Snappledagain's Blog

From my vantage point here, in Canada; I’m not happy to see Trump win. I am happy to see Clinton lose though.

 
This was the sentiment too that was the key to why Americans voted the way they did yesterday. Put yourself into their shoes and imagine getting out of bed yesterday morning, still committed to supporting the democratic process, but faced with nothing but undesirable choices. The question for most voters was not “Who do you want to be President” but rather became “Who do you not want to be president”. After you answer the latter, most people felt (albeit reluctantly in most quarters) that there was really only one choice.

 
Apart from the outcome a couple of things stood out, in particular, from the rest of the election day.

 
The coverage of the election was shocking to watch. By shocking I do not refer to results from each state or county. Nor do I refer to any personal sense of shock about the results. I am talking about the pathetic behaviour of the news anchors on nearly every American and Canadian network that was providing live coverage that clearly took for granted at the beginning of the day that Clinton would prevail. The look on their faces was not merely due to pollsters predictions being incorrect, or that results were so radically different than they had been prepared for. It was their overt lack of objectivity, always apparent throughout the campaign, that look of grief that they had personally been outted as being wrong, that look of pain that their candidate, Hillary Clinton, had not only lost, but had been thoroughly routed. Routed according to the wishes of the American voters. That was what all the shock was really about on television last night.

 
The anchors themselves, already accused of being left-leaning, biased toward liberalism, criticized for being supporters of the Democrats, rather than providing unbiased and objective reporting of the political actions of both sides …. Outted in the moment and on live television as actually being just that; Liberal, biased, left-leaning and elitist. They could not even pretend to hide their disbelief about the outcome. CNN, ABC, CBS … the CBC in Canada …all, so terribly sad, that their “guy” didn’t win. It was all very, very pathetic to watch.

 
Stephen Colbert, running his own election special on the Movie Channel and obviously expecting to have been celebrating … almost beside himself with despair. Florida called for Trump … he actually became quite vulgar at that moment, something he has repeatedly criticized Trump for being (and he was right about that too) began swearing aloud … and to be clear, that does not offend me. What offends me is that he has always represented that he, and Hillary has always represented that she, and the left-wing media has always represented that it in general, is somehow “above” that kind of behaviour. That he was drinking high-balls and waving his sloshing drink around during the broadcast (as if he were hosting a Steve Martin roast from nineteen sixty-four) revealed the asshole that guy can really be at times. And it was that characteristic of personality, in the end, that American voters saw in the entire Democratic movement in recent years. A bunch of arrogant assholes, pontificating about how great they all are, and how great all their ideas are, and it turns out that all along nobody around them was really thinking that at all.

 
Brexit may have been the first hint this was coming by the way. Exactly the same phenomenon occurred in the United Kingdom during their referendum on the European Union. The lofty minds that inhabit central London believed, wrongly, that the rest of their countrymen saw the world through the same lens they did. Utter shock there, too, that in fact everyone else around them had a completely different view of the world than they had come to take for granted.

 
Rejection of globalism, embracing of isolationism? No, this is not going to be that extreme. But, will things like free trade need to be revisited now? Yes. There has always been problems with NAFTA. Keystone XL? Finally, some common sense has prevailed about how to transport energy supplies on this continent. How immigration questions will be answered now, attending from everything to Mexicans and other Latinos that would enter illegally, to refugees from northern Africa, to Islamists from the middle-east …. Well the warm embrace they have all been provided by bleeding-heart liberals these last eight years was abruptly and decidedly broken off yesterday.

 
Trump is not who I would have chosen to lead the United States of America. The man is a boor.

 
But thank God Clinton lost.