Some Election Humor

The bicycle race

The hockey rink

 

Who is Steve Bannon?

The political Left is in the middle of a freakout over Donald Trump winning the presidential election. Some of the reactions are completely unhinged. Others are more measured, intentional, and strategic.

Take, for example, the current demonization of Steve Bannon, the President-elect's chief strategist (google it). This is an excellent example of rule #13 from Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals:

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

In the online Wall Street Journal, Kimberley Strassel let's Mr. Bannon speak for himself.

Steve Bannon on Politics as War - Kimberley A. Strassel

Nor does he profess to care that Democrats and the media are portraying him as a “cloven-hoofed devil,” as he puts it. “I pride myself in doing things that matter. What mattered in the campaign was winning. We did. What matters now is pulling together the single best team we can to implement President-elect Trump’s vision.

He continues: “How can you take anything seriously from a media apparatus—paid the amount of money you people are paid—that systematically missed something that was so obvious, that missed Brexit, that missed the Trump revolution? You’d have thought they’d have learned their lesson on November 8.”

Slight pause. “They clearly haven’t.”

Here are a few things you’ve likely read about Steve Bannon this week: He’s a white supremacist, a bigot and anti-Semite. He’s a self-described Leninist who wants to “destroy the state.” He’s associated with the “alt-right,” a movement that, according to the New York Times, delights in “harassing Jews, Muslims and other vulnerable groups by spewing shocking insults on social media.”

You’ll have seen some of Breitbart’s more offensive headlines, which refer to “renegade” Jews and the “dangerous faggot tour.” You maybe heard that Breitbart is gearing up to be a Pravda-like state organ for the Trump administration.

Mr. Bannon is an aggressive political scrapper, unabashed in his views, but he says those views bear no relation to the media’s description. Over 70 minutes, he describes himself as a “conservative,” a “populist” and an “economic nationalist.” He’s a talker, but unexcitable, speaking in measured tones. A former naval officer, he thinks in military terms and likes to quote philosophers and generals. He’s contemptuous of the media, proud of Breitbart, protective of the “deplorables,” and—at least at the moment—eager to work with everyone from soon-to-be White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to House Speaker Paul Ryan.

At first Mr. Bannon insists that he has no interest in “wasting time” addressing the accusations against him. Yet he’s soon ticking off the reasons they are “just nonsense.”

Anti-Semitic? “Breitbart is the most pro-Israel site in the United States of America. I have Breitbart Jerusalem, which I have Aaron Klein run with about 10 reporters there. We’ve been leaders in stopping this BDS movement”—meaning boycott, divestment and sanctions—“in the United States; we’re a leader in the reporting of young Jewish students being harassed on American campuses; we’ve been a leader on reporting on the terrible plight of the Jews in Europe.” He adds that given his many Jewish partners and writers, “guys like Joel Pollak, these claims of anti-Semitism just aren’t serious. It’s a joke.”

Post-Election Protests

After the election results were settled, Hillary Clinton gave a very gracious concession speech, and likewise Barack Obama and Donald Trump apparently had very cordial meeting at the White House.

However, since then there have been widespread protests in various cities across the U.S. The theme of these protests has been "Not My President". Who are the participants of these protests, and what has motivated them to take to the streets? Is it an organized attempt to de-legitimize Donald Trump's presidency before he even takes office?

Links at Instapundit.

• KELLYANNE CONWAY: Clinton, Obama Need To Calm Down Anti-Trump Protesters. 
• Robert Creamer visited the Obama White House 342 times. 
• Anti-Trump Protests: Proof Of Professional Activist Involvement.

Also:

• Violence on the Left - John Hinderaker
• Democrats: Vicious, Violent, Anti-Democratic - John Hinderaker 
• Inside The Anti-Trump Protest Movement - Blake Montgomery 

  Along with the anarchists, core organizers of the protests have included the ANSWER Coalition, a group with roots that trace back to supporting the Soviet invasion of Hungary in the 1950s, and the Socialist Alternative, a Trotskyist group on the other side of those forgotten Communist civil wars. Those groups’ organizing muscle has long made them important, if controversial, elements of the US left (they were central to protests against the Iraq War in 2003), and they now find themselves marching with Bernie Sanders supporters, civil rights advocates, and thousands of Democrats shocked at Trump’s election.

Who is ANSWER?

• Behind the Placards - David Corn

And finally, a quote from the great Tom Wolfe:

Marshall McLuhan once said that moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity. I think that's quite true these days.

Election 2016 - Inciting Violence

The media narrative is that Donald Trump and the Republican Party incite violence, creating fear in the hearts of a wide variety of American citizens. But let's face it, only one candidate and one political party has actually intentionally incited violence in this election.

Rigging the Election - Video I: Clinton Campaign and DNC Incite Violence at Trump Rallies -- Project Veritas

Also:

• Senior Democratic strategist resigns after video surfaces showing his staff planning to incite violence at Trump rallies and discussing paying mentally-ill people to disrupt GOP events - DailyMail.com
• Two Democratic operatives lose jobs after James O’Keefe sting - Dave Weigel 

Election 2016

I'll admit to being something of a political junkie. And this election has probably been a once-in-a -lifetime event. The political newcomer -- scorned by the media, and fashionable society, and the intellectual class, and the Washington bureaucracy -- comes from behind on election night to win against all odds.

The post-election fallout has been tremendous. Half of the electorate is going through the seven stages of grief. The other half has generally had a more subdued reaction: surprise, relief, schadenfreude, etc.

To both groups I'd like to say it's only an election. Life will go on, and there is a lot of work that needs to be done.

Also, the presidency was never intended to be an all-powerful monarch. So while the president does hold a lot of inherent authority over the executive branch, and is able to veto legislation, and nominate Supreme Court justices, that authority must also balanced out by the other branches of government.

Finally, the solution to most of America's problems are best addressed through the human spirit, and are thus best approached by inspirational or persuasive means rather than legal or authoritarian means.

On the lighter side -

On Trump

The best thing I've read about this election -

Trump and the Emasculated Voter - David Gelernter

Some conservatives have watched their evaluations of Donald Trump’s character drop so low in recent days that on this vital question they no longer see a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Accordingly, they are forced back onto politics and policy; and naturally Mr. Trump wins in a walk. If conservatives who argue that Mr. Trump is worse than Mrs. Clinton had a case, it would be a relief to vote for Mrs. Clinton or for no one. But they don’t, and one is therefore forced for the good of the nation to vote for Mr. Trump.

In his Mr. Nauseating video of last weekend, Mr. Trump showed us that he had all the class and cool of a misbegotten 12-year-old boy. Yet the video taught us nothing; no one had ever mistaken him for anything but an infantile vulgarian. This week’s allegations of actual abuse are different. If these stories are true (and I don’t know why they shouldn’t be), there is nothing to be said for Mr. Trump. Unfortunately, there is nothing to be said for Mrs. Clinton either. If we don’t take both facts into account, we are not morally serious.

Mrs. Clinton has nothing on Mr. Trump when it comes to character. She lies (“Wipe? Like with a cloth?”—cute and charming Mrs. C.) the way basketball stars shoot baskets—constantly, nonstop, because it’s the one thing she is best at and (naturally) it gives her pleasure to hear herself lie—swish!—right onto the evening news. And her specialist talent of all is the verbal kick in the groin of a Secret Service man or state trooper who has the nerve to talk to her as if she were merely human. She is no mere rock star; she is Hillary the Queen. She is so big, and you are so small, she can barely even see you from up there. What are you? A macromolecule?

I’ll vote for Mr. Trump—grimly. But there is no alternative, no shadow of a responsible alternative.

Mr. Trump’s candidacy is a message from the voters. He is the empty gin bottle they have chosen to toss through the window. The message begins with the fact that voters hear what the leaders and pundits don’t: the profound contempt for America and Americans that Mrs. Clinton and President Obama share and their frightening lack of emotional connection to this nation and its people.

Mr. Obama is arch, patronizing, so magnificently weary of having to explain it all, again and again, to the dummies surrounding him. Mrs. Clinton has told us proudly how thoroughly she prepared for the first debate and has prepared to be president. For her, it is all a matter of learning your lines. Her whole life has been memorized in advance. Mr. Obama is at least sincere. Mrs. Clinton is as phony as a three-dollar bill, as a Clinton Global Initiative.

Mr. Obama has governed like a third-rate tyrant. He’s been a stern baby sitter to an American public that is increasingly getting on his nerves. ObamaCare and the Iran treaty are his big achievements. That the public has always disliked them, and hates them worse as it knows them better, strikes him as so unspeakably irrelevant; he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Do you ask 6-year-olds if they like going to school? Luckily, a few grown-ups have been set over the public to keep it in line.

Mrs. Clinton couldn’t agree more. Policy is for smart people, who are people of the left by definition—leftists having scored all those big successes over the years in foreign policy, race relations, policing, restarting wounded economies, making unsecured loans, running school systems and so on. On topics from Keystone to Guantanamo, Mr. Obama has made it clear that he doesn’t give a damn what people think—he no longer even tries to explain to the citizenry. Do your homework! Understand?

Yes, leadership sometimes requires that you take an unpopular position and make it popular. We are told that Mr. Obama is working on his “legacy” instead, as if that makes him farsighted instead of irresponsible and insanely vain. Presidents are supposed to run the country, not worry about their reputation in coming centuries.

Trump voters have noticed that, not just over Mr. Obama’s term but in recent decades, their own opinions have grown increasingly irrelevant. It’s something you feel, like encroaching numbness. Since when has the American public endorsed affirmative action? Yet it’s a major factor in the lives of every student and many workers. Since when did we decide that men and women are interchangeable in hand-to-hand combat on the front lines? Why do we insist on women in combat but not in the NFL? Because we take football seriously. That’s no joke; it’s the sad truth.

Did we invite the federal bureaucracy to take charge of school bathrooms? I guess I missed that meeting. The schools are corrupt and the universities rotten to the core, and everyone has known it since the 1980s. But the Democrats are owned by the teachers unions, and Republicans have made only small-scale corrections to a system that needs to be ripped out and carefully disposed of, like poison ivy.

The Emasculated Voter to whom no one pays any attention is the story of modern democracy. Instead of putting voters in charge, we tell them they’re in charge, and it’s just as good. That’s the Establishment’s great discovery in the Lois Lerner Age.

Enter Mr. Trump. People say he became a star because he just happened to mention an issue that just happened to catch on. But immigration is the central issue of our time. Trump voters zeroed in because they saw what most intellectuals didn’t. What is our nation and what will it be? Will America go on being America or turn into something else? That depends on who lives here—especially given our schools, which no longer condescend to teach Americanism.

The liberal theory is that, other things being equal, all human beings have an equal right to settle in America. For liberals this is too obvious to spell out. But it is also too ludicrous to defend. Does all mankind have a right to camp in your backyard, eat in your kitchen, work at your office and borrow your best jogging outfit? We fail in our duty if we don’t think carefully whom we want in this country, who would be best for America.

Furthermore, we know that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” But that’s got nothing to do with immigration; freedom of religion means freedom for American citizens—what else could it possibly mean? We must not tamper with Americans’ religious life. We must not admit, as possible future citizens, anyone we don’t choose to; anyone we don’t think will be good for America. Not to admit Muslims is bad policy but it does not violate freedom of religion and the American people have a perfect right to discuss and debate it.

Hold on, some of my fellow conservatives say. Never mind Hillary. Trump would be dangerous. He would further endanger our national security and world position. He might start unnecessary wars. He might even push the nuclear button. These are important objections, but after thinking them through I’m unable to take them seriously, either in political terms or psychological ones.

Mrs. Clinton is right at home in the Oval Office and thinks she owns it. She holds herself entitled to supreme power, as her friends are entitled to fancy positions with enormous salaries and her followers to secure government jobs or ample government funds, as the case may be.

But forget psychology. Ordinary politics says that Mr. Trump will not do crazy things or go off half-cocked, because Republicans in Congress will be eager to impeach him and put Mike Pence in charge. That was the subtext of the vice-presidential debate, though Mr. Pence himself (probably) didn’t intend it. When it’s my turn, you can all relax. Democrats, obviously, will be eager to help when the task is removing a Republican.

Impeachment is Trump-voters’ ace in the hole. It’s an abnormal measure, but this is an abnormal year. Impeachment has temporarily dropped out of sight because of special circumstances. Republicans impeached Bill Clinton but got burned in the process; Mr. Obama, as the first black president, was impeachment-proof. Any other president would have encountered serious impeachment talk on several occasions, especially when he ignored Congress and the Constitution and made his own personal treaty-in-all-but-name with Iran.

But Mr. Trump will not have Mr. Obama’s advantages—to say the least. Mr. Trump will be impeachment bait. So will Mrs. Clinton. Even some Democrats have had enough.

Nothing can stop Mr. Trump from shooting off his mouth, but that’s all right. I want America’s enemies off-balance and guessing. For eight years it’s been Humiliate America season—buzz our ships, capture and embarrass our men, murder an American ambassador—a resoundingly successful attempt to spit in our faces and tell each one of us to drop dead. Thanks, Mr. President. Enough is enough. You know that Hillary is Obama Part III. We can’t let that happen. Parts I and II have brought us close enough to catastrophe.

That is the problem for those whose integrity or nobility won’t allow them to vote for Mr. Trump despite their dislike of Mrs. Clinton. There is only one way to take part in protecting this nation from Hillary Clinton, and that is to vote for Donald Trump. A vote for anyone else or for no one might be an honest, admirable gesture in principle, but we don’t need conscientious objectors in this war for the country’s international standing and hence for the safety of the world and the American way of life. It’s too bad one has to vote for Mr. Trump. It will be an unhappy moment at best. Some people will feel dirty, or pained, or outright disgraced.

But when all is said and done, it’s no big deal of a sacrifice for your country. I can think of bigger ones.

— Mr. Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale.

Sugar

The Sugar Conspiracy - Ian Leslie

For at least the last three decades, the dietary arch-villain has been saturated fat. When Yudkin was conducting his research into the effects of sugar, in the 1960s, a new nutritional orthodoxy was in the process of asserting itself. Its central tenet was that a healthy diet is a low-fat diet. Yudkin led a diminishing band of dissenters who believed that sugar, not fat, was the more likely cause of maladies such as obesity, heart disease and diabetes. But by the time he wrote his book, the commanding heights of the field had been seized by proponents of the fat hypothesis. Yudkin found himself fighting a rearguard action, and he was defeated.

Explaining Trump

Glenn Reynolds: 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.

...

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.

Trump: Something New under the Political Sun - Victor Davis Hanson

His supporters want a reckoning with a system that has not so much failed as infuriated them. What drives their loyalty to Trump — if not the person, at least the idea of Trump — is a sort of nihilism. As a close friend put it to me this week, “I don’t care whether Trump wins or not, I just want him to f— things up as long as he can.”

In his supporters’ eyes, had Trump run in 2008 he might have lost, but he would at least have aired one Obama hit-ad a minute, with Rev. Wright screaming obscenities as a trailer crossed the screen beneath, collating the various quotations of praise from Obama for his personal pastor. If Trump had run in 2012, they believe, he would have cut off Candy Crowley — the moderator who hijacked the second presidential debate to save Barack Obama — in a cruder way than he screamed at Rosie O’Donnell.

....

To get a clearer idea of the feelings of Trump supporters, read the comments section following any mainstream news story that deals with race, class, and gender in politically correct fashion. A stream-of-consciousness litany of his supporters’ peeves, for good or ill, would run like this: The wrong people are in the news. Instead of generals, and small-business owners, and muscular workers, we instead see smarmy smart-asses, the pajama boys and mattress girls of the world of TV, who roll their eyes, wink about a joke only the anointed get, and smirk that what they say could have three different meanings — the Jon Stewarts, David Lettermans, and Stephen Colberts of Smug, Inc.

On race, Trump supporters are tired of hearing that black lives matter, while no one mentions that all lives matter. They are sick of seeing protestors wave the flag of the country they do not wish illegal aliens to be sent back to and trash the country they under no circumstances want them to leave. They don’t like getting a letter from an IRS that employs Lois Lerner — a letter that would be ignored with impunity by those who are here illegally, or who run the Clinton Foundation. They are tired of wealthy minorities claiming they are perpetual victims of ill-treatment at the hands of people who are less well off than they. They don’t like hearing from elites that huge trade deficits have little to do with loss of jobs or that cheating by our trade partners is just a passing glitch in free trade. They cannot stand lectures from those who make more money in an hour than they do in a year about their own bad habits or slothfulness. They don’t know what the on-screen savants mean by a leg-tingle or a perfectly pressed pant leg or a first-class temperament or a president as god — and they don’t care to find out. They do not hate political correctness so much as one-sided political correctness, which gives a pass to some to say things that would get others fired or ruined. They don’t want to be lectured that their own plight is part of a larger, healthy creative destruction or a leaner, meaner competitiveness or an overdue restructuring — by those who are never destroyed, rendered noncompetitive, or restructured. And they don’t like to be talked down to by the experts who ran up $10 trillion in debt, ruined the health-care system, dismantled the military, and screwed up the Secret Service, the IRS, NASA, and the VA. Trump is their megaphone, not their solution.

How John Roberts Begat Donald Trump - Ilya Shapiro

As I drowned these existential sorrows in Johnny Walker and “Archer” reruns, it occurred to me that, yes, Obama (and George W. Bush before him), the perfidious GOP elite, the Reid-Pelosi nihilists, demographic shifts, globalization, and a host of other forces have brought us to where we are. Plenty of exegeses have been and will be written about all these culprits. But, no, if I have to point to a moment that spawned the current annus horribilis, it would have to be John Roberts’s vindication of Obamacare on June 28, 2012.

...


Sure, the chief justice cleverly wrote his opinion so it wouldn’t increase Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce and even cut it back under the Necessary and Proper Clause. He also ultimately upheld the individual mandate only by rewriting it into a “unicorn” tax — a creature of no known constitutional provenance that will never be seen again.

But by refusing to follow his own logic, to go where even Justice Kennedy full-throatedly went — I was in the courtroom to hear Kennedy passionately summarize a dissent that would’ve struck down the entire law — Roberts increased cynicism and anger at play-by-the-rules conservatives and decreased respect for institutions across the board.

The man’s twistifications drove the constitutionalist Tea Partiers into the arms of the populists — or made it easy for their populist instincts to “trump” their constitutional ones (pun unintended, but fitting). Why bother with the Constitution? Even when you’re right, you lose.

Print Address Labels

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