The proceeds of the show funds programs which allow under-privileged and at-risk teens to attend charter and other private schools, and then draws ire from the teachers’ unions and Democrats in the House and Senate.
• The fall election of 2020 sees the re-election of President Trump, who wins in forty of the fifty states, garnering 334 electoral votes to Elizabeth Warren’s 204. This immediately prompts demands for a recount by Democrats, and amid allegations that Trump stole the election, the final results have Trump winning 339 electoral votes to Warren’s 199. Efforts by Hollywood to urge Republican electors to swing the vote to Warren prove infantile as well as impotent, once again.
• As 2020 comes to a close, it is announced that Lucas Films will launch the next anticipated blockbuster in the Star Wars franchise, entitled “Young Obi Wan- the making of a Jedi.” Starring Barron Trump as the young Obi Wan, the announcement is made alongside the President, who predicts that the gate receipts for the film will be “YUGE.” In a separate statement, First Lady Melania Trump indicates that Barron’s scenes will only be filmed during the 2021 summer vacation, so as not to interfere with Barron’s education.
• Dateline November, 2021- The Supreme Court unanimously rules that all persons having been fined for not carrying health insurance during the time when such persons fell under the regulations of the now long-defunct Affordable Care Act (also known as Obama Care), are due a refund with interest on the fines that were paid, originally. In a related case, the Supreme Court also rules that all elected officials, including the president, are subject to the same regulations regarding health care, as the public at large.
• A 2023 segment of the new hit show “Fallen Stars Back in Reality” shows one-time star Miley Cyrus working as a cook aboard a Canadian commercial fishing vessel. It turns out that the Canadian government finally allowed her to remain in Canada, on the condition that she remains offshore.
• In April, 2024, former President William Jefferson Clinton publishes a tell-all memoir entitled “The Hell of Living with Hillary Clinton.” The former first lady files a defamation and libel suit against her former husband indicating, among other things, that finally, it was his fault she lost the 2016 election. In the eight years that has followed her defeat in the 2016 election, she has yet to admit that she had anything whatsoever to do with the loss.
• July, 2024- Boeing finally delivers the all-new Air Force One, at a cost of $3.5 billion dollars. After riding aboard the plane on its maiden voyage, President Trump tweets “It’s pretty nice, but my own plane is nicer, so I am going to keep traveling on ‘Trump Force One’ – besides, I won’t have to give it up when I leave office.”
• In January of 2026, the Baltimore Colts defeat the Indianapolis Ravens in an AFC Championship contest that no one anticipated would ever be played. Baltimore goes on to defeat the NFC Champion Washington INAs (Indigenous Native-Americans) in Super Bowl LXI.

So that’s the way it is, or might be, in the new year of 2017, and beyond.

This is your intrepid commentator, Drew Nickell, reporting…

Happy New Year !

 

-Drew Nickell, 29 December 2016

© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

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2016- Month to Month, the Year in Review

In the final few vestiges of the year that was 2016, we pause to review all that occurred, and what developed into becoming, a very consequential year in the course of our national journey.

As the year began in January last, we started to see the potential of damage wrought through the president’s use of executive orders, and took heed in Barack Obama’s clandestine and overt war on the second amendment. Following the president’s divisive and final state of the union speech, our focus was on the Charleston debate and the setting of the table for the GOP nomination.

In February, we unexpectedly said goodbye to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and pondered the ramifications of his passing on the short- and long-term direction of the nation’s highest court. The debates for the GOP nomination continued onward, and during the ensuing debates, we started to see the inexorable dominance of Donald Trump, as evidenced by strong showings in the Iowa caucus and decisive wins in the New Hampshire, Nevada and Virginia primaries. On the Democrat’s side, we started to sense that all was not right with the uneven scales, in the way the Democratic National Committee and the media were managing the insurgence of Bernie Sanders as an alternative to their intended nominee, Hillary Clinton.

In March, Donald Trump’s successful run through the “Super Tuesday” primaries and caucuses sent chills through the mainstream media and the NeverTrump Republicans allayed against his candidacy, both of whom could no longer deny what we knew for the preceding nine months- that the Republican nomination was his to lose. The election campaign itself took an ugly turn in the streets of Chicago as paid protesters, (funded by George Soros and coordinated by Obama’s early mentor, Bill Ayers) bent on wreaking havoc, forced a cancellation of a Trump rally in that city. Anti-Trump Republicans continued to try in vain, to sack the candidacy of their leading candidate with much help from the mainstream media, but the Trump train continued on, despite these efforts to be derailed.

In April, as Trump continued his strategy to eliminate, one by one, his sixteen rivals for the GOP nomination, we saw President Obama in London, arrogantly attempting to “school” British voters on how they should abide by his wishes, and cast their votes accordingly, in the upcoming referendum on their continued membership in the European Union.

In May, Trump continued his path to victory in the quest for the Republican nomination, while the sitting president decided that it was a matter of national urgency to re-direct where its citizens relieve their…ahem…“urgencies”.

In June, we were forced to face the facts of Barack Obama’s failure to defeat or, for that matter, even name Islamic Extremism- both here and around the world. Donald Trump locked up his nomination long before his eventual Democrat rival, revealing the truth that the media had it wrong, all along, regarding what was inevitable and in which party, this inevitability truly existed.  As a harbinger of things to come, British voters defied the “experts” and pollsters (not to mention Obama), voting to leave the European Union, much to the chagrin of globalists in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Bitter warnings of market backlashes, in the wake of this upset, proved to be unfounded, as would the forecasting of similar dire results in the markets, five months later.

In July, the “fix was in” on the investigation of criminal behavior by Hillary Clinton, as Attorney General Loretta Lynch met with former President Bill Clinton just a few days before her FBI Director, James Comey, announced that, despite a litany of wrongdoings by the former Secretary of State, he would not recommend any charges against her. The nominating conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia certified the respective nominations of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but nevertheless revealed continued fracture of both parties, thanks to NeverTrump Republicans attempting to spoil Trump’s win and the revelation of collusion between the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

In August, following these conventions, the mainstream media began pronouncing that Hillary Clinton was certain to win the general election regardless of the number of Trump’s post-convention rallies consistently drawing in the tens of thousands, juxtaposed against Hillary’s extended time off and frequent absences on the campaign trail.

September saw Hillary’s continued part-time approach to the fall campaign, as she preferred lavish fund raisers to campaign rallies being manned by Obama, her running mate, Tim Kaine and other supporters within her party. It was at one of these fund-raisers that she revealed her true feelings about the American people, labeling Trump supporters in what she viewed as a “basket of deplorables.” Later that month, the first debate was held between Donald Trump and the tag team of Hillary Clinton and “moderator” Lester Holt.

October’s release of an eleven-year-old “open-mic” recording of Donald Trump yucking it up with NBC’s Billy Bush, gave anti-Trump Republicans an excuse to bail on their nominee, and gave the Democrats and their allies in the major media much fodder to spread the notion that Donald Trump was just too misogynistic and sexist to ever become president. All the while, they kept pounding it into our heads that there was simply no path for Trump to win the electoral college, despite the fact that it was Trump who continued to improve his performance in the remaining debates- despite adverse “moderation” from Hillary’s supporting cast of supposedly even-handed debate moderators.

November began with continued polling and “expert” commentary that there was no path for Donald Trump to win the election. Then, in the wee small hours of Wednesday morning, November 9^th, Donald Trump won the election, garnering 306 electoral votes to Hillary’s 232. The result of this upset sent shock waves throughout the mainstream media and even into the streets, while demands for recounts and allegations of Russian tampering all failed to deny Trump’s election to the presidency. Further attempts to malign and cast aspersions on Trump’s win, in characterizing his cabinet-selection process in “a state of disarray” only served to make all of the pundits and politicos look even more foolish, as Trump filled his cabinet slots faster than any of his ten elected predecessors.

In December, further attempts to deny Trump’s presidency entered into “the theatre of the absurd,” with celebrities trying to convince the Electoral College to overturn the results. These efforts cost Trump only two electoral votes, while costing Hillary Clinton five electoral votes, in the end. As we observed the 75^th anniversary of the attacks on Pearl Harbor, we were told by President Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, those American survivors of the attack who still bore a grudge towards their Japanese attackers, needed to “get over it.”  Then, just on the eve of Hanukkah’s beginning, and on Christmas eve, itself, President Obama orchestrated a first-time-ever abstention of a United Nations vote to condemn Israel, for settlements in the West Bank and Israeli presence in parts of Jerusalem, effectively proscribing Jewish prayers at the Western Wall- all in an effort to stick it to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli people and further seek to sabotage the foreign policy of the incoming administration. Typically, he left for an extended vacation in Hawaii days before his UN Ambassador, Samantha Power, wielded the knife of his own treachery.

As we usher in the new year, we all must ponder what a year it was, indeed !

 

-Drew Nickell, 27 December 2016

© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Bending-Your-Ear-Collection-Essays/dp/1633932907?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

Signed and personalized editions now available at my website:

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Drew Nickell is back on the Radio Today, December 22, 2016

Today, Thursday, December 22nd from 1:00 to 2:00, EST, Drew Nickell will be sitting in for Nora Firestone on the “Nora Firestone Show,” on WKQA Freedom 1110, on your Hampton Roads (VA) AM dial. During this hour-long broadcast, he’ll be discussing the 2016 Presidential Election- what lead up to it, what has happened since, and what we can expect, as a result. If you can’t tune in, here is the hyperlink to the live-streamed broadcast. We hope you’ll tune in, and don’t forget to call in, at (757) 222-3705 !

http://www.wkqaradio.com/

 

-Drew Nickell, 22 December 2016

 

© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

 

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Bending-Your-Ear-Collection-Essays/dp/1633932907?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

Signed and personalized editions now available at my website:

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A Christmas Appeal- (a Star is a Terrible Thing to Waste)

All over Southern California, and in the suites of New York, many hundreds of celebrities, distraught over the results of this year’s election, are feeling lost and abandoned in the realization that their appeals have gone unanswered. Many dozens of these same celebrities, threatened to leave our country if Donald Trump was to be elected president. Some even took to the airwaves to appeal to Republican electors to do what they saw as the right thing to do, and flip their votes to Hillary Clinton but sadly for them, their appeals went in vain, and even more of Hillary Clinton’s electors went “rogue” than did Mr. Trump’s, in the end.

Now, dejected, despondent and discouraged that their sense of broad appeal was not so broad, and that their influence over the masses was an illusion, not based in the reality of a fan base they found to be waning and wanting. Faced with the certainty that they have failed, in the end, to realize their dream of a Hillary Christmas, and faced with the prospect that Donald Trump will indeed be president, these same celebrities now need your help in keeping the promise to vacate the premises of a country that has gone against them.

In this festive season, where we open our hearts and give of ourselves, won’t you give to UNICREF, the United Celebrity Relocation and Expatriation Fund ?

After all, a star is a terrible thing to waste, and for them, defeat is a terrible thing to taste.

Give today so they might leave, tomorrow….

 

-Drew Nickell, 20 December 2016

© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Bending-Your-Ear-Collection-Essays/dp/1633932907?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

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Barack and Hillary’s Top Ten Reasons Hillary Lost the 2016 Presidential Election

10. All thirty of the states whose electors were awarded to Trump are filled with what Hillary would call the “basket of deplorables” and it is only in the “blue” states that “enlightened” people reside.

 

9. Vladimir Putin rigged the election towards Donald Trump because he has been so cowered by Barack Obama’s forcefulness and resolve, that he was afraid Hillary might even be more so.

 

8. WikiLeaks rigged the election towards Donald Trump because, at heart, they are right-wing extremists who would prefer a Republican to a Democrat.

 

7. The mainstream media was overtly biased against Hillary, just because she is a woman, just as much as they were biased against Barack Obama, just because he is African-American.

 

6. Donald Trump conspired with members of the mainstream media, and the Democrat National Committee, to have Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile write e-mails that appeared to be biased against Bernie Sanders’ candidacy, when Hillary really wanted him to be treated fairly.

 

5. Donald Trump’s children tried to show that they had real class, when actually all of them were in cahoots with Chelsea Clinton to keep her own father from returning to the White House, where teenage interns would once again be set upon.

 

4. Donald Trump utilized all of his real estate and entertainment friends- particularly all of his friends in Hollywood, to air ads pretending to support Hillary Clinton, but knowing full well that the public would do the opposite, instead.

 

3. Donald Trump put his own name on major hotels and resorts, just to evade campaign finance election laws pertaining to advertising.

 

2. The FBI, the CIA, the IRS and all of the bureaucrats in Washington really conspired against Hillary Clinton, by pretending to conspire against Donald Trump, knowing that the public is so disenchanted with Washington that they would vote in opposition, instead. This method is called cross-quasi-triangulation by conspiracy theorists. Anyone who is adept in trigonometry can easily figure this out.

 

1. Barack Obama knew that the only way his own popularity ratings would go up at the end of his term, was to have his protégé, Hillary Clinton, lose the election.

 

Now what’s all of this crap about “fake news,” anyway?

-Drew Nickell, 16 December 2016

© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Bending-Your-Ear-Collection-Essays/dp/1633932907?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

Signed and personalized editions now available at my website:

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To Those Who Would Cast Aspersions on the Election of Donald Trump

No matter how hard the forces still allayed against him try, with all their might to deny him the presidency, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the forty-fifth President of the United States at noon on Friday, January 20^th, 2017.

For the sake of clarity, we will state it again.

Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the forty-fifth President of the United States at noon on Friday, January 20^th, 2017.

Whether one is a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a stubborn “NeverTrump” Rattlesnake Republican, a Bernie Sanders socialist, a stick-with-her-to-the-hilt Hillary Clinton sycophant, an elitist we-know-better-than-you political pundit, a so-called scientific pollster, an inside-the-beltway politico, or a consummate conspiracy theorist, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the forty-fifth President of the United States at noon on Friday, January 20^th, 2017.

On Monday, December 19^th 2016, the Electoral College will convene to certify that Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential Election with 306 electoral votes, 36 more than the 270 electoral votes necessary to win, and that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 Presidential Election with 232 electoral votes, 38 less than the 270 Electoral votes necessary to win. The idea that enough presidential electors will go against their mandates, and summarily reverse the outcome on that day, is nothing more than pure presidential and political poppycock. Suffice to say that it would be more likely (and to some, even more desirable) that the Indianapolis Colts and the Baltimore Ravens will suddenly decide to swap team names, just so the Colts could return to the city where they began playing in the All-American Football Conference in 1947, and where the reincarnated Colts resumed NFL play in 1953.

Oh, we all can bet the farm on the fact that all of the forces allayed against Trump will do their level best to cast aspersions on his uncanny victory, for the four or eight years that he will serve as president, just as the similar forces did their level best to cast aspersions on George Bush’s wins in 2000 and 2004, and even Ronald Reagan’s wins in 1980 and 1984. Demands for recounts will inevitably show that even more people voted for Trump than the official vote tallies thus far reported, but the machinations of the disenchanted won’t stop there. Trump’s enemies will claim that the Russians somehow rigged the election itself (they didn’t), that the Russians hacked the e-mails of the Democratic National Committee, members of the mainstream media and Hillary Clinton just to make her look bad (despite the fact that it was operatives in the DNC, representatives of the mainstream media and Mrs. Clinton who authored these same e-mails in the first place), and that Donald Trump has far too many potential conflicts of interest to become president (he doesn’t). Amazingly, all of these same people who so vehemently oppose Trump’s inauguration had absolutely no problems with fraudulent voting that ran rampant in Barack Obama’s first election in 2008, had no uneasiness about the authenticity (or lack, thereof) of Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and had no qualms about the sealing of his academic and collegiate records which might have otherwise indicated a foreign birth…

…in a word, hypocrisy.

While there are those who think that Mr. Trump is the most divisive president ever elected in the history of the United States, these same ignoramuses don’t know their infernal regions from a hole in the ground…nor do they know their own country’s history.

Once upon a time, it was recorded that an elected president who won only 39.8 percent of the popular vote, and who was so opposed, so hated and so reviled by a large portion of the American electorate- one who even assembled his cabinet with many who were aligned against his presidency in the first place, that it touched off the costliest war in American history. His name was Abraham Lincoln.

Does anyone with any shred of sense believe that Donald Trump’s election and subsequent inauguration will touch off another civil war in the United States?

Let them hear this loud and clear…

… Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the forty-fifth President of the United States at noon on Friday, January 20^th, 2017.

Get over it.

-Drew Nickell, 14 December 2016

© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Bending-Your-Ear-Collection-Essays/dp/1633932907?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

Signed and personalized editions now available at my website:

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A Path to Presidential Success- the Master Cabinetry of Donald Trump

One look into the comings and goings at the New York’s Trump Tower, since its namesake was elected president, and one could easily conclude that the president-elect is willing to meet with anyone and everyone, friend or foe.

Mitt Romney, Bill de Blasio, Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore…these are not what anyone would call Trump supporters…and yet, “the Donald” was willing to sit down with each of them at length, ask probing questions and have substantive discussions with each of these erstwhile political foes. While sending the mainstream media into an absolute “tizzy,” and thus prompting fallacious stories about how Mr. Trump is supposedly turning his back on the base of supporters who elected him president, once again it is Donald Trump who is plodding along and, as before, is enabling this same mainstream media to make themselves look foolish, at the end of the day.

What the media does not understand about Trump is that he is not a politician, but rather a business executive- one who is willing to listen to even his fiercest competitor in order to gain a competitive edge and understand all viewpoints prior to making the best decision.

Take for instance his meetings with Messrs. DiCaprio and Gore. Staunch environmentalists both- environmentalists in the extreme sense of the word, to boot. Both of these men reported having substantive, probing and thoughtful discussions with the president elect. Yet, when it came to announcing his choice for heading the Environmental Protection Agency, it was Donald Trump who named the Attorney General of Oklahoma, one Scott Pruitt, a noted skeptic of man-made climate change- the antithesis of whom either DiCaprio or Gore would have preferred.

While the mainstream media and all of the political pundits are busy musing as to the method behind his madness, Donald Trump knows all-too-well that the best way to defeat the opposition is to step into their shoes, see the world the way they see it, and arrive upon the best way to succeed in overcoming this opposition…

…in a word, brilliant.

One look into the choices President-elect Trump has made in his final selections to fill these posts, and one sees the makings of a cabinet that might well be the best presidential cabinet crafted in the last several decades. The fact that Mr. Trump is willing to seek personnel well outside the politicos in Washington, and even consider the appointment of onetime rivals and outright opponents to his own candidacy, shows that he is a man who is sage enough to look past the squabbles of campaign rhetoric in order to find the best men and women to fit the positions he needs to fill. Much to the chagrin of the “NeverTrump” so-called conservatives within his own Republican party, the choices he has made thus far have been, in a word, conservative, to a degree that Ronald Reagan’s cabinet never was.

Compare this to that of his immediate predecessor. Barack Obama would no sooner sit down with his opponents, and hear them out, than he would get into a four-point stance against the Baltimore Ravens’ defensive line. In fact, it is doubtful that the sitting U.S. president listens much to his own cabinet (Valerie Jarrett, excepted), as even the legislators in his own party have repeatedly complained about the fact that he rarely consults them before making any decision.  As he closes out the second of his two terms as president, Obama is still convinced that he is smarter than everyone in the room, smarter than everyone in Washington D.C. or, for that matter, everyone in the entire world. Just as his party’s candidate for president, Hillary Clinton, is unwilling to accept any responsibility for her own defeat at the polls, Barack Obama is quick to blame anyone and everyone else, including his own immediate predecessor, George W. Bush, for the shortcomings of his own presidency- a presidency which historians will note to be an abject failure, when all is said and done. The reasons for this are many, but suffice to say that President Barack Obama ultimately failed, due to the excess of his own ego in thinking it was he who knew better than anyone else. That’s fine for a university professor who holds the power of his students’ grades in his hands, but disastrous for a president who seeks to lead a nation and, namely, the world in which we live.

Donald Trump will succeed the way he has always succeeded, by listening and probing and negotiating and dealing. He will succeed by hard work, as evidenced by his career and his candidacy, and by his own determination to succeed in the face of opposition, just as he succeeded in winning the nomination of his party and, in the end, the presidency, itself.

And, for the record, he is off to one helluva start.

 

-Drew Nickell, 9 December 2016

© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Bending-Your-Ear-Collection-Essays/dp/1633932907?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

Signed and personalized editions now available at my website:

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Diamond Anniversary in the Shadow of Diamond Head- a Pearl Harbor Remembrance

Seventy-five years ago today, December 7^th, on what was supposed to be a quiet Sunday morning on the island of Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands, the United States was thrust into war by a sudden and deliberate attack by the Japanese Empire. The attack began twelve minutes before 8:00 AM, local time, a full hour before the Japanese diplomatic delegation informed our government that ongoing negotiations- negotiations presumably aimed at the preservation of peace- would come to a cease, and that further discussions between the two nations would come to an abrupt end. In the two hours which followed, 2,471 souls lost their lives including 68 civilians, and an additional 1,213 were wounded- many suffering burns from the fires spawned in the air raid. Nineteen of our ships were sunk or severely damaged that morning, while 250 planes were destroyed or damaged, rendering our Pacific defenses all but powerless to fight back.

The logistics required to launch such an attack, by air and naval forces of the Japanese Empire, made it painfully obvious that plans for the attack had been made many months prior to that Sunday morning, thus revealing the treachery and duplicity of the Japanese government. What also became obvious was the very fact that, despite ominous signs that such an attack might soon take place, our own intelligence assets failed to adequately alert the military and naval command structures stationed on Oahu, in the days and weeks prior to that fateful Sunday morning.

Nestled into a false sense of security that the two mighty oceans which separated the United States from the eastern hemisphere, where two wars in Europe and in Asia were already well under way, the American people were largely united in their steadfast opposition to enter these conflicts, but all of that changed in a matter of hours on that dreadful day. It would be another four years before the largest and deadliest war ever fought would come to an end, a war which saw the death of some eighty-four million people.

Those sailors and soldiers, those airmen and marines, who managed to survive the attack on that Sunday morning, have largely gone on to join those who lost their lives that day. Those relatively few remaining are well into their nineties, and have witnessed first-hand the events which have shaped world history since that Sunday morning, seventy-five years ago. These tortured souls fear that their progeny- those of us who were born in the four generations which have followed, will soon forget the harsh lessons learned in the wake of the attacks on that day, for they know that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

It is for this reason, above all, that we must remember Pearl Harbor on this day, and always.

 

-Drew Nickell, 7 December 2016

 

© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

 

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Bending-Your-Ear-Collection-Essays/dp/1633932907?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

Signed and personalized editions now available at my website:

http://www.drewnickell.com

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