Sunday Times does the election

The Sunday Times Does the Election

        a view from across the pond

From Camille Paglia

Talentless, venal Clinton deserved to lose. . . . any other Democrat would have won this election because so many people voted for Trump just to stop the utterly sociopathic Hillary from gaining office. . . . Bill Clinton was a skilled politician – I voted for him twice – who knew how to negotiate with people and enjoyed public life - but Hillary had none of these qualities. . . she rose to prominence on her husband's coat tails and never accomplished anything on her own. . . her attempts to reform healthcare as first lady were a disaster . . . she became senator for New York through pure nepotism . . . as Secretary of State she spent a lot of time on airplanes meeting people and shaking hands . . her only legacy was destabilizing North Africa . . . we must terminate all connections with the Clintons . . . they must be consigned to the dustbin of history . . . they have drained too much of our mental and political energy for 25 years.

From John Glancy in Wilkes-Barre. Pa.

77 year old Joe Brown voted for Obama in the last two elections. . . this year he switched to the Republicans . . . why? . . . we need a change . . . Obama did nothing . . . Brown loathes the system and the “Washington elites” . . . people are angry about illegal immigration . . . in Wilkes-Barre the Hispanic population has increased by 523% . . . it would have been difficult to find a candidate worse placed to win in Wilkes-Barre than Clinton . . . academic, dynastic, elite . . . Maureen Frank, 58, believes people voted for Trump because “they're uneducated, they're idiots” . . .

From Niall Ferguson

. . . the politics of the Republic has always been a blood sport . . . at least this year we didn't have an actual duel of the sort that killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804 . . . the economist Paul Krugman wrote in The New York Times, “people like me . . . truly didn't understand the country we live in . . . We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law. It turns out we were wrong. . . a huge number of white people living in rural areas don't share our ideas of what America is about. For them it is about blood and soil (Hitler's German: Blut und Boden) refers to an ideology that focuses on ethnicity based ideas – my italics) about traditional patriarchy and racial hierarchy. . . I (Ferguson) received an email from my old university, “we have heard from students, faculty and staff who have expressed anger, anxiety and fear . . .take care of yourselves and give support to those who need it” . . . the Founding Fathers provided for this . . . Alexander Hamilton warned “of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants”. . . It will not be like that. This is how democracy in America was and is meant to work . . . the hysteria on the left is partly because being this wrong has to hurt . . . the Princeton Election Consortium gave Clinton a 98-99% chance of winning . . . how did they get it so wrong? . . . it was very close . . . Clinton was predicted to get 47% of the vote, she got 47.7% . . . the pollsters critically underestimated Trump's vote . . . predicting he'd get 44% . . . in fact he got 47.5%. . . most waverers and undecideds chose Trump . . . if just one in a hundred votes chose Clinton over Trump she would have won 307-231. . . nice try, but no cigar . . . Democrats assumed the Electoral College would help their candidate . . .it did not . . .because Trump spoke in so derogatory terms about Mexicans and Muslims, partly because his campaign won the support of white supremacists, the standard liberal answer is race won it for Trump. . . at first sight the whitewash theory seems to be supported by the data. . . Trump beat Clinton 62%-33% in counties that are at least 85% white. . . in placed where 97% of the population was born in America he won 65%-30% . . . yet 29% of Hispanics voted for Trump - same percentage of Asians and 37% of other racial groups – even 1 in 12 black Americans voted for him . . .but, class turned out to matter at least as much as race. . . your income, your education and your distance from a big city were at least as predictive as your colour . .

the hillbillies were not too drunk or drugged to vote. . . for the average American family the last 16 years have been a round trip via a massive financial crisis . . . Yale economist Ray Fair's simple model which predicts elections on the basis of economic performance clearly pointed to a Democratic defeat. . . lots of well-educated Americans voted for Trump . . . more than half of the over 64's voted for Trump, less than third of 18-24's. . . women voted for Trump 53% of them. . . the status quo offered by Clinton can be summed up as SNAFU – but the alternative may well be FUBAR. . . the word “work” featured nine times in Trump's victory speech . . . deal with it.

From Ron Liddle

I see that John Kerry, the US Secretary of State has been on a trip to Antarctica. Good move. Get used to it John – it's where your staggeringly inept party will be, metaphorically, for at least four years. Get used to the silence and the desolation and the whale-blubber sandwiches. . . the list of utterly pointless people ferried to the North or South Pole by the climate change monkeys is so lengthy they even asked me to go on one of these daft beanos . . . why would I do that? . . . it's cold there . . . I do not believe, as does the President-elect that climate change is a “Chinese hoax” . . . I think climate change is probably happening . . . it's all the attendant baloney that makes me wish to reach for my revolver, if I had one . . . perhaps the most stupid policy was the rush for diesel . . . children can now look forward to choking, nausea and turning blue as a consequence of nitrogen oxide poisoning . . there are calls to ban diesel cars from London's roads . . . But nothing beats wind farms . . . nothing comes close . . . the Scots in particular are gung-ho and aim to destroy the beauty of their entire country by planting them wherever . . . they do enormous damage . . . offshore wind-farms are basically Moulinex blenders for gannets and kittiwakes . . . they discombobulate whales and mince bats (I include this article just to show that Mr Trump is not alone in his environmental scepticism!)

Sunday Times lead editorial page 18

The election of Donald Trump broke so many precedents it is not surprising that the world has been left wondering what will happen next in Washington . . . Mr Trump's victory was not quite a “Dewey defeats Truman moment . . . but it came close . . .pollsters expected a clear win for Clinton, the most optimistic model gave him a 29% chance . . . it is important that Trump's victory should not be seen as the end for free trade, open markets and globalisation . . . the election, after all, was between two candidates notable for their lack of appeal – Mr Trump was regarded by enough people as the lease worst . . . another Democratic candidate might have won easily, just as another Republican might have beaten Mrs Clinton by a larger margin . . . Trump won because he spoke directly to the American working class . . . in the rust belt they probably do not expect him to reopen mothballed steel mills and closed coal mines (I'm not so sure about that!) . . .the Democrats are losing touch with their traditional power-base but have not quite lost it . . . people need to be convinced that open markets benefit them and not just big corporations . . . people do not like open borders and uncontrolled immigration . . . Politicians who ignore, this, as Mrs Clinton mainly did, will suffer . . . Jean-Claude Juncker always strikes the wrong note on behalf of the EU. “We need to teach the President-elect what Europe is and how it works, predicting two wasted years whilst Trump tours a world he doesn't know . . . Angela Merkel, whose open door immigration policy ranks as on of the gravest errors of recent times, offered to work with Trump only on the basis of the values of democracy, freedom and the rule of law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views . . . Europe seems determined not to learn anything from Trump's victory . . . our “special relationship” may become rather important again in the next few years.

A snippet Teresa May – better safe than sorry

The Prime Minister wore a sari to visit a temple in Bangalore for the final day of her trip to India last week. It's now traditional for visiting leaders to wear the costume of their host country. George W Bush and Vladimir Putin wore traditional silk jackets in China in 2001 and Chilean ponchos during a summit in Santiago in 2004. So, here is the appeal to Teresa May, when Donald Trump comes to Britain for his first state visit, we beg of you: don't let him anywhere near Brighton beach and its nudist beach.

From Adam Boulton

Donald Trump is making nice . . . He praised and looked forward to dealing with Barack Obama . . . he told Americans they owe Hillary Clinton a debt of gratitude . . . even professional protesters got a backhanded compliment . . . just like Brexit, no-one saw this coming – including the candidate himself . . . several hours after the polls closed the Republican pollster, Frank Luntz stated flatly that Mrs Clinton was the next president . . . (I'm just guessing, but he may now be looking for another job) . . . Nationwide Mrs Clinton got 444 000 more votes than Mr Trump, but Trump won 30 states to Clinton's 20, so nobody (except real hard-core numpties!) is disputing the result . . . the winner has abandoned his claim that the system was rigged . . . an unabashed Nigel Farage hastened to the US offering to the the “responsible adult” in the room when the PM and the President meet . . . nobody in the US was remotely interested in what Britain was saying . . it seems with each new President we have a nervous breakdown over whether we are cringing low enough before our masters and whether they really love us . . . his team: veteran right-wingers who remained loyal to him, many of them failed candidates – Rudy Guilianil, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie . . . these are all establishment figures, not blue-collar insurgents . . . and none is a noted friend of the UK . . . Trump's priorities are domestic . . . Mrs May should be careful . . . hugging the President (watch out for your bum Teresa!) got Tony Blair involved in Iraq and Afghanistan . . . Trump's foreign policy statements have been contradictory, sometimes isolationist, sometimes aggressive . . . to tie the UK too closely to Trump in the hope of scavenging from the billionaires table would be rash.

From Heather MacDonald

America's Republican elite are as stunned by Trump's conquest of the White House as the Democrats and the press . . . They shouldn't be, since they created the conditions that led to his improbable victory . . . for decades the Repubs suppressed the debate about the costs of mass low-skilled immigration . . . questioning the open borders policy led to charges of xenophobia or were simply ignored . . . immigration was said to be unalloyed good . . . however, residents of areas with large numbers of low-skilled immigrants were experiencing a different reality exemplified by California, the state most transformed by mass immigration . . . the majority of babies now born there are Hispanic and Hispanics have expanded their numbers six-fold since 1970 . . . in the 1950's and 60's California led the country in educational achievement, today the percentage of students lacking the most rudimentary maths and reading skills matches those in Miss, Louisiana, Alabama . . . (so why are Californians still voting for the Dems?) . . . Hispanics have the highest rate of unwed teen pregnancy of any group in the nation . . . low-skilled immigrants depress the wages of less-educated workers . . . in 2016 only two in three American adults without a college degree were working . . . thanks to competition from low-skilled immigrants . . . to go by his campaign performance Trump would seem a deeply-flawed national leader – thin-skinned – childishly vindictive and almost pathologically narcissistic but voters were willing to overlook his failings because he voiced their concerns on immigration . . . the Republican establishment could have prevented the Donald's rise years ago by subjecting its open borders orthodoxies to empirical testing and to good faith moral criticism . . . it has fallen to a boorish reality TV star to articulate some basic truths: the citizens possess the right to police their borders; a country's immigration policy should serve first and foremost the interests of its citizens; and lawlessness in one area breeds lawlessness in many others . .

Trump's famous “wall” is far less important than the enforcement of immigration laws in the interior of the county, including against employers . . . the country watches breathlessly for every hopeful sign that the seriousness of the office he has won will make Trump mature and teach him long-overdue impulse control.

Jeremy Clarkson – as usual had the last word

Almost all my friends are bleeding-heart liberals . . .they host fund-raising evenings t buy padded bras for people with trans-gender issues and they are utterly bewildered and devastated by the Brexit vote . . . they cannot understand why we are leaving because everyone they ever met in their pastry shop and dinner party and on the touch-line of every school sports pitch wanted to remain . . . of course they are completely stunned by the Donald Trump thing, because the Americans they know seem so sensible . . . “I was with Gwyneth only last night trying out some smoothies and she's such a lovely girl . . . they can't understand the US election result because they all go to America a lot and to them the place always seems so reasonable . . . they stay at the Mercer in New York and Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica California . . . all the celebs were for Hillary and she lost . . . (I've been trying for what seems a life-time to explain to the English that the real America lies, in general and in the most part, between New York and California) . . .

Now they are wondering if democracy has had its time . . . if I were to suggest that people with low IQ's (another one of Adolf's great ideas!) should be given less of a say in who runs the country than those in Mensa, most would nod sagely and say pensively, “It may have to come to that, because it's ridiculous that my cleaning lady has the same influence in an election as me.” . . . But I'll let you into a little secret . . . all those words that I cannot use any more in this newspaper . . . all those jokes no-one can say any more on TV . . . all those phrases that are no longer socially acceptable in Notting Hill and the home counties . . . well, up North you will hear all of them, all the time . . . political correctness simply doesn't exist in a Doncaster pub . . . because there is no time to worry about the correct word for “cross-dresser” when you haven't got the money . . .in parts of America there are people who spend all day in a queue for the food bank . . . how much of a shit do you think they give about trans-gender issues or polar bears” . . . in parts of Britain all my friends see from their Range Rover window as they drive to Scotland for a bit of shooting are towns and villages full of young people who have nothing to do all day but reproduce . . . Dims breeding dims, is what my grandfather used to say . . . every time there's an election some politician come on the TV they half-inched (stolen, I translate from British to American – ain't I wonderful!) to say he will make life better, so they vote for him and then find out later that his idea of underprivileged is actually someone who wants to dress up in a frock (dress). . . yes my heart bleeds for those who are bullied because of their sex or their looks or their sexual orientation, but it only bleeds because I've got a ton of money and two houses . . . if I had an empty larder (kitchen cupboard) and a rash and a terrible hacking cough, I assure you of this: I wouldn't care a bit . . . Trump talked a lot of nonsense in his campaign, if I were to meet him I'd probably dislike him on a cellular level; however he said the politicians had let the poor down . . . Ker-ching; he said they would always let the poor down . . . Ker-ching . . . and the only thing that could provide them with jobs and money was business – big business . . . Ker-ching again . . . they said, Yep, the future's bright, the future's orange . . .happily I have a solution . . .The Palace of Westminster is to be closed for essential repairs . . . MP's will have to meet somewhere else and I reckon they should all go to Hartlepool (they hung the monkey – I mean yes they really did hang a monkey – look it up on Wikipedia) . . . after a few years in this former steel town they might start to understand that in the big scheme of things Eddie Izzard's right to wear a pink beret is not that important (look that one up as well)