Post-Election Postmortem
Feeling nostalgic for 2016?
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” - H.L. Mencken.
It’s the day after. To Democrat supporters (on both sides of the border), it means a wake with an open grave and wreaths in gender rainbow colours. To Republican supporters, it’s “ding dong the witch is dead,” and as a bonus the flying monkey count is down in the senate. Pundits will be picking at the entrails of this election for weeks, with plenty of somber ‘wither the Democrats’ think pieces polluting legacy media portals.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” observed Mark Twain. Get ready for a replay of 2016-2020, when it was all Russiagate and Trump derangement syndrome, 24-7, on cable news and social media.
The corporate state offered our neighbours a simple binary, and it’s hard to believe, but something like 40 percent of the republic was “undecided.” I’m not sure how or why that is, but in the epic battle between Giant Douche vs. Turd Sandwich, the sandwich supporters came out on top.
I watched the whole unholy mess unspool last night on NBC (the first time I’ve watched broadcast television in years). I turned it off at 9 PST, when Turd Sandwich had it in the bag, and staggered off to bed with a weird mix of schadenfreude (for the Democrats) and dread (for the Republicans). I’m obviously no fan of either party —but my contempt for the donkey is greater than my disgust with the elephant.
And who won the election hands down for Turd Sandwich? Giant Douche!
Make no mistake, it was the Democratic National Committee and Kakala’s campaign flacks, to say nothing of Kakala herself, who ran in utterly witless and out-of-touch electoral campaign, who sealed the deal for Trump. It was so bad it’s almost like they had Republican moles in their operation.
For this reason alone the Democrats thoroughly deserved being swept out of power, perhaps taking much of their massively destructive woke agenda with them. In that sense, I was cheered by the loss. But that hardly means I was happy with the Trump win — quite the opposite. Even though the people have spoken, I also refuse to believe they deserve Duke L’Orange and the his scary circle for a second term. (For us Canadians, this likely means more economic bludgeoning. “I love the word tariffs,” Trump recently said.)
Anyway, let’s itemize a few of the many ways the Democrats snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
The first way was Harris’ refusal to meet with independent presidential candidate RFK Jr., when the latter saw the primaries couldn’t evolve into a win against the duopoly’s twin behomeths of donkey and elephant. Kennedy, a lifelong democrat, was fixing to endorse the Harris campaign - perhaps with some caveats that they initiate some actual Democratic policies - but was refused. Even though his support likely would have pulled hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of undecided voters toward the vice president. The floundering Dems were offered a lifeline, and the promise of RFK Jr.’s ballot box tractor beam…but nope. We can lose on our own without your help, thank you. And off Bobby went to endorse Trump instead, perversely hoping he might have some effect there.
The second was Kakala’s refusal to go on Joe Rogan’s three hour-long podcast. The ex-MMA commentator and comedian’s ‘bro’ portal has a bigger viewership than most cable outlets, into the millions. Perhaps Harris’ handlers figured it would be too confrontational, and potentially expose the dim-witted vice president’s well-documented difficulty in cadging together an intelligent sentence. Unlike Trump, who chose to appear on the show with a fawning Rogan and performed credibly well (for Trump). It seems his appearance did indeed pull untold numbers of viewers into the Trump camp, while further revitalizing his base among younger male viewers. And we’re talking about a gerrymandered election system in which a difference of hundreds of thousands of votes can prove critical. Unlike the out-of-touch Dems, the Republicans worked social media hard, and came up with campaign ads even I found disturbingly stirring. If I try to imagine myself as a committed Republican voter, they would have been like crystal meth. If I was an undecided voter, they might have been like high-grade dope, making me forget what I’m doing at the ballot box.
The Democrat campaign handed their social media targeting to millennial flacks, who served up the “Brat” nonsense along with condescending LatinX memes for immigrant voters. They stupidly attempted to appeal to immigrants on a cultural, rather than economic level. Commentators last night were shocked how much Trump had increased his vote among them over the past two elections, in spite of his continued leveraging of a cross-border threat from undocumented immigrants. Yet the latter is precisely the block that many documented immigrants are concerned with, as they are competing for much of the same low-wage, labour jobs.
Lastly, and perhaps most fatally, for the past eight years the Democrats have laboured under the quaint belief they need not bother to define themselves by any policies beyond, ‘we’re not Trump.’ They figured they could pretty much land a bag of cement in the Oval Office (and practically did with Sleepy Joe), and run on a Cement-not-Trump ticket.
Guess what, guys. Turns out millions will take Trump over cement, even if the latter is packaged into a convenient, racially ambiguous, cackling female form.
Okay, so that’s my postmortem for the Demoncrats. On to my assessment of the Rethuglicans.
In spite of the legacy media’s best efforts, there’s never been any substantial evidence from his first term that Trump is an ally of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, but neither is he a sworn enemy. That might take some pressure off the proxy war in the Ukraine. Yet this is counterbalanced by Trump’s avowed love US military might and global hegemony. Worse yet, he is more vocal in supporting Israel than both Sleepy Joe or Kakala (on X he endorsed a supporter’s description as “King of Jerusalem”).
Trump will unreservedly back Israel’s ongoing campaign of raining hellfire down on men, women and children from Palestine to Lebanon, and potentially greenlight extending their adventurism further in Syria and Iran. This could bring the world that much closer to nuclear war — if only because the latter two are aligned with Russia.
As for the health freedom activists who stampeded into the Trump camp both before and after RFK Jr.’s endorsement, it appears many have amnesia involving Trump’s launch of Operation Warp Speed, and his continuing endorsement of Covid vaccines as safe and effective into 2024. They’re being sold a bill of goods all over again, but this time they’re not seeing through it.
On X, journalist Whitney Webb offered a concise reality check for those who think of Trump as some think-outside-the box saviour from beyond the Beltway (see below).
Kind of a mess, but even worse than last time. So take heart, it’s not exactly like 2016!
The Bogus Man that you linked to in your article immediately reminded me of the Roxy Music Bogus Man. They both kind of haunt you in the same way and for a minute I thought it was a cover of that earlier song; put though a Dead Can Dance style blender. Yeah, the big selling point for Donald for many who had not voted that way before was his decisive stance on ending war and illegal immigration. One of those issues he might just have in the bag; but with the other he might just be re-directing America's resources into a bigger and bloodier war.
Yeah, watching myself get moved by that grandiose advert was disturbing. Get a grip Glen; they’re just dangling a shiny hook in front of you in the fish bowl. And you’re not even American! …I hate cults. Making the world safe for demagoguery never works. While both cults are dangerous, each for their own reasons , keeping sense of humour about it all is a good antidote. That’s why I like your columns Geoff. Gradually, slowly , believe it or not, we are all slowly trudging towards a better , post authoritarian, post statist, post-woke world. In can’t be otherwise. Two steps forward. One step back.