RUTHFULLY YOURS

The oppression and beheadings of Christians and Yazidis in Syria by ISIS is a mere blip when put against the Holocaust. The execution of five police officers in Dallas and three in Baton Rouge is not so violent when put against the 72 officers who lost their lives on 9/11. Obviously one could go on. For example, presumably, nothing could possibly happen again in Japan to equal Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ipso facto, get real about the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011.

War, murder, enslavement and mayhem in the Middle East and North Africa; one barbaric Islamic terrorist atrocity after another throughout the world, including in the United States; millions of Muslim refugees swamping Europe — none of it compares with a world war. On that scale, Obama is right. It is when being right is breathtakingly vacuous.

The current president of the United States lives in his own relativistic world. Cops kill blacks; it’s a racially-driven epidemic; even though the data shows there is no racial bias at work.[i] Islamic violence, on the other hand, must be left unnamed and minimized by being put on a cock-eyed historical scale. The man has shown yet again why he is monumentally unfit to be president; and, just think, he might be followed by “what difference does it make” Hillary Clinton. And some people are concerned about Donald Trump. There has never been an easier act to follow than Obama.

I found it interesting to compare the initial take of Fox News and CNN to Trump’s speech at the Republican Convention. “Inspirational and uplifting” versus “dark”. “Dark”, by the way, was reiterated by Clinton. I understand other US news outlets also used the description “dark”, for example, NBC. Did Clinton simply copy the media’s language or was it more collegial?

Leaving aside my political leaning, my non-partisan take on the speech was whether you liked it or loathed it, you would be unlikely to turn it off. You gotta say the man has holding power; and for all of the very lengthy 75 minutes’ time he took. I could be wrong. I was wrong about Romney; in part, by grossly overestimating his ability to mix it with Obama and his acolytes in the mainstream media. But I think – not just hope – Trump will beat Hillary. Just a guess: I doubt his adversarial strength will be found wanting.

His campaign reminds me of Abbott’s in 2013 in its timely appeal to working people. And Abbott, too, was (and is) equally distasteful to the chattering classes. In Trump’s case his campaign is badged under making America great again by putting America first: Negotiating better trade deals, opening coal mines, reducing regulations and taxes, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, stopping illegal immigration, building up the military, insisting that allies pay their fair share of defence expenditure, crushing ISIS, stopping Muslim’s who can’t be vetted entering the US, and supporting the police; and, did you catch it, helping families with child care.

A lot of people who don’t take to the man will take to his policies. It will be enough, I predict, for him to win in November. America needs Trump. The world also needs him because the world desperately needs an America which is not weak at home and weak abroad. That said; it is understandable that those on the left oppose him. A strong America does not appeal to their national self-loathing minds. It is much less explicable why some conservatives are so vehemently anti-Trump when the alternative is so grisly.

Here is Daniel Pipes explaining why he has left the Republican Party: “Here’s why I by bailed, quit, and jumped ship. First, Trump’s boorish, selfish, puerile, and repulsive character, combined with his prideful ignorance, off-the-cuff policy making, and his neo-fascist tendencies make him the most divisive and scary of any serious presidential candidate in American history.” And that was just the first reason.

Pipes has lots more to say; some of it particularly silly when he responds to his readers comments, which broke three to one against him. Along with others like him, he pretends that his stance on Trump is not a vote for Clinton. It is sickening intellectual dishonesty, akin to Pontius Pilate’s hand-washing.

Here in Australia sanctimony drips from the media elites. They simply can’t mention Trump without using a demeaning adjective or two to show what morally superior beings they are in comparison. The Australian’s Paul Kelly and Greg Sheridan are at it all the time and they are among the best of our journalists. It is pathetic. This comment from Kelly (20 July) is tellingly remote from reality and the concerns of the common man: “…the lesson of Trump is the vulnerability of our democratic ideals and the risk that in our age of discontent demagogues can suddenly emerge with risk to our politics and society.”

‘Risk to our society’; say that again. He just doesn’t get it. Trump does. Our society is in trouble and great risk has materialised in the here and now. Islamists are on the march wherever we look. In case there is any mistake, they don’t give a fig about our democratic ideals. They can’t be bargained with. They won’t be appeased. Accusations of Islamophobia is a weapon they wield to undermine resistance among our legions of dullards.

They want us converted, subjugated or dead. Take your pick; they are indifferent to our choice. They want Islam to rule the world. And, come the dénouement, all those moderate Muslims living in the West, who we hear about ad nauseam (you know those moderates who never renounce one, not one, hateful Koranic verse), will line up behind them. Doubt that? Ask yourself what you would do in their place.

Meanwhile those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make them mad. Back on Planet Obama, John Kerry is explaining that global warming is the real threat to our way of life. Wannabe president Hillary is planning on closing coal mines while promising miners imaginary jobs in the renewal energy economy; on wind farms maybe?

In sight is a completely politicised Supreme Court, assiduously undoing constitutional protections; a weakened military; emboldened Islamism; more racial division and identity politics; increasing inner-city crime, more dead cops, more debt, more unaffordable health insurance, more Muslim enclaves, more like Kate Steinle being gunned down by illegal Mexican criminals living in ‘sanctuary cities”; and, to ‘relieve’ the doom among the damned, more food stamps. Welcome to an irredeemably enfeebled America and to a very dangerous world without a strong cop on the beat.

However dystopian this potential future, Pipes has made his pathetic point and gone home with his bat and ball. The mainstream commentariat in America, and in the West more generally, no doubt feel morally justified in trying to save American society from the awful possibility of that tasteless Trump winning the presidency. Welcome to Sanctimony City. And don’t worry about its inhabitants, it’s a gated community. Pity about the poor sops who have to live outside in the real world.