D
Departed
Guest
Lol. Trump surprises everyone.
http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37953528
http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37953528
D
Departed
Guest
Yes. He has. Hope that goes viral.
Sir Dick Caan
Vital Reserves Team
its only nailed on to thickish Trump sympathisers... Sanders would have bled votes even in the saner states that finished blue...
LOVE the way EU has come out overnight to say very clearly that if Brexitland dares to start negotiations wih Trump's team of family and cronies before they leave EU, that there will be a heavier price to pay in any EU deal to come..
Rump's time will last 4yrs from January, and an isolationist USA-first Trump will not be offering easy pickings. Any QUICK trade-deal with USA, will most certainly be to their vast advantage, as any quick-deal would always be against the plight of the desperate.
The UK will still be in EU for the majority of that time, and will STILL have EU as its biggest trading-partner in future... better be sure Theresa, better be sure...
LOVE the way EU has come out overnight to say very clearly that if Brexitland dares to start negotiations wih Trump's team of family and cronies before they leave EU, that there will be a heavier price to pay in any EU deal to come..
Rump's time will last 4yrs from January, and an isolationist USA-first Trump will not be offering easy pickings. Any QUICK trade-deal with USA, will most certainly be to their vast advantage, as any quick-deal would always be against the plight of the desperate.
The UK will still be in EU for the majority of that time, and will STILL have EU as its biggest trading-partner in future... better be sure Theresa, better be sure...
D
Departed
Guest
You just reinforced Jonathon Pie's point. Your complete abdication of any responsibility just shows how childish you are. You must be hell to work with. Anything goes wrong you'll be sure to shift blame.
Sir Dick Caan
Vital Reserves Team
'Jonathon' needs to learn how to spell his name correctly..
not abdicated anything....if the USA wants to engage in a civil-war but stop encroaching on ex-Soviet states, stay out of Syria and leave S.E. Asia to the Chinese... its all good (to coin a Yank-phrase)..
we have now entered into an accelerated phase of social-development... its going to be learn to swim together as one, or sink one by one..
overall, I'm just about on the side of the optimistic option... but its going to be bumpy
not abdicated anything....if the USA wants to engage in a civil-war but stop encroaching on ex-Soviet states, stay out of Syria and leave S.E. Asia to the Chinese... its all good (to coin a Yank-phrase)..
we have now entered into an accelerated phase of social-development... its going to be learn to swim together as one, or sink one by one..
overall, I'm just about on the side of the optimistic option... but its going to be bumpy
D
Departed
Guest
Of course we all have to work together. Whenever was that an issue? What we don't need is idiots like you pretending you are superior to the rest of the human race and trying to preach "your way" to everyone without listening to what is important to everyone else.
YOU are the prototypical detriment to the future. Too close minded to believe anyone but you have the right answer.
Sir Dick Caan
Vital Reserves Team
LOL... after reading your rant a 2nd time, I'm still trying to work out how it relates to my post youve quoted..
back on point, I think having the Disunited States of America on good relations with Russia, by not trying to encroach/encircle them and placing missiles within easy strike-range of Moscow is possibly not the worst thing in the world.. ditto the DSA's involvement in the South China Sea (at least Phillippines have come around)..
and Rump teaming up with Putin against the barbaric ISIS will eventually boil down to the status-quo in Syria being reestablished - a good thing for the Sunni-Shia balance of the Mid-East.
as for any pullout of the Paris Accord, I fully expect a blue-state coalition to take matters into their own hands at interstate-level..
back on point, I think having the Disunited States of America on good relations with Russia, by not trying to encroach/encircle them and placing missiles within easy strike-range of Moscow is possibly not the worst thing in the world.. ditto the DSA's involvement in the South China Sea (at least Phillippines have come around)..
and Rump teaming up with Putin against the barbaric ISIS will eventually boil down to the status-quo in Syria being reestablished - a good thing for the Sunni-Shia balance of the Mid-East.
as for any pullout of the Paris Accord, I fully expect a blue-state coalition to take matters into their own hands at interstate-level..
Nick Real Deal
Vital Football Legend
It's strange how Brexit and Trump voters are labelled thick or idiots. Some I know are pretty sharp and see beyond the obvious.
Sir Dick Caan
Vital Reserves Team
but you may well be an idiot if you think that EVERY Trump/Brexit voter is thick..
personally speaking, its quite tiresome to hear individual examples being given as evidence against empirical measurements of sample-sizes taken in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions..
the older, whiter, less-educated you are, the more LIKELY you were to vote Trumpxit... this has been borne out in exit-polls ad-nauseum..
personally speaking, its quite tiresome to hear individual examples being given as evidence against empirical measurements of sample-sizes taken in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions..
the older, whiter, less-educated you are, the more LIKELY you were to vote Trumpxit... this has been borne out in exit-polls ad-nauseum..
Nick Real Deal
Vital Football Legend
Does that mean the more young of colour and highly educated would be more inclined to vote Clintremoan.?
Greavswasthegreatest
Vital Football Legend
Just can't stand all this 'show biz' politics.........
Used to be a way to make change for the good of many (if only)
Started with Regan ex actor
Politicians appearing on Strictly, and Have I got news for you...
Run the feckin countries
Poiticians should show restraint, not look to grab headlines and limelight and deride opponents as a way of winning votes. Should be about 'policies'
We expect them to be serious about what they do as it always affects us, not them!
If you want show biz, go into show biz.
Used to be a way to make change for the good of many (if only)
Started with Regan ex actor
Politicians appearing on Strictly, and Have I got news for you...
Run the feckin countries
Poiticians should show restraint, not look to grab headlines and limelight and deride opponents as a way of winning votes. Should be about 'policies'
We expect them to be serious about what they do as it always affects us, not them!
If you want show biz, go into show biz.
Sir Dick Caan
Vital Reserves Team
thats why China have it about right..
D
Departed
Guest
Rex Murphy: It wasn’t misogyny that caused Clinton’s downfall, it was all the baggage she dragged around
Rex Murphy | November 11, 2016 | Last Updated: Nov 12 5:00 PM ET
From the famous “basket of deplorables,” to the legion of grief counsellors now patrolling the stricken campuses of American universities, the presidential campaign, now finally behind us, was a full clothes-line of oddities, delights and curious turns. Here are just a few of the more memorable moments from a campaign that the world will not soon forget — however hard it tries.
Boasting about her expertise in the area, and her unparalleled experience, Madonna promised to give oral sex to any man who voted for Hillary Clinton. The threat did not go unheeded: all over the country, men went into hiding and trembled with dread. Some went so far as to vote for Donald Trump as the only guaranteed prophylactic. In fact, post-election analysis determined that the prospect of a service visit from Madonna, tied with a promise from actress Lena Dunham to leave the country if Hillary Clinton lost, were major motivators for self-respecting male Democrats to come out in support of Trump.
It’s also true that many media outlets carried their support for Clinton to delusional excess — a blot on journalism that will take a political eon to fade. On the eve of the vote, with the confidence that only self-hypnotizing progressives can bring to a lost cause, the Huffington Post was eagerly boasting that the chances of a Clinton victory were a whopping 98 per cent. Yet after Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey’s many interventions, all the scandals revealed by WikiLeaks, the brewing uproars over the Clinton Foundation and, of course, that pesky email server distraction, putting Clinton’s chances of winning at 98 per cent can only be explained two ways: either the Huffington Post was using the same vote probability software as the North Koreans; or it has given up on being anything resembling a “news” outlet.
Related
Michelle Hauser: Clinton was doomed by naked ambition, unable to see she should not have run
Conrad Black: Donald Trump’s assault on both parties will make America better
Then there was Bernie Sanders. It’s easy to sympathize with the Sanders campaign. After the way the Clintons treated him, it’s easier to understand why he honeymooned in Moscow (seriously). He may want to do that again. Early on, Clinton kidnapped all the Democratic super-delegates. The Democratic National Committee became an unofficial arm of the Clinton campaign. Donna Brazile, interim chairwoman of the DNC and Clinton mole, was feeding the Democratic candidate debate questions that she got from her connections at CNN. And former chairwoman of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was practically running the campaign.
Sanders was campaigning on a shoestring budget, while Clinton was picking up fat cheques from the Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street elite. The One-percenters adored Clinton, as she was, after all, a member of that fine club herself. Nonetheless, in spite of all the forces openly against him, and secretly undermining him, Sanders “coulda been a contender” — until he declared that he was “sick of your damn emails.” He wasn’t going to talk about them, and he didn’t. It was Oscar Wilde who mourned that “each man kills the thing he loves,” but only the Sanders campaign could find a political application for that sour observation. He gave Clinton a pass, and Trump his best weapon.
We cannot leave this campaign without a reference to its most tiresome phrase — the glass ceiling. Post-election analysis from the feminist camps is caught between trauma and tragedy that the patriarchy has won again, that the last glass ceiling remains unshattered. This is, of course, pure nonsense.
For many, many years, countries far less progressive than the United States have been led by capable women. India, Israel, Ireland, Germany, Britain and many others have proudly elected female leaders. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher has been a role model for girls and women for over half a century now.
Clinton’s defeat should not be taken as proof of a glass ceiling in American politics. The only “ceiling” she met with was the one that bars a really dreadful candidate from beating a slightly less dreadful one. It wasn’t misogyny that caused Clinton’s downfall; it was all the needless baggage that she and her husband were dragging around. Clinton was not a stand-in for all women. Instead, her defeat should be viewed as a signal of how difficult it is for a woman who is the wife of an ex-president to become president herself.
The final element I would like to mention concerns the greatest threat to the planet as we know it: global warming — the cause of causes for Democrats. Did Clinton even mention it? It’s funny how meteorological doomsday matters so little to Democrats during election campaigns, and so much after the votes have been counted. I think there’s a whisper of hope that Trump will not take that path. Implausible as this must be, I don’t think he’s going to impose a carbon tax. The horror!
All in all, this was such a diverting campaign that I will miss it. And whether the result means that the Goths have entered Rome, or the contrary, that they have just now been driven out, is something that will take the mercy of time and the patience of the creator for us to find out.
National Post
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/rex-murphy-fear-and-loathing-on-the-campaign-trail-16
Rex Murphy | November 11, 2016 | Last Updated: Nov 12 5:00 PM ET
From the famous “basket of deplorables,” to the legion of grief counsellors now patrolling the stricken campuses of American universities, the presidential campaign, now finally behind us, was a full clothes-line of oddities, delights and curious turns. Here are just a few of the more memorable moments from a campaign that the world will not soon forget — however hard it tries.
Boasting about her expertise in the area, and her unparalleled experience, Madonna promised to give oral sex to any man who voted for Hillary Clinton. The threat did not go unheeded: all over the country, men went into hiding and trembled with dread. Some went so far as to vote for Donald Trump as the only guaranteed prophylactic. In fact, post-election analysis determined that the prospect of a service visit from Madonna, tied with a promise from actress Lena Dunham to leave the country if Hillary Clinton lost, were major motivators for self-respecting male Democrats to come out in support of Trump.
It’s also true that many media outlets carried their support for Clinton to delusional excess — a blot on journalism that will take a political eon to fade. On the eve of the vote, with the confidence that only self-hypnotizing progressives can bring to a lost cause, the Huffington Post was eagerly boasting that the chances of a Clinton victory were a whopping 98 per cent. Yet after Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey’s many interventions, all the scandals revealed by WikiLeaks, the brewing uproars over the Clinton Foundation and, of course, that pesky email server distraction, putting Clinton’s chances of winning at 98 per cent can only be explained two ways: either the Huffington Post was using the same vote probability software as the North Koreans; or it has given up on being anything resembling a “news” outlet.
Related
Michelle Hauser: Clinton was doomed by naked ambition, unable to see she should not have run
Conrad Black: Donald Trump’s assault on both parties will make America better
Then there was Bernie Sanders. It’s easy to sympathize with the Sanders campaign. After the way the Clintons treated him, it’s easier to understand why he honeymooned in Moscow (seriously). He may want to do that again. Early on, Clinton kidnapped all the Democratic super-delegates. The Democratic National Committee became an unofficial arm of the Clinton campaign. Donna Brazile, interim chairwoman of the DNC and Clinton mole, was feeding the Democratic candidate debate questions that she got from her connections at CNN. And former chairwoman of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was practically running the campaign.
Sanders was campaigning on a shoestring budget, while Clinton was picking up fat cheques from the Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street elite. The One-percenters adored Clinton, as she was, after all, a member of that fine club herself. Nonetheless, in spite of all the forces openly against him, and secretly undermining him, Sanders “coulda been a contender” — until he declared that he was “sick of your damn emails.” He wasn’t going to talk about them, and he didn’t. It was Oscar Wilde who mourned that “each man kills the thing he loves,” but only the Sanders campaign could find a political application for that sour observation. He gave Clinton a pass, and Trump his best weapon.
We cannot leave this campaign without a reference to its most tiresome phrase — the glass ceiling. Post-election analysis from the feminist camps is caught between trauma and tragedy that the patriarchy has won again, that the last glass ceiling remains unshattered. This is, of course, pure nonsense.
For many, many years, countries far less progressive than the United States have been led by capable women. India, Israel, Ireland, Germany, Britain and many others have proudly elected female leaders. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher has been a role model for girls and women for over half a century now.
Clinton’s defeat should not be taken as proof of a glass ceiling in American politics. The only “ceiling” she met with was the one that bars a really dreadful candidate from beating a slightly less dreadful one. It wasn’t misogyny that caused Clinton’s downfall; it was all the needless baggage that she and her husband were dragging around. Clinton was not a stand-in for all women. Instead, her defeat should be viewed as a signal of how difficult it is for a woman who is the wife of an ex-president to become president herself.
The final element I would like to mention concerns the greatest threat to the planet as we know it: global warming — the cause of causes for Democrats. Did Clinton even mention it? It’s funny how meteorological doomsday matters so little to Democrats during election campaigns, and so much after the votes have been counted. I think there’s a whisper of hope that Trump will not take that path. Implausible as this must be, I don’t think he’s going to impose a carbon tax. The horror!
All in all, this was such a diverting campaign that I will miss it. And whether the result means that the Goths have entered Rome, or the contrary, that they have just now been driven out, is something that will take the mercy of time and the patience of the creator for us to find out.
National Post
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/rex-murphy-fear-and-loathing-on-the-campaign-trail-16
Sir Dick Caan
Vital Reserves Team
National Post = National (Front) Post
laughable you continue to cut 'n paste your 'fair 'n balanced' masterpieces onto this site... you actually believe peeps read them for more than the 1st sentence
laughable you continue to cut 'n paste your 'fair 'n balanced' masterpieces onto this site... you actually believe peeps read them for more than the 1st sentence
D
Departed
Guest
That was funny. As was Wild Willy's
comment about Brexit and Pokemon.
There is humour everywhere although I wouldn't expect you to find humour in anything as you take yourself so seriously. And you should. Your ability to see the future, have the solution to everyone's problems and dictate how everyone should think is quite remarkable. Future chairman of an expansionist EU I don't doubt. Perhaps, to save yourself from having to tolerate poor, unseeing individuals such as myself you should move to China? Do you need an airline ticket?
Sir Dick Caan
Vital Reserves Team
pre-existing conditions clause to remain.... seems like Rump rather likes 1 or 2 things about ObamaCare after all..1Tr aimed for Infrastructure spending.... Abortion to be devolved to State-level eventually... like the window-dressing of Bannan as a 'strategic advisor' (to keep the hillbillies happy) to be listened to (but with a great big pinch of salt)..
Agent Rump may do the dirty work for Democrats, after all...
Agent Rump may do the dirty work for Democrats, after all...
D
Departed
Guest
This is even better!!!!!
Conrad Black: The “progressive” establishment’s postpartum blues
Conrad Black | November 18, 2016 4:53 PM ET
More from Conrad Black
Student protesters demonstrate at an anti-Trump rally in Athens, Ga.
(John Roark/Athens Banner-Herald via AP) Student protesters demonstrate at an anti-Trump rally in Athens, Ga.
The aftermath of the U.S. presidential election has been fairly sober. The sporadic rioting in a number of cities scattered across the country was essentially the mindless hooliganism that arises after some sporting events attended by large numbers of drunken or otherwise crazed partisans. In Portland, Oregon, a state that Hillary Clinton won by a heavy margin, the majority of the 120 or so alleged disturbers of the peace had not troubled to vote, causing the immediate objective of the disorder to be obscure. This activity can’t really pass as protest, which to be authentic, requires a clear message, organization, and some restraint. The United States has a population of about 315 million and 45 metropolitan areas with more than one million people in them, and what occurred for a few days after the election, though portrayed in much of the world as the beginnings of a popular revolt, was little more than the customary number of misfits and goons seizing a pretext to vandalize shop windows and throw projectiles at the police, until the constabulary response becomes inconveniently discomforting. It was a tiny and inchoate frothing on the surface of the advanced world’s most complicated nationality.
Of greater significance and interest has been the unutterable nonsense that has demonstratively festered on many American campuses. The modern university in the developed democratic world has become anomalous. Tuition, especially in the United States and even in state universities, has become insufferably expensive, as the accumulation of a mass of unpaid student loans totalling more than $1 trillion dollars indicates. (This, the Democratic candidates, Senator Bernie Sanders and in self-protective emulation, Mrs. Clinton, proposed to excuse, in the biggest single bribe ever offered to a bloc of American voters, as it meant the taxpayers would repay the loans, not that the universities would eat the bad debt as the rest of us do when loans we make go sour.)
The physical plant of American universities has only become so immense because it was assumed that “education” was the gateway to universal prosperity, which to some extent was true; and the promotion of it was politically popular beyond any analysis of the return on the public (or private) funds consecrated to it. The process was parallel to the practice in the private sector of financiers, industrialists, and the executive leadership of large corporations smarting under the condescensions of the learned professions — architects, clergy, to some degree medical doctors, holders of post-graduate degrees in the humanities, but especially the ubiquitous and horrifyingly overpaid practices of the legal community, paddling and frolicking in the 360-degree monopoly cartel that shelters behind the multi-purpose aegis of the rule of law. We all believe in that rule, but not, if we were consulted, as we will be eventually, in the exploitation of it by the legal priesthood to run a trans-social, cross-institutional shake-down operation on our entire civilization.
The so-called ‘popular revolt’ was just the usual misfits and goons seizing a pretext to vandalize shop windows
Captains of industry and titans of finance have rebelled against this, not by impugning the right of the legal cartel to use its control of legislatures to produce herniating masses of new laws and regulations that lawyers must argue about in courts presided over by lawyers elevated to the bench, but by trying to qualify business as an academic subject, and dispensing billions of dollars of their shareholders’ and their own money to propagate the myth. It isn’t; it is experience and intuition, and almost none of the world’s great people of commerce learned about business academically. They learned by doing it and becoming bigger and richer and smarter as they grew.
At this point, persevering readers may be wondering what this has to do with the U.S. election, the subject I opened with: the reaction of many American universities to the presidential election was enough to discourage the most ardent adherent to the fairy tale of the pristine impartiality and fearless pursuit of wisdom of America’s vast and hideously expensive academia. The U.S. election went off without incident on the day: there were no charges of stuffed or vanished ballot boxes, (unlike 1960; the voting boxes for some of Nixon’s districts in prosperous North Chicago are still missing), or of false voting lists. Only 52 per cent of eligible voters voted, indicating a lack of enthusiasm for the candidates, but there were no contested results or objectionable incidents at the country’s approximately 100,000 polling places.
Nonetheless, academia fluttered concernedly. The Dean of Williams College offered, as my friend Roger Kimball of the New Criterion called it, a post-electoral “emetic” to her campus community: “Many (students and faculty) are feeling acutely upset, overwhelmed, and frightened this morning. Please take this opportunity to reach out to your classmates, to offer support, to be open to discussion, to be ready to listen, and to remind everyone you see on campus that our community stands ready to support all of us.” This wasn’t reaction to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, or 9/11, it was the aftermath of a completely orderly American presidential election, for the 54th consecutive time.
The administration of Cornell University held a “cry-in” after Trump’s victory, and furnished materials so students could express their emotions.
The director of the LBGTQ Center at Princeton (the university of James Madison, chief author of the U.S. Constitution, and of Woodrow Wilson, and where Albert Einstein was a faculty member), put it out to her community, “I know that many of us may be feeling shock, confusion, fear.… (We) are here for you as you process.… All emotions you may be having now are valid,” presumably including that of the majority of American voters, including the Libertarians: the satisfaction that the country was about to see the last of the Clintons, Obamas, and Bushes as major public figures, unless Chelsea Clinton or the (very ingenuous) Obama daughters, or a young Bush rise through the ranks and become president as the latter Adams and Roosevelt did, a generation after their presidential relatives. Those were meritocratic dynasties, not cartels passing the greatest offices in the United States around among themselves as we have seen in the last 30 years.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesAfter criticizing Trump for indicating he might not accept the election result, "progressives" refused to accept they had lost.
The administration of Cornell University held a “cry-in” where students were furnished with materials to express their feelings. Students at Bryn Mawr called for “a day to heal after we’ve been told the country doesn’t value our existence at all. A Trump election directly endangers the lives of all students at Bryn Mawr College that are people of LGBTQA+ (the last two an emerging mystery), non-Christian, and female.” How are they threatened? Donald Trump ran against almost everyone of any stature in the post-Reagan Republican Party except Bob Dole; all the Democrats; almost all the media and the pollsters, and certainly the snivelling and pathetic whelps of unearned privilege who seem to compose the mood music in and around the Ivy league. Anyone who could incite such orgiastic self-pity from those whose fate is by any normal measure enviable, is a persuasive candidate whose election is timely.
Whatever the new administration does, the university as we know it is a dead pigeon. The entire process will be on-line, except for graduate centres of advanced studies, in fabled ivy-covered buildings, and the vast campuses built by striving capitalists and questing politicians, will be re-purposed. Trump has a clear mandate to reform campaign financing, as the only candidate to finance his own campaign except Sanders; to reform taxes, against the velocity-of-moneyed Wall Street hustlers and for the middle and working classes and small businesses; reform of immigration and disadvantageous trade pacts (which should not include that with Canada, a proudly fair-trading country), health care (including Trump’s pledge to seek universal medical care); and a redefinition of the national interest between George W’s mindless plunging into foreign war and Obama’s distressing charade of appeasing America’s enemies, while being, as President Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski put it on Fareed Zakaria’s program last Sunday: “engaged but ineffectual.”
Americans have elected a president with fewer votes than his chief opponent for the sixth time, flung out those who have generally misgoverned them for 20 years, and voted for a traditional reform program. It is interesting to see how profound and desperate are the postpartum blues of those who have ruled the conventional wisdom with an iron rod for nearly 20 years. While eminent American universities and colleges comfort those afflicted by the election, some close personal relationships of mine of long standing have been strained or broken by this election as if it were a civil war. I myself have received in astonishment, the peevish, churlish termination of the continued receipt of my pieces in the National Review by a learned and well-regarded academic administrator and historian who has been a friend for 50 years.
I face up to the wrath and orchestral sorrow of the grumpy with fortitude; America has shown again the genius of renewal, as it did, though with not so evidently or likely a distinguished champion, in 1828, 1860, 1932, and 1980 (Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan). Someone had to drain the swamp, and Donald Trump was the only person on offer to do it. He attacked racial prejudice on Sunday night on network television, and went without security to the 21 Club the night before. The cry-ins and the “process” will run their course, but so far, the Trump era has had an auspicious start, and the fatuity of his opponents shows that.
National Post
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/conrad-black-the-establishments-postpartum-blues
Conrad Black: The “progressive” establishment’s postpartum blues
Conrad Black | November 18, 2016 4:53 PM ET
More from Conrad Black
Student protesters demonstrate at an anti-Trump rally in Athens, Ga.
(John Roark/Athens Banner-Herald via AP) Student protesters demonstrate at an anti-Trump rally in Athens, Ga.
The aftermath of the U.S. presidential election has been fairly sober. The sporadic rioting in a number of cities scattered across the country was essentially the mindless hooliganism that arises after some sporting events attended by large numbers of drunken or otherwise crazed partisans. In Portland, Oregon, a state that Hillary Clinton won by a heavy margin, the majority of the 120 or so alleged disturbers of the peace had not troubled to vote, causing the immediate objective of the disorder to be obscure. This activity can’t really pass as protest, which to be authentic, requires a clear message, organization, and some restraint. The United States has a population of about 315 million and 45 metropolitan areas with more than one million people in them, and what occurred for a few days after the election, though portrayed in much of the world as the beginnings of a popular revolt, was little more than the customary number of misfits and goons seizing a pretext to vandalize shop windows and throw projectiles at the police, until the constabulary response becomes inconveniently discomforting. It was a tiny and inchoate frothing on the surface of the advanced world’s most complicated nationality.
Of greater significance and interest has been the unutterable nonsense that has demonstratively festered on many American campuses. The modern university in the developed democratic world has become anomalous. Tuition, especially in the United States and even in state universities, has become insufferably expensive, as the accumulation of a mass of unpaid student loans totalling more than $1 trillion dollars indicates. (This, the Democratic candidates, Senator Bernie Sanders and in self-protective emulation, Mrs. Clinton, proposed to excuse, in the biggest single bribe ever offered to a bloc of American voters, as it meant the taxpayers would repay the loans, not that the universities would eat the bad debt as the rest of us do when loans we make go sour.)
The physical plant of American universities has only become so immense because it was assumed that “education” was the gateway to universal prosperity, which to some extent was true; and the promotion of it was politically popular beyond any analysis of the return on the public (or private) funds consecrated to it. The process was parallel to the practice in the private sector of financiers, industrialists, and the executive leadership of large corporations smarting under the condescensions of the learned professions — architects, clergy, to some degree medical doctors, holders of post-graduate degrees in the humanities, but especially the ubiquitous and horrifyingly overpaid practices of the legal community, paddling and frolicking in the 360-degree monopoly cartel that shelters behind the multi-purpose aegis of the rule of law. We all believe in that rule, but not, if we were consulted, as we will be eventually, in the exploitation of it by the legal priesthood to run a trans-social, cross-institutional shake-down operation on our entire civilization.
The so-called ‘popular revolt’ was just the usual misfits and goons seizing a pretext to vandalize shop windows
Captains of industry and titans of finance have rebelled against this, not by impugning the right of the legal cartel to use its control of legislatures to produce herniating masses of new laws and regulations that lawyers must argue about in courts presided over by lawyers elevated to the bench, but by trying to qualify business as an academic subject, and dispensing billions of dollars of their shareholders’ and their own money to propagate the myth. It isn’t; it is experience and intuition, and almost none of the world’s great people of commerce learned about business academically. They learned by doing it and becoming bigger and richer and smarter as they grew.
At this point, persevering readers may be wondering what this has to do with the U.S. election, the subject I opened with: the reaction of many American universities to the presidential election was enough to discourage the most ardent adherent to the fairy tale of the pristine impartiality and fearless pursuit of wisdom of America’s vast and hideously expensive academia. The U.S. election went off without incident on the day: there were no charges of stuffed or vanished ballot boxes, (unlike 1960; the voting boxes for some of Nixon’s districts in prosperous North Chicago are still missing), or of false voting lists. Only 52 per cent of eligible voters voted, indicating a lack of enthusiasm for the candidates, but there were no contested results or objectionable incidents at the country’s approximately 100,000 polling places.
Nonetheless, academia fluttered concernedly. The Dean of Williams College offered, as my friend Roger Kimball of the New Criterion called it, a post-electoral “emetic” to her campus community: “Many (students and faculty) are feeling acutely upset, overwhelmed, and frightened this morning. Please take this opportunity to reach out to your classmates, to offer support, to be open to discussion, to be ready to listen, and to remind everyone you see on campus that our community stands ready to support all of us.” This wasn’t reaction to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, or 9/11, it was the aftermath of a completely orderly American presidential election, for the 54th consecutive time.
The administration of Cornell University held a “cry-in” after Trump’s victory, and furnished materials so students could express their emotions.
The director of the LBGTQ Center at Princeton (the university of James Madison, chief author of the U.S. Constitution, and of Woodrow Wilson, and where Albert Einstein was a faculty member), put it out to her community, “I know that many of us may be feeling shock, confusion, fear.… (We) are here for you as you process.… All emotions you may be having now are valid,” presumably including that of the majority of American voters, including the Libertarians: the satisfaction that the country was about to see the last of the Clintons, Obamas, and Bushes as major public figures, unless Chelsea Clinton or the (very ingenuous) Obama daughters, or a young Bush rise through the ranks and become president as the latter Adams and Roosevelt did, a generation after their presidential relatives. Those were meritocratic dynasties, not cartels passing the greatest offices in the United States around among themselves as we have seen in the last 30 years.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesAfter criticizing Trump for indicating he might not accept the election result, "progressives" refused to accept they had lost.
The administration of Cornell University held a “cry-in” where students were furnished with materials to express their feelings. Students at Bryn Mawr called for “a day to heal after we’ve been told the country doesn’t value our existence at all. A Trump election directly endangers the lives of all students at Bryn Mawr College that are people of LGBTQA+ (the last two an emerging mystery), non-Christian, and female.” How are they threatened? Donald Trump ran against almost everyone of any stature in the post-Reagan Republican Party except Bob Dole; all the Democrats; almost all the media and the pollsters, and certainly the snivelling and pathetic whelps of unearned privilege who seem to compose the mood music in and around the Ivy league. Anyone who could incite such orgiastic self-pity from those whose fate is by any normal measure enviable, is a persuasive candidate whose election is timely.
Whatever the new administration does, the university as we know it is a dead pigeon. The entire process will be on-line, except for graduate centres of advanced studies, in fabled ivy-covered buildings, and the vast campuses built by striving capitalists and questing politicians, will be re-purposed. Trump has a clear mandate to reform campaign financing, as the only candidate to finance his own campaign except Sanders; to reform taxes, against the velocity-of-moneyed Wall Street hustlers and for the middle and working classes and small businesses; reform of immigration and disadvantageous trade pacts (which should not include that with Canada, a proudly fair-trading country), health care (including Trump’s pledge to seek universal medical care); and a redefinition of the national interest between George W’s mindless plunging into foreign war and Obama’s distressing charade of appeasing America’s enemies, while being, as President Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski put it on Fareed Zakaria’s program last Sunday: “engaged but ineffectual.”
Americans have elected a president with fewer votes than his chief opponent for the sixth time, flung out those who have generally misgoverned them for 20 years, and voted for a traditional reform program. It is interesting to see how profound and desperate are the postpartum blues of those who have ruled the conventional wisdom with an iron rod for nearly 20 years. While eminent American universities and colleges comfort those afflicted by the election, some close personal relationships of mine of long standing have been strained or broken by this election as if it were a civil war. I myself have received in astonishment, the peevish, churlish termination of the continued receipt of my pieces in the National Review by a learned and well-regarded academic administrator and historian who has been a friend for 50 years.
I face up to the wrath and orchestral sorrow of the grumpy with fortitude; America has shown again the genius of renewal, as it did, though with not so evidently or likely a distinguished champion, in 1828, 1860, 1932, and 1980 (Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan). Someone had to drain the swamp, and Donald Trump was the only person on offer to do it. He attacked racial prejudice on Sunday night on network television, and went without security to the 21 Club the night before. The cry-ins and the “process” will run their course, but so far, the Trump era has had an auspicious start, and the fatuity of his opponents shows that.
National Post
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/conrad-black-the-establishments-postpartum-blues
