Answer: It’s on The Main Event every week! Written opinion columns are shelved for now, but archived Ed Hoffman opinion columns can be found at this link. Enjoy!
“Everyone has an opinion, and you’re entitled to mine.” – Ed Hoffman
On March 3rd, Ed welcomed Bob Fredericks to the show to discuss the struggles that the 33 survivors of the 12/2/15 terror attack in San Bernardino continue to live with, most notably the ongoing fight to have physical and mental health treatments covered by the county’s worker’s compensation program. To hear what the survivors are experiencing, listen to the March 3rd show here – and to learn how you can help advocate for them, visit www.SBsurvivors.com or call Bob Fredericks at (909) 709-1621.
As my radio listeners know, I traveled to Washington, D.C. for the inauguration of the 45th President of the United States. What an experience! I want to thank those of you who followed my frequent social media updates; to those who left “I’m so jealous!” comments on my photos and videos, rest assured that I’m not actually best friends with Sean Hannity, Eric Bolling or the Fox & Friends crew now – it just looked like I was, thanks to the magic of selfies. Plus, keep in mind that I didn’t have access to the TV coverage you did all day long. I missed seeing the Obamas board the Executive One helicopter en route to Andrews Air Force Base; instead, I got to witness people on the ground who thought Trump was in the helicopter en route to the White House. I guess you don’t have to be informed to be excited about Inauguration Day.
So what happens now? If you’re Donald Trump, you get right to work. If you’re the Senate Democrats, you do everything in your power to keep him from working. Even though Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary pick, Tom Price, said there is no plan to “pull the rug out” from anyone who is covered by Obamacare, the Democrats are stalling his confirmation with all their might. Just because Ben Carson doesn’t fit their mold of what an African-American government servant should believe, they’re throwing him irrelevant questions about whether he would give the LGBT community fair housing treatment and forcing him to promise he won’t let the Trump family profit from any HUD involvement. And because Rex Tillerson has done business with Russia as the CEO of a major American corporation, we are bound to see his confirmation vote becoming a contentious issue next week – just wait and see.
The bottom line is this: The Democrats are embarrassed. It’s been a long time since they’ve seen a President who was focused on getting things done, versus basking in the glory of his new title. Trump knows there’s stuff to do, and he’s there to get it done. Unlike Obama who appointed cabinet positions as favors to his friends from Chicago, Trump thoughtfully interviewed candidates who were recommended to him based on their knowledge, experience and abilities. He didn’t care whether they had done anything for him in the past; he cared what they could do for America’s future.
So far, he’s running the country like a business – the way we knew always he would.
Ed Hoffman is host of The Main Event, which is broadcast on select talk radio stations in Southern California and available on-demand via podcast. Follow him on Twitter @EdHoffman, and like him on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/TheMainEventEdHoffman.
Here’s my mantra for the new year! Feel free to make it yours, too.
By Ed Hoffman
If you’ve listened to Clinton’s water boy Stephanopoulos on ABC, journalistic disgrace Chuck Todd on NBC or literally anyone on CNN this week, then you’ve probably heard that we’re all supposed to be frightened out of our wits that Donald Trump chose a Secretary of State with economic interests in Russia, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson. I was hoping for Rudy Giuliani myself, but so be it; Trump is making choices that are aligned with his “America first” mantra, and that’s the bottom line.
How does choosing someone like Tillerson reflect the promise of putting America first? First of all, it ensures that we have the respect of Russia and that is not such a bad thing. Putin clearly didn’t respect Barack Obama and John Kerry – but Donald Trump and Rex Tillerson, he holds in high esteem. If you ask Democrats, that’s a travesty; however, something tells me they would be fine with Putin respecting a President Hillary Clinton. Why do they worry about us being “hated around the world” only when a Republican is in power? When they’re in power, they seem to have no problem with other countries respecting us. Remember when Obama told Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility” after the 2012 election and Medvedev replied, “I will transmit this to Vladimir”? The media refused to criticize that; they said it was Obama exercising good diplomacy with Russia. And as you know, that’s not what they’re saying about Trump this week.
Speaking of double standards, another issue that Democrats and the media all of a sudden care about is cybersecurity. This is something they laughed off during the election when it only concerned Hillary’s role in the hacking of her emails – but now that they can find the slightest hint of a connection to Trump behind it, it’s a huge deal. With the CIA providing intelligence that Russia may have been responsible for hacking and leaking DNC/Hillary staff emails to Wikileaks, the left wants us to believe that Russia interfering with our election was the only reason Hillary Clinton lost. They don’t seem to care about the actual content of the emails or who sent them, or why they were not secure.
So she didn’t lose because she was a terrible candidate who people find totally unrelatable? She didn’t lose because she showed no regard for the seriousness of her office when she used a private email address to conduct government business? She didn’t lose because she demonstrated gross negligence in the disastrous handling of Benghazi, where four Americans died on her watch? How about her using the Secretary of State position to get massive donations to her fake charity – that’s not the reason? According to the left, no; she lost because Russia wanted Donald Trump to win. Sure, that makes perfect sense.
As former FBI official James Kallstrom said this week, maybe it wasn’t the hacking that did Hillary in; maybe it was that Americans didn’t like what they found out about her when the hacked emails were released. Period.
They’re blaming Hillary’s loss on anything they can: first, they blamed the FBI for continuing to investigate her up to election day; next, they blamed it on racism (a myth Trump has debunked once again this week by meeting with prominent black entertainers); and finally, they blamed it on voter error (hence the failed recounts they demanded in states where it turned out Trump won by even more votes than previously thought). So now, all they can do is throw up flares designed to scare Americans into organizing against the incoming President Trump. Last week they focused on the call from Taiwan; this week, it was Russia. Trust me: When that doesn’t work, it will be something else.
As I’ve said on my show many times this month, people don’t realize how much happier they’re going to be when they’re getting a hand up, rather than the handout they’re used to under a Democratic administration. Once they see the prosperity of a Trump presidency for themselves, people will tune out the left’s insanity. When the proof of his success is right in front of them, it’s going to get harder and harder for anyone to convince them otherwise.
Ed Hoffman is host of The Main Event, which is broadcast on select talk radio stations in Southern California and is available on-demand via podcast. Follow him on Twitter @EdHoffman, and like him on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/TheMainEventEdHoffman.
By Ed Hoffman
After the tumultuous relationship between Donald Trump and the media over the last year, are any of us really surprised that the media is continuing to spew hate his way? They know they’re going to look desperate if they go down the road of covering all the flaws of the electoral college (which they want to abolish so that 1. votes outside of California, Florida and New York won’t count anymore, 2. Hillary can be President and 3. Democrats will win until the end of time). In fact, I’m willing to bet that Hillary and the DNC asked their media buddies to stop covering the electoral college to protect all their reputations. So what can they do instead? Scrutinize every single person Trump appoints to his cabinet, of course – and find opportunities to cry racism about as many of them as possible.
Over the past week, we’ve heard allegations of racism directed at the following Trump cabinet picks:
It’s being leaked today that members of the media are “furious” over the way Trump treated them in a closed-door meeting at Trump Tower this week. Really? They malign him and everyone he has chosen to surround himself with as he prepares to assume the highest office in the land – portraying every bump in the road as a permanent setback, every cabinet appointee as a dangerous risk, and every decision regarding his businesses as a corruption of the presidency. How do they expect him to react?
Ed Hoffman is host of The Main Event, which is broadcast on select talk radio stations in Southern California and is available on-demand via podcast. Follow him on Twitter @EdHoffman, and like him on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/TheMainEventEdHoffman.
By Ed Hoffman
Like many of you, I’ve felt a little more alive over the past two weeks. No exaggeration here: I don’t think I realized how much the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton’s disastrous candidacy and the lack of hope in this country had affected my health. I think a lot of you can relate.
But as we celebrate, there are people who are literally in mourning this week. I’m not gloating in front of them, and I hope you aren’t either. They don’t know what they don’t know, and that deserves our pity. For a variety of reasons – whether it’s the naivety of youth, their lack of information, or just plain gullibility – they don’t understand why more than 60 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. And since they don’t understand it, they’re calling it something they can understand: racism. It’s ridiculous to those of us who understand racism had nothing to do with Trump’s victory, but for them, it’s all they know.
The college kids setting our country’s flag on fire in LA, the unemployed New York millennials marching in front of Trump Tower, and the protesting class who have spent the past five days inciting violence in Portland and Seattle…they all have one thing in common: They grew up with Barack Obama as President. In other words, they’ve been hearing the President of the United States and his allies in the media call Republicans racist for the past eight years. So naturally, they believe with all their hearts that Donald Trump is racist (and by association, everyone who voted for him must be too).
“But if he just hadn’t said ‘rapists and murderers’ that very first week of the campaign, they wouldn’t have been able to call him racist…” I’ve heard that argument too, and I think it’s wrong. These people would have called him racist no matter what, because it’s what the Democrats and their loyal media allies do every four years to the Republican nominee, no matter who it is – and unfortunately, the uninformed public buys into it.
They did it to Mitt Romney, they did it to John McCain, and the election after he united our post-9/11 nation, they did it to George W. Bush. They will do it to every Republican nominee for the remainder of our lifetimes, because it’s all they have. And because their President for the past eight years has been obsessed with race, it will be worse than ever. That’s what we’re experiencing now – and no matter how much he pretends to be conciliatory, he is the reason these protests have escalated. If he hadn’t gone around the world apologizing for America for the past eight years (he’s doing it in Greece this week, by the way), sympathizing with the violent demonstrations after police-involved shootings, and lecturing Christians after every Islamic terror attack, maybe the younger generation wouldn’t be so weak.
They’ve been raised to believe that’s how we should be – because after all, that’s what their President is. Then, along comes this strong presidential candidate; even if they knew who he was in pop culture or business, they didn’t know him in this capacity. He didn’t talk like the current President. He said America is supposed to be a great country. He said we have to secure our borders. They’ve never heard a President talk like this before – and so, he must be a racist. But Barack Obama doesn’t get all the blame for this; to a lesser extent, some blame falls in Hillary Clinton’s lap too. After all, she had no problem playing the sexism card for the duration of her campaign.
These people don’t know how happy they’re going to be two years from now, when everyone has a job and they’re paying lower taxes because the number of people getting a paycheck from the government is drastically reduced. These people don’t know how much better their lives will be because of the new Republican majority, and it could be years before they realize it because of how powerfully they’ve been conditioned for the past eight years.
If you voted for the candidate who held six rallies in six different states on November 7 before getting up at 4 AM on November 8 and staying up a full 24 hours until the race was called in his favor, then you have reason to celebrate; clearly, you care about having a President with energy, focus and stamina. If you decided not to vote for the creature who had nothing in her favor but the woman card, and instead voted for the candidate who fought like politicians don’t normally fight, you are earning your reward this week. You realized that we were on the edge of a cliff, and you slammed on the brakes. Because of people like you, me and President-Elect Donald Trump, we’re on our way to making America great again.
Ed Hoffman is host of The Main Event, which is broadcast on select talk radio stations in Southern California and is available on-demand via podcast. Follow him on Twitter @EdHoffman, and like him on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/TheMainEventEdHoffman.