On election day five chaps and a chump assembled at my home for lunch before settling down to watch the proceedings on television.
Of the chaps, one was a law firm top dog, the others hard headed commercial types and the chump, a medical specialist mate, namely Ian Coutts.
Well lo and behold, over lunch and at that stage perfectly sober, Ian boldly declared Trump would win in a landslide.
Silence fell. From long experience I recognised the vibes in the air from the hard-headed lot; namely the powerful whiff of free money.
One of them tentatively probed. “You’d put money on that Ian?” he enquired lightly.
“I would, I would; I’m happy to accommodate the lot of you at a grand apiece,” Ian declared.
Now a grand is neither here nor there for that lot but when it’s being dished out willynilly as opposed to being earned, it takes on a special lustre, so they all happily accepted.
It was at this juncture I had a life-long flash-back about my experiences with the medical profession. On occasions they’ve saved my life, albeit interspersed with frequent acts of highly damaging negligence for which I bear the scars. So what to do?
Being innately charitable thanks to Jacinda’s Be Kind hammering, I intervened. There was no point trying to explain to Ian why Trump was an abomination and would lose as I knew both propositions would be in vain. Instead I persuaded him to reduce the bets to $50 and then threw in a lesson, I still being imbued in Jacinda’s Be Kind dictate.
So I put to Ian a generous proposition, namely how to make a fail-safe free $10. How? he asked.
“Give me $40 now and I’ll cancel the bet,” I offered, needless to say in vain. So he blew a free $10.
The lesson in this tale for readers is should you ever find yourself in desperate financial straits, make an appointment to see Ian. But be creative.
For example, offer to give him $10 million in return for his $100 bet that next week Wednesday will follow Tuesday. Trust me, he’ll ignore the salient issue and succumb to the odds and you’ll have a free $100.
He’s waiting for your calls and as you will have discerned from the above, is saturated with Jacinda’s Be Kind edict.
I’M A GENIUS
Last week pre-election, I picked (on this site) the Democrats to capture from the Republicans, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, all Republican states. Biden got the lot.
I also picked Biden to win the overall vote by circa 5 million votes. To date, at time of writing, he’s about 4.5 million ahead, so overall, not a bad prediction.
That said, the election was a close-run thing.
Silly nonsense has been written about a badly divided America. In fact, as with all western democracies it revealed a 50/50 divide between left and right.
Indeed, it’s reasonable to assume that had Trump not been so abominable with his lying, insulting behavior, astonishing ignorance and a general awfulness, as with the global trends, the prevailing mood favours the political right of centre over the left.
14 Comments
I think personalities should be left out of the political course to take.
Well, cards on the table, I suppose I’m a chump too. I thought Trump would win on the adage that the bigger rather than the better personality usually wins. I can only quote the old saying (Churchill?) “You can depend upon the Americans to do the right thing. But only after they have exhausted every other possibility.”
Donald Trump would still be President if had of copied Jacinda on her Covid response.
Is that satire? Where was New Zealand’s New York, with Governor and Mayor urging their people to party on as normal to send a message to the terrible Trump with his “xenophobic” beatup of a virus from China? And everyone who mattered in the political opposition, saying the same? The Trump border measures that got them in such a lather was weeks ahead of Our Jacinda.
Then there was that fatal order by Governor Cuomo, to transfer dying Covid victims from Hospitals to Rest Homes – which led to inevitable outbreaks that ultimately comprised 15% of the “whole USA” death toll. But loyal Democrat voters in New York re-elected the guy, “Blame Trump Syndrome” being such a powerful thing.
Then there is the inconvenient reality that a northern hemisphere winter and a southern hemisphere summer are quite different for respiratory virus risk; and that no NZ city has the “global city” features of several US ones, or the crowded “vibrant urbanism”. NZ has some crowding but it tends to be at a remove from the globetrotting set.
With due respect some of the states you called as Republican were actually Democratic. Colorado, Minnesota, New Haven, Nevada and Virginia were won by Hillary Clinton in 2016, albeit some were pretty close. This election only Nevada was tight – the rest were won fairly easily by Biden.
I agree though with your sentiments re Trump. It will be a merciful relief to not have that bombastic blowhard running the USA.
Yep. Minnesota was the only state that Republican Ronald Reagan failed to win in his landslide of 1984 against Democrat Walter Mondale…of Minnesota. Last time it went Republican was when Richard Nixon did a similar landslide in 1972 against the unelectable George McGovern. That year the only state that stayed Democrat was Massachusetts, the stomping ground of the Kennedys. Incidentally, as a result some local Boston wits quipped that Massachusetts had replaced Texas as the “Lone Star State”. An Eastern vs Western USA in joke…
SB. I agree with your accessment of Trump as a human being but subjecting the US and therefore the world, to more woke, PC communist driville is not a palatable altenative sorry. You’ve replaced a loud oaf with a bumbling confused older version of Phil Twyford.
The immediate message to rejoin the Paris accord, the UN, open the borders up to muslIms (and no doubt the Mexicans) and love everyone again all whilst de-powering the police spells bad news for the US.
The really good thing is they are well — simply powerless. No house = no power.
The election has, in total, given them an incompetent figure head who’s mouth will actually be moved by any of the women queing up around him capable of inserting their arm. At least for the 6 months it will take them to work out Biden actually was another Covid victim at which point the real leader will present her colored self. Happy days.
I can see a lot of strongly entrenched division in the US Bob, the fact that it’s 50:50 is certainly no consolation.
Douglas Murray has just returned from there and offers these insights:
“With Donald Trump off the scene, many seem to believe that the country’s political arena will emerge into a bright new future, but things are about to get a whole lot worse.
American polarisation pre-dates Trump by decades, but in the past few years it has intensified to such an extent that a paper on US tribalism from Cambridge University says it is now approaching levels of ethnic parochialism seen in Bosnia and Kosovo — two countries noted for their recent political stability. However, even before Trump’s election, a study of Democrats and Republicans showed similar levels of distrust as exist between Israelis and Palestinians.
Yet while many people recognise the symptoms of this American balkanisation, they do not recognise the cause. It is not just that people believe in different things, it is that they believe in different facts — there is no longer any agreement on what has happened and what has not.”
https://unherd.com/2020/11/americas-divisions-will-only-get-worse/
Speaking of the source of division I think we can lay a lot of the blame on the media. Their relentless and largely unreasonable vilification of Donald Trump and ergo his supporters is truly something to behold – way beyond anything I’ve ever seen before.
Douglas Murray, in that great wee essay I linked, mentioned the Charlottesville protests. There were the conservatives wanting the monuments and names left unmolested and the “progressives” wanting them all pulled down or changed. There was a small contingent of neo Nazis and Antifa extremists looking for trouble. Trump said there were good people on both sides (true) but clearly condemned the extremists, the Neo Nazis specifically. Sure enough the headlines blared “Trump supports Nazis and white supremacists”.
The press and influential elites and the Democrats are deliberately provoking division and not being held to account in any way.
But you thought Trump would lose in 2016. So you’re just a lucky guess, this time round.
You’ve just lost $50 Bob
I must admit I thought the Democrats were asking to lose, Biden being at least as uninspiring a candidate as Mondale and Dukakis were in their day. And Harris being actually unpopular, as the Primaries showed. The record turnout is inversely proportional to the level of inspiration provided by the Candidate! Indeed this election consisted of “votes against” rather than “votes for”. This is perhaps not the same as the typical amicable 50/50 split Sir Robert refers to, but suggests real deep division.
I do think it entirely likely that the outlier statistics in certain districts are strong prima facie evidence of large scale fraud by the Democrats. I mean, a strong correlation between polling stations “closing for the night with votes uncounted”, the obstruction or ejection of ballot-counting observers, outlier-high “local turnout”, and a peculiar high proportion of “Biden only” votes with no votes “down-ballot”. I mean, you’d expect to see similar trends in more locations, including ones where vote counting finished on time, observers were present and reported nothing of concern – if the trends were genuine.
I suspect that a lot of people quite smart enough to connect these dots, nevertheless want no challenge, and downplay the prima facie evidence as “conspiracy theory”, so anxious are they to see the back of Trump. But I wouldn’t count out the people like Rudy Giuliani, Jay Sekulow, and other legal heavyweights who are getting to work on these things. There are even Democrats who are so disturbed by the “bad look” that they agree with an investigation in preference to a provocative “up yours” to the Trump base. It is not an impossible mission to investigate the obvious outlier-statistics districts ballots; not just a recount, a verification of ballot validity.
Good stuff, Phil. I think you have a real talent for writing on this level!
If Trump had won under similar circumstances can you imagine the noise coming from the left being amplified by a sympathetic press. OMG.
I am 100% against any postal or email voting system simply because it invites corruption, actual or imagined and therefore doubt. And doubt and true democractic process should never appear in the same sentence.
I could also mount a debate against overseas absentee votes. 1 Because rigidity is again in doubt and 2 because these people don’t live “in country”. They are therefore heavily swayed by “others” instead of using their own, on location, observations.
I also believe there should be an IQ test people have to pass before being allowed to vote. The system is falling apart. As we rapidly dumb down the population self interest is replacing any concept of politics, policy, or simple right from wrong. Remember a communists wet dream is the collapse of capitalism. Just look at the destruction of the education system in this country alone. Socialism thrives on dumb sheep. Why else do the despots jail the academics and burn the books?