The free press failed and the Clintons, Bushes and Obamas are finally finished
There are many who will or should engage in some soul-searching, following the U.S election, in which for the first time in the country’s history, someone came from no background in public office or military command and seized control of a major political party, running against all those who had led it for the last 20 years, then defeated the incumbent party, defeating all the Clintons, Bushes and Obamas together. The Clintons and Bushes and Obamas are finally finished. Their entire era, though it had its moments, has been a worsening disaster as the United States has been in absolute and relative decline. The media have been exposed in their biases, their overwhelming hostility to Donald Trump, as not just irrelevant, but the object of hatred as intense as that which overwhelmed the political elites who failed the nation and imperilled the alliance America founded and led for many decades.
The public’s loathing and distrust of the media is richly deserved and indicative of one of Western society’s greatest failings: the free press has failed. Only the fact that there is no alternative keeps it going. Few people now pay much attention to the common misrepresentation of public issues and people; nor should they. The American media turned itself inside out trying to portray Trump as a misogynist, a racist and an authoritarian populist whipping up mobs and inciting violence. All this was unmitigated rubbish. President Barack Obama strutted about the campaign trail in a last-ditch effort to salvage the Clinton campaign (despite the notorious absence of any affection between the Obamas and the Clintons), and accused Trump of being a sympathizer of the Ku Klux Klan. The president would have his listeners believe that Trump, who has an unblemished record as an equal opportunity employer, approves of thugs surging about in hoods and bedsheets, burning crosses on the lawns of African-Americans, Jews and Roman Catholics (most of whose 30 million voters cast their ballots for Trump).
The media screamed for Trump’s blood when the Clinton campaign released an 11-year-old tape of boorish remarks about women, though what Trump said was the bland and pious reflection of a Baptist minister compared to the normal conversation of Lyndon Johnson, or the actual conduct, while discharging presidential business, of Bill Clinton. It was magnificent watching the Clinton News Network (CNN) robots on autocue scurrying around like asphyxiated roaches as it became clear that Trump would do the impossible and win, and that the public saw through the animosity of the lazy, complacent, boot-licking, myth-making clique of the Washington media, with its liars, defamers, frauds and idiots.
Last Sunday, I was a token expositor of a positive view of Trump, though I am no Clinton-basher, on Fareed Zakaria’s television program GPS. Fareed, a pleasant and capable man and a friend of many years, opened with a frenzied recitation of Trump’s status as a sexist, racist, xenophobic and crooked demagogue. What followed for 45 minutes, apart from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s artful debunking of the Obama foreign policy (“engaged but ineffectual”), was a sequence of Clinton-parrots. There was a debate between two pollsters about the breadth of Hillary Clinton’s almost inevitable margin of victory. I politely demurred from all this when my turn came after 50 minutes, and Fareed has generously invited me back this Sunday. But his program wasn’t fair comment or thoughtful information: it was propaganda, less virulent and hateful, certainly, than that of infamous promoters of the big lie in totalitarian states, but almost as lacking in integrity or balance.
The most powerful mea culpa from the media was from Will Rahn of CBS. He blogged on Thursday against “the unbearable smugness” of the media, including himself:
“We were all tacitly or explicitly #With Her.… Had Hillary Clinton won, there’d be a winking ‘we did it’ feeling in the press — we were brave and saved the republic.… Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss reporters covering him. They hate us. And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters.… We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste, we believe we have access to a greater truth.” Instead of humility, Rahn expects the media to be confirmed in their view that Trump and his followers are racist and sexist, “so there must be more racists and sexists than we believed.”
Even Rahn’s mother, the saintly Peggy Noonan, while saluting Trump’s victory and acknowledging the general failure to appreciate the depths of public anger, called upon the country to “help him” because he doesn’t know how to be president. As long as the president does not seriously violate the Constitution, the presidency fits its occupant, not the other way round. George VI stammered something to president Franklin D. Roosevelt when he visited in 1939, and said, “This Goddam stutter!” and Roosevelt said, “What stutter? You are the King and you speak as you speak. I could say ‘this Goddam polio,’ but our peoples support us because we hold our positions legitimately and do our jobs adequately, and having shortcomings themselves, aren’t overly concerned with ours.”
Trump will build on his elegant remarks on election night, and can rally the vast centre of American opinion with a tasteful and magnanimous demeanour and the recruitment of competent people who reflect the diversity of America. He has a clear mandate to reform Obamacare, reform the tax system to provide lower rates for the working and middle classes and less of a free ride for the financial industry, to shrink government, reduce the trade deficit, use workfare programs to reduce unemployment and modernize infrastructure, create a southern border, escalate counter-terrorism, reinvigorate the Western alliance and redefine national security between the trigger-happy interventionism of George W. Bush and the Obama attempt to exchange its friends for its enemies, especially in the Middle East.
All this will get him off to a good start, keep faith with the believers and debrief the brainwashed skeptics, but will leave three vast problems. Standards of information and education have withered. The American people, and most other advanced nationalities, are less well-educated and less well-informed than they were 50 years ago. The teaching and academic professions and the journalists have failed. They have not failed completely, of course, and there are many individual exceptions, but they do not get a passing grade. Government can do something about the schools but can’t really touch academia or the free press without threatening the foundation of free society. There is no obvious solution.
The legal profession is increasingly a cartel in which lawyers as legislators and regulators spew out endless reams of new statutes and rules requiring an ever larger number of lawyers to argue, judge and arbitrate them. Legal costs to society are more egregious and less excusable than medical costs, and produce far less desirable results. The criminal justice system is an unspeakable cesspool. Here government can do something.
Technological progress tends to create unemployment rather than jobs, as life becomes more automatable. This trend is parallel to the pattern of companies like Google, with few employees but immense market capitalization, leaving traditional manufacturers like automakers with the reverse phenomenon: a large number of employees sustained by less well-capitalized companies. No one that I have encountered has any idea about what to do about the trend toward industrial disemployment and the extreme disparities in income that it generates.
Trump will promote rising employment and reduce the shrinkage of the workforce. But it is a long and winding upward trail back to a contented America, and to some extent, all advanced democracies are on the same trail.
It wasn’t misogyny that caused Clinton’s downfall, it was all the baggage she dragged around
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.
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.
Enough with the pearl-clutching over Trump’s win, kids will get over it. So should you
Christie Blatchford | November 13, 2016 10:46 AM ET
I once carved a profanity — about the Swedes, for God’s sake, and who doesn’t like Swedes? — in the end boards of an Olympic rink after Team Sweden beat Team Canada, in a shootout for God’s sake, for the gold medal. I offer this only so you may understand that I know what it is be a sore loser, to give away a piece of your heart to something bigger than yourself. I get that Clinton supporters, and maybe anyone with half a brain, would be crushed and upset that Donald Trump is about to become the 45th U.S. president.
Were I one of the aforementioned two groups, no doubt I’d feel a bit of the same, though I’d lean more to anger. I understand anger (if not quite as well as I did when I was younger, when my temper was a white-hot thing with a mind of its own). Rage in my view is a perfectly normal response to a kick in the teeth. What I decidedly do not get is the weeping, gnashing of teeth and pearl-clutching (thanks to John Moore of Newstalk 1010 for the latter) that is going on in the wake of the U.S. election.
The morning after, the airwaves were full of earnest news anchors interviewing psychologists and the like on the best way to break the terrible news to the frightened children of America and Canada.
This, I figured, was simply more evidence of what CBS News writer Will Rahn this week described as the “unbearable smugness” of the press, wherein most journalists, cut from the same #WithHer cloth and with a “shamefully limited understanding of the country,” treated Trump supporters as backward yobs and believe that it is our continuing duty not to fix ourselves, but to reeducate them about the dangerous thing they wrought with their votes. Part of that, of course, is accepting as gospel the tearful assertions from parents that their kids were shattered by the Trump victory.
Still, on another level, fair enough.
I am not a parent, and perhaps my not inconsiderable observation of other people’s youngsters has mistakenly led me to see them as akin to rubber balls, in that they are resilient little devils who can take pretty much whatever life throws at them so long as they have at least one reasonably sane adult in their lives. But over the next post-election days the theme endured and spread such that Friday, on the front page of the arts section of another national Canadian newspaper, over a big picture of Trump, there was a headline which read, “Mommy, why does he look so happy? And why do you look so sad?” The story told the woeful tale of a privileged white woman (dutifully, she self-identified) and her husband who on the morning after, determined they had best raise the difficult subject before their son went off to school for the day. The poor wee devil (too young to declare his own privilege, his mommy did it for him by noting that he was at the time “on the sofa, naked and wrapped in a sheepskin,” as the offspring of a certain type of privileged whites regularly are) was then subjected to an angsty discussion while, en famille, they watched Trump’s victory speech.
Daddy kicked it all off by saying, “A bad and crazy man has been elected the leader of the free world,” whereupon the wee boy asked, “If he’s a bad man, why is he saying nice things?” and Mommy replied, “Because he’s a very happy bad man.” The little bugger is four years old. Are you freaking kidding me? How better to raise a delicate cabbage than worry a toddler with such horse manure? It wasn’t confined to the households of the self-consciously precious, either.
Is it churlish to point out that in those days, 18-year-olds were fighting a war and dying in unspeakable numbers in Europe, not crying on the shoulders of paid soothers about an election result?
On the page below that piece was the story of an Ottawa woman who on election night had prepared for a #WithHer victory party and found herself with blue-frosted cupcakes sprinkled with glass candy, guests in tears, and someone who “literally broke out in hives” at the news. (Perhaps the woman was using “literally” the way people do now, meaning the precise opposite. But I sense she was not.)
On campuses across the States, there were “cry-ins” (Cornell University), tests and lectures cancelled or made optional out of deference to the feelings of the traumatized (University of Michigan, Columbia University, Yale University) and safe spaces, some “with staff on hand to listen and provide support” to the desolate (University of Wisconsin at Madison) and some with Play-Doh and colouring books on offer (University of Michigan).
Good grief.
The Mommy-why-do-you-look-so-sad piece and its companion ran in the Canadian paper on Remembrance Day. Is it churlish to point out that in those days, 18-year-olds were fighting a war and dying in unspeakable numbers in Europe, not crying on the shoulders of paid soothers about an election result?
All of which is to say, Donald Trump isn’t the scary one.
(Thanks to Conrad, Rex, and Christie, and National Post for the publication)
