I am ashamed watching the US election that the country of Lincoln, Grant and JFK has descended into a nursing home fight over which of two querulous old men should get to the bathroom first on being woken by the care assistant.
The US presidency has been badly wounded by this election at a time when the country is in terrible danger. China makes no secret of her determination to clear the Far East of areas of western influence such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and Australia. It should not surprise anybody to hear within a few years that Chinese troops have landed in Australia’s Arnhemland over a bogus mineral rights dispute.
To give Trump his due he recognised the danger of China immediately he took office while the de facto president Kamala Harris will behave in the same way to China as Chamberlain did to Hitler over Czechoslovakia. Trump may well have been cheated at the polls but it is the surliness of his withdrawal that will endanger his legacy, which coupled with the apparent doderiness of Biden will encourage the Chinese to engage in even more reckless foreign policy adventures.
It has been obvious of recent years that US public opinion is so highly polarised between two opposite political views that one half of the country is now talking of going to war with the other. Her electoral system of postal votes and hand counted ballot papers, as outdated and senile as the two candidates, is a major cause of these divisions and must be replaced.
Modern politics cannot wait for four or five years elections. America needs younger presidential candidates and an electronic, 99% tamper proof voting system that not only can elect presidents but offer people referenda on such obvious dangers as BLM, China and immigration. So does Britain.
Dear Harold W.E.H.
It appears to me that the only politically motivated violent threat to the American public is from the supporters of Biden, Harris, Pelosi et al who now dominate the Democrat Party and want to change America into a socialist state.
Dear Harry.
Brilliant! Yes, Donald Trump is a great and energetic communicator and would make an effective campaigner for anti-woke policies just as Nigel Farage did for Brexit if he is able to get a network to support him. As Murdoch’s Fox News appears to have disowned him, I doubt that he has enough money and backing to set up his own T.V. network to carry the word. I do hope that the GOP will take his lead and field an effective candidate to resist the globalist world-be tyrants if they have the will to do so but I fear that snake-oil salesmen such as Obama and Biden, preaching the gospel of trans-national global power, will gain yet more support from, what appears to be, an ever growing number of gullible voters who eagerly vote for political handcuffs and a closed mind.
Dear Peter.
Wise words. I too see the world around me more clearly in my 70s having learned from my mistakes and small successes. Donald Trump brought his life from outside the political world into politics and disrupted the cozy political cartel in their metaphorical ivory tower to address the issues that mattered to working people who were despised by arch beltway grandees such as Hilary Clinton with her remark ‘deplorables’ revealing her true nature. There are exceptions of course but the most trustworthy and wise are those who have made a life of their own before applying for the job to make decisions affecting millions of others.
I sympathize with Myles Harris’s sentiment but not the characterization. This election is between an old corrupt fool and a super-energetic disrupter. A younger candidate could not have done any more than what Trump has. Dozens of state rallies in a week, straight after being taken down by Covid. His endurance over the last 4 years against political enemies’ dirty tricks is legendary. He turned old strategies and tactics upside down, inside out, took the US to lead foreign policy from the front and released government stranglehold on the economy to deliver the best commercial conditions in half a century. Western underestimation of CCP evilness delivered a world pandemic. Trump withdrew from the useless WHO and reviewed global institutions that have been spoiled by CCP bribery. The Paris Agreement is a mess of unheeded promises, with biggest polluter China allowed to keep spewing increased levels of emission. Human rights worldwide are ignored. Trump has defended Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, the Uyghurs, the Balkan states, ASEAN more than any Western leader has dared utter. He brokered 3 Middle East peace deals after 70 years of regional warfare. He has defended free speech while the Western Left sought to eliminate it. He has defended religious freedom while Mullahs murdered “infidels” and the Pope surrendered to CCP persecution in China. Trump shook European NATO and forced spending rises of $130b per year, twice Russia’s annual military budget. He delivered the Pentagon an additional $100b over 3 years to counter CCP. The silly “pivot to Asia” under Obama, who had remained cowardly silent while China stole the Philippines’ Scarborough Shoal, has been turned into a real and significant resources shift to the Indo Pacific with firm response to Hong Kong repression, new Taiwan defense legislation, Quad, Five-Eyes and associated arms sales to Allies. Trump managed to coax India to be part of the alliance. He would have done the same with Russia if it weren’t for Dems and treacherous and treasonous public servants’ sabotage. Fools create 2-front fights. Trump is no fool so wants to deal with the biggest threat to humanity first, the CCP, and wants Russia on-side. At home, he reverses decades of indoctrination of young minds into believing they live in a cult of oppression. Taxpayers’ money was used to degrade the education system, filling it with poisoned thought bubbles instead of STEM. CCP saw the gaping holes and moved its propaganda machine to America to reinforce destructive curricula to rot the country from within. CCP fully appreciates that China has grown rich by sucking up the juices of the global capitalist system established by the West. Hence, it knows it could defeat the US by turning America socialist. The spoilt American brats, dressed up as BLM and woke movements, would be the CCP’s cannon fodder. To be sure, there are genuine citizens of concern who hate Trump. They see form they dislike rather than substance they may like. Trump is a flawed individual (aren’t we all) but he is the lone wolf standing between the CCP-Dem-woke let’s-destroy-America deluge and the nation that is founded on the best principles that humans can offer. Therefore, Republicans cannot yield. There is no walking-away with magnanimity when the threat is existential. Fight in the Supreme Court and every court in the land. And should this not succeed, let GOP candidates flood the House in 2022 with mail-in votes and in-person votes and all kinds of votes, and let Trump come back with a vengeance in 2024.
Yes, Freenations, strong and valid points you make here.
One thing:
If Trump does lose the presidency in the coming weeks, I think the most likely scenario for his future is that he orchestrates and stars in a massive multi-media campaign to champion the agenda he has already set out and pursued -and that he will not pursue the presidency for himself in 2024.
Trump has opened up new possibilities for the rising generation of anti-marxist/anti-greenist/pro-Western politicians not only in the USA, but also elsewhere.
In the US, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Nikki Haley, and Gov Noem of South Dakota are obvious examples of highly-capable, anti-Leftist politicians who might pursue the GOP 2024 presidential nomination -and these are just examples -there are more similar.
And I think it highly likely that Trump, via media and campaigns within the various GOP systems, will continue to set terms by which more people come to see reality and are willing to work deal with the challenges and opportunities that define Reality Now.
And one critical matter:
Can Trump’s health hold up for another decade of his very important crusade?
We always need older men or women as our politic leaders, not younger. One tends to know a lot more as one gets older as you learn to be a little more sceptical, acquire some uncynical disillusion and get a little wiser. It’s certainly worked with me anyway as I know more at 70 than I did at 20 , 40 or 60. Also and still President Trump, isn’t the one who’s committed the fraud, it’s the present day Democrats I’m afraid, as usual, and there is no need for postal votes in a non-compulsory voting system….whoever wanted them is the one who had it in mind to cheat, regardless of any reasons to the contrary they may give.
Dear Harry.
As usual, you make good points to what should be obvious to anyone with more that two brain cells to rub together.
I’m not sure electronic involvement in elections is the answer. Surely the old fashioned way is the best way – ballots counted by hand in full view of representatives from the competing political parties.
And not stopping counting at 10-40 PM in the last few remaining States when it comes down to the wire…..
“Referendums”! chrysanthema?
Mixing direct and representative democracy is not a good idea. It may work in Switzerland but that’s because the government never does anything important.
Iain, what are your criteria for “anything important”?
I know Switzerland and I know this:
Swiss systems, supervised by the Swiss Government, do a creditable job, better than most other systems/governments, of using scarce resources to positive effect.
This is obvious, for example, in their education and training systems which produce a higher proportion of people of greater capability in manual, technical and administrative fields, than say oh the United Kingdom.
And fewer Swiss are prone to violence, theft and other criminality than say oh Britons-
-Swiss politicians and Swiss government administrative departments take an active interest in those matters, more say than oh, in the UK.
And the referendums are handy devices in encouraging the citizenry to maintain their attention on the politics of government -more engaged than is seen say oh, in Britain.
How about discussing the end of US democracy, civil society and consent to be governed should puppet Biden prevail in an election half of America will never accept as fair and honest? ‘Two querulous old men’ doesn’t really capture what’s at stake here.
Indeed, Nick. Indeed.
Just think:
If Kamala Harris were white, we’d never have heard of her.
Ditto Obama and Susan Rice.
And if Pete Buttigieg were straight and married with kids -likewise very ditto indeed.
It is worrying to read Mark Steyn’s article in The Conservative Woman where he is convinced that a gigantic fraud has been perpetrated on the American people. He is a virulent critic of everything Left – the Democrats, Wokeism, Islam, the ineffable Trudeau. Yet is it really possible that in the most advanced nation in the world their electoral system is open to such manipulation?
If it is possible then any hope of a proper investigation now is surely doomed.
You can see much of the reported evidence and form your own judgement at independent sites like Gateway Pundit or on theDonald.win. Becasue you won’t be seeing it inevestigated or even reported fairly by the corporate MSM, which is part of the progressive movement.
Donald.win? Hmmmm. Is there such a thing as a totally unbiassed opinion today? I just wonder that having had four years to prepare for the election the Administration did not either cancel mail voting as unreliable, or reform it. The Dems set the tone by trying every stratagem to remove Trump ; now Trump is using every stratagem to stay in power notwithstanding the deaths that will surely occur because the transition cannot be rolled out. I think it is shamleless to play with people’s lives. He should concede, but continue his investigations, and IF there is any substance then make the case for electoral fraud. Any other way is playing with the lives of innocent people.
Well said Harry. I concur with all that you say. I feel sure that I don’t know America as well as you but I have been there several times and have good fiends. My friend Mike Rahal, now sadly dead, had some of Donald Trump’s rough edges but he was a self-made millionaire who travelled the world in his business; he was generous, always genial, and utterly reliable. He served on a destroyer in the U.S. Navy during WWII and was first and foremost a patriot who loved his country. Although he unfalteringly supported all U.S. presidents, whatever their party, I feel that he would be sad to see the direction his country is heading for now. Incidentally, I’m a life member of the NRAA which benefits me not one jot but I believe in supporting an organisation dedicated to the world’s last best hope for freedom.
Dear Derek, thank you for your note of concurrence -and comradeship.
Your friend Mike Rahal is an American type from whom I have learned many essential lessons about business, about citizenship, about working with others, about contributing to others, and about friendship.
And, along the years, I have been blessed to work with -and to learn from- such men among other nationalities.
All best to you Derek, Harry.
The lesson here is that patriots love their nation regardless of their ideology. Leftists do the opposite.
Hello Nick, perhaps you are saying that Leftists are not patriots, and cannot be?
Seems right to me, because Leftists want a global government and the end of nations, and/or seek to make their country’s denizens into zombies, dependent on, and tyrannised by the Big/Global State.
Exactly. Leftists have dreamt of internationalism and the end of nations since at least the First International of 1864. Globalism (ie not globalisation) is communism lite at the level of entire nations, and this anti-human ideology, again masquarading as virtuous, humanitarian concern, now pervades the professional classes and institutions of the West.
Sainted Editor:
Please be aware that not all your readers are admirers of Lincoln, Grant and JFK. I regard all three as odious.
In fact, I expect the Biden régime (or rather the Harris régime) to resemble the Lincoln régime in its determination to punish the losers. Decent Americans will soon be genuflecting willy-nilly to rioters and looters.
There remains one faint ray of hope: If the scum don’t gain control of the Senate, they won’t be able to subvert the Supreme Court.
I expressed myself badly. I meant that Myles Harris’s complaint was ‘misplaced’.
News just now, early Saturday evening, that Biden-Harris have won -or so it seems.
Anyway, Biden-Harris have declared again today that they will halt climate change and systematic racism.
So that’s good eh.
That will make many people very happy indeed.
Erm, Obama made many declarations along those lines too.
I suppose Biden-Harris have studied why Obama failed in those areas and now have an excellent plan to accomplish what Obama somehow did not.
Happy days indeed.
(BTW, I will not be surprised if before Inauguration Day Biden bumps his head rather badly and decides to step out and Harris is elevated to the presidency. Again, what wonderful general happiness will descend upon the Earth and its Peoples eh.)
She’s a candidate that the membership of the Democrats didn’t want even! That’s how bloody awful this could be.
Iain Hunter:
We used to hope that Ruth Bader Ginsberg would die.
Now we hope that Joe Biden will stay alive.
But my prediction is that he’ll suddenly be deemed to be too old and frail to carry on about a week after his inauguration.
And then the whole world will have to bow down to the Abomination of Desolation.
I tried not to laugh on reading how radical leftists in Portland vandalised the Democrats’ HQ there, sayin ‘F__ Biden’. I guess they need something new to hate now, on the assumption that Trump may be exiting stage right…
https://pamplinmedia.com/pt/9-news/487270-392238-multnomah-county-democrats-hq-attacked-sunday-night
Dear Myles.
You’re complaint of a surly President losing the election and dividing the country to a potential civil war is precisely the passionate and virile response that is so lacking in England to defeat the liberal/social-Marxist yoke enforced by a gendarmerie we are now labouring under. When the choice between two basically consensual political parties in a ‘first past the post’ election, as has happened in Britain since the Conservative Party adopted Blarism, there is no where else to go and the voting populous are powerless except in exceptional and chance circumstances as when David Cameron misjudged his conviction for the ‘right’ outcome in a referendum. Trump supporting Americans have not become ‘domesticated’ and are vilified and insulted in standing up for those freedoms assured for them in their Constitution and its amendments. They are accused of being ignorant just as those in Britain who voted to leave the E.U. were branded for voting to return the sovereign power of a parliament that had so cravenly and carelessly given away in 1972. God preserve those who ‘Charlie’ Falconer called ‘ordinary people’ who will not be ‘put in their place’ by a smug ‘civilised’ elite.
In my view, the issue is not about the age of the presidential candidates.
Rather it is about conflicts between two very different models of the preferred/correct nature of the principles that best guide the US economy, determine its borders, and define the terms of citizenship.
And there’s the conflict over what to do about the vast differences in educability, criminality, propensity to violence, productivity, and loyalty to the USA of the various sub-groups that comprise its populace.
Then there’s what to do when the ultra-elites, who have made more money than can ever be spent, want the striving classes to transfer their hard-earned wealth to non-productive, destructive, violent classes.
These elites also want the education and personal safety of their children of the striving classes to be surrendered to the cause of pretending that blacks, browns and Muslims from everywhere, are as educable and as non-violent, by proportion of population numbers, as whites and NE Asians.
That the Democrat candidate for president in this current election is a worn-out old man is directly traceable to Obama’s shattering of the Democrat party in his own interests.
(That this is not understood by keen observers is a mighty puzzle.)
Meanwhile, Trump is the kind of old, self-sufficient, independently wealthy, beyond career, uncouth, rough, tough guy who emerges from time to time in many types of social orders to try to help the striving classes to regain their rightful positions, freedoms, and safety in a society that has deluded itself into regarding the destructive/non-productive/violent/criminal classes as the rightful arbiters of how much free stuff they should have transferred to them, while being assured they are wonderful citizens in all aspects.
The consequences of anti-empiricism and fake virtue combined with the absence of moral strength in regard to such matters will, of course, be unpleasantness, on large scale.
Trump may be the hero of the red-meat mid-west gun-toting American patriot, but he is also a scoundrel of the first water. He as been effective in some sectors of the economy but his total belief in himself means that he cannot listen to good advice. His incessant tweeting, puerile language and litigation when challenged is not the stuff of statesmen. This election has been comprehensively lost by him when he had the chance to change his image. He will never do this, and is, as a result, yesterday’s man.
Hello Harold,
Trump does not aspire to be a statesman.
His attitude to life is very different from that.
He sought -and post-presidency likely will continue to try- to retrieve the prospects of the disenfranchised striving classes of the USA, while telling the rest of the world that their long leisurely sojourn at US expense was coming to an end.
Trump is rough and uncouth sure, as many great leaders are-
-but playing at being gentlemen is for non-leaders esp when the situation is dire.
And note that he does indeed take a lot of input/perspective/advice from others.
To think otherwise is to misread Trump and to miscontrue his methods for achieving hard-won outcomes.
The Trump period has given new inspiration to the striving classes and has awoken many among the higher-ups both to the necessities and the possibilities for saving themselves, and even perhaps what they might do to retrieve the prospects of ordinary folk.
As proper leaders would.
All best, Harry.
PS: I know the Americans very well -including the beef-eating, gun-toting patriots. And I know their attitudes to work, and to freedom, and to the citizen’s responsibilities. And without all that, and their deep comprehension of the necessity to fight without cease to sustain Western Civ, I believe the West would not have survived very long after 1945.
Since the end of the second great war, Most of the Rest of the West has slumbered and dreamt naive-idealist dreams, while the meat-eating, soldierly citizenry of the USA has incurred enormous losses and debts in defending them.
The Democrats don’t bother with puerile language, only ruining US democracy and defrauding the voters. No-one will trust in US elections again if Biden prevails. democrats like AOC are already compiling hit-lists of those Trump supporters they intend to persecute and silence once in power. I guess that kind of tyranny doesn’t bother you like Trump’s straight-talking does.
My wife being a French National, I listened a great deal of the time to old/style French music on the internet. Find it easier for my sanity! I haven’t watched the news on tv for years. A brief period of the news, when I have the wireless on. Fine by me! To say I am angry/ depressed at what is going on in America, let alone HERE with Boris and his cronies, AND the rest of Europe, with France leading the ‘pack’, is to put it extremely mildly! What can I do about it? Not one whole hell’ve lot! Why worry eh? I live so far north in Britain, recently retired, generally speaking I’m above ALL this ‘stuff and nonsense going on. anyways.
If that loser Biden gets into the White House, just what harm can he do eh?
My wife is very much afraid of what is going to happen with Brexit.
You cannot just turn the switch to ‘off’. What with forty odd years of entanglement. I really cannot see Boris turning the switch to ‘off’ myself. To damn liberal for his own good, is Boris. Just how in the devil did he stay in power for SO long in London, with such a multi cultural ‘lot’ without NOT annoying folk TOO much eh?
London is ONE thing in appeasement, Boris is SO good at that, get out of London, it is a whole different world. Take note Boris
99% is of course not good enough. States have been decided on less than 1% as we are finding out. And that’s the problem. No system is 100% secure, and interference can upend democratic choice so easily.
Democrats and their MSM allies peddled Russian interference for 4 years. It was all proven false, as so many of us knew and predicted. But now they say the election lost by Trump can’t be rigged! Those with eyes can see both this ridiculous lying and the huge cheating, and know that, if it succeeds, US democracy will never be trusted again, US society will only get more divided and hateful, and with no more land of the free, western democracy itself will be nearing extinction.