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You Are Welcome
Hilary Lost. We delivered on the request made in the video. Everyone got it wrong. I am not going to bother to comment on broad issues here - enough places are doing that already. Not my job. I want to write this sort posterity as an observation. I truly hope that I am wrong about what I write below. But everything and anything we have all seen to date is that it won’t be. Here is hoping. I am now paused. I am now just watching. (With possible occasional updates to this single post, as things change.)
I would just like to say that
I am sorry for America
… for so many reasons.
- The Supreme Court will go back to a conservative majority within months and in two to four years will move to an unprecedented ultra extreme right majority which will last a generation
- Healthcare will take a massive step backwards as Obama Care is repealed
- Race Rights will roll backwards
- Civil Rights will roll backwards
- LGBTG Rights? What rights?
- Women’s Rights will roll backwards
- Immigration issues will amplify
- Climate Change Policies? Forget it, watch us reverse out of the treaties
- Gun Control … not going to happen
- International Trade Treaties will be redrawn - watch China - then watch the retaliation
- Terrorism - watch this space - Egypt has already
- Defense, NATO, European allies … who knows
… and your leaders will either be bullying, racially driven, lying sexist, if not misogynistic, old white men - and/or just plain ignorant. Finally, I am sorry for the people who will be most affected by this election …
- the Youth
- the Black community
- the Latino community
… then again, none of them actually came out and voted in the numbers that voted for Obama, seemingly because they couldn’t get behind the alternative candidate to Trump. They (like us all) will live with the consequences.
I am sorry for the people who voted for Trump
… sorry, because he won’t be doing everything he promised.
- The manufacturing jobs are not coming back.
- The wall won’t be built. (Despite what Ann Coulter wrote today on Breitbart.) BTW - if you thought Fox was bad - wait till Breitbart ousts them as the ‘go to’ Republican ‘News’ Service …
- The Country won’t be #Winning … ‘Big League’
- Protectionism will backfire
- The Press will be threatened
- Racism, alt-right threats will increase (having been legitimized)
- Litigation will increase (I know - how is that even possible?)
On Being English
I am English and can’t vote in the US anyway. Over the years, I have often asked, since I live in the US, why I don’t become an American. This is why. That said, I apologize for the role of Cambridge Analytica - an English company who were also behind Brexit. Quite apart from the RNC/Trump focus on voter suppression, long standing gerrymandering, we added threats across the country against minorities that dared to turn up at the polling stations, in North Carolina, and across America … we also had the ‘Karl Rove Methodology’ on steroids. Through their data operations - in both countries - Cambridge Analytica have successfully delivered carefully crafted messages to very specific audiences designed to divide the respective countries. All abely supported by ‘neutral’ organizations like Facebook (who helped the Trump online people understand how best to tune their advertising to focus their lies into very specific ‘market segments’.) Oh - and let’s not forget Board member Peter Thiel.) The world was rocked by Brexit. It was nothing. The results of the US election will now grant permission to, even embolden, the next rolling extreme / alt high thinking that exists in the world. Watch Austria and Italy in December. Watch France and Germany next year. Don’t get me wrong. I am not an unthinking democrat / labour / far left / communist goon - who blindly follows party alliances. I voted for Thatcher twice in the UK, before she went feral. I would never have voted for Bush 2, but would have been ok with McCain (not Palin) and Romney had they won in 2008 and 2012. This is different. Very very different. As Seth Meyers said :
“Do you pick someone who’s under federal investigation for using a private email server?”
OR
”Do you pick someone who called Mexicans rapists, claimed the president was born in Kenya, proposed banning an entire religion from entering the US, mocked a disabled reporter, said John McCain wasn’t a war hero because he was captured, attacked the parents of a fallen soldier, bragged about committing sexual assault, was accused by 12 women of committing sexual assault, said some of those women weren’t attractive for him to sexually assault, said more countries should get nukes, said that he would force the military to commit war crimes, said a judge was biased because his parents were Mexicans, said women should be punished for having abortions, incited violence at his rallies, called global warming a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, called for his opponent to be jailed, declared bankruptcy six times, bragged about not paying income taxes, stiffed his contractors and employees, lost a billion dollars in one year, scammed customers at his fake university, bought a six-foot-tall painting of himself with money from his fake foundation, has a trial for fraud coming up in November, insulted an opponent’s looks, insulted an opponent’s wife’s looks, and bragged about grabbing women by the pussy?”
Apparently - none of that matters. That is how angry the voters are. (1) Everyone this morning is calling him a successful business man. But we still do not actually know that. We have no idea who he owes money to, who he is really in debt to, who his banks are and if he has money to pay his debts. Why, because he wouldn’t even reveal his tax returns ‘because of the audit’. When the audit is complete, I look forward to his taxes being released. Moreover, even today we have zero idea of any policy that he would want to introduce beyond the twitter sound bites. So no, this piece is not about me not being happy with his policies, about a Democrat losing to a Republican. It is about
- Not knowing his policies,
- How he has won this campaign by lying. Over and over again
- How he has constantly demonstrated himself to be a sexist, racist, lying weasel with a media that is in thrall to him
- How he helped turn the election process into a reality TV spectacle that the TV companies played to.
So, despite what Obama said in the Rose Garden this morning, this is not a normal handover. Of course it will be done professionally and seamlessly. It is what happens after that. I hope for the sake of America (if not the world) that I am totally wrong about Donald Trump and that he proves to be a really good change. If you know me, you know that I am about People standing up, being counted and taking responsibility. The problem is that there has not yet been anything that I have seen that suggests he is going to do anything different to what he has been doing.
That’s it. For now I am on pause. Nobody reads this shit anyway.
(1) Actually, the majority of people in the US voted against the bully - that’s the electoral college for you. Interesting side note - this is only the second time in 130 years that this has happened. In 2000 when Gore won 540,000 more votes than Bush. And now Clinton - who at the time of writing is 240,000 ahead of Trump in the popular vote. Funny that both times this has happened was when you had decisive messaging driven by data.
Oh - and in case you are interested - all of the other three cases of the electoral college favoring a candidate over the popular vote also resulted in a Republican becoming President - and the Democrat not.
Andrew Jackson in 1824 (lost to John Quincy Adams [Rep] ) Samuel Tilden in 1876 (lost to Rutherford B. Hayes [Rep] ) Grover Cleveland in 1888 (lost to Benjamin Harrison [Rep] ) Al Gore in 2000 (lost to George W. Bush [Rep] )
See a pattern?
Some Interesting Links and Quotes
World Leaders Congratulate Trump The Terrorists Have Won
The Role Of The Media
“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” Moonves said at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco, according to The Hollywood Reporter — perfectly distilling what media critics have long suspected was motivating the round-the-clock coverage of Trump’s presidential bid.
Les Moonves, Chairman CBS.
“It’s a not-unfair knock on CNN to say that they went all in on Trump and helped him enormously, I think it was a strategy, a programming strategy.”
Ken Lerer, co-founder of the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed - about Jeff Zucker - CNN Predient and previosuly that man that ‘created’ Trump’s version of the Apprentice.
Phaux News we of course already know about.
Breitbart will become a household name
The New Yorker
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.
The New York Magazine
This is now Trump’s America. He controls everything from here on forward. He has won this campaign in such a decisive fashion that he owes no one anything. He has destroyed the GOP and remade it in his image. He has humiliated the elites and the elite media. He has embarrassed every pollster and naysayer. He has avenged Obama. And in the coming weeks, Trump will not likely be content to bask in vindication. He will seek unforgiving revenge on those who dared to oppose him. The party apparatus will be remade in his image. The House and Senate will fail to resist anything he proposes — and those who speak up will be primaried into oblivion. The Supreme Court may well be shifted to the far right for more than a generation to come — with this massive victory, he can pick a new Supreme Court justice who will make Antonin Scalia seem like a milquetoast. He will have a docile, fawning Congress for at least four years. We will not have an administration so much as a court.
Dave Pell
Hillary had the force of her party, celebrity performances, a former president, a current (and popular) president, a well-oiled ground game, the support of every newspaper, and what almost every pollster thought was enough momentum to win. Donald, who famously said “I alone can fix it” was in many ways alone. He had virtually no party or establishment support. In the final weeks, he was essentially running as a third party candidate. The Party of Trump. Add these factors to an untraditional campaign, poor debate performances, a lack of experience, and everything we thought we knew about politics, and there was no way he could win.