THEY REALLY CAN’T HANDLE REJECTION: Les déplorables, or : the dogs refused the food.
AND SO IT BEGINS: Derangement Syndrome Starts.
DOCTOR, IS IT NORMAL TO KEEP GRINNING LIKE THIS? Newsweek recalls 125,000 copies of its souvenir Madam President issue.
JAMES LILEKS ON TUESDAY’S RESULTS: “Well, there’s an old Chinese curse, right? ‘May you live in 2016.’ Or something like that. I keep reminding Daughter: when you follow all the Hot Issues of the Day Everyone Is Furious About, you’re looking the scorpion in the eye, thinking you can glare him down with your indignation. Big mistake. Watch the claw. Beware the tail.”
November 9, 2016
RUTH BADER GINSBURG: Failed Political Pundit. “In recent years she’s hinted that part of her retirement calculation depended upon the fact that a Democrat would succeed President Barack Obama.”
THEY ALWAYS PROMISE TO LEAVE, BUT THEY NEVER DO: Sabo Strikes Again: L.A. street artist ‘moving sale’ posters for anti-Trump celebrities.
Related: Canadians stunned, realizing they are now stuck with Lena Dunham.
AT AMAZON, save on bestsellers in Home & Garden.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Virginia University Offers ‘Healing Space’ For Distraught #NeverTrump Students.
Plus: Protesting Democracy.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A freakout at Wellesley College.
Annual cost of attending Wellesley College: $61,088.
“REVENGE OF THE FLYOVER STATES:” “The National Democratic Party condescended to the heartland.”
SCOTT ADAMS: I Answer Your Questions About Predicting President Trump. “Watch as Trump turns to healing. You’re going to be surprised how well he does it.”
Plus: “I ask Trump supporters not to gloat too much. Be good to your fellow citizens. Be inclusive. Be useful. The country needs you at your best.”
Plus: “When we ceased to operate to generate power for the Democratic Party, it was back to the old insult.” Yeah, that’s how it works, pretty much.
RAMESH PONNURU: Dear America, This Is Important — Trump Did Not Win Because of Racism.
The exit polls are remarkable. Would you believe that Mitt Romney won a greater percentage of the white vote than Donald Trump? Mitt took 59 percent while Trump won 58 percent. Would you believe that Trump improved the GOP’s position with black and Hispanic voters? Obama won 93 percent of the black vote. Hillary won 88 percent. Obama won 71 percent of the Latino vote. Hillary won 65 percent.
Critically, millions of minority voters apparently stayed home. Trump’s total vote is likely to land somewhere between John McCain’s and Romney’s (and well short of George W. Bush’s 2004 total), while the Democrats have lost almost 10 million voters since 2008. And all this happened even as Democrats doubled-down on their own identity politics. Black Lives Matter went from a fringe movement to the Democratic mainstream in the blink of an eye. Radical sexual politics were mainstreamed even faster. White voters responded mainly by voting in the same or lesser numbers as the last three presidential elections. That’s not a “whitelash,” it’s consistency.
AT AMAZON, save on Holiday Hosting.
I’M SO OLD I CAN REMEMBER WHEN “TAKE BACK OUR COUNTRY” WAS A RACIST PHRASE: Anti-Trump Protesters March In Downtown Boston. “Chants of ‘My Body My Choice,’ ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Love Trumps Hate’ reverberated around the park. Protesters, many of who said they feel unsafe now, argued they want to take back the country.”
UPDATE: Twitter Erupts With Calls For Donald Trump To Be Assassinated.
Plus: Rioting Snowflakes: Hillary Fanatics Burn Flag, Threaten To Kill “Not My President” Trump.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
Shot:
—“We Are All Socialists Now,” Newsweek, then-owned by the Washington Post, February 16, 2009.
—“White Won. We are still the country that produced George Wallace. We are still the country that killed Emmett Till,” Slate’s headline today. Slate is owned by the Graham family, who also owned the Washington Post until 2013.
Found via Jazz Shaw of Hot Air, who tweets, “So I take it we’re all done with that ‘America’s already great’ thing, huh?” Those modified limited hangouts sure are limited these days.
THIS WILL HELP WITH THE HEALING: US flag defaced with expletive at UT Baker Center. “University of Tennessee Chancellor Jimmy Cheek urged civility Wednesday evening, after an American flag on campus was defaced with an expletive in the wake of the U.S. presidential election. The flag at the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy has since been replaced after the original was found by the UT Police Department at 6:16 a.m. with the expletive ‘F*** you’ written on it, said UT spokeswoman Karen Simsen. UT police found the vandalized flag on the ground while on patrol, she said.”
The Baker Center was UT’s polling place this election.
HE HAS NO CLUE THAT HE HELPED MAKE IT POSSIBLE, DOES HE? Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz Is ‘Stunned’ by Donald Trump’s Win:
CEO Howard Schultz has made no secret of his disdain for Donald Trump.
In a letter to staff on Wednesday, Schultz said he was gobsmacked by the president-elect’s victory but said Americans had to respect the results.
“Like so many of our fellow Americans—both Democrats and Republicans—I am stunned,” Schultz wrote. “We cannot know what the precise impact will be on our country and the rest of the world. I am hopeful that we will overcome the vitriol and division of this unprecedented election season.”
I know, Howard. I too was shocked by Hillary’s divisive “deplorable” and “irredeemable” references and the equally guttural language of her closest supporters. Almost as shocked as I was last year when a CEO thought he knew more about American race relations than his customers, and was free to hector them with an evangelic fervor. So I’m sure we’ll overcome the vitriolic division of Hillary and the media’s crude tribal politics as well.
True fact, @Starbucks: Liberals once believed people shouldn’t be valued for the color of their skin. #RaceTogether pic.twitter.com/6qAl4sPWjg
— Jeff Jacoby (@Jeff_Jacoby) March 22, 2015
UPDATE: “When you give yourself and your political party over entirely to left-wing identity politics, issues of class become invisible to you, and you end up forgetting that you ever knew people like the white working-class and rural people of the Rust Belt. You lose elections that way. I do not like identity politics. I believe it is dangerous, especially in a pluralistic democracy like ours. But look, if that’s how the left is going to rig the system, then it should not be surprised when white people get tired of it, and decide to play by the same hardball rules.”
A SAFE PREDICTION:
MICHELLE MALKIN WRITES THE POST-MORTEM ON IDENTITY POLITICS IN AMERICA:
“Remember, Jay memorably said: ‘Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther could walk, and Martin Luther walked so Barack Obama could run, and Barack Obama ran so all the children could fly.’”
This would be comical if not for the noxious cynicism of it all. Clinton may not remember (if she was ever aware in the first place), but the original version of “My President is Black” is a brazen middle finger to nonblack America. Just a few lines after the verse Hillary quoted, the song taunts:
Hello Miss America, hey pretty lady
Red, white, and blue flag, wave for me baby
Never thought I’d say this s—, baby I’m good
You can keep your p—, I don’t want no more Bush
No more war, no more Iraq
No more white lies, the President is black
So the poster granny for liberal white privilege, groveling for black votes, kissed the rings of celebrity Obama BFFs Jay-Z and Beyonce by parroting an inflammatory anthem laced with profanities and radical racialized gloating.
Could there have been a more perfect beclownment to cap Clinton’s phony-baloney “Stronger Together” campaign?
After denigrating millions of Trump supporters as “deplorable” and “irredeemable” earlier this year, Clinton then unctuously confessed on election eve: “I regret deeply how angry the tone of the campaign became.”
Read the whole thing.
Flashback: Rapper Kendrick Lamar to Perform at White House for Semi-Retired President on July Fourth.
Obama also met with Lamar, apparently one of his favorite “artists,” before his final State of the Union address. As Victor Davis Hanson noted at the time, the cover to Lamar’s 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly features a dead judge and his murderers posing in front of the White House.
Curiously, the media seemed remarkably unperturbed by both of the above-mentioned affiliations, despite having called for new national tone of increased civility and a reduction of violent metaphors in early 2011.
TRUMP WINS AND DEMOCRATS ARE ONCE AGAIN TALKING SECESSION: In my USA Today column, I say that secession is for losers.
IN SLATE: The Democratic Party Establishment Is Finished.
The Democrats will now control next to nothing above the municipal level. Donald Trump will be president. We are going to be unpacking this night for the rest of our lives, and lives beyond that. We can’t comprehend even 1 percent of what’s just happened. But one aspect of it, minor in the overall sweep, that I’m pretty sure we can comprehend well enough right now: The Democratic Party establishment has beclowned itself and is finished. . . .
The party establishment made a grievous mistake rallying around Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t just a lack of recent political seasoning. She was a bad candidate, with no message beyond heckling the opposite sideline. She was a total misfit for both the politics of 2016 and the energy of the Democratic Party as currently constituted. She could not escape her baggage, and she must own that failure herself.
Theoretically smart people in the Democratic Party should have known that. And yet they worked giddily to clear the field for her. Every power-hungry young Democrat fresh out of law school, every rising lawmaker, every old friend of the Clintons wanted a piece of the action. This was their ride up the power chain. The whole edifice was hollow, built atop the same unearned sense of inevitability that surrounded Clinton in 2008, and it collapsed, just as it collapsed in 2008, only a little later in the calendar. The voters of the party got taken for a ride by the people who controlled it, the ones who promised they had everything figured out and sneeringly dismissed anyone who suggested otherwise. They promised that Hillary Clinton had a lock on the Electoral College. These people didn’t know what they were talking about, and too many of us in the media thought they did.
Well, to be fair, most people in the media are only theoretically smart.
THAT DIDN’T TAKE LONG: No sooner is a Republican elected to the White House than the “antiwar” group A.N.S.W.E.R. is planning protests.
This piece by David Corn is a must-read on that group. Excerpt:
Nor did it speak to Americans who oppose the war but who don‘t consider the United States a force of unequaled imperialist evil and who don’t yearn to smash global capitalism.
This was no accident, for the demonstration was essentially organized by the Workers World Party, a small political sect that years ago split from the Socialist Workers Party to support the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The party advocates socialist revolution and abolishing private property. It is a fan of Fidel Castro‘s regime in Cuba, and it hails North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il for preserving his country’s ”socialist system,“ which, according to the party‘s newspaper, has kept North Korea ”from falling under the sway of the transnational banks and corporations that dictate to most of the world.“ The WWP has campaigned against the war-crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. A recent Workers World editorial declared, ”Iraq has done absolutely nothing wrong.“
Officially, the organizer of the Washington demonstration was International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism). But ANSWER is run by WWP activists, to such an extent that it seems fair to dub it a WWP front. Several key ANSWER officials — including spokesperson Brian Becker — are WWP members. Many local offices for ANSWER’s protest were housed in WWP offices. Earlier this year, when ANSWER conducted a press briefing, at least five of the 13 speakers were WWP activists. They were each identified, though, in other ways, including as members of the International Action Center.
Read the whole thing.
Obviously, we don’t have a criminal entering the White House. American is also well positioned to get rid of the middle class-killer known as ObamaCare.
Those are the two major payoffs, but there are others.
George Stephanopoulos’ wife, Ali Wentworth, said that she and her husband would leave the U.S. and go to Australia if Trump won.
George, old boy. You’re the Democrat operative with a byline who ginned up the phony Republican “war on women” meme in the 2012 election. You also donated 75 grand to the Clinton Foundation and didn’t mention it to your audience until, you know, it sleazed out.
So, please, you sleazy fraud, you and your bride get the hell out of the States. Go to Australia. Sashay to Down Under and frolic with kangaroos. Kiss a Tasmanian devil.
Aside to Team ABC: George Stephanopoulos was never a journalist and you jerks knew it from the get-go. Stephanopoulos was there to slam Republicans and push Democrats. Yet Team Hilary lost the election. Your scam’s over, Team ABC. You don’t believe it. But it is.
It won’t really be over until the media monoculture experiences some ideological diversity.
THE SECRET WORLD OF MICROWAVE NETWORKS: Has anyone spanned the Atlantic with floating microwave masts yet? We’re not sure…
WELL, YES: “This is a complete repudiation of President Obama, the man who pushed Hillary and deemed Trump a clown.” Amazing to see it in the New York Times, though.
Plus: “The Clintons remind me of the Universal horror movies where you thought the monster was dead and then the monster would show up in a bad sequel. I’m glad now that they’re finally gone.”
JESSE WALKER: Where the Third-Party Candidates Were Strongest.
TRUMP WINS AND DEMOCRATS ARE ONCE AGAIN TALKING SECESSION: In my USA Today column, I say that secession is for losers.
TROLL LEVEL: QUEEN OF THE GALACTIC OVERLORD: Melania Trump’s White Pantsuit Proves She Is A Queen At Fashion Trolling.
Related: How “‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want” became Donald Trump’s bizarre theme song,” including last night as Trump was leaving the stage after announcing Hillary had conceded: “I never figured the Rolling Stones for Trump supporters. They aren’t. Then why did they give him permission to play their music? They didn’t. In fact, the group repeatedly asked him to stop using the song, but he ignored them, and has used the song repeatedly.”
How very punk rock – but then, as Kyle Smith writes, “Donald Trump is the punk-rock president America deserves.”
(Classical allusion in headline.)
ACE OF SPADES: One Anecdote That Helps Explain the “Rage” Our Liberal Masters Don’t Understand:
Read the whole thing.
CRYING WOLF: The Republic Repeals Itself, claims Andrew Sullivan today.
As opposed to comparing America to the Weimar Republic, which is how a gobsmacked Sullivan Godwinized President Bush without actually invoking the H-word in 2007.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): “Perhaps we should require reading ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ in journalism schools.”
HE’S GOT A PEN AND A PHONE, AND A RAGING SENSE OF ANGER AT HIS DWINDLING TIME LEFT IN OFFICE, HIS SUCCESSOR, AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE: Executive orders, pardons, ‘midnight’ regulations expected as Obama presidency draws to close.
TEST DRIVE: 2017 Jeep Cherokee 4×4.
SO JOHN FUND EMAILS ME THIS “MUST READ” PIECE FROM . . . GLENN GREENWALD? Hey, when he’s right, he’s right. Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit. “The parallels between the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’ even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president last night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles) aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative (validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational. In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop — were certain of victory. Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination. The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. . . . Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more efficiently.”
“SO, ABOUT LAST NIGHT …” In his column at the Washington Post, Sonny Bunch of the conservative Washington Free Beacon writes:
There’s something to be said for the idea that Trump rode a wave of white resentment into the White House. But this is, at best, a half-truth. I’ll discuss the demographics in a moment; for now, let’s focus on the resentment. “Family Guy”‘s Seth MacFarlane made the totally reasonable point that “the Left expended so much energy over the last several years being outraged over verbal missteps, accidental innuendo, ‘tasteless tweets’ … in the name of clickbait, that when the REAL threat to equality emerged, we’d cried wolf too many times to be heard.”
This is a variation on the “But he fights!” defense/critique of Donald Trump. He gives voice to people who have spent the social media age watching viral outrage after viral outrage consume news cycles and destroy lives, to people who look at the silliness on college campuses and recoil at the thought of giving such institutions tens of thousands of dollars to fill their children’s heads with nonsense ideas. As Robby Soave noted at Reason, “Trump won because he convinced a great number of Americans that he would destroy political correctness.”
* * * * * * * *
Twitter created a series of impenetrable bubbles this cycle, and bubbles of this sort are not healthy for members of the media. They’re not healthy for anyone, really, but they’re doubly unhealthy for those of us who would dare to think they can or should shape the national narrative. If Democrats’ takeaway from last night is “the people of this country are filled with hatred,” as my own bubble suggests it might be, they will learn no lessons and gain no weapons with which to combat Trump and his successors going forward.
I don’t know if it’s fair to say that it was Twitter that created those impenetrable bubbles, or if it was simply one of the many platforms available to amplify and broadcast them.
During the 1960 presidential election, at the height of mass-media, mass-production, and the concomitant federal government shaped by the socialist New Deal, Nixon and Kennedy shared remarkably similar midcentury centrist views on most issues, from civil rights to the role of religion in America to the Cold War. But virtually every election since has seen pitched battles between two diametrically opposed worldviews: the radical chic anger of the McGovernites versus Nixon’s Great Society-esque foreign and domestic policies. Jimmy Carter’s big government malaise versus Reagan’s Goldwater-inspired conservatism. Al Gore’s radical environmentalism as religion versus George W. Bush’s Compassionate Conservatism. Etc., etc.
Until now. This election offered a plethora of worldviews slugging it out: a Northeast Corridor-based overculture that believes a radical chic-inspired failed community organizer and failed health care reformer in a bespoke suit is the second coming of God. And that his designated successor, whom they previously denigrated as a reactionary racist, whose biggest achievement was making a hash of the Middle East while pointlessly racking up nearly a million air miles (all the while railing against “climate change”) deserves to be president simply because of her gender.
Their reality was opposed by the alternate media bubble created by Trump’s most loyal media supporters, such as Dilbert creator Scott Adams, an increasingly surreal Drudge Report, and a Breitbart.com that would likely be unrecognizable by its late founder.
Their reality in turn was opposed by the #NeverTrump crowd at the Weekly Standard and National Review. Who at times arguably seemed more angry with Trump himself and his mixed legacy in business than his Democratic opponent.
Ultimately though, the reality that prevailed was that of Trump’s working class base of supporters. Who tried to send a message to Washington in 2009 with the surprise election of Scott Brown to block Obamacare. And when that failed to stop the Democrats, tried to send a message in 2010 by sweeping a wave of Republicans into the House to block its implementation. And when that failed to stop the Democrats (and its rollout turned out to the debacle that everyone on the right insisted it would be) sent a wave that recaptured the Senate. A group that’s angry at being called homophobic bigots and racists. Angry at a never-ending war in Iraq after victory was in-hand. Angry at a stagnant economy. Angry over possibly the biggest lie told repeatedly by an American president: “If you like your plan you can keep your plan,” only to discover no, you can’t – and if you want any health insurance at all, you might need a second mortgage to cover the premiums.
Is Trump a perfect messenger for such anger? Of course not. But like Bill Clinton in 1992 and Obama in 2008, he showed up to play, mentally decided that he had more star power and cable media savvy than his opponents in his party’s primary, and rode a populist message to success. I hope he can deliver on some of his promises, but the fact that he won’t begin his administration by launching a culture war against half the nation, as both Obama and Clinton did, will give us all room to breathe.
A FLAWED, FRAUD, MACHINE, CRONY AND CRIMINAL CAREER POLITICIAN: These are the words an honest media would have used to describe Hillary Clinton. America, however, doesn’t have an honest mainstream media.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Rolling DNA Labs Address the Ultimate Question: ‘Who’s Your Daddy?.’
PAUL KRUGMAN, 12:42 AM: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”
Markets, just now:
BRUCE KESLER:Trump’s win is really our last chance.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
Shot:
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.
* * * * * * * *
In the coming days, commentators will attempt to normalize this event. They will try to soothe their readers and viewers with thoughts about the “innate wisdom” and “essential decency” of the American people. They will downplay the virulence of the nationalism displayed, the cruel decision to elevate a man who rides in a gold-plated airliner but who has staked his claim with the populist rhetoric of blood and soil.
—“An American Tragedy,” David Remnick, the New Yorker, today.
Chaser:
—“The View of the World from 9th Avenue,” drawn by Saul Steinberg, the New Yorker, March 29, 1976.
Pauline Kael could not be reached for comment.
(Via Maggie’s Farm.)
AUSTIN BAY: Trump’s Biggest Win Was Over The Media Apparat. “In strategic terms—a fancy way of saying the long run—Trump’s stunning defeat of the corrupt mainstream media may be his most important election victory. Here’s why: Since 1968 mainstream media bias (a wicked bias favoring leftist Democrats) has been America’s most grave strategic weakness. America is extremely powerful. Given America’s military and economic power, our enemies pursue ‘judo strategies’ that exploit internal weaknesses.”
Trump Can Kill Obamacare With Or Without Help From Congress.
“Obamacare is a disaster. You know it. We all know it,” Trump said at a debate last month. “We have to repeal it and replace it with something absolutely much less expensive.”
Now that Trump will move into the Oval Office in January, the question is whether he’ll be able to completely repeal the six-year-old law that has had an impact on every aspect of the U.S. health care system.
“It’s a challenge for a Trump presidency,” says Jack Hoadley, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute. “To get a true repeal and replace through, he needs 60 votes in the Senate.” That’s the minimum number of votes needed to block Senate action through filibuster.
ObamaCare passed the Senate through reconciliation with only 51 votes. What can be done through reconciliation can surely be undone through reconciliation.
GALLERY: Photographs By William Eggleston. I like his work which, as I’ve mentioned before, was a big influence on my own photographic style.
AT LAST, THE 1948 SHOW: “It’s like 1948 all over again for American media,” Media Myth Alert author W. Joseph Campbell writes today:
It looks something like 1948 for mainstream American news media today.
Donald Trump’s stunning victory in yesterday’s presidential election brought reminders of the embarrassment of 1948, when Thomas Dewey, the presumptive favorite for the presidency, was upset by President Harry S. Truman, much to the shock of the American press.
In the weeks and months before yesterday’s election, prominent media analysts predicted Trump was going to lose, and probably decisively, to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Notable among these misplaced predictions was that of Stuart Rothenberg, who wrote on August 9 at the Washington Post’s PowerPost blog:
“Three months from now, with the 2016 presidential election in the rearview mirror, we will look back and agree that the presidential election was over on Aug. 9th.
“Of course,” he added, “it is politically incorrect to say that the die is cast. …
* * * * * * * * *
The media prize for excessive self-confidence has to go to New York magazine: Its election issue cover featured a photograph of an angry Trump, a taunting sneer, “LOSER,” emblazoned across his face. The issue’s publication date was October 31.
The cover today evokes the Chicago Tribune’s memorable and stunningly wrong front-page headline of November 3, 1948, which announced Dewey’s victory over Truman.
This election is also reminiscent of 1948 in another way. I believe that year’s presidential election was the first in which the Democratic nominee explicitly smeared his Republican counterpart as being a Nazi. Beginning with the campaign against Goldwater in ’64, in virtually every election afterwards, the Democratic nominee’s enablers in the DNC-MSM would take up the slack. QED: At NewsBusters today, “Celeb D.L. Hughley Sneers of Trump: ‘My Daddy Survived Jim Crow.’” In 2009, Hughley, then a CNN host, told then Republican party chairman Michael Steele (himself a fellow African-American) that the rank and file Republicans attending the previous year’s GOP Convention “Literally look like Nazi Germany.”
How many times can you cry wolf? How many times you can you pretend America is Berlin in 1939 or the Jim Crow South of 1962? These are questions the MSM should be asking themselves – but judging by their immediate response today, likely never will.
(Classical reference in headline.)
JOSH KRAUSHAAR: How Obama Inadvertently Set the Stage for Trump’s Presidency.
Instead of offering voters a detailed policy agenda, Obama won the presidency in part thanks to his identity, an identity that powerfully addressed a historical wrong. In the process, he made it possible for Trump to advance to the presidency on the strength of an entirely different sort of identity, one that appealed to an intensely loyal base of white, working-class voters.
Obama’s mistake was refusing to acknowledge the import of the Republican wave elections in 2010 and 2014 and declining to pivot to the middle, which fueled the intensity of the conservative opposition. By spending his final two years doing end-runs around Congress on immigration and resisting any changes to his signature health care law, he all but invited Trump’s autocratic promises to fix things.
Obama and his legacy were among the biggest losers in Tuesday’s astonishing upset. Republicans will now exercise the vast powers of the presidency and control the Senate and the House by comfortable margins, and they will almost certainly roll back Obama’s health care law. If Trump lives up to his pledge to appoint a conservative jurist to fill the Scalia vacancy, the Supreme Court will have a conservative majority in the years ahead.
Read the whole thing.
FLASHBACK: The Manchurian President.
It’s a little early in his administration to draw any broad conclusions, but the evidence is clear: As a younger man, Barack Obama was kidnapped and brainwashed by evil Republican operatives, then sent deep undercover to destroy the Democratic Party and perhaps even the entire liberal worldview.
That’s the intro of a column I wrote in September of 2009. Might still be worth a chuckle or two.
TRUMP CAMPAIGN: ‘Undercover’ supporters helped deliver upset victory.
In 2008 we were assured that “shy” voters would save McCain. In 2012 we were told the same thing about Romney. But the thing to remember — and I’ve already put a sticky note up on my screen — is that the boy who cried wolf was, eventually, correct about the wolf.
JIM GERAGHTY: There Really Is a Silent Majority; the Right Wins the Culture War of 2016.
Pollsters have had off years before, but there has never been a colossal ten-car pile-up like this in the polling industry. The entire industry needs to scrap everything they know about the electorate and start over. One of the giant questions they must address is whether we now live in an atmosphere of such far-reaching and stifling social disapproval of politically incorrect positions that a significant portion of respondents no longer feel comfortable expressing their actual beliefs to a pollster. There really was a silent majority.
Silent, silenced, whatever.
Trump won because of a cultural issue that flies under the radar and remains stubbornly difficult to define, but is nevertheless hugely important to a great number of Americans: political correctness.
More specifically, Trump won because he convinced a great number of Americans that he would destroy political correctness.
I have tried to call attention to this issue for years. I have warned that political correctness actually is a problem on college campuses, where the far-left has gained institutional power and used it to punish people for saying or thinking the wrong thing. And ever since Donald Trump became a serious threat to win the GOP presidential primaries, I have warned that a lot of people, both on campus and off it, were furious about political-correctness-run-amok—so furious that they would give power to any man who stood in opposition to it.
I have watched this play out on campus after campus. I have watched dissident student groups invite Milo Yiannopoulos to speak—not because they particularly agree with his views, but because he denounces censorship and undermines political correctness. I have watched students cheer his theatrics, his insulting behavior, and his narcissism solely because the enforcers of campus goodthink are outraged by it. It’s not about his ideas, or policies. It’s not even about him. It’s about vengeance for social oppression.
Trump has done to America what Yiannopoulos did to campus. This is a view Yiannopoulos shares. When I spoke with him about Trump’s success months ago, he told me, “Nobody votes for Trump or likes Trump on the basis of policy positions. That’s a misunderstanding of what the Trump phenomenon is.”
He described Trump as “an icon of irreverent resistance to political correctness.” Correctly, I might add.
People will tell you that “political correctness” is just politeness and consideration, but it’s not polite or considerate to form screaming mobs trying to fire people who use the “wrong” pronouns.
But when people are afraid of those mobs, they won’t say what they really think, which means that the left’s shrieking thought police both created the backlash, and then kept it from being noticed. Nice work.
Also: Some Gay Voters Say It’s ‘Dangerous’ to Come Out for Trump.
Related: A Trump Wave Is On the Way.
TRUMP DESTROYS ELITES’ ASSUMPTIONS: Autopsy of the 2012 ‘GOP Autopsy’
IN THE MAIL: The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living.
Plus, today only at Amazon: Up to 50% off Frye Shoes, Bags, Wallets & More.
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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1280.
ROGER SIMON: Trump Wins — Time to End the Republican Civil War.
The Clinton Foundation has issued a brief statement: No Refunds. #election2016 #WheresHillary
— Chris Hagen (@chrishagentb) November 9, 2016
Heh.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: You’ll need a background just to buy ammo in California.
This would be a good time to open an ammo shop near along any Interstate in Nevada or Arizona.
TYRANNY ADVANCES: China Cracks Down On Hong Kong Localists.
Beijing has ruled: the two independence activists at the center of a dispute in Hong Kong’s legislature will not be allowed to take their seats. . . .
As we noted last week, Beijing’s decision to intervene in an active Hong Kong court case set a major precedent. The ruling itself will have even greater repercussions. Beijing has now removed elected Hong Kong officials by decree. And rather than ruling narrowly against the two people in question, China has taken a broader position, barring independence activists from seeking office and pressuring the Hong Kong government to comply.
The ruling comes at a time when President Xi is consolidating his power on the mainland and clamping down on internal reform. The news will likely stir up passions in Hong Kong over the notion that Beijing is expanding its control and directly interfering with the rule of law in a supposedly autonomous region.
Hong Kong’s young localists have apparently overplayed their hand in calculating that they could openly defy China and still enjoy their new political privileges. The backlash in Hong Kong will be something to watch for: perhaps Beijing has overplayed its hand, too?
Let’s hope.
2015 FLASHBACK: Liberals have chosen The Donald as their ‘Destructor.’
SPENGLER: Trump’s Victory Was Obvious from the Outset.
IT AIN’T OVER YET: Obama’s last chance of ending Israeli occupation.
President Loki still has until January 20 to create more mischief. I get the feeling that Bill Clinton’s last-minute flurry of legal (and practical) booby traps could pale in comparison.
FROM THE ALWAYS-INSIGHTFUL JOEL KOTKIN: The Improbable Demographics Behind Donald Trump’s Shocking Presidential Victory.
America is a nation of many economies, but those that produce real, tangible things — food, fiber, energy and manufactured goods — went overwhelmingly for Trump. He won virtually every state from Appalachia to the Rockies, with the exceptions of heavily Hispanic Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, and President Obama’s home base of Illinois.
Some of his biggest margins were in energy states — Texas, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Wyoming, North Dakota — where the fracking revolution created a burst of prosperity. . . .
Class has been a bigger factor in this election than in any election since the New Deal era. Trump’s insurgency rode largely on middle- and working-class fears about globalization, immigration and the cultural arrogance of the “progressive” cultural elite. This is something Bill Clinton understands better than his wife.
Trump owes his election to what one writer has called “the leftover people.” These may be “deplorables” to the pundits but their grievances are real – their incomes and their lifespans have been decreasing. They have noticed, as Thomas Frank has written, that the Democrats have gone “from being the party of Decatur to the party of Martha’s Vineyard.”
Many of these voters were once Democrats, and feel they have been betrayed.
Well, that’s because they have been. Democrats preferred feeling smugly superior to these voters over getting their votes. Trump felt the other way. Last night, both got what they were after, but only one seems happy about it today.
UPDATE: Heh.
PETER THIEL: Trump victory means ‘all hands on deck.’ “Congratulations to President-elect Donald Trump. He has an awesomely difficult task, since it is long past time for us to face up to our country’s problems.”
WHEN RUSH LIMBAUGH SAID SOMETHING SIMILAR IN 2008, IT WAS RACIST: Progressive group vows to obstruct Trump presidency.
HOW THE POLLS GOT IT WRONG: “The electoral map leaves no doubt as to how Mr Trump won. In states where white voters tend to be well-educated, such as Colorado and Virginia, the polls pegged the final results perfectly. Conversely, in northern states that have lots of whites without a college degree, Mr Trump blew his polls away—including ones he is still expected to lose, but by a far smaller margin than expected, such as Minnesota. The simplest explanation for this would be that these voters preferred him by an even larger margin than pollsters foresaw—the so-called ‘shy Trump’ phenomenon, in which people might be wary of admitting they supported him. But in fact, the 29-point margin he ran up with this group was an almost perfect match for the 30-point gap that showed up in previous polling. That suggests an alternate interpretation: this group, which historically has had a low propensity to vote, turned out in far greater numbers than pollsters could predict.”
DAVID BROOKS: “Sociologically, this campaign has been an education in how societies come apart.” “Any decent society rests on codes of etiquette and a shared moral ecology to make cooperation possible, to prevent economic and political life from descending into a savage war of all against all. But this year Donald Trump has decimated the codes of basic decency without paying a price.”
FLASHBACK: How David Brooks Created Donald Trump.
Brooks is, of course, horrified at Trump and his supporters, whom he finds childish, thuggish and contemptuous of the things that David Brooks likes about today’s America. It’s clear that he’d like a social/political revolution that was more refined, better-mannered, more focused on the Constitution and, well, more bourgeois as opposed to in-your-face and working class.
The thing is, we had that movement. It was the Tea Party movement. . . .
Yet the tea party movement was smeared as racist, denounced as fascist, harassed with impunity by the IRS and generally treated with contempt by the political establishment — and by pundits like Brooks, who declared “I’m not a fan of this movement.” After handing the GOP big legislative victories in 2010 and 2014, it was largely betrayed by the Republicans in Congress, who broke their promises to shrink government and block Obama’s initiatives.
So now we have Trump instead, who tells people to punch counterprotesters instead of picking up their trash.
When politeness and orderliness are met with contempt and betrayal, do not be surprised if the response is something less polite, and less orderly. Brooks closes his Trump column with Psalm 73, but a more appropriate verse is Hosea 8:7 “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” Trump’s ascendance is a symptom of a colossal failure among America’s political leaders, of which Brooks’ mean-spirited insularity is only a tiny part. God help us all.
He doesn’t seem to have learned much. Also, “decimated,” which means “reduced by a tenth,” is not a synonym for “devastated.” I rather doubt that Brooks means that Trump has reduced basic decency by 10%. Amazing that that got by an editor.
And really, you backed Hillary Clinton and you’re talking about basic decency? Really?
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF ELECTORAL MISBEHAVIOR? Philadelphia Republicans Claim Voter Intimidation, Voter Fraud.
The answer, of course, is because there are no consequences. I hope that President Trump’s Department of Justice will put more energy into ensuring voter access and ballot integrity than we’ve seen in recent years.
GOOD: Rolling Stone verdict should help fraternity also suing magazine.
For the fraternity, evidence presented in Eramo’s trial revealed that Erdely began writing her article with a severe bias against fraternities. Erdely, in her interview with the rape hoaxer Jackie, said the fraternity members who allegedly gang-raped the accuser represented a “banality of evil” and that she wanted to “get these guys.”
Erdely also cited to Jackie research she had found that claimed fraternity members were “more likely to rape people” and hold “rape-supportive attitudes.” It was clear from this interview that Erdely had a preconceived notion about fraternities and indeed wanted to attack them.
A lawyer for Eramo perhaps summed it up best in his closing arguments: “Once they decided what the article was going to be about, it didn’t matter what the facts were.”
Journalism.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Republicans take the Kentucky House after 95 years of Democratic control. “Republicans last led the chamber in 1921. Going into Election Day, the Kentucky House was the only law-making chamber in the South still controlled by Democrats, who held a 53-47 majority. Longtime House Speaker Greg Stumbo, D-Prestonsburg, was among 17 Democratic incumbents swamped in the Republican wave. . . . As of 11 p.m. Tuesday, the GOP led Democrats 64-35, with one seat still too close to call.”
ILYA SOMIN: Time To Take Political Ignorance Seriously.
Well, yes, but in particular we need to look at the political ignorance of our elites, who want to run a country they’ve never been to.
TO ALL THE ANGRY, EMBITTERED, AND BEWILDERED DEMOCRATS LASHING OUT TODAY, let me recommend Dana Loesch’s book, Flyover Nation: You Can’t Run a Country You’ve Never Been To.
EMBITTERED DEMOCRATS ENGAGE IN RACIST OUTBURSTS: CNN’s Van Jones: “This Was a Whitelash Against a Changing Country.”
TRIGGERED! Yale Professor Cancels Exam for Snowflake Students Distraught at Election Result.
The PC idiocy at America’s universities — in which Yale was huge — played a major role in electing Trump. No wonder they’re distraught.
PAUL KRUGMAN: You’re dead to me, America. You know, he has the same initials as Pauline Kael. . . .
PAPER BALLOTS ARE THE ANSWER: Merkel fears Russian meddling in German election.
Also, if you don’t want your email about doing illegal stuff hacked, don’t do illegal stuff.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Post-Merger Rutgers Law School In ‘Crisis’ As 1L Enrollment Falls 31% From 2015 (62% From 2011) At Camden.
WALL STREET ELITES STUNNED: Good.
RELATED: The smart money people wasted a hell of a lot of money on Hillary’s “public and private positions.” Translation: Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and other financial powers bet on Hillary’s hypocrisy and Hillary’s lies. And they lost. This is good news.
CNN –AKA CLINTON NEWS NETWORK– SAYS REPUBLICANS KEEP CONTROL OF CONGRESS: It’s 4:30 AM Texas time and my quick scan of news updates produced a CNN link. It’ll serve.
Republicans pulled off a political stunner Tuesday night — running the table down-ballot and keeping control of the House and Senate, CNN projects. In a year when the GOP was almost entirely on defense, the party’s incumbents — many outspent and hobbled by struggling campaigns — managed to survive a political landscape that long appeared all but certain to cost them the Senate.
Whoops. Maybe the CNN link won’t serve. RE: “entirely on defense”? Hey, CNN, can you end the spin? Hillary was on the defensive, you blinkered fools. She’s a criminal and American voters knew it. Apparently you didn’t know it. Or if you knew she was a crook you decided to ignore it.
HIS COMFORT THAT IS; AND THE CANADIAN CONSULATE IS DOWN! Liberal Media Freaking Out! Chris Matthews Says It’s Too Close for Comfort. How hard can it be to process “we don’t like you, Mr. Fell, the reason why, you know it well.”?
SO I THINK THIS IS SAFELY OVER, BUT THERE WILL BE TURBULENCE:
So provisional ballots are the reason that MSNBC isn’t calling Pennsylvania. This is why I found being forced to fill out a provisional ballot today so suspect. Reiterating: I had to fill one out because, according to the story told to me by the poll workers, I had been sent a vote by mail ballot, which I had never requested.
Votes that are counted after election night are the Devil’s Playground for fraud. All kinds of things can happen, and they are almost never good for the Republican candidate.
INSIDE THE LOSS HILLARY—AND THE POLITICO—SAW COMING:
None of it was enough, though all of it should have been, and likely would have been for another candidate. She couldn’t escape being the wrong candidate for the political moment.
Interviews over the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign with members of Clinton’s innermost circle, close advisers and other aides reveal a deep frustration with their failure to make a dent, a consuming sense that their candidate’s persecution paranoia might actually be right, and a devastating belief that they might never persuade Americans to vote for her.
“There was no way to generate momentum,” one top adviser said.
Any positive storyline from Clinton “was always fragile,” admitted that adviser, and issues related to the emails inevitably stripped away any uptick in Clinton’s favorable ratings.
“This has been a campaign that has thrived on moments,” Mook said in an interview in his office in the back corner of the Brooklyn headquarters a week before the election. “When voters see the candidates juxtaposed, we do better. When they’re not juxtaposed, he normalizes. He becomes the Republican nominee, instead of Donald Trump.”
Note that the Politico gathered all these quotes in anticipation of Hillary losing; this article dropped very quickly after she conceded to President-Elect Trump on Wednesday morning. And while it’s no doubt that they prepared a similar article ready to go if Trump lost, imagine how much more of a defeat it would have been if the DNC-MSM had been running pieces like this on Monday night, rather than as a postmortem.
FINALLY PUT TO REST: The Election Fables of 2016.
DID OBAMA KNOW IT WAS GAME OVER? Outgoing President used election night speech to tell Americans: ‘No matter what happens—the sun will rise in the morning.’
Related: On Monday, Hillary Clinton Canceled Planned Victory Fireworks Show.
YOU CAN SAY THAT AGAIN: The Most Extraordinary Election of our Lifetime.
OF COURSE HILLARY IS REFUSING TO CONCEDE. AND YET, DING DONG, THE WITCH IS GONE: AP calls Pennsylvania for Trump. It’s Over. Trump Has Won the Presidency of the United States. Good Night, Hillary.
I DISAGREE. THE PRESS IS BEYOND REFORM: Time to Play Catch-Up on Hillary.
DING DONG HILLARY CONCEDES: According to CNN she has conceded. But who can believe CNN? Good point. The mainstream media lost this election, which makes this a big win for the American people. As for the ding dong — the wicked mishandler of classified information is still with us…but Obama had better not pardon her.
UPDATE: Trump says he wasn’t running a campaign, but participating in a movement. “The forgotten men and women in our country will be forgotten no longer.”