Winner: The GOP. The GOP won an historic midterm election and gained control over the Senate. They also finally seem to have gained control over their own party and their own agenda. They have a strong pool of princelings, many of whom are even talking about new and legitimate issues to help win over the public. At the same time, large chunks of the conservative punditry have come back to reality and stopped trying to destroy the party. The left seems more insane than ever. Obama continues to do more harm than good to his own party and is providing the GOP with voter-ready issues to exploit on a nearly weekly basis. And Hillary Clinton appears to be a dud. They face an historic opportunity in 2016 to regain Reagan's popularity if they do the right things between now and then.
Loser: Genuine "Conservatives". We've been over this extensively, but to sum it up: this was the year the GOP fought back against the "genuine conservative" fringe who had been holding the party hostage and crushed them. Not only did every one of their candidates get beaten in the primaries by the GOP establishment, but they were exposed as being much, much smaller than most everyone believed. Indeed, rather than being the "base" of the GOP, these people were shown to be somewhere between 20% and 30% of the GOP (around 6% of the public). This has resulted in the neutering of people like Rush, Levine, Ted Cruz, and the Tea Party, who have spent the past few years trying to destroy the GOP and the conservative brand, and is allowing the party to shift back to real conservative ideas (rather than fringe obsessions) and toward things that actually matter to the public.
Loser: Hillary Clinton. The wheels came off the Clinton mini-bus this year in so many ways. First, it became a matter of open discussion that she's just not a good candidate. She has no charisma, no speaking skills, no political sense, and no loyal base. She's lifeless, uninteresting, uninspiring and gaffe prone. Secondly, the left has all but declared their desire to destroy her because her ideology is entirely corporate-establishment. The couple times she's veered from corporate-establishmentism to leftism to sway the base, she's been caught being highly cynical and has embarrassingly needed to backtrack. Third, she's awash in the worst kinds of scandals... those involving incompetence. Fourth, Obama has made it clear he won't help her, and her husband's help is more likely to highlight her missing skills. Worst of all, her aura of inevitability has been growing holes. That's really bad when that's all you have.
Winner: Jeb Bush. It was always questionable whether Chris Christie was real competition for Bush, should Bush choose to run. This year, however, Christie imploded and opened the door completely for Bush. Combine that with a good year of solidifying support and Bush has essentially cleared his path to the nomination and likely the presidency. Ug.
Loser: Race Hustlers. For some time now, the race hustlers have been losing their clout. With less than 1/3 of Americans caring about the race issue, their days are numbered and there seems to be nothing they can do to reverse that. Toward the end of the year they were thrown a minor lifeline when Michael Brown and Eric Garner were killed by white police officers. Whatever the real facts of those cases, tons of famous blacks bought the myth and even the public seemed to accept the idea that perhaps there was still cause to worry about the way some police officers respond to blacks... then the hustlers went too far in trying to whitewash Brown and demonize the police. In so doing, they danced dangerously along the edge of losing the moral victory they were clutching. Then it all imploded when a black criminal drove to New York and assassinated two police officers.
Rather than condemn this murder, the race hustlers jumped into defense mode and tried to disclaim responsibility for this killer's actions. Basically, they ignored the dead cops as they loudly blamed everyone but themselves and in the process they made it clear they cared more about their own images than the victims. This sat poorly with the public, who rightly saw this as the race hustlers condoning the assassinations and hypocritically showing indifference to the officers and their families. At the same time, newspapers like the NY Post began showing footage of these supposedly peaceful protestors chanting for the murder of police officers. Whoops. And it kept getting worse. A somewhat famous "peaceful" protestor was arrested trying to burn down a gas station in Missouri. Then another black male pulled a gun on a cop in Missouri and got shot. The race hustlers stupidly went all in and tried to claim that the Missouri cop was just another example of police abuse/racism and they actually claimed he should not have defended himself with his own gun... an unreasonable claim to any rational person. This confirmed to the public that the race hustlers' case was never an honest case, that it was always opportunistic and deceptive, and that they didn't actually distinguish between blameless young black males and thugs. This resulted in a massive backlash in which the public seems to have switch sides completely.
Loser: Feminists. Feminists had a miserable year. First, they got nothing from the Democrats and the "War on Women" sales pitch failed in the midterm elections. Even the liberal Pope told them to f-off. Secondly, it's become clear that average women have turned their backs on feminism. In fact, as I explained with 50 Shades of Grey, average women have completely rejected the fundamental beliefs of feminism and are embracing the very thing feminists want stopped. Even famous women are now openly rejecting feminism (click). Meanwhile, internally, feminism seems to have collapsed as well, with dinosaur puritanical feminists and pro-sex feminists going to war.
Then the Ray Rice thing happened and for a couple of weeks, it appeared that the feminists had been handed the gift of renewed relevance... but it was an illusion. Indeed, the feminists misunderstood the entire event. They saw the liberal journalists falling all over each other to lynch Rice and they thought they had found allies. They saw the NFL knuckle under and they thought they had a chance to control vast amounts of men. But within days, the journalists did what they always do and they flipped their outrage on its head and they began to whine about how unfair the NFL had been to poor Ray Rice -- completely undermining the message of feminism. Meanwhile, they discovered that not a single male NFL fan cared what the NFL did or didn't do off the field, and the NFL certainly wasn't going to do more than use feminists to polish their image without changing a single thing. So the whole thing Petered out with the feminists getting used without getting anything to show for it.
Then things imploded when the carefully crafted story of a campus rape epidemic fell apart when Rolling Stone got caught pushing an obviously false story about the University of Virginia. At the same time, Lena Dunham was exposed as having invented a rape just so she could falsely blame it on some mystery Republican. Suddenly, the rape crisis that had become conventional wisdom came into question and and disgrace. In the past week, a series of high profile female celebrities have made a number of statements minimizing the significance of rape and turning feminism's tenant of female empowerment into a joke.
Winner: Wall Street. Wall Street had a banner year all around. Not only is the stock market up massively, but the government enshrined "too big to fail," and even decided to reverse the one smart thing the government had done -- prevent Wall Street from speculating with taxpayer backed money. Basically, now the crony socialists get to continue to play "heads I win, tails you lose" with our money as both parties do their bidding.
Loser: Middle Class. Incomes continue to fall, housing won't recover, stock gains remain the province of the rich, net worth remains stagnant, and middle class-supporting jobs continue to vanish. Yeah, things aren't great for average people.
Loser: Obama. The year has not gone well for Obama. First, it became clear he has no positive legacy and the things he was counting on have all turned sour on him. Then he suffered an historic rebuke in the midterm elections, a rebuke that finally shook free the Democrats from his list of blind sycophants. Next, it became clear that his efforts to muscle his way to a legacy by Executive Order, which he sold as earth-shattering and finally proving his leftist credentials, were essentially duds. Now his task gets even harder because he faces a sane GOP Congress.
Loser: Democrats. It continues to become more and more clear that the Democrats' plan to wait for demographics to hand them a permanent majority is pure fantasy. Indeed, the number of Hispanics in the US population has all but stopped growing as Mexico has run out of Mexicans to export, the birthrate for American Hispanics has fallen dramatically, the birthrate for whites has increased, and the number of Asian immigrants has grown. Even a great many liberals are downright panicked about this. Adding to their panic, they have come to realize that whites are fleeing the Democrats in increasingly greater numbers as the Democrats openly implement their efforts to win more minorities. At this point, the only thing keeping the Democrats competitive is that conservatives have so thoroughly driven away woman and minorities. If the GOP can reverse this even by a couple points, the Democrats' demographic dream will turn into a nightmare.
As an aside, the Democrats' princelings got wiped out in the midterms. They suffered a total collapse in the midterms as well. They are infighting now; and best of all, they seem to have learned nothing. Obama is a millstone around their necks. Hillary looks to be Obama sans charisma... if that's humanly possible. They seem to have surrendered the South unconditionally. The GOP is increasingly controlling the midwest at the statehouse level and even is becoming competitive in the Northeast. And worst of the worst, they are stuck answering for Obamacare... every... single... day.
Winner: America. After the Great Recession and Obama's meddling, the US economy was counted down and out. A few years later, we are again the world's growth engine and its dominant economic, military and cultural power. No one else even comes close. In fact, interestingly, during the year a group of alarmists tried to claim that China's economy was now larger than ours, but the truth is that China's economy is about 75% of ours and will never come close to catching up. They also told us Germany was more popular, but good luck finding any element of German culture the world has embraced. Europe remains a eunuch. Japan is running backwards. South America went from BRICs to basket cases, and all those leftist government who used us as a punching bag are now straining and collapsing. Africa is 1,000 years from being competitive. The Middle East and Russia have collapsed as the falling price of oil dragged them down and as the US inched toward energy independence.
America remains the cultural, economic and scientific engine that drives the world. We are the world's inventors, builders, artists, singers, writers, salesmen, and protectors... and our dominance is so complete that no one else is even trying to compete.
Agree? Disagree? Who did I miss?
