Pot-addled hillbilly correctly calls election ten months out

Back in February I gave the crystal ball a gentle rub and found myself inspired to pen this gem; Trump will bury Hillary in November.

And so it has come to pass... and I think we pretty much nailed the reason; Main Street America is utterly fed-up with "the establishment," and Big Media are far too out-of-touch to recognize that fact. For the most part they don't seem to have had any significant burst of recognition right up until this morning when they read about the Trump landslide in their morning papers.

It's not that individual journalists don't see the suffering of Main Street America, it's that as an institution media has long since become part of the establishment. Establishment bullshit becomes incontrovertible fact that no longer needs to be questioned, because everybody knows it's true.

You know, like everybody knows free trade is good for us. Putin's aggression is an existential threat to America. Donald Trump is racist/sexist/homophobic, etc. These truths do not need to be proven and may not be questioned, certainly not by any j-school grad aspiring to an actual paying job with an establishment news platform. That would be career suicide.

Over time this results in an environment in which lots of media professionals reassure each other of the verity of their recycled insights by endlessly regurgitating the same shit over and over again. I'm guessing that's the frame of mind that set in over at Canada's national newspaper of record. Plenty of bright minds and quality writers on board there, but a week ago they found themselves advising the voting public in the US not to vote for Trump.

You've got all your mandatory Clinton camp anti-Trump smear points in one handy package that is at once outrageously presumptuous and embarrassingly unprofessional. There's not a single professional journalist at the paper who would find it appropriate for the New York Times to advise Canadians who not to vote for a week ahead of a Canadian election. Where did they get the idea this stunt was OK?

In the event, a week later the object of their derision is President-elect of the United States.

Dear US voter; no matter who wins tomorrow, you've already lost

It's been quite the spectacle, this White House 2016 reality show, has it not?

For a nation obsessed with exporting its version of "democracy" relentlessly around the world, what we've seen for the last year or so should give everyone pause.

In the red corner, we have a septuagenarian reality-TV star running on no platform whatsoever other than the slogan "make America great again." One pithy slogan does not a campaign platform make.

In the blue corner, we have a septuagenarian career politician with more skeletons than closets.

This is the best American democracy can do?

Any journalism graduate toiling for the mainstream US media who remembers all that highfalutin twaddle about ethics and objectivity from their J-school days must cringe when they contemplate what they've been reduced to. Never before have big media been co-opted by a political campaign as thoroughly as the Clinton campaign has compromised them this year.

When Team Clinton is caught out dealing dirt to Bernie Sanders, our ever-vigilant guardians of free speech shift the discussion to Russia tampering with the election, and Clinton gets a free pass.

When the Clinton Foundation is exposed as a gigantic influence peddling machine, the story morphs into a fact-free harangue of Putin and his email-stealing ways.

Where during this endless campaign did you hear any real discussion about actual issues that face America? About the endless wars of choice destroying America's reputation and creating a refugee flood that threatens Europe.

About out-of-control military spending that's bankrupting the economy.

About the endless downward spiral of America's public education system.

About the 94 million working age American's who aren't working but don't count as unemployed.

About a health-care system that prioritizes profits for shareholders over health care for the sick.

About the crumbling infrastructure that's been allowed to continue crumbling by the Washington elite on both sides of the aisle for decades.

Aren't those the kind of substantive issues that a free press should be taking the political class to task over?

Instead, we've gotten endless speculation about Trump's tax returns and Putin's internet hacking.

America, you may yet have the most powerful military the world has ever seen, but the list of lands that want to emulate your corrupt and dysfunctional democracy grows shorter by the day.

There is only one nation more exceptional than the Exceptional Nation

That would be Canada.

Don't take my word for it. Check out this exceptional scolding of the American electorate by Canada's newspaper of record...

Please don't vote for Trump. Vote for that grovelling toady to the banksters instead. That's something we here in the Great White North can believe in.

You have to love the tone of inherent superiority in that editorial. If there's one thing that marks us as Canadians, it's that all-consuming smugness vis-a-vis the USA.

You may be the Exceptional Nation...

But we're better!

We'd be outraged if the New York Times published an editorial exhorting Canadians not to vote for this or that candidate a week before the next Canadian election, but we can do it because... well, because we're that much more exceptional than you are!

Canadian media in general and the Globe and Mail in particular have neglected Canadian news to make room for acres of wildly biased coverage of the US election. Today the Globe found several pages worth of space to devote to the many connections that the Clinton machine has to Canada. The decision makers at the Globe seem to take a perverse pride in the fact that a mining financier from Vancouver is the single largest individual donor to the Clinton Foundation.

Yup, billionaire Frank Giustra has personally gifted over $100 millions to various Clinton "charities," and is so tight with big Bill that he'll loan him the use of his personal jet whenever Bill needs a lift. The fact that tin-pot tyrants in shit-hole statelets the world over shower Giustra with lucrative mining concessions after he shows up with Bill Clinton is just a happy coincidence!

Oddly enough, on the very day that the Globe publishes this paean to Clintonian virtue, the New York Times publishes this scathing take-down of Canada's mining industry.

We've got way more than that to be embarrassed about.

Let's get our own house in order before we tell our neighbours who they should or should not be voting for.

Scar tissue; America's "democracy" wobbles into the abyss

No matter who the putative winner is on Tuesday, democracy in America will have turned a corner.

The death knell sounded six years ago when the SCOTUS gave Big Money unlimited access to the election process.

That Supreme Court decision gave free rein to the Empire of Lobbyists. Money has always been integral to American politics, of course, but the Citizens United decision gave big money political donors the stamp of legitimacy.

And those big money political donors have obviously run with it.

Unfortunately, there are no big money political donors lobbying for America's working classes.

Big Labour abandoned the working class at least a generation ago, settling instead for a pat on the back from the establishment for being team players. Instead of fighting for American jobs, they settled for negotiating severance packages when American jobs were shipped willy-nilly to Mexico and China.

It was in fact Big Labour that originally created America's middle class. If you were a member of the Teamsters or the UAW in the sixties, you were middle class. You owned your home and had two cars in the driveway, and perhaps a summer cottage on a lake upstate somewhere. Your kids were going to post-secondary, no question about it.

Today?

The fact that the ersatz billionaire Trump is seen as the champion of the working class speaks volumes. It goes without saying that he'll not be able to bring back the middle class. If he is elected he is doomed to fail.

And Hillary? Maybe Hillary can keep the show alive for four more years; the same-old show where the rich get richer and the poor make do. But that will only last till the next election cycle, when the ground will be even more fertile for an even more virulent anti-establishment candidate.

In the meantime, expect to see the Exceptional Nation export it's toxic and dysfunctional version of democracy to more unhappy recipients around the world than ever before.

How the Clinton-Trump conspiracy to seize Washington fell apart

The think-tankers here at Falling Downs had the Clinton-Trump rivalry figured out years ago.

They're not rivals; they're BFFs!

Our ruminations have been confirmed by certain Podesta emails that reveal the Hillary camp was lobbying for Trump to declare for the GOP race long before he did.

That was nothing more than a bit of shit-stirring on the part of the Clintonites. Get their pal Donald into the GOP primaries, just to muck things up.

A funny thing happened on the way to mucking things up.

Trump started winning primaries over the lickspittles the Republican establishment had thrown up.

Neither Donald nor the Clintons ever thought that was a possibility.

But once it happened, Donald immediately saw that there might be more to win here. He's that kind of guy. Winning is everything. What happens the day after... well, that'll be somebody else's problem.

So Alpha Don got a wiff of victory, and instead of deferring to Hillary, per their initial agreement, he's gone full bore for the big prize ever since.

What's driving this is that Trump unexpectedly bored into the massive resentment of the deplorables who have given up on America's promise. They've given up on the American dream because America has betrayed them. That's an America that the establishment media seldom sees and never hears. I'll bet Trump never heard or saw them either until they showed up at his rallies in their thousands.

Four days from now they're going to make him the President of the United States.

What happens then is anybody's guess.

Say what?! Trump makes America great by sponsoring Toyota at NASCAR

Toyota?

Get the f**k outta here, Donald!

What's wrong with those old school American brands... you know the ones.

Ford.

Dodge.

Chevy.

But noooooo!!!!!....  Team Trump is gonna make America great by sponsoring a Ty-O-tee!

Hmm... rings a bell... Toyota... hey, isn't that the preferred brand of the towelheads 'o terror?

The Clinton camp's gonna be all over this!

After Assad, Duterte?

The Beltway Brahmins have been telling us for five years now that Assad has to go, and he's still there. Furthermore, there's every possibility that he'll still be there five years hence. The failure to affect regime change in Syria, however, isn't preventing the think-tankers and opinion makers in Washington from pencilling in the next candidate for regime change.

This time around it's President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines who's gone rogue. In the four months since his election he's been making all sorts of "anti-American" pronouncements, and America's ruling class has noticed. Check out the scolding tone in this Washington Post missive today; "...Duterte discovered this week that his actions have consequences."

Yup! Filipinos, from the lowliest expat maid to the President himself, occasionally need to be reminded of their place, don't they?

And here's Foreign Affairs chiming in with a polemic about Duterte's defiance. Different venue, same condescending tone.

And don't miss The Limits of Duterte's Anti-Americanism, on view at The Atlantic.

My favorite is the Foreign Policy hit job titled President Duterte's Crazy Drug War Is Just The Beginning. The sub-head tells the tale; the antics of this mad-man and his crazy shenanigans are an attack on the very foundations of democracy, don't you know! When you read that kind of rhetoric you know that calls for a humanitarian intervention to save the people of the Philippines won't be long in coming.

When those leading mouth-pieces for America's policymakers are singing the same song in unison within a day or two of one another, you know there's more at work than coincidence. Luckily, the Beltway Big-boys still have the Filipino military establishment in their pockets.

All Duterte has is a 74% approval rating from his people.

Alas, that won't be nearly enough...