RUTHFULLY YOURS

Take the ostentatiously virtuous  Peter van Onselen, columnist for The Australian, who  wants to tear up his US passport because of the Trump triumph.  Perhaps he could tear up his Australian passport  as well — just so long as he doesn’t litter our streets with its debris, as angry Clinton supporters have been doing in ‘blue” states in the US.

You see, van Onselen says he could not look his daughters in the eye if he did not protest Trump’s stated intention to see Roe v Wade overturned and, more generally, because of Trump’s attitude to women.  Well how does Professor van Onselen look his daughters in the eye while babies in China and India are being aborted purely because they are female? And why didn’t he tear up his US passport when President Bill Clinton seduced an intern in the Oval Office, lied about it and plunged the US into years of hearings and impeachment proceedings?  Or when Democrat  Senator Ted Kennedy parked a one-night girlfriend in a pond, left her to drown and did not report the accident until the following day? And has Professor van Onselen told his daughters about all John F. Kennedy’s affairs, including his fling with a mafiosi’s mistress?

If Trump does indeed succeed in overturning Roe through the appointment of Supreme Court justices who are strict constitutionalists and do not extract abortion rights from an imaginary “penumbra” surrounding the right to privacy, the issue of abortion would revert to being decided by individual states, which is as it should be.  It is the voters in those states who would decide the legality — or otherwise — of abortion, not the nine justices in Washington.  Professor van Onselen apparently dislikes the notion of ordinary voters having a voice in life-and-death decisions, favouring the view, apparently, that such matters should be the province of the elites consisting of people like, well,  Professor van Onselen.

This attitude mirrors the rejection of a plebiscite on homosexual marriage by Australia’s very own politically correct brigade. Such decisions, you see, are far too important to be left to ordinary voters and should be decided in the rarefied atmosphere inhabited by the elite. If the people don’t vote as you wish, abolish the people and appoint another people.

But back to the US, where a long list of celebrities threatened to leave the US if Trump were to be elected:  Barbara Streisand, Rosie O’Donnell, Cher etc. As a satirical piece circulating widely online puts it

“…..Canadian border residents say it’s not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, liberal arts majors, global-warming activists, and green energy proponents crossing their fields at night.  ‘I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn,’ said southern Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota. ‘He was cold, exhausted and hungry, and begged me for a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn’t have any, he left….’

“In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. He then installed loudspeakers that blared Rush Limbaugh across the fields, but they just stuck their fingers in their ears and kept coming. Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet liberals just south of the border, pack them into electric cars, and drive them across the border, where they are simply left to fend for themselves after the battery dies.  ‘A lot of these people are not prepared for our rugged conditions,’ a Mountie in Alberta said. ‘I found one carload without a single bottle of Perrier water, or any gemelli with shrimp and arugula.  All they had was a nice little Napa Valley cabernet and some kale chips’. When liberals are caught, they’re sent back across the border, often wailing that they fear persecution from Trump high-hairers.”

The meltdown in academia warrants a trigger warning of its own. American professors have cancelled mid-term exams and delicate students are receiving trauma counseling, not to mention drawing solace from bonding with “therapy dogs”, colouring books and “safe spaces”.  There is even a feminist scholar offering classes on “Healing from Toxic Whiteness”.  (I am not joking)

Then there is our very own Virginia Trioli (on an annual salary of $235,664) of Their ABC, querying the IQ of Trump voters and claiming that their favoured candiate was staring at his wife’s breasts in the polling booth. True, Virginia  didn’t know she was still live and on air, but if a male journalist had said that Bill Clinton was looking at Hillary’s breasts or queried the IQs of  Clinton supporters, we can reasonably expect that his career prospects would have dimmed considerably. It was the ABC, remember, that bounced columnist Piers Akerman from Insiders after he dared raise the matter of Julia Gillard and her light-fingered former swain.

Missed in all the media bias is the rejoicing in Hungary, Tel Aviv and in Egyptian President Al Sisi’s government.

But we must not take it all too seriously. This is a week for laughter, so I will end with a meme circulating on the internet. President Obama, it is being said, will leave a copy of the Koran on the bedside table of the master bedroom in the White House and a Muslim prayer mat on the floor, the object being to spook in-coming President Trump?

Delicious and “deplorable”, as Hillary might say, and probably not true. Probably.

Babette Francis is the National & Overseas Co-ordinator of Endeavour Forum Inc., an NGO having special consultative status with the Economic & Social Council of the UN