If I was Prime Minister Of Australia, I would immediately see if I could convince the United States to give up being a republic and come back into the Commonwealth with the Queen as head of state, reinstate compulsory afternoon tea and ban this coffee nonsense and most importantly, get rid of baseball forever and give the United States full test cricket status - that way Australia could score 538, bowl the United States out for 187 and then enforce the follow-on...
... wait for it...
Make America Bat Again!
Thank you, I'm here all week. Try the veal.
Seriously. If you think that that was a joke, then what in red, white and blue blazes have I been watching for the past few hours? In this, 2016, the International Year of The Howling Moron, I think what we've just witnessed is the biggest joke in the history of politics but nobody is laughing.
What the actual four letter expletive deleted is going on?
On the 4th of July 1776, the thirteen colonies of America, declared their independence from Great Britain and formed their own country. In the interim 240 years after only counting black people as three-fifths of a person at law, going to war over slavery and generally becoming the most belligerent of democratic nations in the world, it is probably reasonable to assume that the United States Of America might have been a good idea in theory but it has kind of gotten out of hand.
The 2016 presidential election which followed eight years of the Presidency of Barack Obama, was fought between a sociopathic, racist, sexist, xenophobe who looks like he's spent the last eight years marinating in Fanta, and a lady who literally made deals with terrorists while Secretary of State and more than likely broke Federal law by keeping a private email server and then deleting the emails when it came time for the FBI to investigate.
In this grand battle between an angry Grandpa who has said all sorts of things which by rights should have invalidated him as a candidate and an angry Grandma who is so much of a policy wonk that she's the single most qualified candidate to run for president in US history (with the possible exceptions of Washington and Eisenhower), America has collectively decided by a minority of popular votes but the majority of the arcane and bizarre Electoral College votes, to install the angry Grandpa as the next President. If this is the brave new world we find ourselves in, then left is right, slavery is freedom, ignorance is strength and orange is the new black.
I have been watching this insane contest play out over the past nine months, in the same way that I'd watch a football match as a neutral. The difference is that instead of three meaningless points or the glory of etching one's name into the side of a trophy, the prize are the keys to the office of the executive of the most powerful nation on the planet and the only one foolhardy enough to use nuclear weapons in a war. America has decided that instead of letting angry Grandma drive around and scare everyone, they've handed the keys to angry Grandpa, who by the way is the first presidential candidate since about Nixon who has been mad and bad enough to joke about pushing the nuclear button. Mind you, when you compare that to nine months of racist, sexist, and otherwise vile remarks he's made, that joke doesn't seem that much out of character. This was someone who actually said that they could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York City and people would still vote for him. This as it turned out, might not have been a boast but a declaration of fact.
Strangely, this doesn't appear to be a rejection of Barack Obama. The outgoing president has just posted his lowest approval rating at 54%. That will probably increase during the so-called lame duck period as well. This also doesn't appear to be a rejection of the Republican Party as that side of politics may have feared. The Republicans will be returned with a majority in the House Of Representatives and the Senate doesn't look like total wipeout either.
If Donald Trump represents the change candidate in this election, running against the most establishment of establishment candidates of all time in Hillary Clinton, then maybe the underlying narrative isn't something like the rejection of Goldwater in 1964 but something else entirely. The only parallel that I can draw is the election campaign of prize narcissist Andrew Jackson who portrayed the image of running for the working class but still being fantastically wealthy. Maybe it could be that America is ready for a female president but that president isn't Hillary Clinton. I wonder if Michelle Obama, Madeleine Albright or Condoleezza Rice had run for President, whether they would have had to battle with the tag of being the second least popular candidate in US political history. Somehow, I doubt it.
It could also be that the American public haven't actually voted for the President but voted in that way because of the consequences of who the picks for the Supreme Court might be. After the death of Antony Scalia, the US Supreme Court was split 4-4 with socially conservative and liberal judges. The sitting Republican dominated Senate refused to give its consent to any and all candidates that Barack Obama might pick and held this out as a job for the next President. Maybe the Senate might give its consent to a Donald Trump pick but that pick would come from inside the machinery of the Republican Party. Of course, this could backfire if a Democrat dominated Senate refuses to give its consent to whoever Donald Trump might pick but we won't know how that will play out until we get there.
I don't know what the result of today's election means but I do know that America has been bashing its head on the coffee table for months and has given itself democracy brain damage. A sociopathic, racist, sexist, xenophobic, angry Grandpa, could very well be the perfect representation of what America currently is. If people think that Donald Trump has been elected because he is prepared to speak his mind, even when there's nothing in it, and he speaks what the country is thinking, then that must say that America is made up of a bunch of sociopathic, racist, sexist, xenophobes and given what we've repeatedly heard from the vox populi for the past few months, that might be true.
In the year that gave us the unlikely results of Leicester City winning the Premier League, the Western Bulldogs winning the AFL premiership, the Cronulla Sharks winning the NRL premiership, the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series, Britain voting the leave the EU, the unlikely has happened again with Donald Trump becoming the new president elect.
In the UK, Britain voted to leave the EU and David Cameron resigned because he couldn't hold the party togther. The current Prime Minister Teresa May always looks perpetually stunned and I would not be at all surprised if she too is knifed by a blithering idiot like Boris Johnson. It just might be possible that by the next British General Election, that Donald Trump and Boris Johnson could be leading the governments of the anglosphere. Of course Australia would have to follow suit at some point and probably appoint Spud Dutton or worse, Christopher Pyne or Treasurer Scott Morrison, to form a grinning triumvirate of Howling Morons across the anglosphere.
The only thing that I can say is that the Howling Morons are howling louder than ever before and it is beyond my ability to comprehend why. What is this? I don't even.
1 comment:
and the whole world said WTF
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