Count me among those who were astounded and relieved – somewhat – to wake up on Wednesday morning, to the sweet sound of my daughter saying, “He won it!” She had stayed up to all hours watching the returns on streaming video, becoming hypnotized by watching the dominoes begin to cascade. I just didn’t have the endurance in me. I thought all day Tuesday (and for a week or so in advance of Election Day) that while he might possibly have an excellent chance, based on the sense that his various, wall-to-wall-scheduled rallies had standing room only crowds, while Her Inevitableness, the Dowager Empress of Chappaqua basically had to bus in Dem Party stalwarts and lock the doors to keep them from leaving. Just the comparative pictures of the crowds … well, that lent hope. The cascade of revelations from Wikileaks also gave hope that perhaps a larger audience would see the Clintons for the grasping, corrupt plutocrats that they have become, and perhaps have always been. But – seeing the major national news media were so neatly pocketed by her campaign, and knowing that 18-wheel trailer-truckloads of fraudulent ballots were likely being packed and loaded – I could not bear to watch our America fall into the status of a banana republic in a single awful night. I believed that at best – Republicans would hold on to the Senate and House and to a preponderance of the state legislatures and governorships. After all, the Dowager Queen of Chappaqua, AKA Her Inevitableness, is not Evita, and we are not Argentina – and what a pure relief it is to know that millions of Americans of all colors, genders and political persuasions agree with me. “There is a Providence,” as Chancellor Bismarck is believed to have remarked (although likely he didn’t) more than a century ago, “that protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America.”
It turns out now that most of us who chose, with varying degrees of hope and despair, to vote for Trump, were overlooked by the professional pollsters, fibbing to them when we were not overlooked, and the pollsters themselves nudging their findings this way and that to favor the establishment narrative. That is the other takeaway from last Wednesday morning; that just about every polling and mainstream media organization got it all catastrophically wrong. I mean wrong on the sense of launching an unsinkable ship on a collision course with an iceberg in mid-Atlantic in the late spring of 1912, and then standing about with eggy disaster caked on their faces, wondering what just hit them and why the water level is rapidly rising towards the Boat Deck. Shock, horror, disbelief … that everything which had always worked so well before in packaging and presenting a candidate to the electorate suddenly didn’t. Spending a lot of money didn’t work, suborning the establishment press to your side didn’t work, and collecting celebrity endorsements and the endorsements of the moneyed new-tech class didn’t work at all. Their understanding of the world is rocked … but I am certain that those who have suddenly tripped and fallen flat over a pothole of reality in their road will pick themselves up and hurry on as if nothing shattering had happened at all.
Not that we are out of the shadows yet, of course. The hired protestors and freelance rioters are creating mayhem in major cities even now; likely they will continue to do so for as long as the checks from various Soros front “social justice” organizations keep coming, and the busses are for hire to bring them together for a “spontaneous” demonstration with nicely-printed protest signs and carefully briefed professional activists posing as ‘just ordinary folks’. Of course, the establishment media cameras are there to offer lip-smacking, ghoulish coverage. Funny thing, though – as a handful of internet wits are pointing out – basically, this conforms the judgement of those of us who thought that we were taking a huuuge chance in voting Trump. Another mordantly amusing item – the “Not My President” protesters are creating destruction, havoc and inconvenience … in the very places which most probably turned out for the Dowager Queen in substantial numbers, an irony of such density that it threatens to drop through the center of the earth and come out someplace in Tashkent.
Discuss and speculate, as you are inclined.
Something not mentioned as much as it should be is the celebrity impact.
I am utterly convinced that (lemme make up some numbers), for every celebrity appearance, endorsement, or insufferable tweet, about 10,000 millennials said “Wow, Jay-zee is into Hillary? That’s kinda cool, works for me…” and about 50,000 of everyone else said (like me) “These #$&^@%-#7%@-ing sons-of-$*#&@, #$&%-eating, multi-millionaire, studio pontificating, Spago-brunching, First Class flying, @$$holes, living in their mansions, deigning to emerge and inform us Morlocks how we WILL vote and like it if we expect to be granted the crumbs from their table…….”
I went to the polls literally with Cher’s tweet stream in my head, thinking that if maybe, just maybe, Trump won, BOY was I going to dig watching her and so many other heads explode!
Didja hear Taylor Swift being attacked because she made the weird, demented, obscene decision that, as she had a large fan base, maybe just maybe she would…. I dunno….. SHUT UP AND SING… and not feel obligated to piss off half (60%?) of her fans just to make the likes of Lady Gaga happy? Didja see how she was attacked FOR STAYING OUT OF IT?
I really think that these celebs hurt Hillary in red turnout more than many, certainly themselves, will ever want to admit. And I think the entire entertainment industry might be forced to start look at dynamics like we are seeing with the NFL (who themselves, of course, STILL keep their heads buried in the sand as to the reality of why their ratings are tanking).
For the entertainment industry, they may just be on the cusp of realizing that they WILL pay for this nonsense going forward, because EVERYBODY now knows that there are more of us then even we ourselves may have realized.
And when that happens……. now THAT’S entertainment!
I forced myself to watch Real Time with Bill Maher on Saturday night to see what the Lefties were saying about the election after a few days of contemplation. I have a hard time watching Maher with his smugness and all, but it was interesting to hear their thoughts. The guests were Eric Holder, David Axelrod, Ana Marie Cox, Thomas Friedman and Trae Crowder.
They were still saying that the election results were due to a racist backlash against Obama, misogynistic feelings towards Clinton, and the stupidity of normal Americans. They just can’t seem to get over their contempt for regular people who just want an opportunity to succeed.
To me, Clinton represented the Death of opportunity, replacing it with the cold comfort of servitude. She would have cemented the Ruling Class in place, liberty be damned. Trump, while certainly imperfect, gives us a chance at clearing the roadblocks, barricades & anchors countless years of government meddling have saddled us with.
Maher is one of those guys who can be so infuriating, but is very astute and does nail it on occasion.
And he has said, maybe you heard it, essentially that he regrets a lot of the vitriol, mockery, and accusations that he unloaded on the likes of McCain and Romney, because now when he REALLY MEANS IT…. no one is listening.
Whatever one’s opinion of Trump, that is damned astute, and true right down the line. Listening? I sure as hell am not.
Saturday Night Live had a skit where wealthy black entertainers smirked knowingly as naive white libs watched the election returns and perceived for the first time the racism inherent in the system. The wise black men with their inherent moral authority knew all along that such things are possible in the USA. (Am I interpreting the lefty dramatic conventions correctly?) Amid the snark was no apparent understanding that Trump was elected in part because people are fed up with identity politics and with group browbeatings by officially designated victim representatives who themselves are often wealthier and higher in status than the people they are lecturing.
Yep – the celeb endorsements all left a very sour taste in my mouth, too, Andrew. Always have. I’m more of the “dance, dance, monkey – entertain me” mindset. Kind of sad that Taylor Swift and Oprah too are getting stick for trying to stay neutral, or to take a “calm down, wait and see” attitude.
And those particular celebs who HAVE gone all obnoxious – like Cher – will feel a backlash.
How do I sign up to support this California secession movement?
They’re calling for tariffs on TV shows, smart phones, and Uber. I can barely contain my laughter.
On the day before voting my wife noticed that Hellary had cancelled her victory fireworks display. So we were not surprised by the outcome. But, here’s a point, obviously Hellary and her head henchmen weren’t either. So why all the stuff about her being too upset to speak to her worker bees, why the stuff about crying all night? She knew in advance and presumably started immediately planning what to do next. What will that be?
Here’s a day/time (GMT) for one report of that cancellation.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2135970/hillary-clinton-cancels-victory-fireworks-display-planned-30-minutes-after-voting-ends/
RE:How do I sign up to support this California secession movement?
I’m a Californian, count me out.
It’s too fanciful to get into details, but have not the slightest illusion that this would happen without taking Oregon and Washington with it. And likely Hawaii.
Congratulations, you just cleaned the United States out of the Pacific ocean, and turned it over to China, Russia, and Japan. And p—ed on the grave of every American who died over it 1941-1945. Ooooo, the Pacific Ocean! Feh, who needs it?
Don’t even talk this way.
These fraudulent astroturf protests are designed to intimidate Trump supporters into staying in the shadows-we all knew Shy Trump voters was in fact a thing-and need to be squashed. Trump should have gone to the UFC as planned Saturday, and will have to make the SS let him get out to the people where his supporters can show their support free of fear and intimidation. Of course, the SS has to be listened to since there is real danger out there, but a balance must be struck.
We noticed that cancellation too, Dearie – and were a bit puzzled as well. I can only think that her people began seeing the writing on the wall then, and thought they may as well save money and spare themselves some humiliation. She is notoriously awful to work for; perhaps it took them another day to begin breaking it to her gently that she was not gonna be coronated.
She’s only been seen once in public, since, and that may have been a staged photo-op. I shouldn’t be surprised if her mental and physical health hasn’t collapsed.
I hear tell that Hillary is inherently superstitious, and probably thought that was tempting the Gods.
I don’t read much into all this. I can see getting all “Woo hoo, we are SO gonna win”, setting up the fireworks, and then realizing that it was probably not the wisest idea (maybe some unnerving polls), and scaling it back. I also hear that the campaign was popping champagne on Tuesday morning, for whatever that is worth. But I don’t think the fireworks pullback was Hillary thinking she would lose, per se, just that…. it probably wasn’t the wisest idea to start with.
Stipulating that I am not a nice person by most standards; from your keyboard to G-d’s ears.
If she is a mental basket case inside a broken body [think Gilderoy Lockhart at the end of Chamber of Secrets crossed with the Walking Dead], she may or may not be pardoned by Obama, because he will think he is safe. Even if he does pardon her, for “humanitarian reasons” [for some limited values of the word “human” for the pardoner and pardonee]; there is no such basis to pardon the rest of the criminal crew, and no reason to not RICO the [insert crude substance of choice] out of the entire criminal conspiracy on all charges, national security and the Clinton Foundation. As a matter of justice, and payback, it is a consumation devoutly to be wished.
Rent or find some way to watch the movie “Network” while the campaign and election shock are still fresh in your mind.
The scene where people begin screaming out of their windows because they’re “mad as hell, and not gong to take it any more” is about as good a summary of what just happened over the last year or so as any I have seen.
The comments by the leading character about the utter artificiality of the media, esp. television, are priceless.
How do I sign up to support this California secession movement?
We made an offer on a Tucson house today. I think we will get it. It needs a little work but is nice, central and on an acre of land.
I moved to California in 1956 to attend college. My kids were born there. My grandchildren were born there.
I’m done. Lunatics are running the state. I took some British (no English) friends on a tour of California about 5 years ago when they visited on a trip back from Hong Kong. They had been very hospitable to us and I wanted to reciprocate. We drove up the central valley so they could see the real California, not the LA phoniness. We stayed in Yosemite Valley at the Ahwanhee (now name changed to something I don’t know). We drove to Berkeley so they could see the loonies. Lunch at St Francis Yacht Club, then to Sonoma where I showed them the original capitol of the state. We went to the wine country and then to Jack London’s house. They had never heard of him and I gave them some of his books.
Now, the Central Valley is dying due to the lunatic policies of Jerry Brown and the Democrats who want to spend $60 billion on a train to nowhere while that money would buy 200 desalination plants and cure the drought.
My English friends, like so many of their friends, are self exiling to the southeast coast and avoiding London and its Muslim Mayor. We spent a week with them last September. They live in Chichester, a lovely small city. Our friend said, “If you see a brown face it is a NHS doctor.” All we saw were typical English faces and young women pushing baby “prams.”
I have had it with the crazies.
As a rift on Andrew’s post, how many people just quit Facebook and Twitter over their censorship policies? They wanted to do their part in a progressive victory and lost money and mind share in return.
Of course, look at the pressure Merkel is putting on Facebook to support her “invasion by invitation” policy, threatening to punish Facebook for even allowing dissenting opinions and “hate facts” on their site.
Alright, alright, we in the USA will keep San Diego, the Port of Long Beach, and wine country. The Yayhoos can have the rest.
Mike, one of your Congressman from the Central Valley, Devin Nunes, is on Trump’s transition team. There is talk of making him Agricultural Secretary, so the water taps may be about to be opened up for citizens again instead of closed for protecting endangered microbes.
RE: we in the USA will keep San Diego, the Port of Long Beach, and wine country. The Yayhoos can have the rest.
Which is not how it would go down, at least not peacefully, which is why we need to seek other answers and shut up about this one. It is not frivolous.
I’m reminded of how the usual suspects reacted to the 1994 election results. Googling up an exact quote:
“Some thoughts on those angry voters. Ask parents of any two-year-old and they can tell you about those temper tantrums: the stomping feet, the rolling eyes, the screaming. It’s clear that the anger controls the child and not the other way around. It’s the job of the parent to teach the child to control the anger and channel it in a positive way. Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage. The voters had a temper tantrum last week….Parenting and governing don’t have to be dirty words: the nation can’t be run by an angry two-year-old.” – ABC World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings in his daily ABC Radio commentary, November 14, 1994.
And 22 years later, the attitude of our wannabe-aristocratic “betters” remains unchanged.
This obvious satire makes the point that if we EJECT certain areas, the rest of the US can control the process:
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2010/06/secession_no_ejection.html
Seriously, a disuniting of the United States would be a dream scenario for our global competitors like China and Russia.
I am thrilled with Trump’s win, which is bearing fruit already, but I am very worried about Soros’ Revenge. Having spent millions to undermine the US government—and lost—he is now resorting to violence. Where will that lead?
I didn’t realize we had stopped teaching Civics: many on the Left are just out-and-out totalitarians. Psychotics, really. They know nothing of the Electoral College and the peaceful transition of power, and how that compares to the practices of other governments.
So, too, we have evidently stopped teaching reading and critical thinking because the non-Soros anti-Trump forces are fighting against political positions Trump doesn’t even hold; they’re fighting lies and shadows. If Trump were the person they believe exists, I wouldn’t like him either. They appear not to have done any serious research into his positions.
Our education system needs to be razed and freed of all Marxist influence.
The Revenge of Soros … sounds like a bad 1930s movie serial, doesn’t it? He and his buddies – and all those middle-eastern oligarchs must be absolutely steaming with fury – to have thrown all that money into the Clinton Coffers and then gotten so little out of it.
As a palate-cleanser, I give you this withering blast from Col. (Ret) Tom Kratmann… Die Schadenboner.
Education has been placed in the hands of leftist unions and leftist graduate students who become leftist professors.
Apparently, history at the college level is even using Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.”
A People’s History of the United States is the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of view of—and in the words of—America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country’s greatest battles—fights for fair wages, eight-hour workdays, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women’s rights, racial equality—were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance.
That’s from the back cover. It’s a lie, including “if, and and the.”
For several years of the last decade, I taught Advanced Placement U.S. History at a high school in northern Virginia. When I began the course, Zinn had already been assigned by my predecessor, and I needed a counterpoint to the main text (Bailey and Kennedy’s bombastic, traditionalist, and short-on-social history “Pageant of the American Nation”). Zinn’s deftly written book provided a fortunate antithesis to the “march of presidents and industrial titans” approach to American history. I found many chapters of this book to be such excellent stimulants to class discussions that I extended their use into my non-AP U.S. history classes, where students, many of whom could not otherwise have cared less about history, found themselves reading an interesting and provocative historian for the first time in their lives.
That’s the highest rated review by a high school history teacher. A lot of what we see with young idiots derives from those people.
“that may have been a staged photo-op”: I think “may” is a bit mild. Bleedin’ obviously a staged event , I’d say. Who took the photo, for a start? Where were Hellary’s heavies? I even enjoyed the script, in which we were told they were “hiking”, or ‘strolling’ as we’d say over here. But they got a baby and a doggy into the shot, and Hellary presumably didn’t have another seizure, so well done, chaps.
Likely and likelier to have been staged – I can spare a little charity for the Dowager. There was a link on Gateway Pundit to the effect that she had a screaming, abusive meltdown last Tuesday evening as the results accumulated. I’ll take GP with a bit of skeptical salt – but she is notoriously bad-tempered, and her rages over the years have been legendary. I would have been astonished if she had taken the drubbing calmly and like a rational adult.
And she still hasn’t appeared in public, save for that once.
Whitehall Says:
November 15th, 2016 at 1:14 am
“Back in the center of the country, more than a few down-state Illinois citizens would be quite happy to see Cook County become its own independent political entity — so long as it took its state legislators with it”
That would be a dream scenario for us. We’ve been trying to secede from Cook County for decades, but the state legislature always blocks it. Our brave revolutionary comrades in the South Suburbs have just begun their own Long March. ‘Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence’, as the great poets would say.
Mike K
That’s the highest rated review by a high school history teacher. A lot of what we see with young idiots derives from those people. [of Zinn’s A People’s History of the US]
I knew a very bright student at a magnet high school who told me that he wanted to become a history teacher so that he could teach the truth to students. As those dumb right wingers didn’t like Castro, Castro must be a pretty good guy, he told me. I informed him that school districts give teachers a curriculum to teach, and did not appreciate deviations from it. He didn’t like that reply.
He never became a history teacher.It appears that had he become a history teacher, with some some patience he could have ended up teaching a lefty curriculum the school district had approved.
Off-topic: The teacher I came to admire in the local high school was the three girls’ (12 years apart) AP history teacher. Apparently he’d wanted a military career but the salaries under Carter discouraged him. He made it competitive and active and all three enjoyed it – it was one class they talked about at night. Two weeks before the AP test, he told each class to think over what he had taught them and then prepare to write essays from the left – because that was where the graders would be – fairly far left. He’d taught them facts but also ways to organize them. All three get AP credit as did a large percentage of their classes – apparently, talking to an admission officer from the east coast, the school was known in part for what he did in this public school in flyover territory. (One lively episode from the middle daughter’s years was when he got Bush Senior and Gorbachev to visit the baseball team – he was also a coach. The halls were cleared by secret service, but the non-baseball players got to see it over the school video system. I guess that was the year Bush Jr was running for President and that daughter said that by the first week of November he’d pretty much given up any pretense of objectivity – but I suspect the leftists were getting a fair shake. My oldest daughter was going through her assertively feminist stage and she felt she learned a lot and was proud of the AP 5. If you could convince me that such analysis would be encouraged and applied in any national standards, I’d welcome them. My middle daughter’s husband is working for ETS; his area is not political. But I suspect that is not true over in the humanities.
“My middle daughter’s husband is working for ETS; his area is not political. But I suspect that is not true over in the humanities.”
The Educational Testing Service is part of the problem. The SAT has been “race normed.” All the testing has been “leftist normed.”
I was an English major when I went back to school to do pre-med. My favorite professor gave me an F on a quiz when I had skipped reading Wordsworth’s Lucy Poems.
The quiz required us to explain the following segment.
A SLUMBER did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seem’d a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
I guessed but guessed wrong.
He was still my favorite.
So what do you think Rahm Emanuel really was hoping/planning to announce a day or to ago when he had to default to the “Sanctuary City” drivel?
The Left is losing its marbles, don’t you think?
“The US will no longer be a haven for Jews under Trump” is a headline in the Guardian this morning.
Dearie, the crack-up among the lefty intellectuals and entertainers is simultaneously fascinating and appalling – like a twenty-car pile up on the highway. One just can’t look away from the spectacle. We’d suspected for decades that they were contemptuous of the people in Flyoverlandia – now it’s out there, loud and proud for all of us proles to look at and shake our heads in horrified wonder.
And, these people imagine themselves to be discerning, maybe even, sophisticated. The histrionics are awesome; is this something like what the Salem witch hunts unleashed?
We are in the eighth day of demonstrations-turning-riotous as the result of an election. None of us has ever seen anything like this in our lifetimes. Nor do I believe there is any precedent, except possibly the election of 1861.
Our enemies are not throwing a temper tantrum and then going home in a sullen funk. They are ratcheting up the evil-othering, and it is increasingly backed by a hysterical willingness to use physical violence and an even more unnerving willingness to defy the rule of law — if it suits their purpose, natch.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/there_is_no_such_thing_as_a_good_trump_voter.html
http://breaking911.com/nyc-mayor-deblasio-calls-anti-trump-protests-continue-says-trump-no-mandate-lead/
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-los-angeles-police-immigration-20161114-story.html
I am not amused at all. Nor am I entertained. The Left is prepping the battlefield of public and political discourse again. They’re good at that. They have done nothing but move from strength to evil strength since Gore lost. Every time they have ratcheted up the level of vitriol and provocation they have won handily. There is no reason to expect that the people you are laughing at are not deadly serious.
Stop laughing. This is still going to be bad.
Oh, I’m sure they are. Their problem is that the people who oppose them are also deadly serious.
If they really want to wreck the established government, bringing the country into lawless chaos- do they really think the people who have been storing up guns and ammunition for the last eight years, people who have read more history than the lies of Howard Zinn- are going to meekly accept this?
I don’t think so.
Not with the mass murders committed by their communist brethren still within living memory.
There may well be mass graves appearing on American soil, should the left bring the nation to chaos- but I wouldn’t assume that they’re going to be filled with the people who oppose these silly, ignorant fools.